by Linda Tucker
“Marah was born in Bethlehem on Christmas Day. She was taken away from us and sent to the United States, England, China, Russia, etc. She was imprisoned and the sun didn’t shine! But in 2004, an angel came to her rescue.”
And all the kids break into song! Alala! Marah, Alala!
Marah, Marah, you are the Queen of Lions.
Like Nelson Mandela, you spent your whole life in prison,
because people are scared of your greatness!
Now you’re gonna be free, Marah!
Alala! Marah, Alala!
We are witnessing a cultural renaissance out of the humblest circumstances! When the story of the lions was introduced to children, it rekindled in these little ones a connection with Nature and heritage and knowledge, bringing out leadership qualities and self-worth. They visibly lit up—little lionhearts performing with all their hearts and souls … simply adorable!
I smile as I spot Mireille, perched on her seat beside Daphne, glowing with excitement. I can’t help thinking of that once-orphaned child, returned as an elder to give something back to the orphans of Africa.
Mireille is radiating delight—clapping her hands in time to the rhythm, shifting her weight from side to side in her plastic seat. This work is deeply inspirational and so wonderfully heartening. For Mireille and me, it is such an invigorating contrast to the embattled conservation arena. I simply can’t imagine my life and this project without my beloved godmother—her wisdom and constant encouragement keep me focused on the positive aspects of this challenging work and keep me driven to continue the legacy created by Maria Khosa.
Another child steps forward, shiny faced and bright eyed. He’s hanging on to a miniature Land Rover he’s constructed out of recycled wire. It is complete with turning wheels and opening doors—a superb piece of craftsmanship—to which he’s attached a long shaft and steering wheel, enabling him to drive it around in the dust. In our program, we’ve actively encouraged the use of recycled materials in the kids’ presentations, to promote a sense of inventiveness as well as environmental awareness. The results are innovative and delightful.
After more jostling, additional performers appear, dressed in different animal guises: the crocodile’s scaly costume, made of recycled metal bottle tops; the tiny elephant’s flapping ears, made of cardboard; zebra costumes, made from recycled wire frames and strips of discarded rubber tire. A group of kids hop around in hessian sacks, representing a pride of tawny lions. A performance begins with a whole tapestry of different arts—dance, drumming, poetry, singing, acting—all woven together to tell a delightful tale, with different characters playing different roles. I haven’t seen this story before, but shortly after it begins, I notice there is a medicine woman figure, dressed up just as Maria Khosa once dressed, in colorful fabrics with lion motifs. Suddenly I realize that, in fact, this little actress is depicting Maria Khosa, who has become a legendary figure in these parts.
The child with the wire Land Rover comes to center stage, driving his miniature wire vehicle through the dust with great dexterity. But now his vehicle is surrounded by the gang of kids in lion costumes, all growling and snarling. A simulation of my own story! I’m dumbstruck. It’s a retelling of that night in 1991, when a group of terrified companions and I were trapped in the middle of a pride of agitated lions, with no way out—until Maria Khosa, Lion Queen of Timbavati, came to our rescue. This story has become famous in this community; the children from Funjwa School are reinventing it in their own unique way!
So heartwarming! The little Maria Khosa figure walks through the gang of lions, parting the predators like the Red Sea and shaking their hands as she walks, muttering in Tsonga: “You are my mother, my father, my family. My lion brothers and sisters, you will never harm me.…”
The little actress has a doll strapped, like a baby, to her back—just as Maria had on that bizarre night more than a decade ago. Suddenly, there’s a little Linda figure! She walks like me, she talks like me, she’s bossy like me, she’s odd like me. Only she is seven years old, dark skinned, and all of three-foot-three tall. I catch Mireille’s eye—she’s laughing delightedly, and I can’t stop a fit of stomachaching giggles! It’s so delightful to see myself translated into history in this quirky way.
After the play ends, the teachers and performers and audience all look exuberant with the results of their shared efforts. It’s prize-giving time, and my doughty godmother is on her feet again, handing out the white lion teddies. “Still on my pins, and going strong!” she declares. “Lovin’ every bit of it! This is my moment, wouldn’t change it for anything!”
Concerned about her stamina after a day in the heat and dust, I offer to take over from her, but she’s in full swing.
Giggling heartily, she announces, “If my stern old parents could only see me now!”
As the prize-giving draws to a close and Mireille bends down to pin a White Lion badge to a tiny child, a document slips from her shoulder bag. I reach into the dust to retrieve it, but before I can hand it over to her, everyone is on their feet simultaneously, stamping up clouds of dust and dancing delightedly to the pounding of drums. The celebratory singing reaches a crescendo of excitement, and Daphne puts a whistle to her mouth—Phewwwww! Phewwwww! Pheww—Phewwwww! Not to silence the throngs, but to up the noise levels, in time to the African rhythms. A livewire of a headmistress. What a treasured moment! I am totally overwhelmed by the vibrant, joyous sharing of this communal moment! For me, this moment will last an eternity.
In among the throngs, Mireille turns to me, flushed with excitement, rhythmically shifting her weight from side to side with an exaggerated waggle.
“Nowhere but Africa can this joyous rhythm be found!” she shouts. “Goddaughter, thanks to you and the White Lions, I’m back!”
Again, I reach out to her to give her the document I retrieved, but she’s whisked off again by the ocean of excitable children in the heat and dust and dancing—and, suddenly, there are a multitude of little bobbling heads between my godmother and me.
Looking down at the document, I register some of the contents. It is a diagnosis from Mireille’s British doctor … and, to my absolute incomprehension and rising horror, I read the words “… with sincere regret that we inform you that the clinical tests have confirmed advanced Grade 3 malignancy of the duodenum …”
Immobilized, I am in complete shock. All around me, the cultural event is in full swing, but I am frozen stiff, unable to move in the midst of the jostling fray.
I look at these all excited little faces—this heightened moment could be the turning point of their lives!
The drums pulse. Everyone’s singing. I am anchored in place as the ocean of school kids circle all around me, stamping and clapping and beating up the dust to the rhythm of the pounding drums. Mireille can’t be kept down. In the distance, I see her swaying back and forth in the midst of the gyrating children, side by side with her dear friend Daphne, two matriarchs dancing with primal rhythm, joined by teachers and community members, engulfed by dancing kids.
Dancing like there’s no tomorrow.
JANUARY 2006. Bereft, I’m with Daphne, Axon, Nelias, Nelson, Jason, and our team, preparing to walk the slow route to the baobab tree, the sacred site so beloved by Mireille, and where she always said she wanted her ashes to be spread one day. With us is Mireille’s beautiful daughter-in-law, Liz, and her beloved son, Ray, whom I’ve met only once before in my life. He carries his mother’s ashes.
Ray and I are almost exactly the same age. We met just under a year ago on Christmas, when I traveled to Leeds to celebrate the successful acquisition of the sacred lands with Mireille. We spent a little more than an hour together, in which time he gave his blessing to his mother’s support of my unusual project. It was all too brief, yet it instantly felt like we were siblings. And I was so grateful to have this extraordinary man as a newfound brother: highly sensitive, loving, generous, spirited—like his mother, yet different—who recognized me as the sister he’d alwa
ys wanted and never had, a man who accepted my work unconditionally. Now our mother is dead. Both Ray and I are left bewildered and devastated, like two orphaned lion cubs, looking up to the stars and questioning the meaning of existence.
Mireille departed on December 12.
Over the last few weeks, I sat by her bedside, holding her hand, and she was clearer and more resolute than ever. She made lists of any and all unfinished matters that needed attention. But she refused any treatment, traditional or alternative.
“I’ve done what I came to do,” she told me, radiant and silver-haired, propped up on a comfortable chair with big cushions, preparing for her final adventure.
“Don’t cry for me, darling daughter,” she said, observing my irrepressible sadness. “I need you to help me to be brave.”
She ensured she was surrounded by photographs of Marah, Letaba, Regeus, and Zihra, and then in the last days, when she went to the hospital, she insisted that the photographs of her radiant brood go with her, her lion family she’d helped rescue from the hunter’s bullet.
Her dying words to me were: “We’ll never be parted. Now go, open those gates. I’ll be with you!”
As Ray and I walk slowly together down the river sand toward the baobab, heads bowed, Daphne and the others start a chant of aching lament in the African tradition. And my heart weeps rivers.
The year before, Ray and I had been celebrating Christmas with Mireille; now we are laying the Grandmother of White Lions to rest.
Her ashes are being laid beneath the great matriarchal tree, to be guarded over forever by the royal lions of these lands, her pride and joy.
CHAPTER 32
First Steps in Wonderland
FEBRUARY 13, 2006. 7:00 A.M. Mireille left us just over two months earlier, and I’ve been mourning her death ever since, a dense black period of grief and loss and ineffable sadness. Jason tried to comfort me many times with words of encouragement, but what is there to say? Only that Mireille would have wanted the White Lion plan to go on.
This morning, sitting under the baobab tree at dawn, I start to register the landscape around me for the first time. The last of the festive season in the bushveld is fading. Christmas came and went, and I barely noticed. Unlike the northern hemisphere of white Christmases, here in Timbavati, December through February is the height of summer.
I look around me. Defying the drought, the trees seem to be making every effort to decorate themselves in their Sunday best, dangling with long-forgotten Christmas decorations, faded flowers and blooms on desperately dry branches. I see that the sickle bush, so named because of its cruel sickle thorns, has transformed magically into bright yellow and pink pompoms, and the cluster-leaf terminalia tree is spangled with four-sided star ornaments, once a brilliant burgundy, now bleached in the summer sun. Normally this time of year in Timbavati is an enchanted time, a festive, sunny season, but over the past two months the bleakness in my heart wiped out the days, one after the other, and I simply couldn’t see what there was to celebrate.
The fact that Christmas was Marah’s sacred birthday made the occasion all the more painful for me. I should have given orders for her release on December 25th—it was her birthright, no less—but I didn’t feel brave or strong enough to face the consequences: the total onslaught from neighbors; the legal battles to prevent seizure and confiscation of the lions; the media hype; even the best wishes of our increasing circle of supporters. I simply wasn’t ready.
These past few weeks after Mireille’s passing, I could barely function, weighed down by a leaden heaviness, mourning the totally unexpected, cruel loss of my newfound godmother, while lamenting Marah’s continued incarceration—neither of which tragedies were within my power to put right.
Yet all the while, all around me, operations of the White Lion project continued. Jason never let up. I was vaguely aware of the teams laying bales of lucerne and pellets of Boskos for the starving animals, a concentrated mix of indigenous leaves and grasses, all over the lands, particularly at water points. Timbavati had summer rainfall, but this year the rains simply didn’t fall. And with the searing heat, we suffered even greater animal casualties. All around me, I’ve seen death and destruction. A wasteland waiting for rains that won’t come.
As for all the practicalities in our project, I was incapable of assisting. Instead, I spent night after night alone at the baobab tree, where Mireille’s ashes were scattered, sleeping out under the stars, tuning in to the land and the lions, my destiny and theirs. Knowing that one day, after grieving my loss long enough, I would be able to proceed with what Mireille wanted most: freedom.
Mireille had a very dear friend, Dorothy Shields, who, appropriately, had had a star named after Mireille—a star positioned at the foot of the Southern Cross. Looking up at her star on my many endless nights alone, I had cause to remember the belief of the indigenous people that the White Lions are starbeings, and that Timbavati itself means “the place where starlions came down.” This time-honored founding belief—from Ancient Egypt in the north of Africa to the Bushman and Tsonga people in the south, those people so beloved of Mireille—that truly great people, whether kings, queens, or high priestesses, became lions in death and returned to the stars, took on even greater meaning for me now.
Many nights I lay awake all night under the stars, watching the Mireille star shine bright beneath the Southern Cross and feeling the presence of Queen Maria too. Somehow, it seemed these two great matriarchs were working together from the ancestral realms. I felt Maria’s unfailing courage and Mireille’s unconditional generosity of spirit even stronger than before. Their means of effecting positive change on Earth seemed even more powerful from those realms than their achievements in physical form.
Dreams are the means by which my shaman teacher often sent messages to me from the ancestral world, but over the past year of operating this project on the ground, I’ve been so fraught with decision-making and practical measures that I tend to drop into an exhausted coma at night without allowing these messages to come through.
Sleeping out beneath the wise branches of this ancient tree of life, under the cosmic skies, lying directly on Mother Earth’s warm, nurturing body, with only a mat beneath me and a blanket for cover, changed everything. The meaningless irregularities of human law have come into alignment with a divine plan. When Mireille died so suddenly, I began doubting the success of my project and fearing failure. But last night, in meditation, an imperative from ancestral wisdom came flowing into my consciousness with the clarity of a mountain stream, direct from its source: Delay no longer. Human wrangling and human agendas cannot hamper the future of Nature’s most sacred animal. Gather your strength. Enough grief. Time for action.
Finally, the time for action has come. In the tranquility of early morning, a duo of woodland kingfishers herald the onset of day. After another of my all-night vigils at the baobab, Jason has arrived to collect me. He spent last night monitoring the lions on his own.
Although I didn’t sleep at all, at last I feel whole again and deeply at peace with the universe.
Nothing and no one will stop me now. The electric fences are up and running; the barricade is complete; the pipeline is laid; the collars are fixed; the telemetry is operational. All preparations are in place, and I’m prepared too. It’s time.
“You ready, Jase?”
“Absolutely. You?”
“Finally. Yes. I’m ready.”
We arrive at Base Camp, and I walk into the kitchen, feeling like I’m treading on air. The dogs are bounding around me. I’m so excited! It’s utterly liberating knowing we are about take action at long last!
Jason is clear and focused, radioing the team to gather in fifteen minutes for a meeting.
As Jason walks into the office, Xhosa, Thomas, and two foreign volunteers who joined us recently look up expectantly from their breakfast, as if they can smell change in the air.
“Thomas—arrange for the collection of a wildebeest carcass,” Jason instruct
s. “Xhosa—double-check those boma keys.”
“Wait for it!” Xhosa declares, staring directly at me. I smile and give him the nod.
“Put on your crash helmets, everybody!” I announce. “As Godmum would say: tomorrow we’re gonna burn rubber!”
“Yes! I knew it!” Xhosa is bouncing up and down in his chair, still holding his porridge spoon in one hand.
“Correct. We release the lions at dawn,” Jason announces. “We’ve talked through procedure many times. Now it’s for real. No margin for error.”
“Phew. About time!” I hear Thomas’s laconic remark as I stroll out of the kitchen; then he calls after me, “But still no permit—sure it’s not a rash step?”
I keep walking. I’m in the office, closing my files, one after the other, and moving them from the desk to the bookshelf. The permit application file, the letters to authorities, the legal letters file. The canned-hunting file is also open on the desk. I shut that too. Since the canned-hunting “storm-out” of the government forum meeting four months ago, the situation has drastically worsened. The minister’s pronouncements were bold at the time but have fizzled since. The facts speak for themselves. Sanctuaries and reintroduction programs are still being denied permits, while permission is freely granted to hold lions in cages, circuses, and captive-breeding camps for commercial-hunting purposes. Big money brags loudest. No sooner did the minister make his bold declaration than he retracted his draft policy and backpedaled fast—with the canned-hunting consortiums after him, baying for blood. As a former hunter himself, he is viewed as a traitor, and they want to bring him down. So he is running scared, and in his wake all national and provincial legislation has been stalled and shelved. Meanwhile, it is big business as usual for the canned-hunting industry—only bigger and even worse.
Appallingly, the status quo is the same. But everything in our world is about to change. Marah and her family will finally be free!