Profile of PH Rudy Lubin
By his wife, Brooke

Over the last 38 years, Rudy Lubin has probably guided more safaris in the Central African Republic than any other professional hunter, past or present. His 30-year association with Daniel Henriot and Les Safaris du Haut Chinko, remains one of the industry’s, and the continent’s, longest.

Rudy has also hunted in Cameroon, Gabon, Sudan and Tanzania. Nothing in Rudy’s family’s background hinted at his future as a hunter in Africa. In fact, Pierre Alexis, alias ‘Rudy’, is from an old Brittany fishing family. His grandfather, who fished the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, and most of his many uncles died in service to the sea. And seven years of his childhood were spent along the coast of the Channel Island of Jersey, which explains the Frenchman’s ease with English. Rudy must be an incarnation of a forgotten ancestor, for by age six, he had refined his stillness and stalking skills enough to bring home many a partridge and rabbit and woodpigeon for his mother’s Sunday terrines.

When the time came to do his obligatory military service, in order to request a posting in Africa, he signed up for a longer tour. Having applied for Senegal, Gabon, Congo or Cameroon, he was sent to Chad in time for the rebel uprisings of 1968, which continue 40 years later.

He returned to Paris with memories, malaria, and a fierce determination to become a professional hunter. Despite his attempts to discourage the solemn young man from entering a profession he considered already obsolete and dependent on game already hopelessly diminished, PH and outfitter Henri Eyt-Dessus gave Rudy his first job in the safari industry. Those were the days when PHs did real apprenticeships and they developed first-class bush skills – not just for judging trophies – but for the rigours, organization, maintenance of material, creation of an effective staff, and all the elements from ice cubes to radio repair that are vital for the success of the safari.

Rudy quickly moved on to the penultimate safari destination in French Africa – the Central African Republic, whose elephant hunting in those heady days was unsurpassable. After a season with SAFOV – unpaid to this day – he followed his mentor, Robert Rouelle to Henriot’s Haut Chinko in 1975. Robert had hunted tiger and gaur in Indochina and was an exemplary mixture of his father’s French art de vivre and the mystery and elegance of his Vietnamese mother. Robert had the single greatest influence on Rudy becoming the hunter, and the man, he became.

And so began the great Chinko adventure. After a successful career as a hunter-crocodile skin exporter in Gabon, Henriot started Chinko in 1973. Chinko was a vast, uninhabited, unexplored 3-million-acre concession in north-eastern C.A.R. whose heart at Trois Rivières was 1,000 km and a 5-day drive from Bangui. Over the years, 1000 km of trails were carved into the woodland savanna and riverine forests, rich in elephant, lion, Lord Derby eland, buffalo and buck. The landing strip alone took a year of labour to clear and flatten by hand with picks and shovels.

Just getting to the hunting area was a Camel Trophy Challenge: seas of 12-foot grass and muddy, flooded flats. But the hunting was great and, in those days, clients didn’t complain about crossing rivers up to their chins in the chilly dawn to get to the elephants on the other side; about the battered Dodges and Land Rovers cajoled into service; about shortage of diesel or soft drinks; about emperors, uprisings, and the occasional unannounced changes of heads of state. The hunt was everything!

Rudy would have stayed there forever, but starting in the late 1970s, poachers from Sudan armed with army assault rifles began their dauntless extermination of the area’s wildlife. First it was the elephants. In the late 1980s, it was the hippos; then the buffalo and bucks went slowly down. In 1991/92, Chinko reorganized, moving as far southwest from Sudan as they could go, while it launched feasibility studies and sought support to fight poaching from the EEC and NGOs. But instead, the poachers followed the hunting trails, and hard cash for a region whose sole support was sport trophy hunting was too controversial. When the Chinko Conservation and Anti-Poaching Trust became bogged down in Bangui’s political stalemate in 1996, Rudy burned to the ground all he and Daniel had built over 25 years, abandoning Chinko, probably forever, in 1997.

If Cameroon briefly crossed their minds, Daniel and Rudy were convinced that the C.A.R. remained the true Mecca of Lord Derby eland hunters, and the right place for a certain kind of bongo hunter. When Daniel retired from hunting, Rudy went on.

Since 2005 Rudy had operated in north-central C.A.R. in association with Daniel KoudoumÈ’s Oubangui-Chari Safaris, which offers both savanna and forest species in the same concession.

Hunters come to Rudy for his dedication to giving them truly authentic hunting, mostly by tracking on foot for Lord Derby eland, lion and bongo. Disappointed that so much of the safari industry today consists of Toyota Safaris and hunters ready to sacrifice the rewards of fair chase for record-book entries, Rudy is sure there are still hunters eager for the sport and dignity of genuinely hunting sought-after species like Lord Derby eland and bongo.

Fondly nicknamed ‘The Terminator’ for his drive, and overdrive when required, Rudy’s hunters enjoy the black streak and dark wit of his humour. While his meticulous preening of his .416 Heym can make you crazy, its accompanying calm inspires confidence in the chaos of a wounded, charging animal. A bon vivant at the table, his knowledge of birdlife and birdsong is equaled by few PHs.

The years have flown by, and today at 60, Rudy is now older than many of his hunting clients, and is one of the respected backbones of French Africa’s safari industry.

Since 1984, he has made his life with me, daring me to attach my fate to his – and to Africa’s. Dreading the inevitable arrival of the satellite phone in his camp, Rudy’s corner of safari history is still being captured in dozens of, perhaps the last on earth, tender love letters written by a husband to an absent wife. In them, he describes the hunter, his habits, skills and foibles; recounts the chase day-by-day, and each victory; happenings with the staff, scribbles jokes and sketches, enclosing an occasional brilliant crimson turaco feather.

Dedicated to preserving this increasingly anachronistic lifestyle well into this new century – because when it vanishes, it will be gone for all time – he and his hunter take their rifles and drive off into the safari dawn.