Elephant Dawn

  It is clear that Mugabe will never relinquish power. He is determined to be president for life.

  Bowing to regional and international pressure, a power-sharing agreement is signed: a ‘Unity Government’ is to be formed with Opposition Leader Morgan Tsvangirai as prime minister, and Robert Mugabe as president. It will take months of negotiations to work out the finer details and for new ministers to be sworn in.

  President Mugabe’s supporters are not happy. I smell more trouble ahead.

  And now I’ve become a ‘Wanted Person’ in Zimbabwe!

  ‘Oh forgodsake! What now?’ is all I can say.

  I feel rather like Ned Kelly, and have visions of my mugshot appearing on lampposts with a reward for my capture. Am I wanted dead or alive?

  In reality, I am fourth from the bottom on a list of names that is on display in a glass-fronted cabinet outside the public entrance to the Dete police station. The others are wanted for poaching, breaking and entering, theft, assault, fraud and rape.

  The trumped-up charge against my name reads ‘Disorderly conduct’. It’s true I’d used a disparaging word in a private email, but how that could have been turned into ‘disorderly conduct’ is unfathomable.

  Out of pure frustration, I had in fact called a woman working for the largest hotel in the area a bitch, in an email to her manager, after years of her spiteful, unreasonable and aggressive behaviour towards me, and her ongoing attempts to frustrate my elephant work. Just recently I’d successfully initiated a trap that caught one of their employees red-handed with a poached impala, which only worsened my relationship with her.

  With friends in high places, she managed to get hold of my email and then file a formal charge against me for using that word. But how on earth did that extend to me being on the wanted list and why haven’t I been arrested? I am white-skinned, fair-haired, wear rimless glasses over blue–green eyes and I’m the only female matching this description for at least 200 kilometres. I live a mere twenty kilometres from the police station in a sparsely populated district. I drive an easily recognisable 4x4 and spend my days with the elephants, but am home most evenings by nightfall. And the police can’t find me, or leave a message for me?

  Now, six months later, I hear that word on the street is that I’ll ‘be locked up’ if I don’t ‘turn myself in’. One day in a Zimbabwean jail is certainly one day too long, so I finally drive into Dete. My situation is apparently amusing to the officer in charge (a mate of the ex-governor’s family, I’m told), but I don’t share his sense of humour. He demands that I either pay a fine or go to court. After nearly an hour of fruitless talk, I decide that they can go ahead and subpoena me.

  I hear nothing more but I’m told by friends who pass by the police station that my name remains on the wanted persons list.

  While the violence is now under better control, other conditions worsen in the country. A deadly cholera epidemic hits the capital Harare, and thousands die. Typhoid is also about. The risk of malaria is ever present. Shaynie tells me about a plump, wriggling putzi fly larvae that her mother once squeezed from her wrist. She reminds me to iron my clothes to rid them of this fly’s eggs, otherwise they’ll hatch beneath my skin into squirming flesh-eating maggots.

  What sort of country have I chosen to remain in?

  MASAKHE

  2008

  Thank goodness for my elephant friends! By October, tiny babies are once again appearing in all of the families, and how wonderful it is when they’re brought right to the door of my 4x4 by their mothers when they’re just days old, the whites of their eyes still bright red, their ears still flat against their head. It’s an enormous privilege that I’m trusted to this extent. I delight in recording all of these new births, and watching the family’s loving and protective response to the new additions. It’s the babies of those I know best who thrill me to the core.

  ‘Hello, little guy,’ I say, beaming at Misty’s new baby boy. ‘Welcome to this world.’ I decide to give Shaynie the honour of naming him. He is a very special little elephant and Shaynie has already enjoyed some very memorable encounters with his mother. I know that she’ll do him justice by coming up with a great name.

  By now Zimbabwe is close to hitting rock bottom. It sometimes seems like there’s no future for this country. I find myself in a Bulawayo gift shop, its shelves all but bare, as they are everywhere. What’s available is overpriced. A young mother, no doubt a tourist, with a spluttering baby on her hip, turns to a fellow shopper and asks if she happens to have a tissue.

  ‘A tissue? Do you know how much a tissue costs in this country?’ the old lady fumes as she shakes her head and walks away.

  I dig into my handbag and hand over a wad of scratchy green (practically unflushable) toilet paper, which is all that I’m carrying.

  What a sorry state Zimbabwe is in. Nobody even has a tissue to spare.

  We’re now a nation of hunters and gatherers. If we find something and can afford to, we buy more than we really want, to trade with someone else who has a cupboard full of something that we can’t find. Word spreads like wildfire that sugar or flour or salt is available somewhere and crowds gather like vultures to pick the shelves clean before nightfall. Even a simple loaf of bread is now a prized commodity.

  Despite the hardships, most people do share the little bit they have. No one resents stirring two teaspoons of sugar into the coffee of a visitor, despite not knowing when or if it can be replaced.

  Shaynie eventually chooses the isiNdebele name Masakhe for Misty’s baby. It means ‘to build’ or ‘to rebuild that which has been broken’. She knows that for me, for the Presidential Elephants, and for the country, it is a fitting name. So many things have been broken for all of us, and it’s time to try to rebuild. A few days later, when I bump into the M family again, I lean out of the window of my 4x4 and, gently placing my hand on the head of Misty’s baby, christen him Masakhe.

  I’m absolutely thrilled too that there is another baby for Lady, just as gorgeous and special as Masakhe. This little one is named by a couple in Perth, who kindly assist me with replacement field equipment. They choose to call her Lantana. I just hope this doesn’t mean she’s going to grow up to be a noxious pest! I adore her little pink tongue as it closes in on Lady’s breast as she suckles only centimetres away from me.

  When Zimbabwe proceeds with an internationally approved one-off sale of ivory just one month later, the only thing that seems to be rebuilding is the disturbing ivory trade. CITES (pronounced sigh-tees)—the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which is the body that regulates world trade in animal products—has controversially granted Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe approval to sell a combined total of 102 tonnes of their stockpiled ivory to Chinese and Japanese ‘accredited traders’. This represents over 10,000 dead elephants.

  While Zimbabwe argues that it needs the money for elephant conservation programs (which, I imagine, we’re unlikely to ever hear anything about), I simply cannot equate trade in ivory with the conservation of elephants. More importantly, I’ve lived among Zimbabwe’s wildlife for too long to believe that corruption and greed can be controlled sufficiently for this sort of legal trade to work. I don’t believe there is the capacity—or the will—to properly regulate the market. This sale ensures that the illegal black market is kept alive by making it so much easier to exploit the loopholes. An insatiable appetite for ivory, particularly in Asia, drives elephant poaching. I just don’t understand anyone’s desire to fuel that appetite further with ‘legal’ ivory. Although many people in Southern Africa support the legal trade, I agree with my East African colleagues that this sale will help only to worsen the continent’s poaching problems. One way or another, every person who covets ivory carvings and trinkets has the blood of an elephant on their hands.

  I don’t believe either, as Minister Francis Nhema would have us believe, that most of the tusks in Zimbabwe’s stockpile—from which they will sell to Asian countries legally—
have come from natural deaths. How many elephants outlive all of the ration-hunting by Parks staff, and the poaching, and the sport-hunting, to die naturally of old age in their sixties? In eight years I have not seen the carcass of even a single elephant that has died of old age.

  All this talk of a ‘legal’ ivory trade seems to also make it easier to forget how hideous the illegal ivory trade is—trafficking that has been linked to terrorist organisations and organised crime. Elephants die horrific deaths at the hands of desperate and oftentimes just plain greedy and uncaring humans. Conscious that their gunfire might be heard, and preferring to save the cost of another bullet if they can, these killers will axe the backbone of a fallen elephant before it is even dead to ensure that it can’t get to its feet and kill them. Then they axe off the face to get to the ivory, unconcerned about whether the elephant is still alive. And that’s all they take. Only the ivory. To see a fresh carcass with an axed backbone and hacked-off face once is to see it one too many times. It’s abundantly clear to me, especially while so much corruption abounds, that all trade in ivory must end: the illegal and the so-called legal.

  Yet it’s a sad fact that the sight of a dead elephant is not shocking to many people here. It is, actually, exciting. A dead elephant is nyama (meat). Except that by the time the carcass of an elephant killed for its ivory is typically discovered, the meat is putrid and can’t be eaten.

  As Christmas approaches there is more sad news. Gavin, who so readily agreed to take in the snared calf Future, has been fatally tusked by one of his trained elephants in Victoria Falls. He was not much older than me. I can’t help but wonder if distant gunfire, still much too prevalent across the country these days, may have rattled his herd. There are certainly people here who give the captive elephant industry a particularly bad name, but Gavin wasn’t one of them.

  Small, pleasant diversions, away from the Hwange bush, are increasingly important to me. For a few days at least, I can forget. Dinks, who has been living in South Africa for more than four years, is returning to Zimbabwe for Christmas. Shaynie and I are excited, and decide that we’ll all spend some time together in Dinks’ favourite place on earth, the Matobo Hills.

  We also decide, with a wine in hand, that we need to do something about those ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’. There are no partridges or pear trees here, so ‘an el-e-ph-ant in a mud bath’ it has to be. We end up with twelve shots of Amarula, eleven spiders biting, ten warthogs wallowing, nine kudus leaping, eight shrews a-chewing, seven buffaloes bellowing, six savannah sunsets, five charging rhinos, four lions snoring, three friends a-singing, two crimson shrikes—and that el-e-ph-ant in a mud bath!

  We collect Dinks from the dingy bus stop in town and retreat to Shaynie’s flat. With mattresses, pillows, wine and snacks quickly spread out across the lounge room floor, we watch Mamma Mia! and laugh and dance and sing along like teenagers.

  We talk evocatively about our own lives and how different it all might have been. But there can be no regrets. Because no matter how we got here, we are three very different women who somehow became special friends, still sharing extraordinary times that we’ll cherish forever.

  There’s not much frenzy to our preparations in the prelude to Christmas, mostly because there’s so little available to buy, although Shaynie does splurge on a (very scarce) turkey and we eventually find one small pot of cranberry sauce. We decide that it’ll be fun to dress formally and eat our Christmas Eve dinner on a white tablecloth, with champagne and candles, under the stars in the Matobo. Of course it rains. So we set up inside our rustic accommodation instead, looking out over the splendidly sculptured granite boulders and wooded valleys of this timeless place, breathing in the grandeur and the mystique of the Maleme Gorge, pretending to be classier than we really are. It’s the first and only time I’ve seen Shaynie in a dress, and it’s a long one at that. She’s even clomping around in high heels, which, come to think of it, probably brought on the ill-timed rain.

  ‘We’re heading up that gomo,’ Shaynie and Dinks announce on Christmas Day, their sights set on some horribly high rocky outcrop.

  I followed them only once, years ago. That walk was long and agonising. I could barely breathe. Wheezing uncontrollably, I collapsed at the top, swearing never to do it again.

  ‘You should have seen that view,’ they croon after climbing down.

  ‘I like the view perfectly well from the bottom, thanks,’ I say.

  After days of fun and laughter, there are tears and hugs as we put Dinks back on the bus, into the ever-growing diaspora.

  BILLIONS AND TRILLIONS

  2009

  Emails from Australia bring news of intense bushfires that have incinerated entire communities in rural Victoria; Australia’s worst natural disaster in over one hundred years. February 7, Mandy tells me from Melbourne, will long be remembered as Black Saturday. These firestorms killed 173 people and destroyed more than 2000 homes. Hundreds of thousands of domestic and wild animals perished. With no television or internet access, I’m pleased not to have images of it all.

  Weeks pass and then I’m emailed a photograph of a gallant firefighter, caked with grime and sweat, offering a drink from his plastic water bottle to a thirsty and injured koala. Burnt koala paw on human hand, pink tongue poking into the lip of the bottle, it’s an image that has touched the hearts of millions around the world. It has become an image of hope.

  In a similar way, it is Lady who has become my symbol of hope for the Presidential Elephants. It’s when I encounter her with baby Lantana and the rest of her family, wandering among animals like zebra, giraffe and antelope, peaceful and so very grand, that I feel ‘Hope’ returning to the passenger seat beside me.

  Yet in this mad land of Mugabe, a loaf of bread now costs 300 billion Zim dollars. That’s six of the 50-billion-dollar notes that are now in circulation—but even these won’t be of much use for long. It was only a few short weeks ago that our highest denomination note was 500 million dollars.

  ‘How is that even possible?’ Mandy asks me from Melbourne.

  ‘I’m living it,’ I exclaim, ‘and even I don’t know the answer to that!’

  Zimbabwe’s inflation rate will soon pass an absurd 230 million per cent. The government simply keeps printing more and more money to pay its debts. Some of the currency even has use-by dates printed on it, as if it’s already known it won’t be good for long.

  The Reserve Bank has announced that 100-trillion-dollar notes are to be released. 100 trillion dollars in a single note! That’s a number with 14 zeros in it: $100,000,000,000,000. You go cross-eyed just looking at it. Calculators are useless; the numbers simply don’t fit on the screen, even though the government has already slashed even more zeros from the currency, to try to make it more manageable.

  When Andy was still alive and I travelled frequently to Zimbabwe as a tourist, I divided prices by ten to give me an idea of the cost in Australian dollars. Now we have Monopoly money. Million-dollar notes blow around the streets, nobody bothering to pick them up. Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck. I bend to pick up a $750,000 note only because it’s adorned with sketches of elephants. Beggars hold up crude cardboard placards declaring they are starving billionaires. There are signs in public toilets in neighbouring South Africa and Botswana urging people to use only toilet paper and not cardboard, cloth, newspaper—or Zimbabwe dollars! As much as some people would like to, no one dares display such signs here.

  Farm invasions continue. Thousands of productive white farmers have now lost their farms, with no monetary compensation—the best of the land grabbed by the Ruling Party elite and their families. Hundreds of thousands more people, some say in excess of a million, have been displaced as growing numbers of farm-workers lose their jobs. The commercial farming industry has all but been destroyed. Zimbabwe used to be one of the biggest exporters of beef to Europe and a top exporter of tobacco to the world. It used to help feed the Southern African region. Once known as the ‘b
readbasket of Africa’, it has been reduced to a basket case, a begging bowl. Now, it has to import food to feed its own people.

  Unemployment sits somewhere above 80 per cent, with a similar proportion of the population said to now be living in abject poverty. Electricity and water supply is either non-existent, or intermittent at best. There are alarming levels of poaching across the country, and rapidly increasing deforestation too, as new farmers cure tobacco with indigenous timber.

  President Mugabe blames Western sanctions for it all, which he loves to refer to as illegal. How they could possibly be considered ‘illegal’ is baffling. Furthermore, sanctions and travel restrictions have only been on targeted individuals and companies; there have been no trade embargoes. Somebody has to be blamed for this mess, however, and the regime is never going to blame itself.

  Eight long years now we’ve kept saying how beautiful Zimbabwe is, and how it will all come right. We carry eternal optimism around in our wallets, along with our trillion-dollar notes. It’s starting to feel like we’re all lunatics living in an asylum.

  Zimbabwe’s new 100-trillion-dollar note ends up being worth around 40 US cents. And then the Zimbabwe dollar is officially abandoned altogether. The US dollar becomes Zimbabwe’s most widely used currency, along with the South African rand and the Botswanan pula. So, now, here I am in a country that loathes the West, using US dollars as its official currency.

  The Unity Government has finally been formed and Morgan Tsvangirai is prime minister, sharing power alongside President Robert Mugabe. A new Cabinet has been sworn in. There’s hope around the country, and indeed around the world, that some sanity might now prevail. I get indigestion just thinking about it. Where in Africa these days, no matter who’s in power, is it not corrupt?