One of the most interesting conversations I've had in Africa about buffalo bullets took place on my first safari, a plains game hunt in RSA in the early 1990s--though there was an outside possibility of arranging a cancellation buffalo hunt in Botswana if the timing worked.
It didn't, but the owner of the safari company in RSA was John Van Der Meulen, who grew up in what was then Rhodesia back when the country was more involved with killing off wild game to help cattle ranching. Like many back then, John did a lot of "control" work on ranches, killing over 1000 buffalo. This was in the 1950s, and his favorite tool for the job was his .458 Winchester Magnum, using their then "solid," which had a gilding-metal jacket. This bullet was highly criticized by some, including Jack O'Connor, because the jacket was so soft the bullets often "riveted"--but that's the reason John liked them: They mushroomed on typical lung shots, and killed quickly. (By the way, he was still using the same .458 for backup on buffalo hunts when I met him, at that time mostly in Tanzania, where he also PH'd. It had the same early Bushnell 2.5x scope he'd mounted back in the 50s--which still worked fine.)
Then there's my old friend Kevin Thomas, the PH I've hunted most with, who's younger than John. He started as a Rhodesian game department ranger at age 17--and eventually, like John, also did a lot of control work on ranches. He killed over 500 buffalo on "control" on a big ranch, where the black workers drove herds by him. Kevin used the .30-06 with handloaded 180-grain Partitions, back when they were lathe-turned with the "relief groove," and says he never had problem, even with mature bulls on frontal chest shots.
