An Elephant in My Kitchen: What the Herd Taught Me About Love, Courage, and Survival

by Françoise Malby-Anthony

  I knew nothing about his country and was curious to hear more, so to keep the conversation going I asked if he liked jazz.

  ‘I love it,’ he replied, quite eagerly for someone so sick. ‘Do you know any of the jazz clubs here in London?’

  ‘I’m going to one later with friends. Why don’t you join us?’

  We met in the hotel lobby at nine that evening. He had changed into jeans and a patchwork leather jacket, not really suitable for Ronnie Scott’s, but I ignored my fashion alarm bells. His stories about life in South Africa fascinated me. He was a born salesman and I’m pretty sure he knew exactly what he was doing, because in the bone-biting chill of London, his country sounded like heaven.

  Once back in Paris, I wondered if I would ever see him again and was quite taken aback when he announced he was coming to visit. Flying 10,000 kilometres for a date was typical of him – bold, impulsive and never letting anything stop him.

  The glacial weather that had brought London to its knees when we met had eased and it was a cosy zero degrees when he landed at Charles de Gaulle.

  ‘It’s freezing here. Can’t we go somewhere warmer?’ he moaned after a few days.

  ‘How about Venice? It’s a boiling hot thirteen degrees there,’ I joked.

  ‘Perfect. Let’s go by train.’

  ‘The only direct trains are night trains and they’ll take forever. It’ll be much quicker to fly,’ I protested.

  ‘Where’s your sense of fun? Have you ever been on a night train?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘All the more reason to do it. What do we care if it takes forever? It’ll be fun and we’ll be together!’

  Twelve hours by train versus two hours by plane wasn’t my idea of fun, but he was so enthusiastic I couldn’t say no. The next thing, we were in a taxi weaving our way through rush hour traffic to Gare de Lyon. At the station, Lawrence came face to face with Parisian attitude at its worst.

  ‘Hors de question,’ snapped the woman at the ticket office. ‘You’re too late. The train is about to leave and you’ll never get to the platform on time.’

  ‘Tell her we want to try,’ Lawrence whispered.

  I persuaded her to sell us two tickets and off we sprinted to platform 3, getting there just as the train pulled away. Lawrence sped after it, frantically waving his arms, probably hoping the driver would take pity on two hopeless romantics trying to get to Venice. We felt so stupid and disappointed, but then we caught sight of each other – out of breath on a deserted platform – and burst out laughing.

  ‘Let’s go and get a refund,’ he said.

  ‘From that grumpy bag? She’ll never agree!’

  ‘Watch me.’

  Not only did he get our money back with his two words of French, he even squeezed a smile out of her. I soon learned that Lawrence always got what he wanted.

  A few months later, I boarded an Air France flight to South Africa and discovered that he hadn’t given me a sales pitch at all. His country was every bit as breathtaking as he had described it, and I loved it from the moment the hot humid air clung to my cheeks when I stepped onto the steaming tarmac.

  ‘We’re going straight into the bush to a friend’s game farm,’ he said.

  I had no clue what he meant. ‘Bush?’

  ‘You foreigners call it going on safari,’ he teased.

  We drove through the lush hills of Zululand, with sugar cane plantation after sugar cane plantation on my left and the surging Indian Ocean on my right. It was like being in an exotic postcard. Eventually we left the coast and swerved inland, negotiated the chaotic streets of Empangeni, and turned off onto a dirt road through a rural village where barefoot children, dogs and cattle shared the dusty track with us. It was different from anything I had ever seen. We stopped outside the gates of Windy Ridge.

  ‘Welcome to my world,’ Lawrence said proudly.

  The guard let us in and Lawrence insisted we immediately go on a game drive.

  ‘It’s the best time of the day,’ he said.

  I didn’t like the look of the bakkie – pickup truck – he wanted me to get into.

  ‘That’s supposed to keep us safe from wild animals?’ I groaned.

  ‘Have a bit of faith in me,’ he smiled. ‘I’ve done this hundreds of times. The animals see us as part of the vehicle and won’t bother us in the slightest.’

  ‘What about the lions?’

  ‘There aren’t any here. Come on, hop in! You’ll love it.’

  He was so confident that I decided to trust him. We juddered along a badly eroded track and parked near a waterhole just as six giraffes arrived. They were as tall as a two-storey building and walked with the slow, swaying steps of dancers.

  ‘They’re beautiful, so graceful,’ I murmured.

  ‘Don’t be fooled. They can be very violent.’

  I thought he was joking and laughed.

  ‘I’m dead serious. Their necks are their weapons – two metres of rock-hard muscle that they wallop each other with.’

  He added that a group of giraffes was called a tower of giraffes. I searched his face to see if he was pulling my leg, but no, he wasn’t.

  I had never seen wild animals before, not even in a zoo, so every animal I saw was a new experience for me. The first rhinos I ever set eyes on were at Windy Ridge. Four enormous prehistoric-looking beasts grazed about ten metres away from us. They seemed peaceful enough, but their size and horns terrified me.

  ‘You’ll never guess what a group of rhinos is called,’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘A crash of rhinos,’ he grinned.

  If he thought that would make me less nervous, he was wrong. I crouched down in the bakkie.

  ‘I think we should leave. They don’t like us being here.’

  ‘Nonsense. Look at them. They’re just eating,’ he replied.

  ‘What if they attack us?’

  ‘Why would they? They’ve got better things to do than hassle us.’

  ‘But if they did attack, is this truck faster than them?’

  He must have wondered why on earth he had brought a city girl to a game reserve.

  Thirty years later, I know much more about rhinos and I understand that while they can be unpredictable, they usually don’t attack unless provoked.

  The biggest difference between then and now is poaching. Back then, it didn’t really exist. There were no armed guards, no GPS tracking collars on rhinos, no surveillance drones flying over reserves. Being in the bush was simpler, more primitive and pure.

  In those days, the rhino population was actually growing, thanks to Dr Ian Player, an internationally renowned conservationist who was a close friend and mentor to both of us. He spearheaded Operation Rhino, an ambitious initiative aimed at repopulating reserves with the southern white rhino to broaden their gene pool. It was a huge success and pulled that particular species of rhino back from the brink of extinction. What an impact our friend made, and if he were still alive, he would be devastated to see how poaching is wiping them out today. If rhinos continue to be killed at the current rate, there won’t be a single one left in twenty years.

  * * *

  Everything was so different in South Africa. The people were warm and welcoming, the autumn weather was a sweltering thirty degrees, even the air smelled different. The smoggy pollution of Paris felt like a million miles away. I was hooked. Not only by the larger-than-life man creeping into my heart but also by the African wilderness that was stirring my soul.

  Lawrence took me on that first game drive and I never looked back.

  A year after we met, I gave up my job and my chic Montparnasse apartment and moved to South Africa. My work was with a chamber of commerce in northern France, and as head of international trading my role was to attract foreign investment. I travelled a lot, dealt with high-powered executives, and it never occurred to me to do anything else. Needless to say, my friends thought I was out of my mind throwing everything away to go to a country full of rac
ists, which was quite ironic coming from the French.

  Of course, I hadn’t yet seen what life in South Africa was really about. I had met a wonderful, funny, crazy man living in a magnificent country and I wanted to be with him. It was that simple.

  One day, Lawrence took me to Umdloti Beach on the north coast. Soft yellow sand stretched for miles and the sea was as calm as a pond, rolling onto the beach in gentle ripples. At the entrance was a sign: Net Blankes: Whites Only. I frowned and scanned the beach.

  ‘Lawrence, why are there no black people here?’

  ‘It’s apartheid,’ he grimaced.

  I knew it existed, but actually to see it written was so strange. After that, I saw the signs everywhere. At bus stops, post offices, even on benches. I had come across racial discrimination before in my travels but never like this, and it quickly crept into all sorts of unexpected corners of my life.

  Housekeeping was never my strong point and I always had someone to do the cleaning, even in Paris. So when Lawrence and I lived in our first apartment, years before we bought Thula Thula, I quickly employed a young Zulu woman called Beauty to help us.

  ‘Where are my plates and knives and forks?’ she asked me on her first day.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I frowned.

  I learned that black domestics never shared eating utensils with the white families they worked for. What a shock. I showed Beauty where I kept our crockery and cutlery.

  ‘What we use, you use,’ I said simply.

  Beauty was often bewildered by my cooking, especially when I prepared something French like snails in garlic sauce, but Zulu culture is very polite and she never said no to anything I made for her. Only years later, I realized that the strangeness of us working together was probably as great for her as it was for me.

  My Thula Thula staff always get worried when they see me being creative in the kitchen at the lodge.

  ‘What are you concocting now?’ Mabona complains.

  She was one of the first village girls I employed back in 2000 and has blossomed from a timid, determined-to-learn teenager into a confident young woman who has become like a daughter to me and who runs our lodge with humour and efficiency. She’s beautiful, smart, sings like an angel and never hesitates to tell me what she thinks.

  ‘Get ready to be a guinea pig,’ I threaten playfully.

  Which is exactly what they’re concerned about. I once made crocodile meat curry with a dark chocolate sauce and although they tolerated my experiment, I saw the horror in their eyes: what is she making us eat now? Promise and Mabona are by far my most adventurous tasters and always game to try something different, even if they can’t identify what I’ve put on their plates. They’re also my most valuable critics because they’re never scared to tell me what they like or don’t like, or give me pointers on how to improve a dish.

  ‘Tell me about your name,’ I once asked Beauty.

  She smiled shyly but didn’t reply.

  ‘Is there a story behind it?’ I pressed.

  ‘My first boss couldn’t pronounce my Zulu name,’ she shrugged.

  I was baffled that Beauty wasn’t her real name.

  ‘It’s what my Zulu name Buhle means in English, and Beauty was easier for that boss to pronounce,’ she explained. ‘After that, I just stayed with it.’

  I called her Buhle from that day and her story jolted me into signing up for Zulu lessons. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I studied, my French accent did terrible things to Zulu and everyone begged me to stop trying.

  ‘Your Zulu is technically good, much better than Lawrence’s, but it really hurts our ears,’ Mabona grinned. ‘Rather speak to us in English.’

  * * *

  I had loved working in the competitive Parisian business world and when I arrived in South Africa in 1987, I was looking forward to getting stuck into something challenging, but I quickly saw that business in the tropics was different. Especially in Durban, where everyone is laid-back and more interested in the waves than what’s happening on the stock exchange.

  However it was a perfect environment for creativity, so I decided to try my hand at fashion and looked around for a school where I could learn how to design and sew clothes. I found one in downtown Durban and asked the woman at the front desk if they had classes for me on Mondays.

  ‘Sorry, that day’s for Indians.’

  ‘What about Tuesdays?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s for black people,’ she frowned.

  ‘Do you have a day for French people?’ I asked crossly, convinced she was making it up because she didn’t want me.

  I finally joined a school run by an Indian man where I was the only white person. When the course finished, I invited my new friends to our apartment in Durban North for a graduation party with a Bastille Day theme. My white neighbours were quite surprised but they probably figured I was a mad foreigner and never complained.

  I bought an industrial sewing machine and brought Buhle on board, teaching her everything I knew about sewing. We were a fantastic team, and later that year I sold my first fashion and accessory ranges to chi-chi boutiques in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Looking back, I was as mad as Lawrence. We both believed we could do anything we put our minds to.

  One evening he came home with the news that his friend was selling Windy Ridge. He unfolded a map and circled the area around the hunting lodge. I looked at him, not sure what he was up to, but the fire in his eyes warned me that there was probably a hare-brained scheme cooking.

  ‘It’s my old stomping ground,’ he sighed. ‘And everything around it is wild tribal land.’

  ‘Yes…?’

  ‘Let’s buy it and turn it into a massive conservation area.’

  ‘But we don’t know anything about animals or game reserves!’

  ‘You didn’t know anything about making clothes.’

  ‘How on earth will we pay for it?’

  ‘We’ll only buy Windy Ridge, the rest will stay tribal land. Don’t you see? The local community should be part of it. We’ll do this with them. We’ll form a huge nature reserve, create jobs and help wildlife at the same time.’

  ‘We’re not exactly rolling in cash, Lolo.’

  ‘That’s the least of our worries. We’ll find some,’ he scoffed.

  I couldn’t help laughing every time he said he was going to find money. When I grew up, I was taught that you earned money, and I always teased him that he was hiding a magic money tree from me.

  We sold our beautiful home, he talked the banks into giving us a hefty loan, and Windy Ridge became ours – 1,500 hectares of pristine bush, a rustic camp with four huts, and some very skittish game.

  We did two things immediately: ended hunting and changed the reserve’s name.

  People had hunted there since King Shaka’s days, and between gunshots and testosterone, much of the wildlife had been killed. The name had to reflect our vision of turning the killing fields into a sanctuary. We chose Thula Thula because it expresses the tranquillity and peace we wanted to offer the animals. In Zulu, the word thula – quiet – is usually said in a hushed voice: shhhhh, thula, be still, my baby is sleeping. It’s a tender little word best known from the Zulu lullaby, Thula Baba.

  Our next challenge was figuring out how to make our dream happen.

  It’s what I loved about life with Lawrence. There was never a dull moment. He wanted to make a difference and we did. The word can’t wasn’t part of our vocabulary. If we didn’t know how to do something, we found out.

  At night, we sat on the stoep – veranda – and soaked in the silence, with our dogs, Max, Tess and Bijou, at our feet. No throb of cars, no aeroplanes overhead, no screeching alarm sirens. And after a while, the silence talked to us and the air filled with the grunts, squeals, whistles and chirrups of animals, birds and insects.

  And gunshots.

  We had banned hunting but were powerless against poaching.

  To this day, it’s my biggest challenge. Rhino horn has become more valuable than go
ld and platinum. It’s the new status medicine in the Far East. Some claim it heals cancer, others use it as a hangover fix, and men believe it helps virility. What nonsense. Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same as fingernails. These people pay top dollar for a product they grow on their own hands.

  Lawrence and I had no idea that poaching would be such a big problem, but it didn’t stop us wanting to create the biggest conservation area that KwaZulu-Natal had ever seen. It just came with a bigger price tag than we could afford.

  We were still figuring out how to raise money when Lawrence received the life-changing call from Dr Marion Garaï about a small herd of elephants that was causing havoc on a reserve near the Kruger National Park. Money was tight and we had only two weeks to build a thirty-two-kilometre electric fence, plus a boma big enough for nine disturbed and angry elephants.

  Lawrence talked to his magic money tree and then threw himself into getting the required infrastructure ready at breakneck speed. Our dream became very real, very fast. It was nail-biting, right up to the very last moment.

  Shortly before the herd was due to arrive, Lawrence had to leave on an emergency trip to Germany, and while he was gone I received a call from the manager of the reserve that owned the elephants.

  ‘You have to take the herd sooner. We can’t keep them for another day.’

  ‘You can’t do that. We’re not ready!’

  ‘If they don’t leave tomorrow, we’ll have to shoot them.’

  ‘They can’t come now. Lawrence is overseas,’ I said quietly.

  He was silent.

  ‘Could you give us until after the weekend? He’ll be back by then. I can’t possibly handle their arrival on my own,’ I begged.

  He wasn’t happy but he relented.

  ‘They leave on Monday. Not a day later.’

  That gave us five days. Enough time for Lawrence to get back home to finish the fence and deal with the last hurdle of getting it approved by the conservation authorities.

  An hour before the inspectors arrived, Lawrence noticed that the electrical wires had been attached to the wrong side of the fence.