I had been made aware of my shortcomings as a non-scientist, as someone who did not possess the requisite knowledge and experience to perform wildlife rescues with any kind of confidence. All true, of course. I had no argument with that. But now there were just the three of us: Bwana, Lapalala and me. We had to figure it out for ourselves.
There were many trees in our garden and I was up in them for a long time that day, encouraging Bwana to investigate each new kind of food while I tried to find some encouragement for myself. I thought I knew what I had to do, but I wasn’t sure if I had the courage of my convictions. The courage born of necessity would have to do. Mut verloren, alles verloren, my mother used to say – without courage, you’ve lost already. It was the voice of dearly bought experience.
Gertrud Anna Franziska Hagens (née Schröter) was a modest but resourceful woman of enormous fortitude. She needed to be. As the brand-new bride of a Lutheran missionary sent out in the early 1900s by the Berlin Missionary Society to work in rural South Africa, she travelled with her exquisitely hand-embroidered trousseau linen to a remote part of what the white people knew as the Transvaal, and the black people as the chiefdom of King Sekhukhune. They arrived at Lobethal, the small mission station, in the middle of the night. Paraffin lantern in hand, she followed her husband through a cold rambling house. Their first furniture would need to be constructed from the packing crates of their luggage shipped from Berlin.
A year later their son was born. Their second child, a girl, died in infancy. When I came along, it was February 1938, the same month that marked the first arrival in Britain of the “Kindertransport” from Berlin – Jewish children between the ages of five and 17 who were sent from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to escape the darkness that was settling over Europe. When I was two weeks old the German Army marched into Austria – the beginning of the “Anschluss”. In September, when I was seven months old, four European leaders sat down in a great European city and debated the fate of ordinary people. It was the Munich Conference and Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Edouard Deladier negotiated the ceding of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Germany.
Chamberlain returned to Britain and announced that they had achieved “peace in our time”. But before I was 18 months old Germany invaded Poland and Chamberlain made another speech: “I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street … I have to tell you that this country is at war with Germany.”
WWII. And suddenly all of that European politicking affected us on our little mission station in far-off Sekhukhuneland in Africa. My father was only a missionary, but he was a German missionary in a country that was to join forces with the Allies. He was sent to the internment camp at Baviaanspoort near Pretoria. While more and more of the globe got drawn into the war, my mother was left to manage, on her own now, all the responsibilities that came with mission work: family, of course – the youngest of whom was a baby, her fourth child – but also the mission’s school, clinic and church; she had to keep up her community classes in midwifery, needlework, food gardening and bible study; she had to diagnose ailments and in that remote location somehow obtain medicines for them.
Fifty kilometres from the nearest shop – an Indian trading-store – she had to feed her family from her vegetable garden, her chicken coop and the few cows on the mission. When shopping became an unavoidable necessity it was by donkey-cart.
She wrote letters to her husband telling him all about us, his children growing up without their father. He was able to read the censored letters in the presence of a guard. Then the letters would be confiscated and he would rush back to his room to write down everything he could remember from the letters. Once or twice a year my mother could visit him in the internment camp. After every visit he would again write down everything he could remember of their conversation.
Those little wartime notes of his became a treasured family archive, particularly precious to me because they record parts of my life that I was too young to remember. Like my mother’s recurring malaria attacks. Many years later I read, in my father’s handwriting, my mother’s words:
“Conita behandelt mich zo liebevoll…”
“Conita treats me so tenderly and brings me her dolls to hug and water to drink; she strokes my face and brings me cold face cloths for my feverish cheeks and asks her dear Jesus to make me better quickly, that I could sleep.”
This is also how I discovered that as a toddler I would walk up to his photograph on the wall, and ask him when he is coming home, begging him to make it soon; that an eye-infection blinded me for a time, until by some miracle American missionary doctors were able to obtain antibiotics, and I got my vision back; that I had a little black friend with a white name, Regina, and that she taught me to eat black people’s food: flying ants, grasshoppers, plump mopane worms roasted over an open fire.
I was to wait for that man in the photograph for five years.
In June 1944 the South African government offered the internees the option of returning home. Home was war-time Europe. Still, overwhelmingly, the internees chose to be repatriated. My mother was given a date to board a ship in Durban. She packed up her household, and after a final few minutes at the grave of her second child, left Lobethal for ever. The internees from Pretoria were transported by train and brought right up to the ship. We had no way of knowing if my father was among them. My mother gathered up her three children and boarded anyway. I am chilled when I think of the kind of desperate faith that made her do that. She got us settled and then she began to search the ship, deck by deck.
I remember waking from an exhausted sleep to see my brother and sister in the embrace of a bearded man. Older than the man in the photograph and there was the unfamiliar beard, but it was him. We were a family again.
All the world was at war. It took six months for us to arrive at our destination. First that interminable ocean voyage and then progressing from one quarantine camp to another, one bomb shelter to another, from Portugal all across Europe to Berlin. We arrived the day before Christmas. In Africa it would have been mid-summer; war-ravaged Berlin was freezing in winter snow. We had the almost unimaginable joy of a family Christmas with grandparents and Christmas decorations and treats and presents, but when the sirens sounded we had to hurry down into dark, crowded bunkers while the bombs rained down.
I contracted scarlet fever and had to be kept separate from the others. In the coal cellar I could still hear the sirens, but not the bombs any longer. There is a memory that has stayed with me far more acutely than the sirens or the bombs. It is the picture of small children being made to stand in a circle, shamed and mocked for their fear which caused them to wet themselves during the bombings. One of the children was my baby sister. I couldn’t bear to see that and rushed to hold her.
The bombing raid would finish, the all-clear would sound and we’d go up into the day to see the smoke drifting over the ruined city.
The most remarkable thing was that I wasn’t afraid. I felt so secure in the love and care of especially my mother during that time, that I didn’t know fear. Somehow she managed that.
As Bwana and I progressed from tree to tree through the Doornleegte garden I was struck by the parallels in the lives of mother and daughter, and humbled too by how puny my challenges seemed against hers. Now her challenges were over – she had passed away the previous year taking a major part of the anchoring of my life with her. But in the immutable way of mothers and daughters some of her example must have imprinted on me. If her kind of mothering could have kept me happy and secure in the midst of the greatest war this world had had to endure, I thought, perhaps I might manage sufficient mothering skills to help a little orphaned wild animal thrive.
I also had another role model, one which, were it not for her warmth towards me, I might have found very intimidating. My mother-in-law.
Clive’s father, the son of that young British soldier who’d come to Africa to fight in
the Anglo-Boer War and afterwards found he couldn’t leave again, had died unexpectedly when Clive was eight years old, his brother six. The family business, a construction company, waited for the young widow, just 27, to decide on the way forward. She was a dental nurse; she knew nothing about the construction business – in 1940s South Africa that kind of business was in any case almost exclusively a male preserve.
Enid Florence Walker buried her husband, walked into the offices of a company whose operation she didn’t understand and informed the 40-strong all-male staff that it would be business-as-usual. She was taking over. When Clive first introduced me to her she’d been successfully running that company for 21 years. She was to do so for 40. She never expected her sons to join the business to help her, but insisted that they should have their own independent lives. Her last project before she retired as Chairman of C.A.Walker & Sons was to build a house for herself on an acre of land in a Johannesburg suburb.
I had much to live up to. However loving and accepting our mothers-in-law might be of us, we’d prefer not to fail in their eyes.
So with two matriarchs looking over my shoulder I climbed down from the last wild-pear tree, resolved on my course of action. The next day was my new beginning with Bwana. Most importantly at first, I thought, was for him to be completely assured of having me as near to him as he needed, all the time. He had to be able to trust that constancy.
I don’t remember that Clive interfered with the changes I made. I do remember some odd looks and a word, “molly-coddling”. But more vividly I remember the many times he joined me for a cup of tea or a sundowner in our deck chairs near Bwana’s feeding area. Both of us would talk quietly to the little rhino and he’d be so totally relaxed, he’d come right up close to our faces, nudging and pushing at us to be hugged. He was remarkably vocal, squeaking and softly moo-ing his hints for whatever attention he wanted.
As with elephants, some vocalisations of adult black rhino are infra-sonic, capable of travelling considerable distances over densely vegetated terrain. Such loud audio bursts are mostly at very low frequencies – below the threshold of human hearing. Bwana’s baby squeaks, though, were very audible indeed, and I learnt to squeak and moo and moan right back to him.
My records from that time chart his steady progress. Measurements, weight, strength, changes in behaviour. His health held.
Our walks soon extended well beyond the front garden. I loved taking him up the hill behind the house. Time-consuming outings, but I’d trained as a teacher – I understood the virtue of patience. I’d dawdle in front and on my heels Bwana would slowly and loudly sniff his way up the rocky slope. Black rhinos have an acute sense of smell and he needed to smell everything. Herbal plants were a delightful discovery and after a cautious taste he started eating them, a little bit here and there, more each day.
He was becoming familiar with the shrub and tree species that provide the natural food for Lapalala’s wild black rhinos. Twice a day the field rangers, en route to and from their reserve sections, stopped by at Doornleegte with all the freshly cut browse a growing young rhino could possibly need. At first Dale was unsure about this daily harvesting, worrying that it could have a negative impact on the vegetation. But it turned out to be no problem at all, being as it was simply the provision for one more black rhino who’d have browsed in the reserve anyway, and the rangers taking due care with their pruning.
With dung from some of the wild black rhinos, we created what I hoped would be a reasonably convincing rhino midden where Bwana could smell others of his own species, and learn to use the midden himself. At first the strange smells scared him, but then instinct took over and it worked wonderfully. This was more than potty training. Black rhino are solitary animals, and their communal excretion spot serves as their communications hub. It tells them who’s around – male, female, one known to them, or a stranger.
Bwana was steadily acquiring the appropriate behaviours that made our ultimate goal of releasing him into the wilderness seem possible, so I had to look ahead to fostering his independence. He would have to be weaned, not only off his supplementary milk feed but also from his foster mother. He’d have to get used to other carers and accept my absence from time to time. In the main I was helped by two allies. Slender, good-hearted Rosina Baloyi, her skin the colour of Lapalala’s basalt rocks, had a sense of responsibility that sat well with my German work ethic. She lightened the treadmill burden of bottle-feeding and, more importantly, was accepted by Bwana. Titus Mamashela, a young Shangaan, was the proud possessor of a newly minted Grade 8 certificate, able to speak both English and Afrikaans in addition to his mother tongue, North-Sotho, and diligent to a fault. Whether it was cleaning Bwana’s enclosures, or painstakingly measuring his water intake, or joining me in watching closely to establish his food preferences, or be on the lookout for the first sign of an abnormality in dung or change in mood, Titus was invaluable.
In addition to my extensive daily rhino-care records, I also have records of another kind. My legs are covered in scars from lacerations acquired during excursions with Bwana. We’d meander up our rocky hill and he, bold enough to explore a few metres away from me, would suddenly discover that we were not the only animals around. A grasshopper would send him on a frightened dash back to mother. Or straight back into mother, and mother into thorns, a rock or spiny branches. I learnt to dodge and brace myself, although this very often still meant thorns and rocks and broken branches and a fresh crop of scratches and scabs by the end of the day. We met mice and mongooses on that hill, and rabbits, a variety of small buck, the odd kudu. Sometimes Bwana’s full-tilt charge stopped just short of my bruised legs, but not always.
There was the memorable day when he encountered termites. He was engaged in a deeply satisfying head-rub against a termite mound when he got what seemed to me to be the fright of his life. Hearing is a black rhino’s best developed sense and the slightest little sound would always bring him to a totally alert upright stance, his large ears swivelling to focus on the direction of the sound. I could imagine what the disturbance he’d caused inside that termite mound must have sounded like to him. He took off down the hill and raced straight into his enclosure. I was close behind to reassure and comfort him, but was delighted. He didn’t flee to me first – it was a step towards independence.
Virtually from the first day at Doornleegte Bwana lived up to his name, the Big Boss. Playful, naturally, as befitted his age: rolling on his sandpile with legs in the air and then jumping straight up and down on all fours as if it was all just too much fun to be able to hold still; messing around in his mud-pool, covering his entire body with rust-red mud and then, only the whites of his eyes showing, heading straight for something to rub against – his rubbing-pole, a tree, the house wall, the verandah railing, or me. Then, galvanised by a sudden burst of adrenaline, he’d race around the garden or around and around the corners of the house at an astounding speed, to the imminent danger of any human who might be passing by. It was easy to believe the often-cited statistic of a black rhino’s running speed being 45 to 50 kilometres per hour.
He’d get it into his head that a log or rock needed pushing and, nose down and eyes rolling wildly, he’d manoeuvre that heavy object from one corner of the garden to the other, or down the driveway and back up again and into a shrub, and then lose his temper in a way that fully illustrated the black rhino’s reputation for aggression and danger.
We didn’t dare leave the back door open. The damage a determined rhino calf can do in a house has to be seen to be believed. It wasn’t just the mess. Whatever he pushed, moved. If it couldn’t move, it dented. If it couldn’t dent, it broke.
We were doing as well as could be expected. When I had to be in Johannesburg with my two boys who were still living in our house there and both studying, Rosina and Titus could hold the fort. On occasion Glynis Brown was kind enough to take a break from the camps management office and come to Doornleegte to substitute for me. Provided I wasn’t away for to
o long, Bwana seemed to be happy with his growing independence.
Re-wilding, though, was still some way off. With black rhino, particularly males, this has proven to be very difficult. Males compete, they fight for supremacy. And with black rhinos being the immensely powerful and dangerous animals that they are, such fights are a serious matter.
Natal Parks Board offered us another young black rhino male, a problem animal which they needed to relocate. I was not at all sure about the wisdom of putting the two males together, but the experts assured me that because they were still so young there would be no danger. I allowed them to meet on a daily basis, but it was soon clear that the problem male was going to be a problem for Bwana too. He was prepared to kill him on sight. It wasn’t long before the newcomer’s vicious temper necessitated a re-think. He was released into the reserve and I had a strong sense that Bwana had dodged a bullet.
FOUR
Mothlo
THERE IS AN OLD PIECE of film in our family archives: Bwana is playing in the mud, his firm, chunky little body, over-sized ears, ancient-looking young face caked with rust-red blobs and drips and smears. Small dark eyes, bright and alive. The man doing the filming is Dale Parker. Off-camera there is the odd comment or chuckle from Clive.
I treasure that little film for a number of reasons. As with one’s own children, it’s a pleasure to be reminded of the cute and enjoyable phases, especially if you’re no longer dealing with the very much less cute realities of exhaustion and smells and illness. It also reminds me of the joint pleasure we, the Walkers and the Parkers, had in witnessing Bwana’s progress, vindicating the decision to bring Lapalala’s orphan back home. Vindicating also another decision of Clive’s.
A Rhino in my Garden Page 5