The Bafut Beagles

The Bafut Beagles is the account of Gerald Durrell’s second animal-collecting expedition to the British Cameroons in 1949, and it introduced to English literature one of the most memorable characters in travel writing: the Fon of Bafut. The Fon was the hereditary ruler of the Bafut people in the Cameroon highlands — a man of immense presence, enormous hospitality, a love of whisky, and a gift for dancing that put his younger guests to shame.

The book traces Durrell’s months in the highlands, collecting animals with local hunters (the ‘Bafut beagles’ of the title) and drinking the evenings away with the Fon in his compound. The wildlife is extraordinary: giant rats, pangolins, flying squirrels, rare birds — but Durrell’s attention keeps returning to the human drama, and particularly to the character of his host.

The friendship that develops between Durrell and the Fon is one of the best things Durrell ever wrote about: genuine, warm, comic, and respectful in both directions. The Bafut Beagles is among his most purely entertaining books, and the portrait of the Fon remains one of the finest in 20th-century travel writing.

Reading Guides

• Gerald Durrell Books in Order
• Where to Start with Gerald Durrell

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Bafut Beagles apart: The Fon of Bafut is an unforgettable character; Vivid portrait of Cameroon highlands; and Durrell at his funniest. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Bafut Beagles give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Cross-cultural friendship. Cameroon highlands wildlife. Comedy of expedition life. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Reading Experience

The Bafut Beagles is the kind of book that changes slightly depending on when you read it. The surface — plot, character, setting — remains constant, but the reader brings different things to it at different points in life, and the book meets them there. This is a property of enduring work, and it distinguishes The Bafut Beagles from titles that are consumed once and not returned to.

Limitations

Less focused on wildlife than some Durrell. Episodic structure. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers who enjoyed The Overloaded Ark or My Family and Other Animals

The Cameroon Highlands

The British Cameroons in the late 1940s were a landscape of extraordinary wildlife abundance — a transitional zone between the lowland rainforest and the open highland country that provided habitats for an unusual range of species. Durrell arrived in 1949 on his second expedition, having already established himself with The Overloaded Ark as a collector of unusual competence. This time he had local hunters — the “Bafut beagles” of the title — who knew the landscape and its animals with an intimacy that no European naturalist could match, and the partnership that developed between Durrell and his hunters is one of the book’s most interesting subjects.

The animals collected on this expedition included pangolins, giant rats, flying squirrels, rare birds, and the full range of Cameroon forest creatures that would later populate Durrell’s zoo on Jersey. He describes each animal with the double attention of the naturalist and the comedian: precise about behaviour, diet, and temperament, but also alive to the comic possibilities that arise when a dozen creatures of incompatible temperaments are confined in close quarters. The logistics of keeping live animals healthy on an expedition in conditions that would defeat most zookeepers are a running theme of all Durrell’s Cameroon books, and the Bafut material is particularly rich.

The Fon of Bafut

But it is the Fon who distinguishes The Bafut Beagles from its predecessors and successors. The Fon of Bafut was the hereditary ruler of the Bafut people in the Cameroon highlands — a man of considerable political authority in the region, a host of legendary hospitality, and a personality that combined regal dignity with an appetite for whisky and dancing that delighted Durrell completely.

Their friendship was one of those encounters that transcend the social distances between two people — a twenty-four-year-old British animal collector and the traditional ruler of a Cameroonian people — because each recognized in the other qualities that were genuinely admirable. The Fon was curious, generous, funny, and possessed of a gift for enjoyment that Durrell found irresistible. Durrell was respectful, genuinely interested in the Fon’s world, and capable of the kind of direct, uncomplicating warmth that crosses cultural barriers more reliably than any formal courtesy.

A Return Engagement

Durrell would return to Bafut for his third Cameroon expedition, which produced A Zoo in My Luggage (1960). The Fon’s reappearance in that book, older and no less exuberant, confirms that the friendship was real and lasting rather than merely a traveller’s encounter. For readers working through the Cameroon trilogy in sequence, the Fon’s continuity across two books gives the Africa chapters a human anchor that the wildlife observation alone could not provide.

The Bafut Beagles is among Durrell’s most purely enjoyable books — the natural history is excellent, the comedy is sustained, and the Fon is unforgettable. For readers who have started with My Family and Other Animals, this is the expedition book to read next.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — One of Durrell’s most entertaining travel books, distinguished by the extraordinary character of the Fon of Bafut. The friendship between the two men is one of his finest portraits.