Saving the White Lions

by Linda Tucker

  Either way, our situation was precarious. This was in the days before game lodges had been established in that wilderness region, so lions were neither familiar with nor habituated to humans. Today, many tourists in open safari vehicles mistakenly think lions are placid, especially during daylight hours when they’re fast sleep. In most of Africa’s wildlife reserves nowadays, lions are accustomed to daily visits by guided guests in open vehicles, and the big cats tend to cast a lazy if watchful eye. But make no mistake, they are fully aware of the presence of each and every one of these tourists—and if humans do something unusual, such as suddenly stand up or dismount from their vehicles, lions may instantly revert to their predatory instincts. Consequently, there have been a number of grisly incidents in safari parks, in large part due to human ignorance.

  Surrounded by sinister, prowling felines in the undergrowth, we knew that if we remained cool-headed and sat calmly—possibly for days on end, or until such time as the lions dispersed—we’d probably be safe. But in the darkened confusion, we couldn’t tell which lion was where. And while everyone knows what it feels like to be alone and scared of the dark, group hysteria is something different—more primal and archetypal, something infinitely harder to manage than private terror. For our desperate group, it was almost more than we could do to stay in our seats. The smell of fear in that open vehicle was overwhelming. And indeed, just then, the woman next to me began calling out for help, a pitiful sound in the African wilderness. The camp was only a few kilometers away, but between our captive place in the middle of the African bushveld and that safe haven lay near-certain death. In our shared panic, we humans were now behaving like prey, meat in an open butcher’s shop.

  Unable to handle the fear, Rosie, the plump Swiss woman in the seat behind our driver, started screaming—what a fatally flawed move. I remember the instant response of snarls and low growls that issued back from the bushes. Leonard snapped at Rosie to sit down, to keep calm, but he had lost command of the group. His own nerves were shot. As he shouted, the growls came closer. There was a shuffle in the bushes on one side of the vehicle, and the spotlight’s beam picked out a pair of fiery eyes. Then Mae, my sister, gave a cry on the other side of the vehicle, and the swinging spotlight picked out another pair of angry eyes, then another pair, and another. The predators were everywhere! It was terrifying beyond my worst imaginings. We only had twenty minutes of battery life left before darkness swallowed us whole. I realized then that the only thing worse than seeing man-eaters crouched in predatory mode, ready to spring, was the creeping thought that the spotlight was about to die. I’d see nothing at all. Nothing. Just pitch blackness, knowing nocturnal predators, with their perfect night vision, were watching me.

  We had no way out. One or more of us was destined to die that night, devoured in front of everyone else’s terrified eyes. Looking back, I realize we should have known better. We had invaded their sacred space; but at the time all we could think of was they were attacking us! Even if I were destined to be a survivor, I couldn’t imagine living with this ghoulish memory for the rest of my life … horror of all horrors.

  But then something happened that no one could ever have anticipated.

  A woman appeared. She was walking on foot, in the dark night without a flashlight, through the bush, right into the pride of lions. Unbelievably, she was carrying a small baby on her back. She was an indigenous woman draped in tribal fabric, and she walked very slowly, as if in a trance. Hearing our cries of panic in the bushveld, she had come to our rescue.

  The eight of us sat spellbound in the Land Rover, watching this woman make her way with mesmerizing, slow steps toward us. With the infant on her back, she was accompanied by a small boy and girl, whom she was leading through the jaws of death. But a calm had descended upon the lions. The snarling and growls ended abruptly, replaced with a deathly silence.

  She carried no lantern to light her passage, but it was as if she held a burning flame. Instantly, that flame transformed fear into courage, and the entire scenario changed in a flash. Once she reached us, she climbed into the vehicle without a word. Then she turned her face to give me a stare I’ll never forget, sitting in silence in the seat in front of me. She may have said something in Tsonga, which was incomprehensible to me. Then she passed on this flame of courage. I was numb with confusion, but I watched it ignite the man in front of me, who just moments before had been stricken with fear, like the rest of us.

  Suddenly heroic, this man, a dark and silent Afrikaner, my sister’s boyfriend at the time, climbed down from the open jeep, leaving the only gun behind with us. Clutching a wheel spanner in one hand, Theuns returned on the route that the woman herself had taken, walking right through the lion-infested bushveld. Miraculously, he arrived safely back at the camp, where he managed to start up a spare vehicle; he then came to retrieve us from our dreadful circumstances.

  After the events that night, my sister said she’d marry him, and they are still happily married today. Theuns had saved us. We owed our lives to him, and to the other true heroine of the story—that amazing woman who risked not only her life, but also the lives of her grandchildren, to come to our rescue.

  CHAPTER 2

  Accepting My Destiny

  AFTER THAT NIGHT, I RETURNED to my superficial world of marketing and advertising in Europe’s fashion centers, but every step I took felt like walking in someone else’s shoes. I’d been drifting through life, but now my former existence had been reduced to trappings, to exterior casing. My disillusionment mounted day after day, every day, intensifying the emptiness I felt under the facade I showed to the outside world. When it came to my profession, I no longer enjoyed the thrill of leading trends, playing with people’s minds, manipulating them into buying products they didn’t need or really want. And personally, in my own everyday existence, I could no longer endure the hollow sense of barely living, all the while consuming—eating, buying, spending, utilizing, wasting—and giving nothing back.

  Despite my disenchantment, I continued to resist my true calling—I was wrestling with the challenges and implications of leaving my old, familiar, apparently safe world. While I tried to suppress my fear of the unknown, my life looked more and more meaningless.

  Like a slow-burning fuse lit by the mysterious woman on that dark night, a quantum shift was waiting, and finally—three years later—it exploded. By this time, I was suicidally depressed. Nothing in my previous life made sense any longer. In a state of physical and mental burnout, I was forced to face the revelation that my glamorous existence was a farce. I was living a lie. Utterly despairing, I came to the revelation that to follow my own truth, I had to leave everything behind—without any guarantees.

  It had been three years of confusion and resistance since my dramatic rescue when I finally made an overnight decision to give up everything: my career, my city life, my house and all its paraphernalia, and my marriage and all its failings. Finally, I was prepared to return to the Timbavati wilderness of my childhood to find that heroic woman who had saved my life. This—at last—was my destiny.

  AFTER TRACKING LEONARD DOWN AGAIN, and then going from one local Tsonga person to the next, I finally found her. Her name, I learned, was Maria Khosa, but she had another title: Lion Queen of Timbavati. People traveled great distances in rickety public buses and on foot on long dusty roads in order to seek her healing. When I finally found her, Maria spoke wryly in her native Tsonga tongue.

  “Huh! It took you a long time to wake up!” she said through a translator.

  Maria was a beautiful woman, with a powerful physique, draped in colored beads. Her eyes were piercing, but one was murky blue in color, since a cobra had spat into it, activating her shamanic inner sight. She was somewhere between sixty and seventy, yet seemed ageless. I soon realized that she didn’t view time the way I did, and didn’t count her years.

  She was a sangoma, a medicine woman or traditional healer, and a queen of lion warriors. She hailed from an ancient lineage of lio
n shamans or high priests who were initiated in the knowledge and the way of the lion, and she herself regarded these kings and queens of animals as her beloved family. Indigenous people throughout the region revered her for her wisdom and healing abilities, yet I discovered her in living conditions that were humble to the point of poverty. I found her in staff barracks of sorts, without easy access to water or ablution facilities, her only income derived from working as a house cleaner and not from her healing arts, which she practiced without charge. In bygone times, she would have been advisor to the king. The reduced circumstances in which I found her were a consequence of the colonization of Africa, where traditional structures and belief systems were systematically broken down, and where the original leadership was forcibly eroded as Western values were instated. Still, when she took me back to her village, she was honored and respected by her people—she slept on the floor on a grass mat in the traditional way, and she was proud of it.

  I knew I was forever indebted to her for saving my life in the wilds of Timbavati. With time, I came to realize I was indebted to her for so much more: for continuing the lions’ work of awakening me from a life in which I was barely alive, for helping me find true purpose and direction.

  I had to know what had motivated her heroic action that dark night. How was she able to walk through that angry pride of lions without harm? It had haunted me over the years. When I put this question to her, her face showed a quizzical expression, as if my question were nonsensical, and the answer obvious. She explained there are only two rules in relating to Nature: the first is love and the second, respect. If you follow those two golden rules, you will never be harmed.

  Maria Khosa was courage personified, a lioness in human form. Before she came to us out in the darkened bushveld, she had spoken to her ancestors—once-heroic lion-warrior figures themselves—and they had sanctioned her passage through the angry pride of lions. She was granted safe passage, and she knew she was protected. The presence of the baby and children was a token of her faith. No one takes their infant grandchild into the jaws of death unless they’re absolutely sure the baby won’t come to harm.

  This kind of certainty was something completely foreign to me. Never in my life had I felt sure of anything. But my emerging awareness did not come without growing pains. To gain entry into this new life, I’d given up everything I knew. And being academic and overly rational, I still doubted what I heard. I was overawed, confused by the enormity of everything being shared with me. Deep down in my soul, I knew it was a profoundly fated transition. And day by day, as I shed my old life, my growing eco-consciousness had to develop, fast. I realized that by unconsciously following daily principles of consumerism and exploitation, I had been harming Mother Earth. And as I worked more closely with Maria, I came to learn that there was nothing unnatural about what she’d done under the darkened African skies, walking into the lions’ realm to come to our rescue. In fact, it was entirely natural, given the loving and respectful relationship between the Lion Queen and Nature’s kings and queens, the lions of Timbavati. With time, I came to the conclusion that this harmonious condition between humans and apex predators is the balance of power intended from the beginning of creation, before we humans mistakenly started believing we’re superior, dominant, and unaccountable for our actions, no matter how brutal and disrespectful these actions may be.

  Through Maria, I came to learn that Nature is magical and magic natural. And that we live in a meaningful universe, where everything happens for a reason. A universe in which Nature continually provides lessons of growth and awareness, and the only appropriate attitude to this great loving, nurturing, healing, creative force is one of absolute love and utter reverence.

  As Lion Queen of Timbavati, Maria taught me that the White Lions are the holiest animals on the African continent, and consequently, that to harm a White Lion is to harm the land, to kill a White Lion is to kill the soul of Africa.

  Maria and I spent the next few years together, and I learned the ways of lion shamanism from my lionhearted teacher. In uncovering layer upon layer of the mystery behind these rare, elusive creatures, I came to learn that the ancient Tsonga name of Timbavati means “the place where something angelic came down to Earth from the heavens.” Furthermore, tsimba means “lion,” and vati means “to come down,” so timbavati could be translated as “place where the angelic lions came down,” or “place where the starlions came down.” By the time I met up with Maria, the tragedy was that Africa’s most holy animals, the White Lions, had disappeared into the realms of myth and mystery. None now roamed the bushveld plains of Timbavati. In fact, unbeknownst to our terrified group stranded on that dark night in 1991, we had been in the presence of the last sacred White Lion cub, born that very night in the wilds of its ancestral homelands. But sadly, after investigating further, I learned this cub disappeared a couple of years later, and no White Lions had been sighted since.

  This haunted me. The White Lions, the most sacred animals on the African continent, no longer roamed the bushveld plains of Timbavati. Here I was, alive and present in their ancestral lands, recovering and reclaiming ancient secrets about them, coming to understand their critical importance, yet these magnificent beasts were no more.

  While working with Maria, I started receiving messages through my dreams and in moments of quiet meditation. Maria explained that these messages came directly from my ancestors, whom she sometimes referred to as the Lion People. She told me to record it all, because these messages might one day change the world.

  For the first time in my life, I felt that my Cambridge training in interpreting ancient symbolism could finally be put to good use. So I started committing the secrets I was uncovering to a book—a book I might one day share with the world.

  Nonetheless, coming from the prejudices of modern Western conditioning, I also found that reading Nature’s signs wasn’t always so simple. It was all so foreign—yet strangely familiar, as if I were retrieving this wisdom from long-forgotten ancestral experiences.

  After returning to Timbavati to find Maria, I gradually came to accept that occurrences around this leonine woman and the rare White Lions of Timbavati had deeper meaning than first appeared. I learned from her, an indigenous shaman, that everything in Nature carries significance; one simply has to know how to read the signs.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ingwavuma, My Spirit Lion

  OUR FIRST INTRODUCTION CAME THROUGH A DREAM—or rather the same recurring nightmare that had been terrifying me since childhood. A huge male lion with a golden mane was staring down at me while I was sleeping. Sometimes his massive visage was so close he was literally upon me, open-jawed, breathing into my own face—and roaring! Time and again, this lurid vision recurred, jerking me out of sleep—I found myself sitting upright, screaming with deep-rooted terror.

  The dream had become so persistent I could no longer ignore it. However, when I shared it with Maria, she smiled knowingly and explained that of course my lion was roaring at me—because I was screaming at him. Once I embraced him lovingly—as my Lion Guardian—only then could he and I work as one. She also informed me that my Lion Guardian would now make an appearance—in physical form. What’s more, she said mysteriously that I would recognize my special lion without any doubt in my heart.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Because he has wings,” she said.

  From what I’d learned of the elevated spiritual overtones of the White Lions, it didn’t surprise me that these legendary beasts may be associated with the angelic lion—symbolic bearers of spiritual enlightenment, such as the winged lion of Saint Mark. At Cambridge University, I’d studied heraldic gryphon-type emblems and taken them to be symbols merely—part lion, part eagle—but Maria suggested that this mythical creature would soon make an appearance in the flesh. Not only was this ancestral lion my spiritual guide and guardian, but he was also, in fact, a pride male ruling over the Timbavati region. Furthermore, she explained my lion had long since known of
my presence in Timbavati but was awaiting my recognition of him. She also informed me that he carried the secret code and would be progenitor of the future White Lions, bringing the royal lineage back to the wild after many years of extinction.

  Ignited by an excitement deep within my soul, I determined to venture out into the bushveld and look for him, as soon as possible. That night, after Maria’s prediction of an impending meeting between my Lion Guardian and me, I stayed awake all night. Through the long hours, I lay in the reed hut listening to the roars of the territory’s dominant male. Was this the Lion King who would, according to Maria, shortly declare himself to me? The next morning, I cautiously joined the Tsonga trackers who had picked up his paw prints, which led directly past my rondavel and into the bushveld. We followed the huge paw prints, but after a distance, his tracks suddenly disappeared. We picked up the pugmarks again, only for them to dematerialize a few paces later. Losing tracks is not unusual in the bushveld, but afterward, thinking back with a smile, I realized the experience was like following a lion who kept taking wing, then landing again a little further on, before taking off again!

  Hours later, we finally found my Lion Guardian in the middle of the bushveld wilderness on a gravel landing strip, where the occasional light aircraft might land, carrying a warden or veterinarian. He was a monumental male, truly magnificent, in his prime, standing proudly—with the aviation windsock fluttering orange and white behind him like a heraldic flag. My Lion had landed! Even upon my first sighting of this great lion, I felt an instant connection, a soul bond. His laser-sharp eye contact stirred a deep familiarity in my consciousness. He had a Maltese cross on his forehead, formed by a double band of dark fur from his mane. Maria referred to such beings as Lions of God, and said that they naturally carry sacred encodings in their physiological makeup, which I have since witnessed for myself. There could be no better symbol of the winged lion of Timbavati. I wanted to laugh out loud and couldn’t wait to return to Maria, with joy in my heart. In that instant, I remembered the ancient Tsonga meaning of the name Timbavati: “the place where angelic lions came down.” And that landing strip, it turned out, was one of the main locales for rare White Lions sightings in previous decades when these luminous winged lions were spotted in Timbavati.