Mzungu Mjinga by Rick Boyer. High Sierra Books, 2004. $21.95 — 202 pp.

Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing edited by Dorinad Dallmeyer. University of Georgia Press, 2004. $16.95 — 153 pp.

Mzungu Mjinga, which in Swahili means Crazy White Man, is also the title of Rick Boyer’s latest book. In Mzungu Mjinga, we follow Boyer to Tanzania as he goes in search of mbogo — the Cape Buffalo, also known as the Black Death. Before returning with his trophies to his home and to his teaching duties at Western Carolina University, Boyer encounters in full the modern African safari: angry, arrogant guides; skilled natives; wildlife ranging from pesky honeybees to elephants the size of trucks.

After a brief explanation of how he came to be interested in an African hunt — the author, like so many of us, first found himself attracted to the beauty and the dangers of Africa by watching different movies as a boy — Boyer takes us directly to Tanzania and the beginning of his many misadventures. He lands with the other members of his party in Arusha, where they learn that their guide, a man named Glen Schacht (pronounced Shot, though all the names in the book have been changed for the sake of privacy) has been delayed with a client in the bush. When Glen eventually shows up, he is a profane, arrogant American with a fierce temper who frequently curses his clients for what he regards as their stupidity.

As we proceed with Boyer and company. into the African bush, we are treated to an ongoing tour of what it is to hunt that country today. Like his fictional Doc Adams, the hero of a series of mysteries, Boyer is an ordinary guy who in many ways is an ideal guide for the rest of us. Through him we learn what it means to have to leave our tent at night to use the latrine in a lightless landscape filled with wildlife, including lions, deadly snakes, and chui, pronounced chewy, which is Swahili for leopard. Though African safaris have changed dramatically in the last hundred years — the men rumble across the landscape in Land Cruisers, for example, thereby increasing their speed and reducing by several times the number of porters required to haul their equipment — dangers still abound on such a hunt, ranging from killer buffalo to hunters careless with their weapons.

Though Boyer brings the hunt alive by giving us a feel for the gritty terrain in which he stalks various animals, we also see the hungers pursuing the time-honored practice of imbibing alcohol after a long day in the bush:

We returned to Whiteface for the best time of the day: Attitude Adjustment Hour. Pronounced AAHhhhhhh! We started with a Tusker apiece to slack our thirst (a preventative measure — the bloody heat can kill you out there don’t you know), then followed it up with a gin and Scotch while Christoph and Teodore built up the fire. So there (sic) sat in our khaki hunting jackets and desert boots, drinks in hand, cigars going, looking into the flames and coals and up at the blood-red clouds of the sunset, musing over the day’s events. We realized we had a hell of a lot of land to cover, and the necessity of early to bed, early to rise made total sense.

The above paragraph gives us a sense of the personal behind Boyer’s style of writing, but it presents us with a problem as well. Mzungu Mjinga, like so many other books these days, is sorely in need of an editor. Throughout the book, on nearly every page, punctuation is misused, words are omitted, and the tangled syntax is confusing (in the above paragraph, for example, it sounds as if they are drinking gin and Scotch mixed together). On page 27, for instance, Boyer writes in regard to a herdsman, a young boy: Good luck kid. Does he mean Good luck, kid or is he calling the boy a Good luck kid? The reader has no clue. On the same page he begins a sentence by writing “First, There is the hornbill ...” Why is There capitalized? In the next paragraph the quotation marks are missing from part of a conversation.

In addition to pondering the cause of these editorial flaws, which mar nearly every page of Mzungu Mjinga, we may wonder why Boyer and other adventurers put up with a guide like Glen Schacht, who finds his clients the game they seek but who will also strike many readers as the biggest horse’s patoot to come down the pike in many days. In his Preface, Boyer calls Schacht “... a nice guy underneath ...,” yet that quality of his personality certainly remains hidden here. If the book is faithful to the expedition, then we are left to wonder why one of the hunters hasn’t shot Schacht rather than a mbogo.

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Readers interested in a different sort of outdoor book are advised to look at Elemental South: An Anthology of Southern Nature Writing. Edited by Dorinad Dallmeyer, a faculty member at the University of Georgia, this book of essays by writers such as Rick Bass and Thomas Raine Crowe takes us into the natural landscape of the South, revealing the authors’ love of this landscape and their hope that it will be preserved.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)