An African Safari

Filmed during the AMNH Central African Expedition, 1948. Starting at Cape Town and going round the southern tip of Africa up to Mombasa, Kenya, the AMNH Central African Expedition, led by AMNH director of preparation and installation James Lippitt Clark, then traveled through Nairobi, the Mountains of the Moon in the Ruwenzori Range in Uganda and Zaire, Ripon Falls (Uganda), Bagasson (Congo) and Stanleyville (now Kisangani in Zaire), all north of Lake Victoria, then to Uganda, the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) and Congo. The film opens with a map showing the route. Expedition activities follow, including fording rivers, setting up camp, cooking, baking bread, and ironing, all photographed at Campsite #4 in Narok, Kenya. The Masai people are shown tending their cattle, which includes milking and bleeding. The Masai dung-covered dwellings are seen, as are the moran, or warrior strata of the Masai, with their shields and swords. Pygmies cook, smoke, sing, and dance. The expedition filmed many different species of animals: mammals, including giraffes (courtship behavior), lions, zebras, buffaloes, elephants, leopards, cattle, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, warthogs, jackals, waterbucks, impalas, kobs, topis, bushbucks, Thomson's gazelles, Grant's gazelles and wildebeests; birds, including egrets, crowned cranes (courtship behavior), storks, vultures, hammerkops, hawks, bustards and pelicans; insects, including ants and various ant nests, termites, termite queens and termite nests, butterflies, and grasshoppers; reptiles, including a python, and a turtle; and invertebrates in the form of millipedes and a snail.