Death of Frederick Selous

Shortly before midday on 4 January 1917, at Beho-Beho in the Rufiji valley, Captain Frederick Courteney Selous of the 25th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, was killed. He was 65 and one of the most famous hunters and explorers of his time. He fell in the last phase of the fighting that had begun the previous day: during the night General Sheppard’s column had outflanked the German position from the west in order to cut off Captain Otto’s Germans from the only bridge over the Rufiji, at Kibambawe. According to “The Times History of the War”, at about 10.30 a.m. the brigade caught up with the main German force just as it was falling back from Beho-Beho.

Fight on the road

General Jan Smuts later told Selous’s biographer that the 25th Battalion was to bar the Germans’ only line of retreat to the south-east. The Germans must have noticed the outflanking move and withdrew early, because their head reached the road at exactly the moment when the leading company of fusiliers, commanded by Selous, got there. According to accounts, the enemy outnumbered it several times over. Selous deployed the company to attack and went forward himself to spot German riflemen in the bush through his field glasses. It was then that the bullets struck him. Accounts differ in detail: the battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Driscoll, wrote that Selous fell on the spot, leading his company against an enemy four times as strong. Other witnesses said he was first wounded in the side or in the arm and immediately afterwards hit in the head. His place was taken by Lieutenant Dutch, who was also mortally wounded at once.

The Germans disappeared into the bush, went round the fusiliers and came out onto the road further down. The South African official history says that they suffered severe losses but managed to withdraw. Captain Otto succeeded in getting his entire detachment to the south bank of the Rufiji and, as ordered, destroyed the bridge at Kibambawe. When Sheppard’s brigade reached the river on 5 January, the Germans were already dug in on the other bank, and the whole deck had been torn off the bridge. Another attempt at encirclement ended like the earlier ones: in Smuts’s words, the enemy had “once more slipped away”.

The hunter from Matabeleland

Selous was born in London on 31 December 1851. At nineteen he went to South Africa and for more than a decade hunted elephants in the lands of the Ndebele and Shona, in what is now Zimbabwe; his book “A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa” (1881) made him famous. In 1890, at the request of Cecil Rhodes, he guided the Pioneer Column of the British South Africa Company, which occupied Mashonaland, and in 1893 and 1896 he fought in the wars against the Ndebele. He was a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, who hunted with him in East Africa in 1909. It is widely believed that his adventures served Henry Rider Haggard as the model for the character of Allan Quatermain in “King Solomon’s Mines”.

When the war broke out, the army at first turned him down because of his age. In 1915 he joined the 25th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, made up of volunteers from the Legion of Frontiersmen, as a lieutenant, and in August he became a captain. At 63 he fought at Bukoba. After treatment in England he returned to East Africa at the end of August 1916 with a draft for the battalion, and in September he received the Distinguished Service Order “for conspicuous gallantry, resource and endurance”. His comrades recalled that he never rode but marched with the men and ate the same food as they did, and in the evenings went out with a butterfly net, collecting specimens for the Natural History Museum in London. On Christmas Day 1916 he wrote to his wife from Kisaki that the troops were badly depleted by disease and that an attack on the entrenched Germans “may not be child’s play”.

Burial under a tamarind tree

Selous was buried that same afternoon, sewn into a blanket, beside several fusiliers killed that day, in the shade of a tamarind tree by the battalion’s camp, a dozen or so kilometres north of the Rufiji. His fame reached the other side of the front too. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck wrote in his memoirs that “the old hunter Selous” was well known among the Germans as well, thanks to his engaging manner and his thrilling stories. After his death Roosevelt wrote that Selous had closed his life exactly as such a life ought to be closed, dying in battle for his country. The grave at Beho-Beho survives to this day. Since 1922 it has been surrounded by a game reserve named after Selous, one of the largest in Africa.