January 8, 2025
The Namibian Escarpment is perhaps the most prominent geological feature of the country. People have described this rugged escarpment, where the coastal plains of the Namib Desert rise steeply towards the Central Highlands, as the rocky backbone which runs through the entire country parallel to the coastline. At times these fissured badlands amidst the arid country are of such rough inhospitality that people have called Namibia the country that ‘God created in anger`.
January 8, 2025
I like old things. In my house I’ve got a wooden carving from a Flemish church dating from the 1800s, some pewter tankards from the mid-1600s, and a smoking pipe of New Zealand origin from around the last war. My usual hunting rifle is an early 1970s Heckler and Koch .308, obtained via the deceased estate of a friend of Erich Honecker, the former communist East German party leader.
January 8, 2025
With my gun case and rucksack I set off to Namibia on my own at the end of May 2024. I was looking forward to my second attempt to bag a mature old kudu bull according to the rules of the Erongo Verzeichnis. Like the previous year, my destination is Hagen Denker's hunting ground at the south-western foothills of the Erongo Mountains.
December 2, 2025
When Elzanne contacted me to request a contribution for this year’s Huntinamibia edition I was hesitant. First of all, the hunting season until then had not delivered something really noteworthy and moreover I have a feeling that after a quarter of a century of contributing to this publication, as not to become boring, it must come to an end. Therefore, I replied: "I don’t have something in mind at the moment. But I still have a last safari at the end of September. Should this hunt deliver something notable, I will contact you."
December 3, 2025
That is why I came here: to put my hunting skills at the service of a community. My first African safari, in pursuit of the Greater Kudu five years ago, brought me to the magnificent backdrop of the Erongo Mountains. It was an intense combination of strenuous hiking and meditative glassing of the mountain slopes and dry river courses. I returned again two years later, that time in the surreal expanse of the Namib Desert. The previous week I had hunted on the edge of the Kalahari at Petersfarm, going after hartebeest, gemsbok and warthog – the typical game species there. I thoroughly enjoyed all these hunts.
December 3, 2025
Experiencing intense moments in nature, embracing physical exertion and deprivation as a challenge in order to come to know hunting in a way that is rarely possible in today’s hunting grounds in Germany. This was the motivation for my hunting companion Holger and me to travel to Namibia.
December 3, 2025
I walked in circles around the fallen old warrior for several minutes, studying the scars and characteristics that told the 14- year story of a rugged life lived in the furtherest shag of Mozambique’s northern Zambezi Delta. From the prominent snare marks encircling his neck and right hindfoot, to the smallest tick bites, each blemish in the bull’s weathered skin offered a glimpse into what he had endured since the day he was born, long ago when I was just eleven years old. As much as I wanted to know every episode of his feral life, imagination and speculation would be as close as I could get. The now-forgotten details of the battle that had once been so forceful as to snap his left horn in half will forever remain a mystery.
December 3, 2025
We were kneeling in the hot sand. It was early April, yet the sun was burning down on us mercilessly. Poldi was sitting behind me. It was his second visit to Namibia and therefore he now knew that in Africa, too, the scorching heat and biting flies do come to an end.
December 3, 2025
Hunting for me goes beyond the obvious, beyond the daily grind and the collecting of trophies. Even beyond the now hackneyed phrase of “collecting memories” ‒ something probably nobody can really define. Once you allow yourself as a hunter to actually and consciously take in moments and breathe in air, you realise that there is so much more to hunting, and being a hunter.