The First Safari Searching for François Levaillant: A Revised Edition

François Levaillant was the first and greatest South African birder, the first major figure of modern ornithology, the creator of the first safari, the first anthropologist of the Cape and the first investigative reporter criticising colonial brutality at the Cape. He predicted the rebellion of the frontier Boers and portrayed the dilemmas of coloured identity. He created the most beautiful, illustrated bird books of his time, becoming a model for Audubon and others, and inspired a map for King Louis XVI that has become the most valuable African map ever produced. His Travels into the Interior of Africa was a best-seller across Europe and the most widely translated text on South Africa until Nelson Mandela’s autobiography two centuries later.

This book tells how, for a quarter of a century, the author searched for Levaillant’s travel notebooks and the fate of his collection. Glenn’s search took him from the banks of the Orange River to the vaults of the Paris Natural History Museum facing 30 000 dead birds in search of Levaillant’s legacy; from tracing Levaillant’s travels to Theefontein, Pampoenkraal and Kokskraal to showing that the bloubok exhibit in the hall of extinct animals in Paris’s Natural History Museum came from Levaillant; from encounters with billionaires to interactions with French archivists. Glenn’s experiences show that research means searching.

The revised second edition reflects new information and research on Levaillant’s descendants; the provenance of the Paris bloubok; Levaillant’s use of illustrations as a re-viewing of his experiences and his collaboration with Colonel Robert Gordon as a crucial part of his development as an ornithologist.

The book appeals to all natural history lovers, to researchers on colonialism and criticism of it and to people interested in birding who want to know more about Levaillant’s role in establishing ornithology as a new discipline.

Ian Glenn has edited and co-translated an English translation of Levaillant’s Voyage into the Interior of Africa for the Van Riebeeck Society and co-authored the Brenthurst Press edition of François Levaillant and the Birds of Africa. He has written or co-authored many scholarly articles on Levaillant and curated the King’s Map exhibition at the Iziko Museum in 2012–2013. Glenn studied at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, the University of York, England and the University of Pennsylvania. He taught in and was head of the Department of English at the University of Cape Town and then helped found a new Centre for Film and Media Studies of which he was director and first professor of Media Studies. He is Emeritus Professor of Media Studies at UCT and a Research Fellow in Communication Science at the University of the Free State. His most recent book is Wildlife Documentaries in Southern Africa: From East to South.