Whatever You Do, Don't Run

by Whatever You Do, Don't Run- True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide (epub)

“There’s no such thing as a perfect murder.” I said. “There’s nothing perfect about killing someone.”

  “Oh yes, of course,” he said, looking suddenly lost, embarrassed and incredibly lonely. “I was just asking because . . . it was interesting.”

  I still wasn’t sure why he was asking. I looked to see if one of the guides or managers were nearby, grinning at a prank they had played, but we were alone. I wanted to question him now, to know for sure, but was flustered and didn’t know where to begin.

  So I left it where it stood, and to this day pray that he did the same.

  A Guide Dies

  Rantaung Rantaung had exuberantly doubled up on a name (“Call me Double R,” he would say to guests, smiling enormously, “just like Rolls Royce!”), so it was perhaps appropriate that he should have two deaths.

  But before he died, he was a guide at Mombo. And before that, he’d had to apply not just for the job, but to join the gang.

  We’d had a quick turnover of guides, with a number of unsatisfactory applicants briefly filling the vacant position. One candidate, to the horror of his guests, took great and perverse delight in running over slow-moving tortoises, even veering off the tracks to pursue them. Another guide was from Gaborone, the capital city, and spoke flawless English in a seductive, mellifluous voice that would have charmed birds from the trees if he chose to use it that way—but he did not, and that was his problem. He showed his guests no animals because he was absolutely petrified of wildlife and turned his vehicle and fled at even inoffensive creatures like zebras and warthogs. The third was an accomplished tracker, a competent driver, and a reasonable communicator, but he was inexcusably gross, picking his nose ceaselessly and farting his way through meals. The management had quickly ended the probationary period of all three and approached a guide they had both worked with at another camp.

  I sincerely hoped he would be up to par. There were now only three guides at Mombo, which meant that we rarely had any sort of break in the seven-day-a-week, three-month-long stints that we worked before taking leave. I was exhausted and yearned for at least one morning that I didn’t need to wake at five o’clock. So it was with some selfish hope that I drove to the dusty airstrip one day to pick up Rantaung, the next candidate.

  On the road to the airstrip, you pass a perfectly proportioned baobab tree. Its base is wide enough that an elephant could hide behind it if the urge ever overtook one, and its top tapers to form a perfect bottle shape. The baobab is remarkable, beautiful and the perfect place for a nap if a plane is ever late. A guest of mine with the odd hobby of dendrochronology had estimated its age at roughly one and a half thousand years, and I loved to imagine the things the tree would have seen—the lions, elephants, the now extinct rhinos, and the years when humans moved in as cattle herders, were driven out by tsetse flies, then returned as tourists.

  Baobabs have a magic about them, so the tree makes the ideal place for an informal church. Every Saturday night the staff members who are devotees of the Zionist Christian Church attend a service there. These are presided over by one of the guides, whose name is Baikego Setlabosha. Since that proves a bit of a mouthful, he is known as BK, even to the staff who come from his village. He was my best friend among the guides and had a taught me most of what I knew about finding animals. On the day I was to pick up Rantaung, he was also at the airstrip, waiting for guests of his own.

  BK looked as tired as I felt, but I knew he would not show any fatigue to his guests. He was a complete professional in his work, and I envied him for the unaffected air of contentment he radiated.

  Rantaung’s energy only highlighted our fatigue when the plane disgorged its passengers. He bustled out first, talking loudly and excitedly to the guests. He expressively waved his skinny arms to guide the tourists as they negotiated themselves past the struts and braces that make light aircraft so much fun to enter and exit, and then he ran beaming to me and BK. He quickly pumped our hands and introduced himself to me, explaining that his first and last names were the same, so they were easy to remember. He gave BK a hug, and I saw the badge on his shirt that signified he was a member of BK’s church.

  The guests had finally unfurled their limbs from inside the fuselage, and BK and I shook their hands and took their luggage to the vehicles. Rantaung assisted me, then hopped into the passenger seat of my vehicle, grinning like he had won a prize for being first out of the plane. I soon realised that a smile was his default position.

  The couple who had been allocated to me were nondescript Midwesterners, but I was delighted to overhear the way BK’s guests announced themselves. “Bob Johnson! Houston! Texas! And this is my wife, Mary!” The man thrust his hand out as he barked each word. It had always struck me as peculiar when people who were introducing themselves gave their name and where they were from, like rank and number. But it was that they were from Texas that made me so happy. When BK or I were guiding people from Texas, the game was on.

  BK gave his name (but did not add, “Jao Village. Northern Botswana.”) and then said, “ . . . and this is my son, Peter.”

  I saw the Texans look at me, and their smiles faltered. The Midwesterners gasped. Rantaung just smiled at everyone, as if the announcement was exactly what he had been expecting. The shaking of hands carried on, the arrivals all glancing at each other askance, wondering if they had heard correctly. The reason for their perplexity is that BK and I could not look less like father and son. For a start he is only ten years older than me, and physically we are quite different. While I am not tall, BK is at least a head below me and is far more solidly built. His hair is tightly curled, whereas mine, whenever it emerges from under a hat, is straight to the point of being lank.

  The most distinguishing difference, though, is that BK is dark skinned, and I am not. In fact I am so pale that I like to say that I can’t sleep naked, because I am kept awake by moths bumping into my backside, mistaking it for the luminous moon. It is this blanched appearance that made people so sure that they must have misheard BK, and why it was so much fun for me to shout as I drove away, “See you back at camp . . . Dad.”

  Rantaung didn’t comment, and I asked him if he owned any cattle and congratulated him when he said he did. This is the polite way to meet a man in Botswana. I then asked my guests if they had enjoyed the camp they had just come from, what they hoped to see, and if they had been to Africa before—a fairly standard icebreaker. Throughout the back and forth I could feel the burning urge they had to ask about my relationship with BK. If they had come right out and asked if he was my father, I would have answered honestly. “Naah . . . that’s just a game we play with Texans.”

  If they asked why we chose Texans, I would answer just as honestly that there was no real reason. It was just fun.

  Once we arrived in camp, the guests were handed cool drinks and cloths to wipe the dust from their faces. The arrivals eyed me almost warily, assessing my features. Then one of the Texans asked if BK was really my father.

  “Oh yes,” I said, “but my mother was Swedish, which is like pouring bleach over your DNA. That’s why I’m so white.”

  “Oh,” said the Texans, still not convinced.

  “But there was a problem.” It was Rantaung, somehow picking up on the script without ever having been told about it. “Our cattle, which are like money to us here in Botswana, were afraid of him because he is so bright he hurts their eyes, so we had to send him all the way to Australia. That is why he talks in such a funny way.”

  “ . . . and I only came back so I could learn the way of the bush from my father.” I nodded at BK, “and my uncles.” Here I nodded at Julius (the other permanent guide) and at Rantaung. He was, in my mind, now part of the gang.

  Later I spoke with Grant and Chris and told them I liked Rantaung and asked if he would be offered the job full-time.

  “Probably. For as long as we’ve got him.” They paused, and I must have looked quizzical, because they added, “He used to be fat.”

  “Oh,” I sa
id, immediately comprehending. In Africa it is no cause for celebration if someone has lost a lot of weight. The usual cause is an illness such as malaria. Malaria strips meat from your bones faster than a butcher can, but since your appetite returns before your energy, the weight usually piles straight back on. If the fat doesn’t come back, it usually indicates an even more serious illness.

  At this stage I hadn’t known anyone who had died from AIDS, although the statistics insisted that I must know a lot of people who were infected. One in three of the people whom I worked with were likely to be HIV-positive. But despite the never-ending parade of funerals that could be seen in Maun, the staff just didn’t seem to get sick. An AIDS specialist had told me not to be overly hopeful about this, as part of the pay we received was in the form of three meals a day. So compared to a town dweller, we had a healthy lifestyle, which would for a while stave off the sort of illnesses that will ultimately kill a person with AIDS.

  Rantaung got the job, and got the meals, but put on no weight. As I had never known him when he was bulky, nothing seemed untoward, and his sense of humour was certainly in robust health. It was Rantaung’s special talent that he could make painfully bad jokes (“See that over there! A rock with legs! Oh no, it’s an elephant!” was a standard), but tell them with such enthusiasm and laugh so uproariously at his own wit, that people couldn’t help but join in.

  Now, we all had our places in the gang. I spoke the best English and had the greatest book knowledge. This was counterpointed by BK’s astonishing ability to find animals that no text or school could teach. He had grown up hunting for food with his father and could spot a leopard in a tree that was miles from the track. His calm demeanour also inspired confidence in his guests. Once, midway through a drive, he casually radioed me, told me where he was, asked if I was nearby, then mentioned offhandedly that his vehicle was on fire and he would like a lift back to camp. He was cool in the true sense of the word.

  Julius was the greatest seducer of tips. Our salaries were minimal, and it was gratuities that really paid for whatever lives we led when on leave. Julius had a family to support, something he could casually insert into the most unrelated of topics without it being obvious that he was fishing. “ . . . And do you have children?” his guests would ask. “Oh yes, I have six!” he would answer, or sometimes, seven, eight, or twelve. “ . . . And do they go to school?” was the standard reply from the guests. “Only half of them. I want to send them all, but it is so expensive! So some must stay at home and help their mother plant the maize.” You could almost hear the wallets falling open, and I was astonished at some of the fat, book-size envelopes I saw him receive from departing clients at the airstrip. He would have done well even without this trick, because he was an excellent guide, with a knack for knowing which way an animal would turn. He was always right at the spot where the lions brought something down, unerringly knowing which way their prey would flee. His other knack was for naming people. But even though we had worked together for a few years, it was Rantaung who gave me my second African name and my first in Botswana.

  One morning as I worked on a Land Rover, he walked by, looked at me, and burst out laughing. I quickly checked myself over and saw nothing untoward, except my patchy sunburn. I was out of uniform and wearing only shorts, exhibiting the unusual red bands that had come from driving around in the sun all day. My legs were white from the foot to the knee, then brown from there to the thigh. My nether region, belly, back and chest were as pale as a fish’s underside from being covered by clothing. The white stopped at the neckline, though, where there was a triangular patch at the top of my chest that spread onto my face. This region was an alarming burnt chestnut colour. The same tint appeared again halfway down my biceps and ended at my fingers.

  “You look like a Lehututu!” Rantaung burst out, and some other staff, who up until now had treated my odd markings as no more unusual than anything else about me, all joined in the laughter.

  Lehututu is the Setswana name for a bird, which in English is called the ground hornbill. The Setswana name perfectly represents its deep, haunting call, which carries across the plains: “Le—hu—tu! Tu—tu!” It is turkey size and pitch-black in plumage, unless it shakes a tail feather at you. These feathers are as white as my rump, but I doubted Rantaung could have any idea how pallid that was. The parallel Rantaung had drawn was based on the hornbill’s most distinctive feature: Its face and neck, in stark contrast to its pitch-black plumage, are the lurid red of a streetwalker’s lipstick. Catching a glance of myself in the wing mirror, I had to admit he had a point.

  From that point on, whenever he called me on the radio, that was the only name he used. Like a gang, we all had our names now—Rantaung was Double R, Julius was Galloping Horse (a name of his own choosing, and he became very grumpy whenever we altered it to Galloping Tortoise), and BK, perhaps due to his palpable dignity, just stayed BK.

  For about a year we were a stable guiding group and found a working rhythm that we had lacked up until Rantaung had arrived. We learned from each other, honed the games we played with tourists, and reached the point that we could tease each other about skin colour without worrying about offence. BK could claim the darkest skin and would mock Julius for his lighter tone, suggesting that somewhere in his heritage there was a Dutchman. Julius would in turn say that once all my freckles had joined together, I might actually start looking like BK’s son. I would offer them all sunscreen at the start of each drive, to the bemusement of the guests, and Rantaung would make a show of lathering himself, then claim that he felt different now that he was white. He would look at the guests and say, “But to be like them I need more money! You need money to be fat like that!” I knew that all the money in the world wouldn’t make Rantaung fat and would quickly scan the faces of BK and Julius after such a comment. I wanted to see if they were reserved in their laughter, but they would be openly guffawing, so I would join in as much as I could.

  The guides also took turns trying to teach me Setswana, which I had struggled with from the moment I arrived in the country. BK taught me some phrases, but when I tried them out on Rantaung, he just laughed and said, “That’s not Setswana! He taught you Bayei! I’ll have to teach you real Setswana, or you’ll end out talking like a monkey!” Bayei was the name of BK’s tribe and its language, which apparently Rantaung thought inferior to his. So Rantaung taught me some words, which Julius promptly told me were not Setswana either, but Hambakushu. Julius then gave me some words of Herero, even though he insisted they were part of the national language. And in the end I came to think that we all got on so well because nobody understood anyone else.

  Most of the time we all spoke English with each other, talking about where the animals were, where they would most likely have gone since we last saw them, which lions were expecting cubs, and who would be the first to find them. We spoke of people—whose guests were good, and bad; and we complained about the managers. The others would usually complain about all white people, then add, “But not you . . . you’re not white. You’re a Lehututu.” One thing we did not speak about was Rantaung’s clearly failing health.

  One morning after a drive, some of Rantaung’s guests asked to change vehicles. This happened on occasion to all guides, because nobody can be expected to get on with everybody, but it is always a blow to the guide’s pride. The guests complained that he spent too much time away from the vehicle tracking the animals. It struck me as strange, as the wildlife is so dense at Mombo that we rarely left our vehicles for long. Then Chris explained it to me: “He’s going off into the bush to be sick.”

  Shortly after that he went into town to see a doctor, and I didn’t expect to see him again. I didn’t sleep that night, and by the look of it the next morning neither had BK or Julius. We waited for word of his condition, and waited some more. Then, to our surprise, three weeks later he came back, looking gaunt and wasted but smiling as much as ever.

  “Hey Lehututu!” he shouted when he saw me. “You’re fat!
Nice!”

  In Botswana saying someone is fat is a compliment, as it represents prosperity. There was no way I could return the favour, though, as it would be so patently untrue and only serve to point out that he was dying.

  “Good to see you, Rolls Royce,” I said instead.

  He lasted another month, then went back into town “for some tests.” Within two weeks one of our staff went to visit him and his family and was told that he had died moments before. Grant took the radio call and let us all know. The kitchen and laundry staff burst into wailing ululations, and the men looked down at their shoes and the dust that was slowly speckling with tears.

  The wailing carried on for hours, an eerie sound drifting on the wind from the little village where the staff lived. A guest asked me what it was, and I told him that a friend, Rantaung, had died. My voice hitched as I said his name, but I held my lip firm and changed the subject. The Africans keened, a sound with no words that said everything, and I wondered if I would feel any better if I was with them and let go of the grief. For once I felt separate from the other guides, my Western sensibilities not allowing me to wail. In the village I would only make them feel uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to do that. So I sat, tense, in my tent, trying to block the sounds from outside and waited for the afternoon drive to distract me.

  Before the day was out, word came through the radio that Rantaung was still alive. He had collapsed, and his family had mistaken it for death. It seemed strangely cruel, because for me it was the fulfillment of a long-held wish. When my mother died, I would have given anything, anything at all, to have her back. I craved the news of some mistake, that through a miracle she was alive again. I have felt the same way about every other friend or acquaintance that has been lost. But when I learned that Rantaung still lived, it only seemed like a blow. It was a postponement, not a reprieve, and the word came within a week that this time he was dead for sure.