Elephant Dawn

  ‘Santa’s even more unlikely to visit you now,’ Henry jokes as he drives off. ‘He used to be scared that somebody would shoot his reindeers. Now he’s terrified that somebody will poison or capture them!’

  The air is thick with mosquitoes. I’m having to contend with leaking water pipes, both inside and outside my cottage. My geyser and water-reserve drum have also sprung new leaks. What’s more, everything from my refrigerator to my hot water taps is giving me electric shocks. ‘Always wear rubber slops (thongs)’ is the only solution I’ve been offered thus far. It’ll take weeks to get this all properly sorted. But once it is, I know I’ll be set for at least a couple of years, without having to outlay more time and money.

  Later, when I drive into Dete to get a flat tyre repaired, I bump into a black Zimbabwean named Jerry who used to work for the Parks Authority. We don’t see each other very often these days. Years ago, I took him out with me to meet the Presidential Elephants and we had an extraordinary encounter with Whole, which he has never forgotten. Initially, he’d been terrified of this enormous elephant right beside him, but soon he was so moved that he asked if he could bring his family to meet her one day.

  When I tell him about the latest land grabs, he hugs me tightly and says, ‘If they take that land, then it’s all over.’ All I can do is blink back the tears that spring from nowhere and threaten to spill down my cheeks.

  A FOOL’S ERRAND

  2014

  The new year doesn’t begin well. The land claimants are digging in despite the Cabinet directive: erecting signs, diverting water, and becoming more abusive to me and lodge game-drive vehicles full of tourists who report their ‘ranting and raving’. One afternoon at Kanondo, where I’d been observing a snared elephant, a hand suddenly comes through my window and my locked door is flung open. My arm is grabbed by a male who flings his other arm across my body in an attempt to snatch the keys from the ignition. Then he has a shot at grabbing my mobile phone from my hand. I manage to dial and speak to Minister Kasukuwere, which unsettles this man and his land-grabbing companion enough for them to back off and leave. Despite having been ordered off the land, I remain in the area until nightfall.

  That evening the local CIO agent phones me to advise that the land claimant has demanded I be arrested for trespassing on her private land. After I report this, Minister Kasukuwere emails me with just one word: ‘Calm’. When I speak to him again, he assures me that everything is under control. ‘With all due respect, minister,’ I tell him, ‘I think you need to come into the field and see for yourself that this is absolutely not under control.’

  When I speak to Minister Mutasa, he assures me that the Cabinet directive still stands and I shouldn’t be impatient. I certainly know that things take time in Zimbabwe. However, I also know that the more entrenched the claimants become, the more difficult it will be to remove them.

  For safety’s sake, I’m advised to collect a National Parks scout from Main Camp every day, to accompany me in the field. This is not realistic however. Not only do Parks not have the spare resources, but collecting and dropping off a scout each day would add several hundred dollars a month to my fuel bill. And there is no donor covering my costs.

  I decide to travel to Harare to speak with Minister Kasukuwere in person. I know that he already has one of my books, and I bring to our meeting a copy of my latest one, along with a DVD of the documentary. When he asks me to sign the book, above my signature I write that I can’t keep doing this without his help.

  But I am on a fool’s errand.

  When I attempt to discuss the land claims, Minister Kasukuwere dismisses the topic immediately, waving it away with his hand. ‘That must be fixed by now,’ he says brusquely, and requests that our conversation move on. I persist for as long as I can, but get nowhere. I move on to my visa problems and ask about the permanent residency that he’d assured me he would secure. He says it is done, that I just need to get to Immigration with my passport. The reality, sure enough, turns out to be vastly different.

  ‘I can never be certain what’s going on with anything anymore,’ I lament to Carol over a glass of white wine in her garden. ‘Not that I’ve ever been sure of anything. But now I’m sure that I just can’t keep going through all of this, time and time again.’

  ‘I don’t know how you’ve put up with it all for so long,’ Carol sighs. She’s been a friend and supporter since soon after I arrived in 2001 and can see that I’m well and truly at my wits’ end. I’m not the only one: there are signs tacked to tree trunks around the streets of Harare that scream, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. I am paying attention to what’s happening in this country, and I am certainly outraged.

  There is some happy news, though, that we delight in: Wilma has had a new baby, as gorgeous as can be, and Worry, whom Carol named as a day-old calf way back in 2002, is pregnant for the very first time. Despite it all, another generation has begun.

  When Carol drives me to the bus stop in the city centre, both of us wonder if this might be the last time that I am here in the capital.

  I overnight in Bulawayo, and decide on the spur of the moment to stock up on food supplies. I need to feel grounded and normal again, I need to feel like I’m going to stay put. I’ve been delaying restocking my fridge and pantry, always so unsure of what’s happening from one day to the next.

  ‘Come with me,’ I urge Barbara. ‘I’m going to do a big shop.’

  ‘If I was you, I wouldn’t even be buying green bananas,’ she says.

  ‘Imagine having this great big fridge and being too scared to fill it. Come on, I’m going to do it,’ I laugh.

  Back in Hwange, it isn’t long before it becomes increasingly clear that something is seriously amiss. It’s been two months since the Cabinet directive, and things on the ground have only gotten worse, despite Minister Kasukuwere even now assuring a South African journalist that all offer letters have been withdrawn.

  The police are threatening to throw me in jail, for trespassing on grabbed land. I can’t help wondering if this actually has more to do with the poaching case I’m pursuing, after two very well-connected men from Dete were caught with elephant tusks last year. Month after month after month their court date is postponed and they’re allowed to walk free. The system is so corrupt and broken, even ivory poachers manage to keep going about their lives, knowing it could well be years before any real action is taken against them. If this happens at all.

  What’s more, the land claimants are now publicly declaring that I’ve made myself rich out of these elephants! Somehow, of course, they have to try to discredit me. I look around at how frugally I’ve been forced to live for all of these years.

  My oldest sister, Genevieve, makes contact to tell me that our Uncle Cecil—my mother’s brother—has died. I look skywards and an image of the big black-maned lion also pops into my mind. Since first meeting Cecil the lion, I can’t seem to think of one without the other. As a Lutheran pastor Uncle Cecil had seen a lot over the years, including when he was based in a developing country. Every time we’d seen one another over the last ten years he told me he thought it was time I left Zimbabwe. I wasn’t aware that family had been called to his bedside, but his words had been ringing in my ears.

  Genevieve had been planning to visit me this year, but I tell her now this is not wise, and that maybe Uncle Cecil is right. Maybe it really is time. My dad, now in his eighties, thinks it’s past time. My parents have grown old while I’ve been in Africa; my dad’s body has been in severe decline since the Grantham floods. He’s basically immobile now, being cared for in the family home by my mum, with help from my sisters when they’re able. A high-care nursing home will eventually become necessary. He’s mentally alert though, and frequently insists that I’m ‘verruckt in the kopf’ (‘crazy in the head’, as his German-born grandfather taught his father to say) for staying in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

  I try for more assistance from Minister Mutasa, my faith now wave
ring in Minister Kasukuwere. He has fallen ill however, and has been out of the country. Some of the Parks Authority management are still doing what they can to ensure the Cabinet directive is enforced, but there are others clearly trying to frustrate the process, and nothing changes on the ground. A couple of government officials, I’m told, have been sent to Hwange to investigate. They talk to Parks staff, land claimants and hunters. It is surely significant that not one of them tries to speak to me.

  It is increasingly clear that deals have been done by local officials, deals that even the Harare heavyweights are not fully aware of. I know that none of this is actually about elephants. It is all about politics. And I am more and more distressed by this knowledge.

  There has been talk that the chief has had his offer letter withdrawn, but I’m also hearing that he is determined to make more trouble for me. Sometimes I awake to unknown footprints around my cottage. I’ve been warned I should check my 4x4 each morning for evidence of tampering. I hold my breath now as I start my engine, silently hoping that it doesn’t explode in a ball of fire. Five friends are checking on me daily.

  ‘You must drive back to town now,’ Shaynie begs.

  ‘Not yet, Shaynie. I need to see this through,’ I say, giving her instructions on what to do if I don’t answer my phone.

  ‘One day,’ she says to me in an email, ‘I think I’m going to kill you myself!’

  Which for a moment at least, makes me smile. She insists on making contact twice daily.

  By now a fourth Cabinet minister is involved, Minister Sylvester Nguni from the Vice-President’s Office, trying to find out why the Cabinet directive has not been enforced. ‘We are trying to find a permanent way forward,’ Minister Kasukuwere assures me again—but by now his words are as ephemeral as the wind.

  Recently released reports reveal that over 100,000 African elephants were slaughtered for their ivory between 2010 and 2012, more than 40,000 of them in Southern Africa. Last year, another 30,000 elephants were massacred. Not only is this one every fifteen minutes, it’s almost the equivalent of Hwange National Park’s entire population of elephants wiped out in just one year. It would certainly appear that the CITES-approved (legal) sale of ivory in 2008 has fuelled the illegal trade.

  As a result of escalating poaching in Zimbabwe, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has announced a suspension on the importation of sport-hunted elephant trophies from Zimbabwe into the United States. The Wildlife Ministry and local hunters are livid about this, since most of their sport-hunting clients come from America and will now likely choose to take their hunting dollars elsewhere.

  Predictably, Minister Kasukuwere starts referring to this ban as ‘illegal sanctions on our elephants’. Just as predictably, the local hunters consider that I am partly to blame for this ban. I hear that they are, once again, out to try to crucify me. USFWS made its own decision based on concerns about the long-term survival of elephants in Zimbabwe, its questionable management practices, lack of effective law enforcement and weak governance. I am certainly not the only one who knows that there’s uncontrolled poaching and unethical hunting going on here. I’m pleased the Australian government has already banned the importation of any elephant trophy, from any country, including Zimbabwe—although this is yet another thing that some Zimbabwe hunters choose to blame on me.

  Meanwhile, the ex-governor’s relations have managed to get their hunting quota reinstated for the land they’ve retained, between the two photographic lodges, despite Minister Nhema’s declaration a few years ago that they must never again be allowed to hunt this area. Equally concerning, local Parks Authority staff try to justify their reissuing of this permit, stating these men no longer hunt on their own land; they shoot their quota on other people’s land (where a quota has already been issued to that land-owner). How is this sustainable hunting? Now I’m expected to sit back and accept two hunting quotas on one piece of land! What’s more, Parks is also issuing quotas to other people in areas where they should not be allowed to hunt at all, and certainly haven’t been in the past.

  I am absolutely bone weary of the harassment but I don’t sit back quietly. Some people are furious that I continue to question what is happening. It is those who don’t openly or publicly threaten me that I fear the most.

  With Minister Nguni now involved, I still hold out some small hope that the land claim issue might at least be resolved.

  On 21 February, President Robert Mugabe turns 90. ‘What happened to “He won’t be around for much longer”?’ I mumble to myself.

  In ten days time Minister Kasukuwere is scheduled to be in Hwange for World Wildlife Day. I’ve committed to have the recently delivered solar-powered water pump up and running on one of the Forestry Commission waterholes for him to commission during the afternoon. I enlist the help of Gary from ‘Friends of Hwange’, who looks after numerous pumps and boreholes inside the national park and has the expertise and equipment I need, to work alongside the equally competent installation team from Grundfos South Africa who donated the rig. All that can go wrong does, despite their combined skills, but eventually Gary pulls this monstrosity of a contraption upright with his 4x4 tractor. I can barely watch, fearing that this gigantic stand will topple right over, smashing all of its 24 solar panels. We fudge a few things at the last minute, to do with the troublesome borehole, in order to make everything look 100 per cent complete.

  A whole swag of officials, and guests and reporters arrive on the afternoon of World Wildlife Day. The head of the Forestry Commission is Darlington Duwa, who was actually in my 4x4 when Minister Nhema first met Misty and the Presidential Elephants. He remembers Misty emphatically, and still has her photo on his phone.

  Darlington’s speech contains a surprise. The waterhole to be filled by this solar-powered pump is called Mdlawuzo (a name that few whites, including myself, can pronounce). ‘Now we will know it as Sharon’s pan,’ Darlington declares.

  I am not only shocked by this but also embarrassed. ‘Sharon’s pan’ sounds truly awful! I thank him graciously and remind him that the local people call me Mandlovu. Perhaps the pan could instead be known as ‘Mandlovu pan’ in celebration, too, of ‘mother elephants’ like Misty.

  I celebrate with the installation team in front of the dignitaries and beneath the towering solar panels, by cracking open some bubbles. We all take a swig, straight from the bottle.

  And then I’m hit by a devastating low. During drinks at the Forestry Commission’s Ganda Lodge, Minister Kasukuwere finally admits that the land grabbers will not likely be removed. ‘After everything, you’re now going to leave them there?’ I ask him, bewildered. ‘Why did you put me at risk over all of this, for so long, checking on things and passing on information, if you’re going to just leave them there? What has happened to the Cabinet directive?’ Minister Kasukuwere storms off without another word and climbs into his chauffeured vehicle.

  The land claim saga is not over yet, however, and Minister Kasukuwere emails me again about ‘a permanent way forward’. These guys are known for keeping their friends close, and their enemies even closer. The trouble is, I don’t know any more whether I’m considered friend or foe. It’s a dangerous place to be, if you’re on the wrong side of these men. As Minister Francis Nhema once told me: ‘You only exist there because I allow you to.’

  THE LITMUS TEST

  2014

  It’s now nearly four long months since the Cabinet directive and there is nothing to indicate that the situation with the land grabs will ever change. All there’s been is more useless talk. This uncertainty, combined with all of the endless harassment and frustrations, is hard to bear. The documentary is screening once again in parts of Europe, showcasing my work to even more people, raising much-needed awareness and generating a lot of positive vibes for Zimbabwe. But I simply cannot ride this roller-coaster anymore.

  I snap.

  It’s been another year of constant battles. I realise now that no matter how much I contribut
e, none of President Mugabe’s ministers are about to put their necks on the line to help, at least not for long. I have no faith anymore, and no hope. What’s more, I’m feeling emotionally battered and disloyal to myself. As much as I adore my elephant friends and am anxious about their welfare, I’m no longer even sure of who I can trust. Is it finally time to walk away?

  I force myself to take more time to think this through. Just like after Lady’s death, I take to my bed and curl up in a ball. Tears flow. It’s not like me, to crumble like this, and the answer comes to me. I know—for certain this time—that this is finally it. I have to leave. I fear that I’m becoming hardened to much that is awful and wrong. Worse, I risk becoming complicit. As desperately sad as it is, my mind does not waiver. I simply can’t do this anymore. I remember my litmus test: ‘You have six months to live and can do anything you wish with your remaining time on earth. Where will you spend your time?’ I know it would not be here. Anywhere but here.

  After speaking with friends, I decide to take the nuclear option and post about the situation openly on the elephants’ Facebook page. This is not the sort of thing that you do in Zimbabwe. But I’d tried dealing with this privately and quietly. It hadn’t worked.

  The consequences of going public are predictable. Revenge is one thing you can always count on in this country. The land grabbers, the hunters and a few others, including Minister Saviour Kasukuwere himself, at least temporarily, are now out to jointly discredit me.

  But my work with these elephants has been widely celebrated for more than a decade. The support I receive both locally and internationally is overwhelming, even more so after an interview I give to National Geographic. It’s the only one that I agree to do.

  ‘Sharon is to elephants what Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall are to gorillas and chimps,’ Don Pinnock, a respected South African investigative journalist, is later quoted as saying. ‘She’s put up a heroic fight for so, so long and in giving up in the face of such poaching and brutal opposition is a real danger signal for elephants in Zimbabwe and, really, in Africa.’