Hegel’s image about the owl of Minerva (wisdom) only spreading its wings with the coming of dusk can be taken to mean that, after flapping its wings and flying off into an approaching darkness, an insight is left behind that will later come to light. Meaning emerges retrospectively, interpretation only comes into existence after the event, so there is no way of being sure how the present will be understood in the future. No straight line leads from episodes in the past to our present understanding of them; we shape the past as much as we are shaped by it. Beard’s The End of the Game first appeared over sixty years ago but only now does his achievement come into the light.
First appearing in 1965, Beard rewrote parts of it for a second edition in 1977 and the current Taschen publication gives it another shape with additional material from contributors and a conservationist’s interview with the author. The book has evolved over time and what we see now is a complex and not always consistent compilation of photographs and texts that raises unsettling questions.
The 1965 book was written by someone in his mid-twenties who had been to Kenya when the country was on the cusp of independence. He found himself enraptured by the wildlife and perhaps this helps explain an apparent indifference to certain realities of Kenya’s colonial history. A photo of scaffolding for public executions in Mombasa is slipped in amongst vintage hunting shots but is not commented on; more demanding of the author’s attention is Mackinder’s 1899 ascent of Mount Kenya and of his meeting with Karen Blixen. At times, colonialists’ vocabulary and stereotyping informs the writing: describing the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi railway, he writes of ‘coolies’ recruited from India to build it due to the ‘complete disinclination’ of the ‘native population’ to work.
Such infelicities of language aside, Beard is conflicted about ‘the coming of the white man who imposed his steel tracks’ in a land where ‘nature herself had always been sovereign’. His point, after recording the grim record of the human cost of building the railway, is an ecological one: the balance of nature has been disturbed: the land was an Eden and it has been invaded. This is a familiar trope and it is played out in the book’s movement between fond reminiscences of safari experiences and a photographic record of the catastrophic event that saw thousands of elephants starving to death in Tsavo National Park in the 1970s. His wordless depiction of that disaster takes its place alongside the book’s amassed collection of historical photographs showing hunters posing next to the animal they have killed. The cumulative effect is a palimpsest of slaughter, one traced back to the gentlemen hunters of past times, indicative of Beard’s interest in photography as a form of documentation.
Any response to The End of the Game has to be a complicated one. The book is a paradoxical mix of insight and nostalgia, prescient and romantic, and the conclusion Beard draws about human nature gives him little hope: ‘We’re a scourge from which the planet may never recover’, he tells an interviewer. Paul Theroux, in a foreword to the book, gives coruscating expression to what Beard himself came to feel about the continuation of the ‘game’ begun by privileged white men in Africa. Theroux’s list of those who now make use of the continent includes ‘the child buyer, the retailer of dirty drugs or toxic cigarettes, the experimenting economist, the diamond merchant…the eco-tourist, the adventure travellers, the bird watcher …the banker.., the bullshitter and your cousin the Peace Corp volunteer’. His list is as relentless in its indictment as the photographs Beard brings together in his book and — now that the owl of Minerva has flown — his achievement can be assessed in retrospect.
Sean Sheehan
The End Of The Game
Taschen
Peter Beard
Extent: 304 pp
Size: 24.5 x 27.2 cm
ISBN: 978-375440271-9
https://www.taschen.com/en/books/photography/02223/peter-beard-the-end-of-the-game/
