A Rhino in my Garden

by Conita Walker

  I remembered the autumn of 1993 when Bwana first arrived at Doornleegte: the trepidation with which I prepared and waited, my insecurity about the responsibility of taking care of him; the months and years of getting to know his strong wild fighting spirit as well as his other sides – playful, inquisitive, naughty, intelligent, vulnerable.

  A few weeks after my morning in Nylstroom’s concentration camp cemetery I had still not mentioned to anyone the plan with which I’d driven back to the Waterberg that day. It wasn’t something I could implement by myself, and I wasn’t even sure whether it would be wise for me to moot it – better if it came from someone else. But everyone was being crippled by a tactful silence on the subject. Even Clive – despite all the openings I’d thought I’d given him – avoided the issue.

  With the usual bucket of game pellets, I walked up to Bwana’s enclosure. He was dangerous, but in truth he was at our mercy. Like all wild animals. We’ve removed their right to their own habitat. We make decisions on their behalf. If they are to survive, it has to be on our terms. All too often that means fences. Game reserves, game ranches, the illusion of roaming free among tarred roads and tourists, powerlines, hunters and poachers. They live with the dis-ease of instinct pulling against truncated territories, severed migration routes and dammed rivers. They submit to our notions of population management – birth control, relocation, culling. The sensory bombardment which is such an inescapable waste product of human activity interferes with their intricate communication systems via their senses. They have no choice but to adapt to the way we change their world.

  Look at it from a particularly human perspective and our decisions make some sort of sense, albeit in the short term, given the distance we’ve travelled along the way of claiming every inch of this planet and everything inhabiting it as exploitable resource. Look at it from any other perspective, especially from that of the non-human – polar bears, riverine rabbits, old-growth forests, eagles, epiphytic orchids, frogs, tigers, chameleons, sea-horses – and it makes no sense at all. The innocent party is not the human.

  Even when we try to help, with only the animal’s welfare as our goal, it may still end up the loser. Like Bwana. We rescued and hand-reared him, and found ourselves with very few options. We were reluctant to risk another attempt at releasing him among the other black rhino bulls in the reserve. Translocation was not an attractive option either. Lapalala was his home, as it was ours. I hoped that I had found a way to make it work for all of us.

  Bwana was waiting for me, leaning against the wooden poles of his enclosure railing, his head raised, mouth wide open in anticipation of the treat. I put my hand inside his mouth; his prehensile top lip curled under – firm, slightly moist on my hand – and he scooped up his pellets. As he chomped I talked to him as I always did, rubbed his head and checked him over. His nose was wet – a sign of good health – and on either side of his well-grown horns his small dark eyes were bright and alert, following my every move. There was a swollen tick low down on his flank, but that didn’t worry me. In the early days I used to remove ticks and treat their bites, but I later discovered that his natural mechanism for dealing with irritating insects – mud and a rubbing-post – was equally effective, perhaps more so.

  He strained against the railing and moo-ed his hints for more pellets, but before I could oblige I heard footsteps approaching. I waited for Clive to join me. For some reason I usually developed a rash when I’d had contact with Bwana’s saliva, but Clive didn’t, so I handed him the bucket. He scooped up a handful.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

  Finally, I thought, here it is. I’m going to be asked to do the very thing I’ve been wanting to do. I knew the signs. Ever since Clive was a young man with dark-brown hair and a rifle slung across his shoulders, all kinds of enterprises and adventures started this way: he’d been thinking. An organisation to train field guides, a new way to raise conservation funds or support a lone scientist-conservationist working in some remote wilderness; or it would be time to visit an old friend in Botswana’s Savute, or join a colleague on a research trip to the Kgalagadi. If I wasn’t invited along I knew it would involve dangerous exploits among predators or elephants – it was better if I didn’t know. This was also the way he broached a subject when he had a favour to ask, or intended to persuade me into agreeing with a plan he’d hatched, “I’ve been thinking…”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  He started way out on the periphery of the matter: “… conservation … education … the need to reach young people …”

  I curbed my impatience while he continued to circle: “… rhinos are misunderstood … you can’t teach conservation from books … Bwana gives us an opportunity here…”

  A hornet was aiming for my arm. I slapped and fussed while Clive beat around the bush some more. “We’ve got thousands of kids already coming to the school, you know. Guests at Kolobe Lodge, the bush camps…”

  The hornet gone, I had to settle for rubbing a spot on my arm as if the hornet had in fact struck. I wasn’t going to offer, I wanted to be asked.

  Clive lowered his head to Bwana’s. “You’d like it boy, wouldn’t you?” He looked around to me. “So I thought we’ll advertise. There’s bound to be a conservation-minded youngster who’d be interested.” He moo-ed back at Bwana and dug into the bucket for more pellets. “And then he can take Bwana off your hands.”

  Clive had the satisfaction of seeing my shocked face as I stared at him, utterly at a loss for words. He turned away and continued to feed Bwana while I fought with my pride. “Unless,” he said over his shoulder, “you perhaps already know of someone who could do it?” I’d been out-manoeuvred. “Yes,” I said. “I do. Me. Monday to Saturday. Three o’clock in the afternoon.”

  In order for Doornleegte to become an outdoor classroom, a place to encounter and learn about black rhino with me as the teacher, I was going to have to adjust to a much more public role than I’d ever imagined or desired. Clive was the one who was at home in the spotlight – accessible and approachable as he needed to be in order to effectively promote his conservation causes. On Dale Parker’s insistence he was also the media face of Lapalala. I had been content in the shadows. Yet how often had I wished that other people too could share in my experiences? I wanted more people to see what I saw, and to really understand what it was that they were seeing. I wanted them to know Bwana for the splendid, rare creature he was. I wanted then to care about him and his kind.

  By bringing people and children into close contact with such a flagship species, a greater good might be served for wildlife conservation. If our past experiences were anything to go by, a good number of the adults and especially children who met Bwana might go on to become supporters of efforts to save what is left of their natural world. What lay ahead of us then wasn’t so much a new beginning as a new chapter in something Clive and I had begun many years before, first with the wilderness walking trails, then the wilderness school and the bush camps: expose people to the life of the wilderness, let nature do the rest.

  It was an eventuality I hadn’t foreseen on that long-ago first day with Bwana, but given that my greatest fear then was that I’d be responsible for killing him outright through my ignorance, what remained was still considerably better than a worst-case scenario.

  Clive returned to the house to begin making the arrangements. Bwana and I walked up the rocky slope of his hill, close and relaxed as we’d done hundreds of times before. He sniffed and snuffled at everything, paused for a mouthful when we passed a favourite tree or shrub, or lingered at a rock to rub away some irritation. From the top of the hill I could see all the way across the floodplain to the dark green curving line of the Palala – Mothlo’s domain. Further around to my right the rocky slopes climbed higher, the light picking out the massive candelabra of tree euphorbias among the mountain seringa and star chestnut and the many other trees that could have sheltered and fed Bwana. All around, as far as I could see, Lapalala
stretched to the horizon. From where I was sitting I couldn’t see a building or road or powerline, and all I heard were the sounds that naturally belonged on that hill – insects, birds, the dry rustle of late summer leaves, and a young black rhino bull contentedly exploring the world which rightly belonged to him as much as he belonged to it.

  SEVEN

  Munyane

  IT WAS NOVEMBER BUT HOT enough for February. The weather had been building for days and I’d scheduled my Monday accordingly, with appointments in Nylstroom and Vaalwater as early as possible. By early afternoon I was already well on my way home. As the kilometres passed my eyes kept straying to the north-east. Cumulonimbus turrets and crowning them, a promising anvil, purple at its base. It could reach us in a couple of hours. I willed it closer.

  The Waterberg, not as water-rich anymore as in centuries past, waited for the first rain of the season. I passed vineyards draped in acres of black netting. Table grapes, for the export market. The nets would fend off the birds, but would not stop hail. Should the rains arrive with too much force, the outcome for that farmer and his neighbours with their vineyards, citrus orchards and maize fields could be almost as bad as no rain at all. Farming, at the best of times, is a gamble. When it is dependent upon your ability to out-smart the weather, it could be a sure-fire recipe for bankruptcy.

  No wonder so many farmers were turning to wildlife, trying to make a living within the constraints of the prevailing climatic conditions, working within the natural ecosystem rather than against it. In more and more places farm fences had given way to game fences.

  Once I was off the tarred road and trailing a cloud of red dust, evidence of agriculture had all but disappeared. On both sides of the road, behind the 2.5-metre-high fences, it was Waterberg bush. Trees grew higher, closer together, shaggily overhanging fences and signboards, until they sheltered the final sandy stretch to the Lapalala gate. Far ahead the boom across the road lifted. A tall figure waited with one arm held high.

  I pulled up and let down the window. It was like opening an oven door. Andries Mokwena, in his neatly pressed olive-green uniform, had a sweat-shiny brow and a broad smile. As Lapalala’s chief rhino tracker he infinitely preferred being out in the bush but even when co-opted for gate-duty I never saw him without a smile. A cattle-herder years ago in whom Clive had discovered a rare facility for intuitive observation, Andries had been groomed to become the head of Lapalala’s game scouts with, as his special care, rhino. He became a master tracker and rhino monitor. It was unusual to find him anywhere except in the bush with his beloved rhinos.

  He touched his forehead. “Magog!”

  We exchanged news of our families and commiserated with each other about the clouds that were retreating yet again. He told me that Clive had driven through an hour or so before me – he’d probably be home by now.

  He wasn’t. A few kilometres on I rounded a bend and saw his Pajero parked by the roadside. His boot prints led down a game path which wound across a clearing where plumes of silky bushman grass stirred in the lightest of breezes. I felt the sweat-soaked back of my shirt cooling. The path headed for some rocks on the lip of a shallow green-treed gully. And there he was: light khaki trousers and shirt, the familiar bleached kerchief knotted around his neck. Rastunya, “he who carries the gun”, the name Andries had given him. The two of them had spent countless hours together walking the Lapalala bush, each teaching the other and cementing a friendship. The gun had made way for sketching materials, but Rastunya stuck.

  He was sitting with his back against a rock, his attention on the small family group of waterbuck grazing less than 30 metres away. I quietly sat down, my back against a rock of my own. This was my life. This man. This place. The smell of baked dust. The stillness not of things standing still, but of order. The natural order of the wilderness. I felt my body relax into the warmth of the rock and of that moment.

  We were getting too busy. Moments for being still and just taking it all in were becoming too rare. My conscience wasn’t helping: sitting still felt like slacking off, something lazy people did. I vowed, not for the first time, to strive for a little more balance.

  The very next thing I did, seconds later, was to look at my watch. But I squashed the impulse to hiss at Clive, to hint that time was marching on. For once he’ll finish sketching when he’s ready, not when I tell him it’s time to go.

  The waterbuck moved off, their white-on-charcoal bulls-eye backsides gradually disappearing in the vegetation. Clive got up and walked over to me. He was surprised when I remained seated, and put out his hand to pull me up. “Shouldn’t we be going?”

  I made room for him next to me. “Not yet. Show me.”

  He sat down and flipped through his sketches. A lilac-breasted roller, a group of guineafowl, a flowering creeper, the waterbuck – one of them, a male with trophy horns, looking straight out of the page. As a non-artist I took it upon myself to have an opinion. As usual he took it in good part.

  We stayed there for a while. I tried, and failed, to locate the crested barbet whose continuous alarm-clock chirrrr, together with the cicadas, was to remain the soundtrack to that memory. Yellow-billed hornbills cackled and foraged through the canopy of a wild fig tree. One took off and crashed into the deep green foliage of the next tree. Another one followed. I turned to look north – the clouds were further away. No rain for us that day. Clear, clean blue sky dissected by a vapour trail – people hurrying to get somewhere. Another world.

  Clive turned to me. “Regrets?”

  I shook my head. “You?”

  He smiled. “Never.”

  There was the sound of a vehicle on the road, slowing down where we’d parked, then speeding up and continuing on towards the gate. It was time to go.

  As we strolled back Clive filled me in on the meeting which had taken up most of his day. All good news. Years earlier, soon after we came to Lapalala there had been another such meeting, much smaller, but as is the way of foundations, crucial. It would, in time, contribute to the reshaping of the entire management structure of conservation in the Waterberg.

  Wildlife conservation is all about habitat, all about ecosystems. And since nature doesn’t operate neatly within fenced title-deed grid-networks as landowners do, it is imperative that neighbours should cooperate. Well and good to implement wilderness principles within Lapalala, but what happens on the other side of the fence, the opposite bank of the river? How could it affect us, on this side?

  Early in the ’80s Clive had discovered that several farms on the other side of the Palala were owned by Mr Hennie Dercksen. Since he and Lapalala shared 25 kilometres of the same river it seemed like a good idea to cooperate on conservation matters. Mr Dercksen agreed. It was the beginning of a conservancy. By 1985 so many other farmers wanted to join that another meeting, a much larger one, was arranged to take place in the lodge of Mr Wynand du Toit on his farm Kliphoek. That night Clive came home and when I asked him how it had gone, he shook his head. It was the idea of a conservancy that had drawn people to the meeting in the first place, yet when it was fully explained to them, it wasn’t welcomed.

  For the next four years it must have felt like bashing his head against brick walls all the time. Discussions didn’t lead to anything concrete; every so often a farm changed hands and then he had to start all over again with the new landowner.

  Why was this so important? Because Lapalala was not an island. It was not isolated and therefore not protected from whatever happened outside its fences. Actions taken on neighbouring farms would impact what Dale and Clive wanted to achieve with Lapalala. Policies implemented in the greater Waterberg region would have an impact. Whatever happened in South African conservation, in South African politics, would have an impact. And if one did not have voting power let alone veto-ing power in matters that affected you, their outcome could not be guaranteed to be favourable to your goals.

  For Lapalala to survive as a wilderness reserve, it had to have more muscle, a stronger voice with
in a wider system of policy support.

  In autumn 1990 Clive found a sympathetic ear in Mr Rod Henwood of the Touchstone Game Ranch. Within months they, with a third member, Kwalata Private Nature Reserve, had established the Waterberg Nature Conservancy. They were on their way. Eventually the WNC would grow to 26 members, jointly protecting 150 000 hectares of the Waterberg, within which 100 kilometres of the Palala was safer than it had ever been before. In terms of Lapalala itself, the WNC was a first defence against threats from outside.

  Almost six years later Clive was midway through his term as chairman of the WNC, and although it was going well, I was not at all surprised that even on a hot November afternoon, he needed a sketching break in the veld to soothe the stresses of the meeting.

  We got back to the vehicles and he enquired about my trip. “I got fan-mail,” I told him.

  He laughed. It had become a welcome feature of my stop at the Vaalwater post office. On a weekly basis I had the pleasure of reading that I was a highlight. The best ever. “Awesome.”

  Of course it wasn’t really me. It was Bwana.

  Our sessions with the children were a delight. So much easier to hold the attention of children with a live black rhino as your teaching aid rather than books and a blackboard. Their excitement at meeting a dangerous wild animal, many times their size, was all the reward I needed. Bwana obligingly lingered at the feeding station in his enclosure until I had helped even the most timid child offer his or her tiny handful of pellets to be gently scooped up and contentedly chomped.

  Amazingly it was sometimes the littlest ones that were most brave and insisted on being held up in a parent’s arms, or in mine, to be able to reach Bwana’s waiting, wide open mouth, and then finish their feeding turn by carefully patting his horn while he chewed. Bravest of all was probably Twana who, true to her lineage as the latest of the pioneering Waterberg Nels, did not have a timid hair on her cherub head. Overflowing with love for her new friend she leaned from her mother’s arms and insisted on putting both her hands deep into Bwana’s mouth. I watched in trepidation as his upper lip delicately manoeuvred around the little matchstick forearms and found his pellets in the small happy hands.