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Hunting >> Hunting in Africa & hunting dangerous game

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Andrew Holmberg of Selby & Holmberg Safaris
      #206992 - 13/04/12 09:50 PM

I did find an interesting interview that was written 24 may 2011. It´s about Andrew Holmberg of Selby & Holmberg Safaris. He was 93 years old in 2011.

Andrew Holmberg is one of the two oldest professional hunters alive today. He was in a sense born into the business, for his godmother was Karen Blixen, wife of the famous old time hunter Baron Bror von Blixen. Andrew had a long and successful career and excelled above many professionals for the quality of big game trophies. He took for himself, clients or friends more large bull elephants than any other man, living or dead. Sixty three pairs of tusks over 100 pounds each represents a massive mount of hard and successful hunting. You can be lucky once or twice but not sixty three times.
His own best bull was 141 pounds. His best buffalo was 58 inches. As every big game hunter knows, truly big trophies are generally found only by pioneering new country and hard work. Andrew Holmberg excelled in hunting more remote areas where others came later. He was the leading exponent of the modern foot safari where pack animals carried light loads in and Large tusks out. His evocative photographs represent something that was truly original and unique at the time. Today they have a great historic quality, representing a vanished era indeed.

Interview 24 may 2011:
My Life in Africa
Andrew Holmberg was born in Karen Blixen's guestroom on a farm in Kenya. She also became his godmother. After almost a whole life on another continent, we meet him at home in Österlen. He talks about his African - and is one of the last to remember another time in leopard attack, elephant hunts and Hemingway fights. He hears a little ill, 93-year-old Andrew Holmberg, but do not believe myself that this is associated with a long and adventurous life as a professional big game hunter in Africa. There, he was perhaps the most successful of them all.
Hearing problems, he has another explanation.
- I got into a terrible snowstorm in Denmark when I was seventeen. The ear was full of snow and then burst eardrum, he says.
Judy, his wife of 51 years, makes a fitting that Andrew also was shot in the jaw during World War II which had a hearing. Like those times when land mines exploded in his immediate vicinity ...
Let's start from the beginning.
The year was the 1918th The place was a coffee farm in Kenya, which would become world famous. Olga Holmberg's labor pains set in and Bror von Blixen-Fineke prepared to take care of even a birth. He was used to help the calves into the world and the midwife could not make it.
A moment later, Karen Blixen cradle a baby boy in her arms while the new mother rested. He was named Anders after Karen Blixen's younger brother, but calls himself Andrew. Karen Blixen became his godmother.
Today, Andrew and Judy live in a small house in Österlen, chock-full of African memories. They have no children or grandchildren and they like myself have a voice in where their collections to be. There are a number of museums and institutions who want to study the photographs, documents, trophies and African crafts.

- We are old now, says Andrew.
Judy is 95 years old and Andrew 93rd I can not help but ask the classic question: what is the secret of such longevity?
- Staying at the equator, said Judy lightning speed, and looks out on the farm where snowdrifts after a long winter, not so long ago thawed out.
She is wearing a fleece sweater with logo of the magazine National Geographic. It feels just right. She pulls up the zipper when we go out to the "house", an outhouse in the yard where the photographs and paintings from nearly a century of life in Africa have gathered.
Andrews parents, Emil and Olga Holmberg, traveled to Africa to become coffee farmers. Otto Dahlströms roasting in Stockholm was discovered that they could usefully replace the Brazilian coffee with Arabica grown in East Africa.
Holmberg became friends with Blix and when Karen Blixen moved back to Denmark from her African farm 1932, Andrews mom over part of the author's furniture. Later she died in bed where she once gave birth to Andrew.
I asked Andrew what he thought of the movie Out of Africa with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. The film about Karen Blixen's life in Africa - with the interiors of the home where he was born.
Judy conspiratorial nods at me and says:
- It's a good question.
Andrew himself screws on for a while before he says:
- It is a super film. Absolutely. A super film.
That it then did not reflect reality, he thinks today is quite irrelevant.
The hunt was a natural part of life from the time Andrew was a child. From the catapult to airguns to shotguns to the weapon that brought down the elephants. 1939 he received his first license as a professional hunter.

He had, the age of seventeen, have already been able to visit Sweden and part in the hunt for Lundsberg. Moose hunters had permission for three elk. Andrew shot two of them.
Andrew probably thinks I'm stupid when I ask about big game hunting in Africa was dangerous. I have glanced at the skin of a leopard lying on soffryggen behind him.
- It was a real adventure, challenges, and it gave me great satisfaction, he says in a summary, which does not reveal very much of all the breathtaking adventure that is still alive as highly personal memories in his head. Several times he also excuses himself with that it is difficult to point out themselves, and what you have done.
Of course it was dangerous. Above all, one would look out for the rhinos.
He also mentions a wounded leopard who attacked him from a tree. Andrew dropped tropikhjälmen and the leopard grabbed it instead of giving up on him. When the leopard stuck with the white helmet he had come to his feet and fired it.
Andrew was the first to stop chasing from motor vehicles. He arranged hunting safaris on foot or with donkeys, camels and horses as draft animals.
- We went out lightly packed because we knew we would have a lot of us back, he says with a twinkle in his eye, and I really see how memories of the savannah flashes.
It could be several weeks in the bush, in remote areas where few Europeans set foot. It was also where they found the biggest trophies. He himself is the one shot most large elephants and rhinos, and the living room of the house in Österlen is the head of a huge buffalo on the wall. It is said to be an unofficial world record.
Big game hunting in Africa has been heavily criticized over the years and many of the big animals such as lions, elephants and norshörning, is now critically endangered. The trophy hunting as including Andrew Holmberg ran no longer exists.
He is aware of the criticism but defended themselves by saying they have always hunted with the intention not to deplete the populations of game.
- We shot just large males. Their place in the pack were always of a new male, he says.
He also explains how the Hunting Act was received with open arms by locals when they came.
- We always had extra medications with us so that we could offer those who needed. And when we had shot and taken trophies so we offered food to the villages, he says.
Leopard on the couch, then?
Judy tells how a few years noticed that it disappeared a cow now and then from the farm. They knew it was a leopard. The dogs tried to hold it away, but it did not, and one of them came home wounded is difficult. When asked Andrew license from the authorities to shoot the leopard.
In the evening they sent away the dogs and had a change in the open, arranged lights, and waited. When it was lit lamps. Andrew sat in the bedroom window.
- I shot it with a shot in the head.
Judy points to the hole in the skull.
- Andrew did not want to destroy the skin, she says. You can hear her pride in the skilled shot.

Bror Blixen was friends with Ernest Hemingway. Andrew remembers him. As a young boy, he came across him and several times he got hold of the great writer's jacket when he flung off his clothes for boxing, or fighting with someone.
It did Hemingway frequently when he drank.
Andrew will not say anything about the Nobel laureate and author, but he is not impressed by the man Hemingway, which he says was a man of cruel personality. He tells a story of how Hemingway ripped up a friend in a tree with a rope and then he suggested that he would hang himself when he was still there.
- Such was his. It was his way of joking, but it was not funny. It was wicked.
Andrew was born in the colonies and got to experience the change when the struggle for freedom swept over the continent and the European colonial powers left the government from him. In some countries without major conflicts, in others the more war-like shapes.
When asked about Mau Maurörelsens emergence in Kenya, and mention that I read an article in American Life magazine from 1953 which says that the Kenyan rebels and independence fighters had put a price on his head, he becomes interested.
- I had no idea, he says, genuinely surprised.
He can not explain why it was so, and do not want to talk politics, but I understand that he would have welcomed the colonial Africa that he was born and grew up in had been allowed to live there.
When the Belgians head over left Congo 1959-60 came a flood of refugees in Kenya. Judy says that they had many Belgians at the farm. The Belgians were on their way to the port city of Mombasa to get home to Europe.
- Then, we were unsure what would happen in Kenya, says Andrew.
Jomo Kenyatta, a leader of the underground guerrilla movement Mau Mau, was also the country's first African president. During his period, it remained politically stable in Kenya, Kenyatta is still regarded as a sort of father of the nation, although he soon had a policy that simply replacing the white upper class with a black. Unrest broke out in earnest only when Kenyatta died 1978.
As early as 1962 searched Andrew brings new hunting grounds. Along with including his brother started a company in the then Bechuanaland, now Botswana. They had the country's first professional hunting license. He tells of a plane crash on the first reconnaissance tour. They discovered, however, quickly followed by a reconnaissance plane and got all the food and equipment they needed with a parachute. Except for one thing - something to make tea in!
- We turned off the nose cone that sat above the propeller, did clean it with water and gravel, and so we could cook our tea when we held it in a pair of tongs over the fire.
The day after they picked up "distressed" homes.
When Andrew and Judy left Africa, they moved first to Spain and then they chose Sweden. Somehow, despite everything, to come home for Andrew, or Andrew whom he is named.
Now hope the two that their collections should be taken care of and shown they are gone. Several museums have contacted them and some things have Karen Blixen Rungstedlund already shown interest.
Andrew Holmberg on ...
SCANIAN: The language I do not understand. We speak Swedish, Danish, English and Swahili at home, but Skåne I do not understand at all.
HEMINGWAY: I did not know him, but I met him many times. I did not like him at all. It was an evil man.
WORLD WAR II: I should not have survived. I served in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), and twice I was in close proximity to exploding landmines and once I got to act a decoy and pull on my Italian artillery that the company could outflank the enemy. I drove back and forth on a road and the enemy shot - but missed - all the time.
SWEDEN: Here we have it good in our old age. We become so fantastically well cared for.
Article written by Per-Erik Tell

Age: Filled 93 years May 9
Lives: In a house outside St.Olof Österlen with his wife of 51 years, English piano teacher Judy.
Current: Prepares himself, after a long life as a big game hunter, to donate his collection of trophies, photographs, documents, and African crafts. Some ports are likely to Karen Blixen Rungstedlund.


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Mike_Bailey
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Re: Andrew Holmberg of Selby & Holmberg Safaris [Re: Sville]
      #206993 - 13/04/12 10:36 PM

marvellous stuff ! thanks, Mike

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NitroXAdministrator
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Re: Andrew Holmberg of Selby & Holmberg Safaris [Re: Sville]
      #206995 - 14/04/12 12:00 AM

Staffan,

Super post. Very interesting. I need to read it a second time to absorb it.

--------------------
John aka NitroX

...
Govt get out of our lives NOW!
"I love the smell of cordite in the morning."
"A Sharp spear needs no polish"


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