In the Bush: Africa Through Paul Renner's Camera Lens
We stood on the tarmac of a tiny airport in rural Tanzania, not far from Mount Kilimanjaro, ready to board a puddle-jump flight into the vast Serengeti.
And, suddenly, it hit me.
Maybe it was our proximity to that snowy peak made famous by a 1936 short story about another fateful East African safari, or maybe it was his full white beard and capable demeanor, but on that bright morning our tour leader at once reminded me of Papa.
“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Ernest Hemingway?” I asked.
Paul Renner blushed, then laughed.
“A few times,” he said.
But there were differences, big ones.
Unlike Papa, the Laguna Beach-based photographer doesn’t venture into Africa to shoot and kill. His mission is to document wildlife in their threatened environment, to help call attention to all those vanishing predators and prey, taken by poachers, hunted for skins and ivory, pushed off their ancestral terrain.
This was his 73rd African excursion since 2005, trips on which he has shown safari clients like me and my pal Homer Simpson that he is no usual wildlife photographer and tour guide. (Here's a link to a photo gallery from his safari website.)
Because Paul, you see, has an emotional connection to this place. He grew up in Kenya and Tanzania in the 1950s, one of four sons born to missionaries who founded a leprosarium and taught Africans modern agricultural methods, how to use donated tractors to develop the bush.
Rather than any Hemingway, Paul grew up an East African Tom Sawyer.
He was a curious, tousle-haired boy, free to roam the equatorial range, astounded at such exotic wildlife as gazelle, zebra and leopards, not to mention the rich African tribal culture, and all that untouched land that spread as far as his eyes could see.
Paul Renner seemed made for a life in Africa.
He had a pet dik-dik, a small toylike antelope with large searching eyes, that often followed him into the kitchen, its ungainly legs sent sprawling on the linoleum floors.
At age ten, according to a 2005 newspaper story, Paul befriended Simeon Yakobo, a teenager from the Iramba tribe, who lived nearby in a hut made of sticks and mud.
“Yakobo taught him about animals – what habitat they liked, how to track and hunt them with a bow and arrow,” the story read. “They would take day hikes to hunt warthogs and gazelle. They shipped themselves as freight on trains to travel a hundred miles for 7 cents, visiting what were to become national wildlife parks.”
Eventually, Paul picked up a Kodak Brownie Box and began to photograph the animals and scenery around him. Putting his slingshot away for good, he now hunted the bush armed with only his trusted camera.
He soon developed his photographer’s eye, learned how the animals moved, observed their habits, blinking at the tiny beautiful details he captured on film.
In 1966, at 17, Paul and his family left Africa after he mother became ill. He was dropped into Southern California’s tumultuous 1960s, a bewildered boy from the savanna, trying to find a place at high school dances and talking to girls when his instincts told him he should be back in the African bush.
Out of four Renner brothers, Paul is the only one to return.
With a dream of becoming a game warden, he briefly took a job selling hotdogs at the San Diego Zoo but left it because he worried that one day soon, there would be no African wildlife to return to.
He wanted to go home. But life doesn’t offer immediate payouts.
Eventually, Paul got a construction degree and spent three decades working weekdays as a contractor, his weekends spent shooting scenery across the American West.
But in 2005, he saw a chance to return to Africa, and began leading tours back to the parks he one visited with his boyhood pal Simeon as freight train stowaways.
Many clients are Orange County residents who see his photographic work for sale at local cultural fairs and fall in love with Paul’s vision of a wild Africa.
His wife, Sandy, has witnessed how her husband’s personality changes the moment he sets foot back in the bush.
“Paul,” she once exclaimed. “You’re an African!”
One predawn morning as we loaded into our land cruiser for another day in the bush, Homer and I got l lucky.
Paul decided to accompany us on our travels that day.
As we moved through the undulating landscape, with Homer and I chatting like Heckle and Jeckle, two old cartoon crows perched on a fence post, Paul was quiet.
But when he spoke, we listened.
He conversed in fluent Swahili with Julius, our Masai driver, gazing out the truck windows with expert unaided eyes, seeing things that we did not: Giraffes moving into the bush in the distance, a leopard drinking from a stream, right there before us.
Just then, he was more than a guide and photographer in search of his next image; you could tell that Paul just wanted to be here, to experience and drink in this place that had helped shape the humble, independent, well-rounded man he has become.
Along the way, Paul shared stories, little tricks of the trade. Like how to photograph a walking pride of lions from up front, so they were approaching you, or how to position yourself so you’d capture the morning light in their eyes.
Or how a puff adder is known here as the five-step snake — because if its bites you, you’ll take maybe five steps and then keel over dead. Paul saw elephants with smaller tusks and worried that the older males had all been poached.
He knew the life spans of every animal on the grassland, explaining how elephants lived the longest, to age 65 or more, while cheetahs and male lions died relatively early, at the tender age of just 16.
He explained how lions avoid the wet brush after a rain, finicky as an average house cat. He didn’t like to see tour guides harass a pride just for a picture. As we descended into the Ngorongoro Crater, on a paved road shaped generations ago by herds of elephants, Paul’s voice dropped in respect.
“Elephants built this road,” he said. “And now they’ve lost it.”
As war loomed in the Ukraine, Paul remarked how mankind had a lot to learn from the animal kingdom, where wild creatures coexisted, driven to kill only by instinct or hunger, but never greed.
His bush memory, that institutional knowledge, remained fierce.
“Julius, do you remember those three cheetahs who chased that gazelle in the pouring rain,” he asked of some previous safari. “Was it this valley?”
"Yes," Julius said. "Just there to the left."
They were like two professors poring over some ancient text.
Along with his concern for the region’s wildlife, Paul also looks out for its people, urging clients to generously tip guides and drivers, these proud Masai workers he considers his brothers, his ndugu.
They’re the caretakers of the Serengeti, East Africa’s so-called “endless plain” who years ago taught a young missionary’s son how to walk with dignity and pride.
Both as a boy and as a man, Paul has had so many adventures in the bush.
Like the time a male lion stuck its head inside his safari truck and roared like that MGM mascot. Or how he watched lion cubs play with hubcaps their mother had pried from the wheels of a bush vehicle.
He explained how leopards live 95% of their lives in trees and how he had once taken a photo of a female lion on the chase, its forepaws and hind legs stretched almost horizontally, looking in all its heartbreaking beauty like a wild ballerina of the bush.
One day, as we drove the grassland, looking for a way across angry swollen streams on our way to view alligators on the Mara River, Paul told of a pride of lions that had earned an epic reputation as the fiercest hunters on the savanna.
The patriarch was nicknamed Scarface after he lost an eye in battle. His progeny featured five brothers — including Lipstick because of a torn lip, and Notch, the one with the gorgeous black mane — who instilled fear across the land.
But time takes its toll in the bush. One brother was taken by an alligator, and another met a similar fate. Now the band was down to three, diminished but no less proud.
And they were still out there, Paul pointed out, somewhere.
At one point, we watched hundreds of wild-eyed wildebeest cross a savanna track, only to backtrack to recross the road, as if going in some maddening circle.
They were goofy, odd-looking characters, straight out of a Dr. Seuss rhyme, with high shoulders and skinny legs but an indomitable spirit, the young kicking their legs high, sprinting and pivoting, able to run within just minutes of birth.
As Paul tells it, on the sixth day of creation, God must have used all the leftover animal parts to come up with this lovable Frankenstein of a creature.
Having birthed a new generation, the animals prepared for their annual migration from the Serengeti to the Masai Mara, across Tanzania and into Kenya. Faces masked in black, with shaggy white neck beards, the ungainly beasts seemed ready to stampede at the slightest startle, always the first to bolt from our passing vehicle.
“Every year, 1.3 million wildebeests make the trip,” Paul said. “And to think that there used to be 60 million head of bison roaming the American plains.”
He paused.
“Imagine what we have lost.”
Paul grew used to the potty humor Homer and I tossed out like two class clowns.
When we argued whose job it was to replace the last spent roll of toilet paper in our tent, Paul said he felt like he was back in high school again.
“Or maybe the eighth grade,” somebody commented later.
At one point, I began talking to the animals like a street thug.
“Hey you, c’mere,” I called out in a Brooklyn accent. “Whatta you lookin’ at?”
I christened our bush vehicle Big Daddy, shouting to other trucks at the scene of some animal sighting to “Step aside and let the big dog drink.”
Paul looked on sympathetically as I told him of the apparent “Ass Rule” that had so far defined my time in the bush: Whenever I pointed my smartphone, animals turned to show me their butts, as in some international sign of disrespect.
As we rolled along, we all sang the lyrics to the Beverly Hillbillies theme song and traded stories of our favorite Twilight Zone episodes.
But Paul always brought our attention back to the bush.
He pointed as we passed the acacia tree that served as model for his business logo.
Then Homer spoke up.
“If it wasn’t for the presence of so much death,” he said, “this would be a real nice place for the animals to live.”
Paul gazed wistfully at the horizon, once again finally home, back in his beloved bush.
“Yeah,” he whispered, “it sure is beautiful.”