‘Lynda! It’s me! Open up!’ I shivered in the rain, waiting for her to let me in. ‘Poachers at the orphanage. I’ll never manage the roads in this weather. We need your 4×4.’
She saw the horror on my face, asked no questions. ‘Give me five minutes.’
The rain smacked hard as hail as we sprinted to her car. We crept along the dirt track at a snail’s pace, struggling to see, not speaking, hearts hammering. There were four volunteers helping Axel, animal-mad girls who had travelled a long way to care for our calves. I couldn’t get my thoughts straight. What would we find? Had they been hurt, or worse, killed? Slashing a rhino’s face for its horn is barbaric, and the men who do it are dangerous beyond anything these trusting youngsters would understand. Even if they did everything the men told them to do, one wrong move or word and an agitated lunatic could pull a trigger. The journey took forever. Slowly, painfully slowly, we struggled through the downpour until we drove up the orphanage’s long driveway.
Our anti-poaching rhino guards were the first people I saw. One of them ran outside to meet us.
‘What were you thinking driving here on your own?’ he burst out. ‘The attackers could still be in the reserve! Quick. Get under cover.’
I stared at him. It hadn’t crossed my mind that going there without a guard was dangerous.
‘Is anyone hurt?’ I asked.
He nodded, grim-faced, and took us inside. The police were already there, scouring the orphanage for anything the poachers might have left behind.
I found the girls huddled together in the office, distraught and disorientated. I hugged them, held them tight, so relieved they were alive. Young Caitlin had only been with us for a few hours, her dream of working with orphaned animals now a savage nightmare.
The rain battered on the corrugated iron roof. We could hardly hear each other speak. The girls talked through tears and sobs. Everyone was paralysed. No one knew what to do. Who to phone. How to get help. I realized Larry from Security-4U should be on-site.
‘Has someone called Larry Erasmus?’ I asked numbly.
They didn’t know. I was a robot on automatic, barely functioning. I fumbled for my phone. Larry answered immediately, already on his way.
‘The guard escaped and got hold of me. How bad is it?’ he shouted over the thunder.
‘Worse than bad. Where are you?’
‘The road’s a disaster with all the construction work so I took the back track through the reserve. The storm’s not helping. My other static guards are on their way and the control room called the cops. Are they there yet?’
‘They got here before us,’ I said.
He arrived soon after and we started to piece together what had happened.
Around 9 p.m., when the team had finished the first evening feed, five heavily armed men breached the fence, disabling cameras and cutting cables as they crept towards the carport where the security guard was sheltering from the storm. Two men attacked him from behind, dragged him into the storeroom and pistol-whipped information out of him.
When is the next feed? How many people are here? How many firearms? What security is there? Where’s the dog? Where are the horns? You lie, we kill.
The storm bucked and reared outside, drowning out his screams. They took his gun, phone, radio and shoes, tied him up and bolted the door shut. Then they waited, patient predators, biding their time until the next feed.
Axel and the volunteers had already gone to bed, five unarmed young people oblivious to the gun-and-knife-bearing thugs hiding outside in the shadows.
At 11.30 p.m., lights went on in the kitchen and the two girls on feeding duty chatted and laughed as they prepared bottles for Impi, Nandi, Storm, Gugu, Charlie, Makhosi, and the latest arrival, Isimiso. Six hungry rhino calves and a bolshie little hippo were already squealing for their midnight snack.
Within seconds of going outside, the girls were ambushed and dragged back inside. The men fired questions at them.
Take us to the boy. Where is the dog? Give us your phones. Where are the radios?
They were coerced into taking the men to Axel, who was in his room with Duma. One of the girls, Nicole, understood that the attackers might kill Duma.
‘Axel, wake up! We need you,’ she shouted through his closed door. ‘Leave Duma behind.’
It wasn’t such an unusual request. Snakes were a regular problem in the house and Axel immediately assumed the girls needed his help to get rid of one. Keeping Duma safe in the room made sense. It also occurred to him that it was probably why Duma had barked earlier.
‘Sit. Quiet,’ he ordered Duma as he opened the door.
Four men faced him with guns, the two stricken girls captive between them. Axel stayed calm, yanked the door shut behind him. Duma didn’t move or bark.
The girls and Axel were shoved into the office where other poachers were already unplugging the data cables feeding into the CCTV video recorders. The men knew exactly where to go, what to do, to watch out for a dog.
Two weeks earlier, a drone had flown over the reserve. We have a shoot-on-sight policy for them, but the minute security was close enough to shoot, its headlights cut out and it disappeared into the darkness. We thought they were looking for Thabo and Ntombi – but now we’re sure they were investigating the orphanage.
These criminals had money and high-tech equipment and had clearly been gathering information for weeks, maybe months. Ordinary thieves would have smashed the computer and video hardware, but these tech-savvy men knew that by simply unhooking cables, all links to the outside world would be dead. The team was isolated and helpless.
The men were aggressive and edgy and forced Axel into helping them round up the rest of the volunteers. One of the girls was severely assaulted while the attackers badgered the others for information about rhino horns they believed were on the premises. What horns? Permits had been granted to remove Gugu and Impi’s horn stubs before they went back to their original reserves – a procedure that was also done before Ithuba and Thando left – but the dehorning hadn’t yet taken place. The poachers must have known Gugu and Impi were about to leave the orphanage. Did they think their horns had already been removed? Or did they think Ithuba and Thando’s horns were still at the orphanage? We’ll never know.
The men dragged Axel with them as they ransacked the orphanage for the horns.
Give us the horns! Open the rooms! Why is this door locked?
‘It’s the manager’s office. I don’t have the key,’ Axel replied, never raising his voice.
They struck him again and again with the back of a panga.
There must be a safe! We want the horns!
‘There isn’t a safe. We would never keep horns here.’
Time was beginning to run out for the poachers. They gave up interrogating Axel and tied him and the girls up with duct tape and rope and locked them in the office.
One minute the team had been getting ready to feed the calves, the next they were hostages and didn’t know if they would make it out alive. Axel did his best to brief the girls on how to reduce the danger of being hurt.
‘Look down. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t resist. Do whatever they say,’ he urged.
Three men guarded the youngsters, while two others, armed with guns and an axe, headed through the darkness to the calves. I can’t begin to imagine the fear the team felt for their vulnerable rhino charges and how utterly shattering the sound of the gunshots must have been.
They put a bullet into Gugu and Impi for horns no bigger than a child’s fist.
Gugu died instantly, sweet Impi didn’t. The poachers didn’t give a damn. They held him down and hacked his face with the axe, Impi’s tiny dark eyes glistening in confusion and horror. Superstitions run deep in rural Zululand; eyes see and have memories, so they did the unthinkable – they poked out his eyes.
Half an hour later, the men and their bounty were gone.
The team waited, too terrified to move, eyes glued to the clock above the door. A
fter twenty long minutes, they nervously untied one another. They were frantic, dazed. Had the attackers really gone? Was it safe to go to the calves? What carnage would there be? A radio was found but no one was reached. One of the girls discovered a mobile that the poachers hadn’t taken. They rang me, tried my assistant, phoned people outside the reserve. Desperate call after desperate call.
Unbeknown to them, the guard in the storeroom had escaped and was running barefoot through the reserve to raise the alarm. Petrified of being caught, he avoided roads and tore through the bush in the pitch dark, shredding his feet, oblivious to the rain and the pain. He reached the lodge, found the night guard and together they called the Security-4U control room – at exactly the same time as the manager from outside the reserve reached Larry Erasmus.
‘It all happened at once. While I was on the phone, I had three missed calls from my control room,’ he said. ‘I heard about the attack from the first call, and from my guard I got the low-down and knew we were dealing with pros with serious firepower.’
A week earlier, poachers had attacked a private farm nearby and Larry had lost a man in the shootout, so he wasn’t taking any chances. He unlocked his safe, grabbed weapons and ammunition, and phoned for extra reinforcements. The last thing he did was wake his wife and kiss her goodbye. He had no idea how long he would be but he knew the danger he faced.
Back at the orphanage, the team found Gugu dead, and Impi half-submerged in his wallow pool, struggling to breathe through his horrendous facial injuries, keening in pain as he tried to pull himself out of the water.
Blinded and terrified, Impi panicked at the slightest touch. No one could get close enough to help him. To this day, I can’t bear to think about him and the anguish of his carers. They had hand-raised him and there was nothing they could do, not even hold him. They begged Larry to shoot him, free him from his suffering.
‘I was desperate to,’ Larry said afterwards, his voice raw. ‘But I know how these things work. Crime scenes can’t be messed with. It tortures me still that I didn’t, couldn’t, end his agony.’
The tragedy was that both calves had been days away from becoming wild rhinos. They were originally from different reserves and everyone had been fighting tooth and nail to persuade their owners to allow the rhinos to stay together. The owners had even been invited to visit the orphanage so they could see for themselves how strong the bond between Impi and Gugu was and how traumatized they would be if separated.
Little Impi had survived his mother’s poaching then would die the same hellish way.
Tender little creatures killed for keratin that grows on our fingers.
* * *
I went into survival mode to keep the team and animals safe and hauled our chef Tom, who lives at the lodge, out of bed to open rooms for the girls. It was late, they were exhausted and we had to get them away from the scene of the attack.
Axel and Nicole wouldn’t leave the orphans. Charlie and the four remaining calves were crying out of hunger and fear, sensing the mayhem, needing comfort and food.
More Security-4U men arrived, armed and ready for battle. Larry wasn’t satisfied and woke up the area police commander to send in more support.
The weather eased. Sun spilled into the wretched night.
First thing in the morning, my assistant Kim drove the girls to the Empangeni Garden Clinic for medical care and trauma counselling. Mike Toft arrived and euthanized Impi. Vusi got hold of a local farmer to lend us his front-end loader and to help us lift the bodies out of the boma so that they could be laid to rest.
Those twenty-four hours are a blur. I remember it in flashes. The ashen faces of the youngsters, the explosive racket of the storm, the atrocity of Impi’s injuries, the chaos in my heart.
I blocked out the pain. If I dwelt on it, it would have destroyed me. For a while, I lost faith in mankind. I lost hope in saving rhinos. Demand for their horns will never stop and they will always be in danger, as will the men and women who risk their lives guarding them. I see-sawed between being devastated that our security units hadn’t been able to stop the killing and relief that they hadn’t risked death by barging into the middle of the attack. It could have escalated into a full-scale hostage stand-off. If the poachers could do what they did to a live animal, they wouldn’t have thought twice about killing a human being.
The orphanage sits on a hilltop, perfectly positioned for the poachers to shoot at any guard or policeman who dared to approach. But no matter how well armed and trained in high-risk situations Larry’s anti-poaching men had been, they would have been sitting ducks, unable to return fire. Not with our people in the same building as the attackers.
What could I do but pick myself up and keep going? I hoped with all my heart that we would all manage to put aside our differences and be the partners we were supposed to be. Rhinos need us to fight for them, to do our best to keep them safe. But, I kept asking myself, is anywhere safe? What can you do against men with no fear and nothing to lose, armed to the hilt with shotguns and assault rifles? But if we don’t try, more will die.
The day after the attack, I received a phone call from Megan in England. She had left soon after Ellie had died and was sickened by the killing of two little calves that she had helped care for. She knew we needed extra security to make the orphanage impenetrable to another attack and she also knew that came at a cost we couldn’t afford.
‘How can I help?’ she asked. ‘Shall I start a crowdfunding campaign? What do you need?’
‘We’ve bolstered security but we need more, and we need urgent protection for the rest of the reserve to make sure poachers don’t get in again.’
‘I’ll start with a goal of $6,300,’ she promised.
She reached her target in five hours.
Donations flooded in from all over the world. People were appalled and wanted to help. The outpouring of love and concern was incredible. There was so much goodwill. A Mozambican farmer walked to us to bring his donation.
So much goodness shone over us.
Donations sky-rocketed and within twenty-four hours over $30,000 had flowed in and continued to come in until $56,800 was raised.
We deployed round-the-clock armed guards and extra protection for staff during night feeds. We reinforced boots on the ground to create a safety net around the orphanage. We drained Security-4U of resources: every available man Larry had was at Thula Thula.
And that was just the start. I appointed Christiaan, who had military experience, to coordinate new long-term security measures for us, and to work closely with Security-4U so no stone was left unturned to keep the orphanage safe. We brought in specialists to evaluate, repair and upgrade our entire system. National and local police hunted the poachers. Wildlife authorities were on red alert. The clips of CCTV footage that could be salvaged were sent to a laboratory in Pretoria for analysis. Suspects were apprehended, two escaped, no one was arrested. The investigation is still in full swing and won’t stop until the men are caught.
Dehorning the remaining calves became a red-hot priority. Everything possible was done to rush through the permits for the operation.
Three of the girls went home to their families but Axel and Nicole stayed to look after and comfort the orphans. Charlie and Makhosi were especially distressed and were put on Rescue Remedy to help them.
Thabo and Ntombi felt the danger, and for weeks they stayed close to the main house and the lodge, always sleeping within eyeshot of us. Even with full-time armed guards, they didn’t feel safe in the bush and came back to the place where they were raised.
Nana and Frankie sensed the turmoil and disappeared, hiding the herd in the deepest corner of the reserve until they felt the threat had passed.
Debates raged about the future of the orphans. The outside management team wanted to move the animals to another venue which they felt would be safer. Safer? Is anywhere really safe when we can never know just how far crime syndicates will go? Some of us longed for them to stay. Others agreed t
hat it was better for them to go. I couldn’t bear the thought of the calves leaving, especially the most vulnerable ones – Charlie, Makhosi and Isimiso. The orphanage was the only home they had ever known.
In the middle of this chaos, a four-year-old white rhino was slaughtered in a Parisian zoo, the first rhino poaching in Europe. It almost broke me. Nowhere was safe. Nowhere. If rhinos weren’t safe in zoos, how would they ever be safe in the wild?
I had naively believed that everyone would cooperate for the good of the animals but the opposite happened. The conflict with the outside management team worsened to the point that decisions were made without consulting me, Four Paws or the amakhosi.
And then I ran out of fight.
Our two older calves, Storm and Nandi, were the first to leave, going back to where they were born. I consoled myself that, given how old they were, they were ready to be making new memories and to start the beautiful process of becoming wild rhinos in the bush.
That left Duma, two rhinos and our darling hippo.
And, to my great sorrow, they too were moved.
By the end of April 2017, just ten weeks after the attack, our orphanage was an empty shell.
The days that followed were the some of the darkest of my life. I would drive through the reserve, see the orphanage up on the hill and be overcome by loss. I told myself it wasn’t a failure and that we had done so much good. Four rhino calves were still frolicking, and two more, plus little Charlie, would grow into healthy animals thriving in the wild. But it was impossible to hold on to what had gone well when so much went wrong. People didn’t pull together. Relationships ruptured. Friendships tore apart. Collaboration with the outside management disintegrated.
The amakhosi and our Austrian sponsor Four Paws felt let down and betrayed by people they believed had been partners. The accusations thrown at me about Thula Thula security almost destroyed me, but I resisted being drawn into a public squabble, and even today, I avoid going into details. There is no point. For months I lay awake at night, tormented by what had happened and the terrible fallout afterwards.
An Elephant in My Kitchen: What the Herd Taught Me About Love, Courage, and Survival Page 24