Back in the ’80s when we first moved half our lives to Lapalala, I was reminded of my parents, half a century before, arriving at the Lobethal mission station in the middle of the night and having to make a home out of what they saw in the light of their paraffin lamps. I viewed each of my five small rooms by daylight: they were blindingly cheerful. Walls in shrill pink, blue, green and yellow teamed with linoleum floors in even louder shades of the same plus one with scarlet squares and I seem to remember another in a sort of mottled purple. We, boringly, opted for something more sedate: white walls, neutral flooring. After that, a number of trips to second-hand furniture shops in my trusty Toyota, an epic tiling session by myself and a friend which ended in an exhausted bath at sunrise, and the Doornleegte farmhouse was home.
Clive was appreciative, but wouldn’t rest: life in the bush required a verandah, preferably one stretching all along the front of the house and overlooking the garden in which he had planted more than 30 trees. He was right. It became our favourite spot for meals, sundowners and meetings. A stereotypical colonial verandah it sported antelope horns, elephant and buffalo skulls, and a camelthorn rhino rubbing post from Savute in Botswana. It was an ideal vantage point too for keeping an eye on Bwana and filming him as he played a few metres away while, beyond the garden, the wilderness waited for him.
That single-reel home movie is also a record of such naïveté. Principally mine. One makes these unthinking assumptions about the horizons of your own life. You can only do so much. When your days are filled to capacity there’s no room for more. You can say No.
How wrong I was.
On 10 April 1994 I was busy writing up my Bwana records when I heard the radio crackle. A field ranger was calling the reserve manager: “… in the water. Screaming its head off.”
“The mother?”
“Just the baby. Not looking too good – there’s a lot of blood.”
“Where are you?”
“Blocklands crossing.”
“Stand by.”
I returned to my writing. Another Lapalala baby was in trouble; winter was approaching; it was Sunday; Clive was away in Johannesburg. Déjà-vu.
The radio crackled again. “Doornleegte, Doornleegte, come in.”
The reserve manager, now on the scene himself, had determined three things: the mother was gone, the baby needed emergency rescuing, and it was extremely hungry. Could I get some milk ready? Oh, by the way, not for a rhino – it’s a hippo.
There was still a small supply of Bwana’s fat-free milk powder which I kept for emergencies. I had no idea if that would be appropriate for a hippo calf. As little as I had known about the rhinoceros a few years earlier, I knew even less about the hippopotamus. It lives mostly in water; it feeds on underwater vegetation; it grazes on grass when it comes out of the water at night. It’s considered highly dangerous: most humans who are killed by wild animals in Africa are killed by hippos. To my embarrassment, that was about it.
Ten kilometres from Doornleegte there was a fully catered tented camp on a tributary to the Blocklands River. Rhino Camp was run by my younger son, Anton, and his wife, René. They responded to my radio call in typical fashion, Anton being a wildlife manager and René the kind of gentle-hearted person who would rescue and hand-rear baby birds fallen out of nests. They picked up my two bottles of milk en route to the rescue.
With the radio in one hand and a duvet cover in the other I walked over to the storeroom, hoping that I’d hear reassuring news that would make my just-in-case preparations unnecessary. But I stuffed straw into that duvet cover to total radio silence. Back in the house I heard that Clive was on his way back. He had in the meantime managed to get hold of Karen Trendler at the Animal Rehabilitation Centre, but no, she had not dealt with baby hippos before. A very competent lady in the Kruger National Park had though. The very competent lady’s phone just rang and rang without being answered.
A couple of hours later Clive pulled in at Doornleegte. I offered tea and waited. It wasn’t long. He began to hint, cautiously, that an injured baby hippo was unlikely to last the day, let alone a cold night, without the warmth and protection of its mother.
There was history behind his caution.
Along with most of its other big game species, the Waterberg, rich as it was in watercourses, had lost its hippos. Then in the early 1980s the first hippos to be re-introduced into the area were brought from Lake St Lucia in KwaZulu-Natal and released into the Palala. In Lapalala’s other river, the Blocklands, there were no hippo.
One day Clive was contacted by a game dealer who was in search of blue wildebeest. He could pay in hippos. He had five of them, acquired from a Texan zoo, living in his swimming pool. Tasked as he was with the restoration of Lapalala’s ecosystems, Clive contacted Dale Parker in Cape Town and suggested they do a swap: spare blue wildebeest for the pod of hippo. Expert opinions were not on his side even though the Blocklands had a fairly large dam, ideally suited to hippo, along its course. The unarguable fact was that both the Palala and the Blocklands harboured thriving populations of crocodile.
Dale thought it a risk worth taking and agreed to the swap. Now there was a badly injured baby hippo – possibly due to a crocodile attack – in the Blocklands, and Clive was waiting to hear: “Told you so.”
He stirred his tea and without looking up wondered if it might not be a sensible idea to get ready to help out, “Just in case, and just for the night.”
I led the way to the laundry. In the centre, like a four-poster bed, was my straw-stuffed duvet cover snugly shaped as a mattress between the four legs of the laundry table; on top of the table was the collection of lamps with which I intended to keep the room at a cosy temperature. Clive said he was happy to have married a German girl.
Anton’s Land Rover drove up and we hurried down the verandah steps. An almighty noise erupted from the cab. With my hands over my ears I peered in. On René’s lap squatted 20 kilograms of exhausted, hungry, bleeding and complaining hippo. René smiled: “Her name is Mothlo.”
She was a heart-rending sight. Her face was scratched, her back ripped open and oozing blood. The rest of her body was covered in blood blisters – evidence of the way hippos sweat to protect themselves against sun exposure and over-heating, and of the fact that this little one had been exposed to the sun for far too many hours.
She’d had no nutrition for goodness knows how long. Despite the reserve manager’s valiant attempts at feeding her with the bottles I had sent ahead she’d taken nothing. But settled into her four-poster in the laundry she greedily and messily drank as much as I felt was safe. Exhaustion overcame her and she was out for the count. That night she had more sleep than Clive and I, a few metres away. Every once in a while a grunt – of contentment, I hoped – reverberated through the walls and when, well before morning, she was ready for her next feed she made sure we knew it. While preparing her bottle I tried to pacify her with what I hoped might sound like hippo “talk”. If Clive was laughing he did it in the bedroom where I couldn’t hear him.
Another 24-hour-a-day job had arrived at Doornleegte. By sunrise work had begun on turning the back garden into a hippo-friendly environment. Until such time as Mothlo was ready to be introduced to the Palala, she needed a plunge pool. Even in winter the sun would be too hot for day-long exposure. She also needed to be in water to relieve her initial constipation. Hippos are born under water and are habituated to defecating in water – a behaviour which is of benefit to the river systems within which they occur.
While her pool was being excavated and cemented we made do with hosing her down at regular intervals. She took to this as readily as she did to being paraded around her new dominion in stately fashion beneath a huge black umbrella.
The kitchen was re-converted into a milk-formula feeding station. Mothlo required 15 to 20 litres per day of a much richer formula than Bwana’s. To my great relief my previous supplier of fat-free milk powder could also supply 25 kilogram buckets of full-cream milk powder at a re
asonable price. The full-cream milk needed to be further enriched with egg-yolk. I contributed greatly to what I’m sure was a boom-time for egg producers in the greater Vaalwater area. As a consequence of being left with all those egg-whites not needed for Mothlo’s formula I discovered the limits of my husband’s tolerance by serving at every possible occasion an ever-expanding range of experimental meringue recipes.
Mothlo’s settling-in was surprisingly smooth. Her wounds healed and she was so sweet-natured that everyone adored her, although her astoundingly loud calls continued to frighten the unwary.
Long before she entered my life, on my first wilderness trail in the Lake St Lucia area, I’d been warned against hippo. It was late afternoon and we were canoeing to our overnight camp. We were told to keep quiet and get a move on; it was neither the time nor the place to encounter hippos either on foot or on water – not if you wanted to survive to complete your trail.
At Doornleegte I bottle-fed a member of this notorious species, her big eyes fixed on mine, tiny hairy ears moving constantly. It was difficult to reconcile the chubby, trusting little creature who so loved having her soft blubbery belly rubbed with the reality of a massive mammal, weighing between 1.5 and 3 tonnes, capable of killing people. I also didn’t like knowing that, on the IUCN Red Data List, the conservation status of hippos was given as Vulnerable.
Waterberg winters have something of my childhood memories of Europe. At first light a field can shimmer and sparkle as if with snow. But it’s frost coating the bleached dry-season grass and the countless spiderwebs criss-crossing and spiralling, trembling in each exhalation of crisp air. Bushes droop with dew-drips turned to icicles. Shallow ponds ice up. But overhead stretches a sky which is pure Africa: all possible shades from gold, green and red in the east to the aquamarines and blues of the kingfishers nesting along the Palala.
On such mornings the laundry door used to bear the brunt of Mothlo’s impatience. But she’d have to wait while we laboured with buckets of hot water to get her pool ice-free and up to an acceptable temperature for her first plunge of the morning. Much as she had to be protected from overheating, she also had to be protected from the opposite extreme.
That pool created a lot of extra work. With Bwana doing so well after his early health crises I suppose we might have become just the slightest bit complacent about the horrors of stress-related illnesses assailing us again. We were not to remain complacent for long. It was the dreaded diarrhoea attacks again – not so severe as those suffered by Bwana, but serious enough to necessitate another round of hyper-vigilant checking and re-checking of our hygiene systems. As before, the cause didn’t lie there. Nevertheless, until we were 100% sure and she had lost that heart-rending look of a helpless, sick infant, the location of her ablutions – her pool – had to be emptied out every day, thoroughly sanitised and refilled. At least the garden benefitted from the regular, copious applications of hippo-fertilised water.
Three weeks after Mothlo’s arrival I had to leave Doornleegte for what I hoped would be just a few hours. It was Wednesday 27 April 1994 – election day. I was by no means a political animal, but it was important to me to make my own small gesture that day. My vote would not have made the slightest difference to the outcome of the first truly democratic election in South Africa. But this was the election that was to finally loosen the suffocating grip in which apartheid had held the destiny of all the peoples of this country. I’d been brought up to look forward to that day.
My father was born in West Africa. His family owned a chain of bookstores, and one of them was on the Gulf of Guinea, in Lomé, the capital of Togo. At that time Togo was under German rule and Lomé, with around 5000 inhabitants, the kind of place that promoted a comfortable blending of the cultures of Africa and its colonial rulers. When my father succumbed to the tropical infections rife there at the time and was sent back to Germany for treatment and for his schooling, his deep love of Africa went with him.
Fortunately Walther Hermann Renning Hagens did not rebel against life in Europe – his education continued within the family traditions of music, theatre and concerts. He excelled at his studies and, like his sisters, was a gifted and accomplished performing musician. They lived in a large beautiful house in East Berlin, the venue for some of their receptions and soirées. This was Berlin in its Weimar era – he had a life of elegance and sophistication. When it came to deciding on a profession, however, he chose Africa. He returned, not as the manager of a successful Hagens bookstore, but as a missionary in the employ of the Berlin Missionary Society. He learnt to speak Sotho, and in due course so did his children. When WWII sent him and us back to Germany, he kept on speaking Sotho to me, so I shouldn’t forget the language of the people to whom we would one day return.
It was a circuitous route back.
In early 1945 all civilian radio communications in East Berlin had been blocked. But somehow disturbing news of the advancing Russian Army filtered through. One morning in early March I was told to choose a favourite toy – nothing heavy or too large to be carried in one hand. Without benefit of luggage we had to wear all the clothes we couldn’t afford to leave behind. Many heavy layers that made our journey to the station hot and awkward. I remember my grandmother and great-grandmother, tears running down their cheeks and ours as everyone clung together. Suddenly the time was up, we were on a train, and through the small window I saw them waving and growing smaller. They were not to survive the cold and hunger of that bitter winter of 1945.
We’d escaped, but we were homeless refugees. We were taken in by a farming family in Oldendorf near the town of Schnega. In that period my father became the mayor of Schnega, his skill with languages – fluent in eight – being highly sought after in discussions between Europeans and Americans. I went to school for the first time. I was seven, but due to the education my parents managed to give us during the preceding war months, I was ready for the third grade.
As all parents must under such circumstances, they worked hard at keeping some semblance of normality going. The topic of discussions with their children was not the war or its legacy of suffering. They spoke about our opportunity to learn and absorb as much of Europe as we could, and of their work waiting for them in Africa.
Strange as it may seem, my memories are overwhelmingly of happy times, also when we moved to Clenze in the Hanover district, where my father was called to serve the large, spread-out church community. It was now our turn to provide shelter for refugees. Two Polish families moved in with us and I remember being taught to turn whatever meagre ingredients could be obtained with our post-war ration coupons into delicious Polish dishes. My parents, tending to post-war trauma and dysfunction in homes and schools, must have had a much less enjoyable time of it. Through the wet summers and icy winters my father cycled on his rounds from one small village to the next and on to the next. After two years, exhausted and suffering from debilitating asthma attacks, he requested a transfer back to Africa.
There was a last farewell. We travelled to Stuttgart to meet again the only other members of our extended family to have survived the war. When we fled Berlin my two younger aunts, both with fiancés on the battle front, had stayed behind to take care as best they could of their mother and grandmother. In Stuttgart I heard the stories of the family members we had lost, of the fiancé who had died in action, and of the terrible fear of the approaching Red Army that had caused the two young women to also flee, just in time.
I don’t remember that my aunts tried to persuade my parents to remain in Europe, or that my parents tried to motivate them to accompany us to Africa. While the war undoubtedly strengthened such bonds of blood or friendship as had survived, perhaps it also resulted in a kind of acceptance of the impermanent nature of things – nothing is guaranteed, least of all life itself. Loved ones leave. The opportunity to live as fully as possible is not infinite. Do everything you can while you can. Perhaps that is something that went way down deep for a young girl and has remained into adulthood. Wha
t may now appear to outsiders to be a grownup’s responsible sense of doing her duty may in large part simply be the response of that child who had learnt very early on that every day counts and that, at the end, there would have been too few of them.
That year drew to its close with another wrenching goodbye, another long ocean voyage, another arrival on the shores of another continent, and then it was Christmas 1949. We were back in Africa.
It was not to be a resumption of the life we had had before the war. From the mission station at Heidelberg near Johannesburg I entered a world I did not know. Boarding school, the language of the Afrikaans people, the kindness of their children who shared their food and treats with us newcomers who, after the privations of life in Germany during and after the war, were unused to and unprepared for such largesse. I saved up half of all their gifts to take back to the mission station for my little sister.
There were surprises for my parents too. On Christmas Eve 1951 my father and a black lay preacher were sharing a communion service in our mission church. They were not allowed to complete the service. A group of black people stormed into the church and amidst the shocked and screaming congregation dragged my father from the pulpit and the lay preacher from the altar, and made their displeasure at white and black sharing their devotions absolutely clear. I learnt that these angry, violent people were called activists, and that their cause – though one might disagree with the way they fought for it – was a just one.
The Nationalist government that had unseated South Africa’s war-time president, General Jan Smuts, in 1948, implemented a system of what they called “Separate Development” to the advantage of white people and the considerable disadvantage of all others. Apartheid. If you did not have a white skin, you did not have the vote and your rights – socially, economically, legally – were determined by those who did have white skins.
A Rhino in my Garden Page 6