by Boyd Varty
“Put your life jackets on!” Mom shouted at us.
Bron looked out the window. As far as we could tell, the plane was flying in a perfectly normal way. Also, Zimbabwe is landlocked—red earth as far as the eye can see. “Why?” my sister asked. “What’s going on?”
Big mistake. We’d made the critical error of not reacting immediately to the Flying Voice. When you’re in Flying Mode, you just do what you’re told and shut up. Mom’s arm came around like a serpent, striking indiscriminately at whatever it could reach. This is the best description of my family I can find: we go down slapping. “You kids just put your life jackets on!”
Bron and I began struggling with the straps and buckles. Mom felt around behind her seat and snatched up the blue-and-white checkered cheesecloth pillows our grandmother had embroidered—“Bron” in blue and “Boyd” in red—which we always took along while flying, for naps. Mom jammed them onto our laps. “PUT YOUR HEADS DOWN!”
“What?”
“PUT YOUR HEADS ON YOUR PILLOWS! BRACE POSITION!”
This was Mom and Dad’s first major air crisis, and they were going to handle it. They’d have to call in an emergency landing to Zimbabwe air traffic control. Dad positioned Rio to “trim for glide,” which meant putting her nose down so that the plane would start to descend, allowing us to gain speed and get lift so that we would keep flying even as we steadily lost altitude. They prepared for a forced landing. That meant picking a spot where they thought they could get the plane in without hitting a tree or rocks or water—and manage to arrive just as the plane was running out of speed. Too high, and they’d miss it. Too low, and we’d be in the trees. Or they could “dead-stick” it—that is, hope to glide without power—to the nearest runway. Those were the choices.
Bron and I could tell that things in the cockpit were starting to heat up. Mom had the map out and was attempting to work out their route with her protractor—two degrees wrong, and we’d be miles off course. Dad was looking around, trying to figure out if we could make it to a runway in Masvingo.
“Hold on to your false teeth!” Mom called back to us. To this day, I have no idea where that came from.
Somehow they got Rio down, on a sad little grass airstrip in Masvingo where the windsock hung completely limp. There wasn’t even an air traffic controller. We all sat silently, staring at each other. Then Mom herded us out of Rio and under the wing of the plane, the only shade available. Dad disappeared and somehow managed to find a mechanic to look at the plane. Somewhat anticlimactically, once the mechanic had fixed the problem, we got back in and headed home.
Whenever you’re in a situation that’s going wrong, you can’t help thinking how silly you were to get involved with it in the first place. I wonder what went through Mom and Dad’s minds while Rio’s engine was running rough. Did they ever think, “Why are we flying our precious children around Africa in a biscuit tin?” At the time, they seemed so supremely confident that it never dawned on me that they’d put us in danger. My parents had a pioneering spirit, and like all pioneers, they measured risk against the vision of the life they wanted for all of us. Given a choice between playing it safe and fulfilling that vision, they chose the latter.
My parents finally upgraded us, from Rio to MTV (Mike Tango Victor), a Cessna 210—a faster plane with six seats. MTV had a singular quirk: a tiny bit of the throttle stayed on after you cut it just as you touched ground, so there was still a little bleed of power. The plane would slow but would not stop completely unless you gave it another hard yank. This slipped Mom’s mind once as we hit the airstrip at Londoz. She was standing on the brake with all her might, the stick pulled back, the throttle off—and the plane wouldn’t stop. We were quickly running out of runway. Dad sat beside her, screaming, “Brakes! Brakes! Brakes!” Mom made a split-second decision and steered MTV into a marula tree, crumpling the front and wing—and stopping the plane.
Why hadn’t my dad simply yanked on the throttle or told Mom to do it? Because he wasn’t “pilot in command.” From the moment you’ve buckled yourself into the cockpit, it needs to be crystal clear who’s in charge. The pilot in command makes all the decisions, and in an emergency, you need one person to get the plane on the ground. Mom and Dad had learned this lesson early on and were absolute sticklers about it. Whenever they’d hand over the controls, they’d confirm, “You have control.” “Pilot in command” is also an operating theme in their marriage. There’s conflict when one strays into the other’s area of command. If Dad starts telling Mom how to host lodge guests, or if Mom starts to tell Dad what time he should go on a game drive with them, you can rest assured that a storm will be brewing.
Twenty years later, Mom still relishes Dad’s retelling of the forced lob into Masvingo, but any mention from him of the marula tree crash can fire up a punch-up of unspeakable proportions. “You were pilot in command!” Dad protests. “I fully understand that,” Mom responds frostily, “but seconds before we hit the tree, you might have pulled on the throttle.” “Well, you were pilot in command!” “But we hit the tree!” Two decades hasn’t washed away the reproach.
Having grown up with all these near misses, I’m a very nervous passenger. Ironically, I’m even more afraid in commercial planes, as I feel more out of control; at least in a small plane, I could fumble with the controls on the way to death. I’m a wreck around takeoff and landing. If the engine changes pitch, I’ll vault out of a sleeping pill–induced nap to full red alert. You’d think that I’d be used to it, but when you’ve hit an impala, a marula tree, and a vulture in a small aircraft—once, on the way back from Joburg to Londoz, we looked up and there was a pair of vulture legs sticking out like two-taloned turkey drumsticks from the front curve of the wing—you start to get a bit jittery.
The other thing that makes me a nervous passenger, particularly on large African airlines, is the fact that I’ve been in a number of African repair shops. I know how “cannaking”—mechanical repair—works in Africa. A certain rhythm must be followed at all times. Everyone must stand around the broken mechanism, staring at it for a very long time. This action must be accompanied by a lot of head scratching and tire kicking. Next a guy called Velhaphi—and there is always an outback mechanic called Velhaphi in any bush workshop—will suggest that “it is impossible to fix this situation.” This pronouncement will be followed by some debate. Then, after another ten minutes of deliberation, it will suddenly be hit upon that, in fact, the entire problem can be solved using strawberry jam and a beer can—but just for “temp.” African people are incredibly resourceful; someone will always come up with some left-field plan. I’ve seen this little drama play out with all manner of African mechanical creatures, from water pumps to tractors. I would be very surprised if a similar situation isn’t playing out in a Congolese airline’s repair shop as we speak. It’s a testament to Africans’ unsurpassable hope and ingenuity, and the reality that things are usually falling apart.
Time has made my parents more circumspect about living literally on the fly. My mother, in particular, no longer seems to want the stress of trying to work it out as you go along. Nowadays she would rather just drive herself somewhere than get involved in some Varty aviation scheme. My father … well, he knows a lot more, knows the dangers better, and still gets in the plane and trusts himself. I don’t think his spirit will allow him anything else. The word “irrepressible” comes to mind, even if something in his eyes now speaks of a little doubt. Mom still flies with him, though truly and justifiably scared. For them, now as ever, dying together beats living apart.
EIGHT
MADIBA
“A VERY GREAT MAN WILL be visiting us,” Dad told me. “Someone who’s going to change our country.” A major figure in the African National Congress was coming to Londolozi. I expected someone dressed in a sharp suit, his eyes hidden behind designer sunglasses. Yet when I walked into Nelson Mandela’s bedroom with the breakfast tray, I found no stiff head of state but a warm, unaffected man.
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nbsp; Mandela sat up, and I put the tray next to him. He thanked me graciously and began chatting about the previous night’s game drive: “Oh, last night we had an amazing time. We saw a leopard. We saw it jump onto the back of a buck.”
The man we all called Madiba (his family tribal name) radiated humility, walking the grounds in a beat-up boxer’s T-shirt, old tracksuit pants, and scuffed slippers. He was still trying to adjust to his immense stature after being released from twenty-seven years of isolation, most of it in a cramped coffin of a ten-by-ten cell on Robben Island. His innocence had been utterly destroyed by forces of which I was then blissfully ignorant, yet somehow during that unjust imprisonment, he had restored his own soul.
It was 1990. Mandela had become one of the most famous and inspiring people in the world, yet parts of him were still deeply imbedded in his years of prison life. People close to him within the ANC realized that he needed a period of adjustment and recovery. Enos Mabuza, an activist who had been close with my family for years, believed that Londoz, where apartheid’s tentacles had never reached, would be the perfect place for Mandela to relax. Most important, if the people wanted to put themselves in his path, they’d risk getting eaten—an unusually compelling deterrent.
Three months after his release from prison, Mandela paid the first of many visits to our reserve. At first he stayed in one of the guest chalets, but once he became more comfortable with the place, he preferred the quiet of our family cottage, where the accommodations were far more modest: a bed and a bookshelf. He liked the simplicity and being away from the hustle and bustle of the camp. He fell into a nice routine each morning: he would sleep in and then have a late breakfast with my uncle. Having already returned from an early morning’s filming, Uncle John would sit at the head of a large stinkwood table, pour his muesli, and cut a very ripe banana into it. In true JV style, Uncle John treated Mandela exactly the same as he treated everyone else: as an equal and a friend. I have no doubt that if Mandela had been out in the bush during an amazing action sequence, Uncle John would have made him a camera assistant. Nelson would sit to John’s left with a plate of fruit, and they would discuss recent events on the reserve, including the highlights of the morning’s footage and the animal sightings from Mandela’s latest game drive, which never failed to enchant him. I joined them often, although I can’t say that, at age seven, I fully appreciated what momentous occasions these were.
A few weeks into this routine, Mandela invited Uncle John to join him for a more official lunch at the camp with some ANC members who had come to the reserve to see him. Once again, I expected sharp suits, but these men were dressed in typical strugglewear: jeans and black leather jackets, more like union leaders than politicians. From the time they arrived on the front deck of the camp, it was clear that this was an event beyond the casual breakfast-in-slippers routine. When it came time to be seated, Uncle John, in a rare moment of tact, headed for a side seat at the table. Nelson stopped the proceedings. “No, John,” he said in his gracious way. “I would never take your place at the head. Please come and sit here.”
Whenever I went into the village with Mandela, it was clear just how important he was. People flocked around him, not in a mobbing way but at a respectful remove. Everyone just wanted to drink in his peaceful presence. Years later, when Oprah Winfrey asked him to be on her show, he agreed, then asked, “What will it be about?” He didn’t seem to comprehend that viewers would be on the edge of their seats, waiting to hear the story of a man unjustly imprisoned for twenty-seven years, who upon being freed immediately reconciled with his jailers and guided a reunited country toward freedom.
Madiba was at Londolozi at the start of the CODESA talks between the ANC and the National Party, of which F. W. de Klerk was the president. The country was fragile, and tensions were high; the talks between these deeply opposed parties were meant to be about how to communicate on equal footing in the future. Almost immediately, the right wing of the National Party drove an armored vehicle into the latest summits and took them over, waving their old South African flags, as inflammatory a gesture as raising a Confederate flag in post–Civil War America. Mandela asked Dad, Mom, and Uncle John to charter a helicopter to fly him to the scene immediately.
“We won’t do it,” they said. “If you land at the scene, they’ll shoot you.”
Mandela didn’t care. “I must be with my people. Charter me a helicopter.”
The argument grew quite heated. “We are your people,” Dad told him, “and it doesn’t help us if you fly off and get shot. We’ll charter you an airplane and fly you to a nearby airport and you can get a report before you go in.” Mandela stormed off. Shortly afterward, he returned and agreed with my parents and uncle. As it happened, by the time he flew in for the summit, the revolution was over and everyone was out having a barbecue.
This wasn’t the only time we saw Mandela assert himself on behalf of his people. One Saturday night, reports came in that ten people had been murdered in Alexandra Township, a poor black slum—more casualties of the Third Force, a group dedicated to the breakdown of negotiations between the ANC and the National Party. The Third Force was essentially made up of terrorists who committed atrocious acts and blamed them on one party or the other to try to blow apart the fragile peace.
We had an ancient TV in the family room with bunny ears antennae. The next morning as Dad and Mandela watched the news, they saw only a snowy transmission of this tragedy. Our phone lines were down for scheduled maintenance. In classic Londolozi style, Dad came to a last-minute rescue with a jerry-rigged radiophone.
“De Klerk!” Mandela screamed into the line, trying to get his point across through heavy static. “I’m warning you! If the Third Force doesn’t stop, I’ll pull out of the negotiations!” The connection was so terrible that the future president of the ANC and the current president of South Africa couldn’t hear each other. Dad was frantic: the whole future of our country rested on a fuzzy phone line. Luckily, Dad was able to get the phone working and persuade Mandela to speak into the transmitter instead of holding it to his ear, and he and de Klerk came to a resolution. In late 1993, Mandela and de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their work in negotiating a peaceful transition against the backdrop of imminent civil war. And in 1994, Nelson Mandela became the first democratically elected president of South Africa.
Mandela’s visits coincided with one of the worst droughts we’d had in a long time. The Sand River had almost run dry because of a dam upriver controlled by the Gazankulu districts, a big reservation system. The Nationalist government at the time offered no protection for the waterways. Some farmers set up their farms right on the river, siphoning water for their land, building dams wherever they pleased, with no legislation to protect other people who likewise needed this vital resource. There was corruption and tribal infighting, a general disconnect between government policy and what people needed. Dad flew to Gazankulu to plead our case.
“You’ve got to open the water for the people downstream,” Dad said.
“No, our people need the water,” the local puppets of the government replied.
Dad flew back and told Mandela about the dilemma. “When I’m in power, let’s talk and solve this problem,” Mandela promised. That very night there was a great downpour. All the staff members met in the village; everyone stood in a circle and offered thanks for the rain. Mandela gave a speech, saying that Londolozi was in line with his vision for the future of South Africa, a society of racial harmony.
Mandela proved true to his word; when he became president, he involved Dad in the drafting of the National Water Act, which mandated a more democratic handling of rivers. People could no longer deny others an essential resource by blocking it upstream.
It was Mom’s dream for Madiba to do the foreword for the book she’d been working on, I Speak of Africa: The Story of Londolozi Game Reserve. This book was deeply important to her. Filled with lush photographs from the reserve, it not only told the story of the lodge’
s beginnings but described our family’s philosophy on conservation. Originally, not wanting to cash in on their relationship, she sent her request through his foundation, the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. Weeks dragged by as her message got bogged down in bureaucracy. Finally, my mother decided to throw caution to the wind. She phoned the security desk at the Union Buildings and cheerfully talked someone into giving her Madiba’s home number. Such was life in the new democracy. She called his house directly. “I’d like to speak to Madiba, please.”
The clearly flummoxed person on the other end of the line told her to hold on. Moments later Mandela came on. “Madiba, it’s Shanny from Londolozi speaking.”
“How wonderful to hear from you. How are you?”
“Oh, just fine. I wanted to ask you something.”
“Do you mind? I’m just in the middle of watching the news. Could I ask you to ring me back in ten minutes?”
When Mandela picked up the phone ten minutes later, it was with a warm “Now, my dear, how can I help you?”
“Oh, Madiba, this is a long shot, I’m sure you get asked to do this a million times, but would you consider writing the foreword for my book?”
“Yes, it would be my pleasure.”
Within twenty-four hours Mom and Dad had driven to Pretoria, to the office of the president. Madiba had put his thoughts down, and his letter was given the official seal from the president’s office. It appears as the foreword to I Speak of Africa, opposite a gorgeous rendering of Madiba with Dave, Shan, and John Varty. I was particularly moved by the final paragraphs:
During my long walk to freedom, I had the rare privilege to visit Londolozi. There I saw people of all races living in harmony amidst the beauty that Mother Nature offers. There I saw a living lion in the wild.