by Boyd Varty
Londolozi represents a model of the dream I cherish for the future of nature preservation in our country.
After Mandela became president, Mom was staying at the Balalaika Hotel in Johannesburg when Mandela suddenly walked into the foyer surrounded by press and security. Spotting her, he broke from the crowd and walked across the lobby to greet her, holding her hand for an extended period of time in a typically African way as they chatted. My mother was blown away. Years later, when I was captaining a cricket team, she would remind me of Madiba’s example: “It’s the little things, Boyd, the little things that make the great leaders.”
Twenty years after the morning I met Madiba, in the room that is now mine, I realized all over again how extraordinary he was, and is. He’d woken up exactly as I am doing now, just a few pounds of bones and blood and gristle and tired muscle. He had to generate within himself the energy to extend the restoration of his country beyond that small human body. I couldn’t imagine how he must have felt, emerging from the terrible isolation of prison immediately into cheering crowds, a whole nation desperately in need of what he represented.
Mandela is revered by all for the way he catalyzed change in our country. His birthday will always be a major holiday at Londolozi, filled with singing, dancing, and eating. I join in the wild games of soccer played on a field where lions have been known to sit and watch. In the heat of competition, race becomes irrelevant, with players and fans of all colors cheering and embracing; cooks and bottle washers clink glasses with wealthy First World guests. A flood of children snitch dollops of icing from the cake that says, “Happy Birthday, Madiba!” The Londolozi Ladies Choir, made up of cooks, housekeepers, and other staffers, provides a rousing soundtrack.
Nelson Mandela is proof that one individual can change the world.
NINE
ELEPHANTS ALL AROUND
I WAS WITH PHINEAS, ELMON’S older brother, out in the bush. He was tall and very thin, in his fifties, with a roguish smile and smart sideburns. At age ten, I was too young to go out in the bush by myself, so if Dad or Elmon couldn’t take me, Phineas would be my guide.
The coarse sand of the dry riverbed crunched under my bare feet. It was hot, even as dusk started to arrive, and bushbucks on the slopes of the ravine were making their way to the floodplain on the riverbank above our camp. Phineas and I had laid down a tarp to sleep on and made a small fire beside it on which to cook a francolin. I’d spent the first three hours in this campsite stalking through the shady river glens, trying to bag a fowl with my .22. I felt very grown-up being out for the first time without my father or uncle, preparing to sleep on the ground overnight with someone else, just the two of us. It was very exciting for a young boy. But when I eventually shot the francolin, I didn’t feel the thrill; I just felt a little cold. Phineas showed me how to pluck the chicken-sized bird and place it in the coals of the fire. As if on cue, there was a rumble of far-off thunder.
Then something answered the thunder. Out of the reeds a giant bull elephant lumbered straight toward where we were sitting, his trunk cocked to drink in the smell of smoke and sweat, his ears tuned to the sound of our breathing. I could hear every footfall as his feet scuffed and compressed the sand. Not a cricket or a bird made a sound; it was as if the court had fallen silent for the king.
My heart started to race. I slid closer to Phineas, watching him for a reaction, but he stayed calm.
Although the elephant was only a faint outline in the dark, I could see his white tusks rise when he lifted his head. I flushed with excitement as the giant creature came closer and closer. Phineas’s hand fluttered, a signal that meant “Stay seated.” The elephant approached the edge of our tarp. I felt as if a mountain had come to say hello.
Phineas shifted onto his haunches in case he needed to stand up quickly and create a ruckus to scare the elephant away. He had no gun. The elephant was so close that his breath blew dust from the sandy riverbed onto me. He was so still, his skin twitching, his ears like satellites aimed forward. I saw that he wanted to proceed down the river but was uncertain if he could pass between us and the steep bank. He stood there, considering, for what felt like hours, although it was perhaps only four or five minutes. With a final swish of his head, he strode past us.
Phineas chuckled quietly. I was shaking, but for some reason I didn’t feel afraid—or if I did, I have no memory of it. I felt nervous about facing the rest of the night—it was now nearly dark—but I was also thrilled and proud that I’d be able to tell the story when I got home. We’d had an encounter—and bushveld adventures were all about encounters.
For the rest of my life I would return often in my mind to that ten-year-old boy who had been visited by a mountain.
Elephants walk through the spirit as much as they do across the earth: they are the ambassadors of peace, the universal prayer, the om in motion. The footsteps of the great matriarchal herds bind the earth together like the stitches on quilts sewn by our grandmothers’ grandmothers. Elephants are ancestor spirits while they are still alive.
It seemed fitting to me, then, that my own grandfather’s encounter with an elephant was a pivotal point in the history of Londolozi, a fusion of the patriarchs with the matriarchs. A bull elephant charged him, and he shot it six times with an underpowered rifle. It was within ten paces when he managed to turn it back. I’ve often thought how different the story of Londolozi would be if that elephant, and not a heart attack, had killed my grandfather. Would my father and uncle’s reverence for the great pachyderms be any different? Would they have fought so hard to keep the farm they loved if it had been the place where my grandfather had died, trampled back into the earth by an elephant? I’m always amazed by how the fate of generations can pivot on single moments.
When Dad and Uncle John began working on Londolozi in the seventies, almost all the elephants had been fenced into Kruger National Park. The fence closed off the natural migratory path of elephants and wildebeests. It had been erected as a “veterinary fence,” but essentially it turned Kruger National Park into the perfect military buffer between apartheid South Africa and the advance of communism in Mozambique, ninety miles to the east of Londolozi. To my parents and uncle, that fence was a powerful symbol of man’s destructive influence on the land.
Next door to Londolozi, Kruger was culling elephants. Meanwhile, Londolozi had only five elephant bulls in the whole area. Dad and JV needed more; Ken Tinley had told them that elephants are natural deforesters—by feeding on scrub bushes and pushing down large trees to eat the leaves, they promote grassland. In accordance with Tinley’s advice, workers at Londolozi had used heavy machinery to clear out some of the scrub, and the land had been responding wonderfully. As the grassland returned, the wildebeest and zebra numbers were beginning to improve. The elephants would accelerate the restoration of the land to its original state.
Since Kenya had a thriving elephant population, Dave and Uncle John traveled there on dubiously obtained Paraguayan passports; South Africans weren’t welcome in Kenya, or much of anywhere else, because of sanctions against apartheid. Dad and Uncle John had devised an ingenious plan to get elephants onto Londolozi’s land; they’d bought themselves a tiny percentage in the “Dundee Crocodile Farm” near Iguaçu falls in Paraguay. By Paraguayan law, this made them landowners and therefore eligible for Paraguayan passports. They managed to get through Kenyan border control by flashing this questionable paperwork and saying “Sí, señor” to every question a border patrol officer asked them.
There they met with naturalists who confirmed Tinley’s claim that elephants could translate woodland and scrubland to grassland. They came back bounding with enthusiasm to stock the park with elephants and set up a mission to raise money for the effort. They managed to talk their way into a meeting with a Kruger Park official. These two long-haired twenty-somethings with droopy mustaches—who, incidentally, had just been baton-charged by the police because they’d protested apartheid at Wits University—sat across the table from the
old-guard official and laid out their plan: “Listen, we want to catch elephants in Kruger.”
“You’ll never pull it off, but if you get a permit, I will help you,” he told them. They got the permit, and the Kruger game rangers, to their credit, were on board. “This is fantastic! This’ll be brilliant,” they said. Next the brothers needed to line up a helicopter from which they could dart the elephants with sedatives. This would be the first live moving of elephants ever undertaken, and it was fraught with problems. How much sedative to shoot into an elephant? How big an elephant should they choose? If it was too small, would it survive? How would you transport it? There were no guidelines.
After they successfully darted the first elephant, they tugged to get her into her box—twenty-five Shangaans on one end, with a vet on the other end jabbing antidote into her bum to rouse her just enough so she might walk. The operation went perfectly until the elephant took a deep breath and the box just disintegrated around her. There she stood, completely awake, with no box, surrounded by twenty-five Shangaans. They scattered in every direction. The elephant ran around, trumpeting, then finally took off into the bush.
The next day, the brothers and their workers reinforced the crates, caught smaller elephants, and successfully transported eight of them in large crated trucks. Some survived, but unfortunately some were too small. And the project was out of money.
Eight elephants weren’t enough. They would need more money and went to New York to get it. The brothers were fans of ABC’s Wide World of Sports’s two-hour weekly special, which sometimes sent celebrities on adventures in the wild. They heard that the program had done a story on a famous elephant, so they wrangled a meeting with producer John Wilcox.
“Listen,” Dad told him, “we’re gonna catch elephants in the Kruger and relocate them to Londolozi. Would you like the film rights?”
Wilcox barely looked up from the phone conversation he was involved in. “I’ve done elephants. We don’t need elephants. Africa’s too far. No, we’re not interested.” He punched a second button on the phone and addressed himself to another caller. “Yeah, yeah, what do you want?”
John said, “We’re going to dart helicopters from elephants.” In the heat of the moment, John garbled his words.
“What?” Wilcox covered the receiver.
“I mean, we will dart the elephants from a helicopter and hang them from the helicopter so we can relocate them.”
Wilcox hung up the receiver. He was a filmmaker; they could see him thinking in pictures. “If you can do that,” Wilcox said, “I’ll do the show.”
Dad looked at John. “What the fuck are you saying?” he whispered angrily. “No one’s ever hung an elephant under a helicopter.”
John smiled and whispered back, “Don’t worry, don’t worry.”
In short order, Wilcox sent a crew of eighteen men to cover the transport of ten elephants. The plan was to have Cheryl Tiegs, then the highest-paid model in the world, and Ben Abruzzo, an adventurer who’d flown across the Atlantic in a hot-air balloon, dart the elephants from a balloon.
Dad was having trouble convincing helicopter pilots to go along with the next part of the plan. “Listen, you guys, you have to catch an elephant and sling it under the helicopter.”
The pilots wanted none of it. “That’s the biggest bullshit—you don’t have to use a helicopter. You can just transport them in trucks.”
Dad and JV were not deterred. They were determined to get those elephants to Londolozi. They eventually convinced the pilots to do the darting and help them muscle the elephants into the trucks. Out came Wilcox and his crew. “You’ve never seen a goat rodeo like this in your entire life,” Dad told me later. “We had two still photographers and a second helicopter. A hundred people showed up, including Cheryl and Ben and hangers-on and hangers-on to the hangers-on. We had trucks and low-beds and proper crates and two helicopters and film crews and groupies and cousins, uncles, and aunts—and Johnny Wilcox.” Wilcox set up the camera and hooked a fellow on a harness dangling from the helicopter to film the whole operation. Then the veterinarian who’d flown 250 miles to do the darting opened up his box of tricks to discover that he’d left the sedatives back home. The whole day collapsed. Wilcox went ballistic.
The next day, the drugs arrived, the elephants were darted from the helicopter for transport by truck to Londolozi, and Wilcox got magnificent footage. That night, everyone celebrated into the evening around a campfire. Cheryl Tiegs had brought Peter Beard, her future husband, who was Kenya’s voice of conservation and a maverick like Ken Tinley, who’d also joined the festivities. They began to fire each other up. Somehow, in the alcohol-fueled haze and smoke, Peter announced, “Cheryl, we’re going to have a party at Studio 54. We’ll invite Mick Fleetwood to perform. We’ll get Steve Rubell”—one of Studio 54’s co-owners—“to donate all the gate money to a trust for elephants.” Johnny Wilcox would donate the day’s footage so it could be projected on the disco’s walls.
Dad and Uncle John were ecstatic and threw themselves into preparations for the fund-raiser. The party cost $67,000. They ultimately raised $69,000, netting them a scant $2,000—and earning Dad the eternal resentment of Mom, who’d had to miss Mick’s performance at the hottest disco of the day because Dad had left her back home at Londolozi to “mind the shop,” feeding the film crews and repairing Ben Abruzzo’s balloons, which had gotten ripped by thorn trees during the elephant transport.
From the middle of apartheid-infected nowhere, Dad and Uncle John had created international attention. Most important, they’d managed to move twenty-five elephants to Londolozi. Kruger National Park began to rethink its elephant-relocation policies. By April 1983, there were forty-two elephants in Londolozi. A year later, the first elephant calf was born to an elephant relocated to the reserve. Today there are more than a thousand elephants on this land.
My grandfather survived that charging bull the way Jonah survived his whale, so that Dad and Uncle John could one day relocate the first elephants into Londolozi. After their shaky reintroduction, they now roam freely between Londolozi and Kruger National Park, leaving an invisible trail of peace.
In the late eighties, when Uncle John wrote an article for The Star, an influential South African newspaper, protesting the fence, he was viciously attacked by the leaders of the national parks board. Yet he was right. For years the Vartys lobbied to take it down, and in 1994 they prevailed. A piece of that fence sits with my mom’s most prized sentimental possessions on top of a yellowwood cabinet in our house. This rusted length of barbed wire quietly broadcasts the magic that comes from laying down our barriers and letting nature heal the divide.
Try as I might, I could never transfer my love of elephants to Bron. She continued to admire them in theory but not actually like them. Uncle John was perhaps somewhat to blame for that.
When I was eleven, Uncle John became a father; he and Gillian had a lovely daughter named Savannah. She was born in Johannesburg but spent her infancy in tented camps way out in the bush wherever John happened to be filming. JV loved Savannah upon arrival and quickly became putty in her tiny hands. Bron and I were godparents to this golden angel who bathed in buckets in the tent camps. Savannah quickly became a favorite part of our visits with our uncle in the bush.
When Savannah was still very small, perhaps two or three years old, Uncle John took her, along with me and Bron, for a picnic at a beautiful place called Tatowa Dam. After the large dam had been dug, the earth wall had never sealed, creating a small circle of clear water in a deep hollow. We’d found a gorgeous area behind the dam, a grove shaded by the faded red and green leaves of the tamboti trees a stone’s throw away from the pond. Uncle John laid out his usual spread: a couple of the tart citrus fruits called naartjies, some nuts, and a rotten banana. (Uncle John is never without duct tape, which he believes will mend anything, and rotten bananas, his all-purpose source of nutrition.) We were just about to leave when three bull elephants came ambling down to the water�
�s edge to drink.
The documentarian in Uncle John leapt into action. He jumped into his Land Rover, which he’d converted into a mobile filming unit by tearing out the rear seats and replacing them with foam-filled black boxes to house his cameras. Then he reached into one of the compartments and pulled out his gigantic Arriflex. I knew what came next: my job would be to carry lenses and batteries while Uncle John rolled film. He barked out his usual bullet-point briefing as we shouldered our equipment:
“Buddy.
“You and me.
“Gonna.
“Sneak in close.
“Bonna.” He looked over at Bron, who was already narrowing her eyes in suspicion.
“You stay with Savannah.”
He swerved back to me.
“Buddy.
“If they look like they might iron us.
“Hit the water.”
Meaning: if we get charged, dive into the dam and swim underwater to escape. John’s number one lesson was: Always have an escape route.
We set off, leaving Bronwyn silently fuming that we’d entangled her once again with elephants, her nemesis.
Uncle John was in his element. We soon set up on top of a large, grassy termite mound, and his eye was pressed to the lens while he captured the three bulls refreshing themselves. Finally the elephants finished drinking and began to head around the side of the dam, toward us. We were directly in their way, which could be a problem if we surprised them. If we were going to move, I thought, we should have done so long ago. Now our only option was to be very still and hope they wouldn’t notice us, which was unlikely, given elephants’ keen sense of smell. Uncle John, I feared, was completely oblivious, his eye still jammed against the camera. He was simply zooming the lens out as they drew closer, intent on his footage, all sense of depth perception lost. I was horridly aware of their proximity, but a good bearer never questions or runs without his cameraman.