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The one-stop shop for those game for the hunt and the kill
YOU can almost smell the camp fire and hear the lions roar as you come upon a throng of rifle-stroking he-men inside Lucas and Wendie Potgieter's hunting emporium in Roodepoort, Gauteng. The Powder Keg and Eco-Africa is, as Lucas enjoys describing it, "where you can buy anything from laces for your hunting boots to a buffalo hunt in Tanzania". Indeed, the putty and green double-storey near the Gordon Road turnoff from the Concrete Highway is probably the only one-stop shop for a growing hunting elite made up of locals and foreign tourists. Many will remember the Powder Keg from its Melville days as a dealer of two decades in firearms - mainly rifles and shotguns - and a range of other hunting gear. But in the past two years the husband-and-wife team have also carved out a niche by booking hunts for their customers. The travel side of this distinctly masculine business - though the number of women hunters is said to be increasing - is the baby of distinctly feminine Wendie Potgieter. "We started it because we were continually being asked about places to hunt by guys who were buying rifles. It has also expanded into ecotourism - game viewing, bird watching, fishing and even bush education programmes for wives accompanying their husbands on hunting trips. And we don't confine our booking to 200-odd farms in South Africa. We book hunts as far north as Burkina Faso." Wendie, an expatriate Englishwoman, met her Afrikaner husband, Lucas, when both were in advertising, he having been a founder of what is today Saatchi & Saatchi Klerck & Barrett. She tells me that this year she is looking forward to shooting her first buffalo in Zambia. When I respond that hunting does not exactly figure on my wish list and that I can't even bear the thought of squashing a Parktown prawn, she deadpans that she, too, "would hate to squash a buffalo". Lucas Potgieter, who has a doctorate in business economics, is well-known to the hunting fraternity not only through the business but also through the column he writes for Landbouweekblad. He says there are about 200 000 hunters in South Africa and they spend well over R750-million a year locally and internationally on the sport. "It costs about R500 to shoot an impala, R25 000 a buffalo and R130 000 an elephant." Hunting game is still very much the sport of the well-off Afrikaner - under the old regime its obvious description was the sport of cabinet ministers - while English-speaking South Africans tend to prefer shooting birds. A good rifle costs from R5 000 to R130 000, while a fine shotgun will set you back between R4 000 and, believe it, R500 000. Then, says Potgieter, "there are those who are really buying men's jewellery when they buy sporting firearms. They tend to put them in safes and only take them out to stroke them. The fourth reason they buy them is for hunting, the first, second and third all because they are fine investments, appreciating at 20% a year."
I ask Potgieter how people who wish to take up the sport but are liable to shoot a farmer's prize bull instead of an eland go about it. "There are shooting ranges, but the novice's best bet is to join the SA Hunters' Association," she says. By the way, girls, if you're looking for love and your taste runs to the rugged, you could do a lot worse than pop into the Powder Keg and Eco-Africa on a Saturday morning. Though they probably won't notice you because they'll be so busy ogling the guns, you won't find more macho men en masse in any other place which doesn't also serve beer. ý Linda Stafford is a senior editor of the Financial Mail
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