Donald Ker

Donald Ker was a famous Kenyan white hunter, safari guide and conservationist of British descent. As a young man he teamed up with Sydney Downey to create Ker and Downey Safaris Ltd., one of the first guide companies to transition from hunting to photographic safaris. He is also known for leading two long expeditions with Edgar Monsanto Queeny for the American Museum of Natural History which resulted in the production of several nature documentaries and in Ker's own dedication to conservation.

When Ker was six years old his family moved to a coffee plantation in Kenya. He took to hunting early in his life and killed his first lion when still in his teens. Not much later he accompanied Denys Finch Hatton on a safari for the Prince of Wales. He soon joined the safari company Shaw and Hunter Ltd. It was while he worked for Shaw and Hunter that he first encountered Sydney Downey in the Masai Mara. In the beginning the two hunters developed a feud stemming from an incident when both were in the Mara at the same time, and felt the other’s hunting party was encroaching on theirs. As time passed the hunted together many times. Throughout the 1930s, the two hunters, Ker and Downey, opened up much of the Masai Mara to hunting. Their first paying safari as Ker and Downey Ltd. was outfitting The Macomber Affair, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

When WWII broke out in 1939 Ker enlisted with British army where he became a scout and partook in campaigns against the Italians in the Ethiopian theater. After the city of Addis Ababa was reclaimed by the British, he met Downey at a bar, and made plans to form their own safari company after the war. Shortly after, they announced their decision during an "impromptu meeting of the East African Professional Hunters" Association.

Ker and Downey was eventually created after the war in 1946, making it now the world's longest running safari company. Offshoots of the original company were set up in Tanzania, Botswana and the United States. The original main partners were Jack Block, Sydney Downey (Syd) and Donald Ker. Jack Block who owned the Norfolk and Stanley Hotel, Nairobi was the business brain who saw it as his role to keep Downey and Ker out on safari for as many days as possible. The Botswana operation was set up by new partner Harry Selby (hunter), who joined after the huge success of Robert Ruark's Horn of the Hunter which was based on a safari they took together.

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