N'Djoko

About the Book

There are many words in Africa to describe "elephant", whether it be in Lingala or many of the multitude of sub-Saharan native languages, however there will never be another "N´djoko" such as this one. He was by no means a forest elephant, although he shared that wisdom. His genes emanated from the heart of the Lado. He had the tall heavy frame of Angolan ancestry, and his tusks were heavier than any elephant that ever died climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro and whose tusks now rest in the British Natural History Museum.

N´djoko was a juvenile bull when Teddy Roosevelt first trekked and hunted East Africa. The huge animal was still a wise and powerful old man in 1971 when our paths crossed during his annual migration through the Congo forests. He survived wars, the automatic weapons of North Korean trained Congolese terrorists, and trophy hunters.

He was too majestic for me to permit my clients to kill, no matter the incredible value of his single remaining monstrous tusk that would have been the world record at an estimated 232 lbs. N´djoko lived on after our last encounter, and so far as is known was never intentionally destroyed by humans. Nor did his tusk ever surface during the last thirty-two years.

This book is not just about a legendary loxodont. This work is an exciting adventure in an Africa that no longer exists. It is a capsule in time-gone-by when darkest Africa was on the cusp of change yet still had both feet in the savage, superstitious past; the native cultures had yet to be bleached to the level of Western mediocrity.

About the Author

Raised in the pre-war bayou country, Michael F. Bradford, delivered a culture shock for schoolmate Californians in 1945. After graduating from UCLA, the author spent a tour of duty as commanding officer of a small US Naval Facility in Chaguaramas, Trinidad, West Indies. Mr. Bradford founded his own private firm that grew in eight years to be the 159th largest international construction company, as acclaimed by Engineering News Record. Other activities included major feature and documentary film productions abroad. The author in the 1960s became active in the development of theme parks, safari operating companies in Africa, and exotic game capture and supply for international zoological facilities. Mr. Bradford was responsible for the successful re-establishment of endangered African species through relocation, breeding, and game management. England, Central and Sub-Sahara Africa became home over the past forty years; the last fourteen have included intensive research and travel to little known areas of the Pacific, both above and beneath the surface.