I met P.J. Schoeman - author, anthropologist, philosopher, nature conservator and hunter - a few years before his death at his retirement home in Stellenbosch, when I was a young student. Being an aspiring writer of fiction myself, I considered him a sort of mentor figure. I still remember him telling me the story of how, shortly after his appointment as Head of Etosha National Park, he went to see Oom Jan Robbertse, the renowned elephant hunter of Angola and Kaokoland, whom he, on his part, saw as a possible mentor. When he showed Oom Jan a carefully drawn picture of an elephant and asked him to please indicate the correct places where to aim his rifle in case of a confrontation, the old hunter told him in all earnest: “Listen, my boy, I don’t study these things, I damn well shoot them!” With this, Schoeman probably wanted to tell me to disregard all advice and just do my own thing in the field of fiction. I proceeded to do just that in my career as a writer.
Piet van Rooyen
When the editor of Huntinamibia asked me to write a short article on P.J. Schoeman, I found an archive picture of him sitting next to a downed lioness. At that time Schoeman was definitely a much younger man than when I met him during his last years. When I was young myself and in love, I read his love story Where the Far Winds Blow, in which he used a lion charge to bring the story to its fatal ending.
The picture of my mentor with his lioness made me think back to my own lion, which I shot in what was then Namibia’s Bushmanland (now part of the Otjozondjupa Region). I was working for the Nyae Nyae Foundation. My job was to instruct the Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherers in cattle herding…
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