Mundjamba – The Life Story of an African Hunter and In Any Kind of Cover
By PH Hugo Seia
It was the year the end of the hunting season in CAR coincided with the government’s decision to fly collectively to France, and all the non-Africans were thrown off the flights to Paris. When normal service resumed, the PHs (and their wives, like me) turned over their precious seats on the next overbooked flights to their hunting clients and, for a few days, Bangui had some of the old-time feeling, with PHs from all over Africa crossing paths. The atmosphere at the airport during the endless waiting was weary but gay, the first time I met Hugo Seia.
That elegant gentleman with an impressive moustache and a trunk full of hunting stories from a lifetime in Africa has white hair now; but then, masked by blonde highlights, so do I.
Hugo was born in Angola to parents who were three and five years old when they arrived from Portugal with their parents. The lovely photo of his mother petting a pet leopard in Hugo’s book Mundjamba says it all, as does the gift of a small double-barreled 9 mm shotgun on his eighth birthday, and a 9.3 x 62 FN rifle at age 12. “All my memories are related to the Dark Continent, to my Motherland, to wild game and hunting,” writes Hugo in his 385-page African autobiography, covering his birth to 1995, when this remarkable signed and limited edition was first published by Trophy Room Books.
His surprise second book, In Any Kind of Cover, was published in 2001. This invaluable, more
technical book about the actual hunting and killing of elephant, buffalo and cats is a genuine “must-read” to anyone hunting big game, especially hunters going for one of the Big Five for the first time. Hugo recounts many of his best hunting stories here, using them to illustrate the lessons he has learned in the bush over 40 years – some of them the hard way. He gives fact-based practical advice, like in the chapter dedicated to elephant. After hunting some 1,000 elephants (including his own personal record of 49 kilos of ivory in each tusk in Angola), he reminds matter-of-factly: “Accuracy is very important when shooting elephants… Bad shots bring trouble.”
Hugo gives solid descriptions of elephant, buffalo or cat behavior: singly or in groups or herds; the calibers he has used and the results he’s seen; the effects of softs vs. solids; where to shoot and why; safe shooting distances; changing winds, mock charges, bullet velocities, etc. I wish every safari hunter would read this book. Twice.
His hunting life in Angola, Namibia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Zambia and Tanzania, translates into pursuing 100s of elephants, dozens of lions and leopards, buffalos, hippos, Sipata, the 3,000-pound, 20-foot crocodile, giant or royal sable (whose biggest recorded specimen measured 65”), Lord Derby eland and even the wild camels of Angola (!). Hugo speaks very naturally about the hunting life: its landscapes, its sunsets, its dailiness, its long string of clients who become friends, its cooks and trackers and colleagues, its close calls and its bad calls; its calibres and the bullets that break up or miss… and inevitably, at some point, wound.
There are plenty of those stories, too. As Hugo writes, “If the hunter’s shot does not stop the charging animal, there are no reflexes, no actions, no thoughts which can save the hunter’s life. Only God can do it.” In 1992, Hugo stepped on a Gaboon viper and was seriously tumbled by a surprised buffalo – all on the same day; and, not long after, survived a full-out tackle by an unwounded leopard that he stumbled upon while unarmed, looking for “the perfect place to build a blind.” That he is alive to write his books is proof that there is a God. “Man cannot figure nature,” writes Hugo. “If he does, he won’t win.”
Starting his hunting career as an ambitious Chefe de Posto (the youngest of his generation) in Angola, his job included “obtaining information about the needs of the local people.” Conveniently, this often meant supplying villages with fresh meat, or taking care of problem lions in herding areas, and naughty elephants wreaking havoc in agricultural areas… and many, many, many that were not. “I hunted many elephants, more than I ever should have hunted,” he confesses after a youth with an avid hunter as a father during the “free hunting law” period prior to 1956 in Angola, when “it was more important to spend the night killing crocs than playing cards.” Back when there probably really were too many crocs – or elephants or lions.
“Africa was different. Men were different. Hunters were different. The world was not the same,” he says, lamenting an Angola whose wildlife will never really recover from almost two generations of civil war.
Like so many of Africa’s white families, Hugo’s was handed its fair share of hard kicks: his father’s premature death (a man who shot one thousand buffalo with his Mannlicher 9.5 x 57); in Angola he and his family were forced to flee, the safari industry closing in their tracks. One of his few but great regrets is the loss of his entire Angolan trophy collection, which included a giant sable he took far from its home in the reserves of Kangandala and Luando, and was probably one of the best ever taken.
Hugo is very frank and doesn’t hesitate to name the scoundrels who paid their PHs with bad checks, or the business partners who cheated him, or the bad days of hunting in Sudan – so bad, he hardly discusses it. Only four men ever “made life impossible on safari”; Hugo declines to tell all, but one story.
Ultimately, Hugo’s books are a tribute to Angola, a country he knew intimately from the equatorial forests of the north facing Zaire, to “The Land at the End of the World” bordering the Caprivi Strip. If you ask Hugo today where “home” is, despite his family’s life in Portugal, the answer is still Benguela, Angola.
His books are also a special tribute to many unforgettable elephant hunts, earning him his nickname, Mundjamba, including his three-year quest for Bulvue, an elephant whose killer would be called “Elephant Soba” or “Father of the Elephants”; an elephant with a front foot diameter of 25 inches that traveled hundreds of miles every year.
These many pages of black and white photos are a worthy monument to the times Hugo experienced and the many good hunters, and their families, he encountered. It is almost as if he knew it were all going to disappear and wanted to preserve these images for all times. At present, I know of no other hunter who has showed such attention to his hunting archives.
We should be grateful that he has preserved dozens of stories – from the hundreds he has heard - that might otherwise disappear: “some similar, some touching, some imaginary, and some just stories coming from rich or naïve imaginations of men living in the bush,” including the African belief that, “a child, by simply touching the wrinkled skin of a pachyderm, gains knowledge and sexual strength.”
There is more to hunting than killing animals, and Hugo captures the spirit of the hunt. He experiences the nature around him, asking himself questions about game distribution and sub-species each time his experience expands another step across the continent. He is one of the few men qualified to compare the buffalo of northern Angola with the buffalo of Sudan and CAR.
As he encounters life and death situations, Hugo questions the hazy spiritual relationship between man and animal, for example, recalling the time an elephant literally spared his life. And yet, only hours later, he killed that elephant. Other times, he lets go the buffalo or leopard that almost ended him. Men with this amount of experience in hunting wild animals do not have to explain.
All PHs have a streak of masochism, and Hugo confesses that there are places, like Mamué, Angola that were pure hell for someone else, but paradise for him. Hugo’s beautiful wife, Maria Alice, who carried her babies while sitting in cat blinds and following him elephant hunting, emerges in these pages and photos with her own heroic quietness, following the uncertain roller-coaster and havoc of the post-Colonial professional hunting career.
Hugo knows the era is over when the universe of hunters knew no geographic boundaries, when safaris lasted 30 or 40 days, when hunting clients “in order to get a good trophy, didn’t care if they had good food, or poor accommodations. It didn’t matter if they went days without a shower and if there were no cold drinks in camp. They ignored the heat of the day and the cold of the night.”
The 1971 Angola Safaris brochure reproduced here is of another time, listing its hunting areas from the “Namib Desert, Moçamedes District on the West Coast, thru Huila, to the Cubango and Cuito Rivers in Cuando-Cubango District.” This was when the trophy fee for lion or greater kudu was $50.00.
Times have changed, but Hugo remains an outstanding example of a professional hunter. Lucky for us, between hunting seasons, he is always busy on another book, another batch of photos. And that, indeed, is good news.
Hugo’s books are available from Trophy Room Books as signed limited editions only; there is no trade or popular edition, so be prepared for the $125 plus shipping price tags.