Attilio Gatti

Attilio Gatti (Voghera (Lombardy, Italy) 10 July 1896 - Derby Line (Vermont, USA) 1 July 1969; 72 years old) was an Italian-born explorer, author and documentary film maker who travelled extensively through Africa in the first half of the 20th century.

Expeditions

Gatti, a member of the Società Reale Italiana di Geografia ed Antropologia, was among the last great safari expedition men. He led thirteen expeditions to Africa starting from 1922. Broke after the financial disaster of his 7th African expedition, Gatti settled in the US in 1930. His second spouse Ellen accompanied him from his 8th expedition. They did the 10th expedition (in Belgian Congo, 1938-1940) and the 11th expedition ("To the Mountains of the Moon" i.e. the Rwenzori Mountains at the border of Uganda, 1947-1948) with a caravan of motor vehicles, including a 9-ton "Jungle Yacht", especially build for their expeditions by International Harvester in Chicago.

Gatti became one of the first Europeans to see and capture the fabled okapi and the bongo, a brown lyre-horned antelope with white stripes. He was an enthusiastic amateur radio operator (his callsign in the Belgian Congo was OQ5ZZ) and he tried to operate from the Congo deep inland regions. Commander Gatti, known by the Africans as "Bwana Makubwa", knew the Pygmy peoples of the Congo very well. He took good photographs of them and of the Watussi and the Masai. He met an important female python shaman and became experienced with African magic.

The books and many articles that Gatti wrote about the native peoples he met and the no less than 53.000 photos he took on his expeditions, contain invaluable scientific and anthropological material about an entire world which has since disappeared.

Books

• Tom-Toms in the Night. 1932 (includes: The King of the Gorillas. 1932)
• Black Mist. 1933
• Hidden Africa. 1933
• Musungu. 1933
• Great Mother Forest. 1936
• Saranga the Pygmy. 1939 (trad. in Italian: Saranga il cacciatore. 1941)
• Kamanda: An African Boy. 1941 (with ill. by Ellen Gatti)
• The Wrath of Moto. 1941
• Adventure in Black and White. 1943
• Here Is Africa. 1943 (with Ellen Gatti)
• Killers All!. 1943
• Mediterranean Spotlights. 1944
• South of the Sahara: Perilous Encounters with Big Game and Strange Peoples in the African Wilds. 1945
• Here Is the Veld. 1948
• Kamanda on Safari. (1953?)
• Jungle Killers. 1958
• Africa is Adventure. 1959
• The New Africa. 1960 (with Ellen Gatti)
• Sangoma. 1962
• Bapuka. 1963

Ellen Gatti: Exploring We Would Go. 1944 (autobiography)

Movies

• Siliva Zulu: Storia Negra in 5 Parti (Italy 1927/1928; silent film; with anthropologist professor Lidio Cipriani)
• Tramonto dei blasoni (Italy 1928; silent film)
• Perils of the Jungle (USA 1941)
• Bitter Spears (USA 1956; remake of "Siliva the Zulu")