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and carrying out the final steps in his master plan. At one point in 1951, when lonides was off in the Sudan hunting for addax, Bwana Kijana was called in by the Provincial Commissioner at Lindi in regard to a Game Department request to incorporate this Lung'onyo River region into the Selous. The P.C. stepped over to a wall map and slowly traced the expanding outline of the Selous with his thumb, then said coldly to Nicholson, "You people are sterilizing this whole area." Remembering this, Nicholson remarked, "That man could never look you straight in the eye. Don't know where they found such people - hadn't a clue about Africa. All they thought about was giving these local Africans just what they wanted, whether it was good for them or not. No thought for the animals at all!"
    In 1954 lonides went off on leave and, except to collect his things, never came back; he formally retired from the Game Department in order to give full time to collecting uncommon creatures on commission for various clients, including the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi. Since renamed the National Museum, it still displays lonides's gorilla group, bongo, and addax - pursued on camel back - and an assortment of other creatures, including the black mamba that, in 1942, crawled over his bare legs in the dark while he was seated in an outdoor privy in Liwale. lonides later credited this creature with inspiring the snake collecting avocation that eventually displaced the hunting of rare animals as the great passion of his life. Of the local Provincial Commissioner - perhaps the very one disliked by Nicholson - lonides once remarked, "He wasn't an attractive character: he didn't like snakes and he had beady eyes and damp hands." lonides was fond of saying that he found human beings the least interesting of all animals, which may have accounted for his reaction when in the dark a green mamba fell out of the thatch roof of a local hut on to a group of sleeping Africans and bit eight of them fatally before escaping from the panic that ensued. lonides, who succeeded in capturing this snake, was outraged: "If I hadn't been in that area, they'd have pursued it relentlessly and beaten it to death with sticks! Hooligans, insensitive dolts, thoroughgoing bastards!"
    Like many another wounded by snobbery early in life, lonides

    SAND RIVERS
    became a snob himself, "a Royalist and imperialist of deepest-dyed hue", as he himself described it, a "dinosaur", to use the word of one of his colonial contemporaries, at least in all matters having to do with Africa and Africans. Before he acquired the name Bwana Nyoka, or Snake Man, lonides was known as Bwana Mparangozi, or He Who Takes the Hide Off Them, a name awarded for his unstinting use of the kiboko, or hippo-hide whip; on one occasion he prescribed flogging for all sixty adult males of a certain village. lonides later acknowledged that he might have been a bit too free with the kiboko. However, he said, "Flogging is a method that is simple and effective and very widely understood. ... In a primitive country you use primitive methods. For twenty-five years (c. 1935-60] this country's had a rule of fish-flabby hands in velvet gloves, and all it's done is to make third-rate Europeans out of a race of potentially first-rate Africans." In the same vein he remarked a few years later, "These people have been largely emasculated, that's what it arhounts to. Their splendid virtues have been driven out of them; it isn't their fault if we've turned them into a rather second-rate lot."
    Quite apart from anything else, a certain nostalgia is apparent here: the man of "Old Africa" has always been more attractive to the white man then the "new African" who presumes to compete with him. Thus the unregenerate lonides, speaking at the time of Independence, could still refer to "our little black brothers, who haven't yet even developed a brain to think straight with, and certainly haven't contributed a single idea to the present sum-total of