Well, a Madness-derived timeline could not be ”mad” without something about safari hunting. So let it be, the update on Madness and Ardor focused on the exploitation of Africa through safari.
Luxury in a Far-away Land
The History of Safari Parks in the Protestant Realm
Promotional Poster in English for a Safari in Prussian Kongo
Welcome to the beautiful Jackson Safari in Windhook, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to see everyone here. Are you ready to go for a hunting trip, and bag in the most beautiful lions, cheetah, elephants, rhinos for your own decorations? If so, let’s load up your trusty rifle and katana, and unleash your hunting instinct. It will be helluva ride!
The people of each Great Powers have their own ways of indulging in leisure and exoticity. For the IFE, they love to build gardens under geodesic domes filled with rare species or sculpting avant-garde arts and architectures. For the Europans and their Catholic brethren, it is all about enjoying the finest aspect of life that their vast territories could offer. But for the Protestant, it is not purely relaxation. Nay, they have a history of being smaller than their neighbors and must always be ready for war, which cultivates a strong gun culture and affinity for some kind of adrenaline rush. For that, the Protestant revel in Safari hunting, a form of indulgence that satisfies the rush for combats but nevertheless still hosts a feeling of aristocracy for their customers.
While hunting for big games has always been a significant part of many colonial empires, there had been few efforts to establish a true breeding ground for big wild games. That all changed during the Great Depression, when a Japanese-American entrepreneur, Jeremy Yoshio, son of the fame Japanese naturalist Tanaka Yoshio, came up with an idea to establish wild zoo, where the large, expansive nature of Africa and Asia could house real adventures for the wealthy, and potentially be far more profitable than simple hunting. This idea was then pitched to the American, Prussian, Dutch, Korean and Cokies, from 1936 - 1937. It actually managed to gain traction, mostly because Yoshio had made it explicitly that they could deprive many natives of food sources by banning them from hunting wild game, while providing extra incomes for hotel and resort conglomerates and procuring jobs for poor Betters. With these premises, constructions and establishment for safari parks with hospitality began in 1938, and boomed during the 1940s.
The first safari park was the Zeeland Game Reserve (OTL MalaMala), located in Dutch Zuid-Afrika. It was established and planned by Yoshio, funded by the Afrikaner Society of Big Games and built by Carolinian Gentry Hospitality Corporation, a world-famous hotel corporation known for their extravagant Antebellum plantation hotels and designs. The ground was broken on June 1st, 1938, but before that, they had to chase out the natives inhabiting that area. To save money, mercenaries and authorities simply deported the inhabitants, or shot anyone who resisted orders. Thousands were forcibly removed from their ancestral land and then put into Cokie Africa, and hundreds more perished under the hand of Cokie Trench Sweeper or Boer sharpshooters. All was done within a span of two weeks. Next, barricades surrounded the designated area, a bush savannah region of fifty square miles, and guarded by those same mercenaries who had removed the bush people. Natives who tried to get close to the reserve were shot or apprehended, with severe punishment for “threatening nature and tourists”. This was part of Yoshio’s intention for the safari to be fully operated and visited by Betters only, and he viewed the native Africans as “too inferior and incapable of managing the day-to-day task of civilized Protestant.” There were also exclusions towards non-Protestant, which meant Slavs and Catholics were not allowed to enjoy the resort. Exceptions were for those with enough wealth or professed Protestant faith.
The actual resort employed a new design, more integrated than typical Antebellum architects. Yoshio was a naturalist at heart, and he opted for an eclectic design, combining local materials and artifacts of those that were massacred, while using natural wood colors prevalent in the reserve. This caused some friction with the Cokies, but since most of the money was funded from the Afrikaners and Chancellor Gamble himself did not want to have conflicts with fellow Betters, the squabbling died down. With that, Yoshio’s exquisite and eclectic design was passed. The ultralux but incredibly elegant building began to manifest itself after many months of construction. The final resort would occupy several hectares, and had multiple suites, all were incredibly private and secured. Not only that, there were reserved mansions for high-profile politicians, and came with the finest high end weapons, all bought from Purdey and Sons, Craig-Jordan or Japanese katana makers, to cultivate a feeling of nobility and aristocracy.
The grand opening of Zeeland Game Reserve in 1940 was a massive media sensation, especially among the upper class of the Protestant realm. Immediately, booking and reservations filled up all the available rooms within a few days, and vacant rooms would not be a thing until a few months later, when the rain season kicked in. Notable guests who had the opportunity to enjoy first-hand the luxuries of the resort were Chancellor Gamble himself, Jan Smuts of Zuid-Afrika, the van Heemstra family, President J Edgar Hoover of RU, the Kims, and many more. All had such positive experiences and services that they went forward to authorize even more construction of such reservations across their territories. The Dutch and Korean came up with reservation for snorkelling and spear-fishing in their turquoise lagoon with beautifully vivid corals, the Americans for bison hunting, the Prussian and their Teutonic European fellows for even more jungle wild games, and the Cokies continued with big game hunts. The Australian took a more cowboy approach, with kangaroo and bison hunting in typical cowboy garments, and slept in rustic resorts located in the Outbacks. Their Great Barrier Reefs became a destination for Cokies’ interests. Of course, all of them cost an arm and leg to stay in, and could be so expensive that even a typical suite could eat up a six-month worth of salary for a middle class family, or upwards of four-year salary in a Presidential Suite.
A Safari Resort in Cokie Africa, circa 1950
A romantic moment of a Cokie planter-class couple in a Yonderland safari
It should be noted that even within the Protestant, there were many conflicts and competitions. In Carolinian Africa, for example, the Cokies made it difficult for non-Presbyterian business to operate and open reservations, and even hired looters to disrupt such businesses. In Korean Philippines and Korean Four Provinces, they barred the Aussies and Dutch from incurring deeply into the pie, and created “Exclusive Zones” for Korean and Cokie businesses only.
Behind every gorgeous, paradise-like resort, the Protestant brutally crushed oppositions to their construction progress. Thousands more would perish or end up in concentration camps, where they became subjects of Project Uber. These were bloody enough that some tribes went extinct, and their cultures forever lost to mass graves or in dirty prison cells underground. The Protestant all agreed on one thing: natives should be excluded from the reserve, and those who crossed the line would get punished (read: get shot). And the number of reservations became so much that in some regions, the lands for natives got reduced to fewer than fifty-percent. Famines and riots were common among the natives, to the point that the military had to intervene and block more developments, lest full-blown rebellions exploded.
A very rare image of an African native getting “punished” for not moving out of his hut
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Somewhere in Prussian Kongo
An African man inattentively entered in a safari while looking for baobab and woods. The sun was at its highest noon, beating on him like an oven. He had gathered enough fuel for his family today. But when he was going back, a group of “anti-poachers” arrived. Spotting the man, they shot him without any hesitation, and left his body there. Later that day, a group of lions came by and finished off the body. It was far from an isolated incidence. In fact, there were many unreported cases of natives who went stray into the reservation, only to become a meal for the big cats, or impaled by elephants, rhinos and hippos. Their bones obviously had to be gathered and thrown away, deprived them off any proper burials.
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The IFE and Catholics reacted with these big game reservations with their own resorts and hotels, deep in the Amazon, taiga, on the mountains or next to the endless blue sea. But to show their moral “superiority”, they hired local workers and flaunted efforts to conserve natures. There would be tariffs and banning of all kinds, slapped against Protestant and non-Protestant alike, to deprive their respective national opponents of business activities. A new tension would begin, one that started with some squabbling in the luxury market.
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