As time went on it was as if Munyane was taking charge of her own re-wilding, one step at a time. Her gate was open, there was food if she wanted it, but she was free to come and go. Sometimes she’d choose to hang around the house, often at the stairs leading up to the verandah. I noticed the ticks that she’d picked up while grazing, but was reassured to see how competently she took care of them. The red-billed oxpeckers that had been re-introduced into the reserve in the 1980s were a good first line of defence, each one able to account for 100 fully engorged female ticks or thousands of larvae per day. What the oxpeckers didn’t get went the way of the mud-bath and a variety of rubbing posts. I never tired of watching from the verandah as Munyane parked herself against a tree or over a rock and proceeded to enjoy a blissful abrasive massage of those hard-to-reach corners.
Bwana, although he could roam to the extent of his 20-hectare enclosure, required the ongoing care that comes with wild animals in captivity, so the growing independence of my two other orphans came as a considerable relief. Mothlo had of course been free for quite a while and was seldom up at the house with us during the day. It was logical to assume that she was doing exactly what hippos are meant to do: spending her days at the river. After watching her feeding with a male companion one night I resisted the temptation to check up on her progress any further. I felt quite proud of my resolve and was determined to do the same with Munyane. I would trust that she could handle her own freedom.
On one of Dale’s solo visits to us at Doornleegte, Clive invited me along on an inspection drive – they would see Munyane, he said, and surely I would enjoy watching her, free in the wild. But that was exactly why I couldn’t go along. Those hours or days she chose to spend away from Doornleegte were hours or days she chose to spend away from me. I had to respect that. So I waved them off with a last entreaty not to approach her so closely that she’d know they were there – there was more at stake than the male urge to demonstrate how clever and tough they were. Nevertheless I was pleased that Dale would witness the outcome of something he and Elizabeth had started: they saw Munyane, a distraught little calf with her dead mother, before I did and persuaded me to undertake one more rescue. Her freedom was reward and vindication for all of us – a token of the joint leap of faith that had created Lapalala.
On another occasion I did accompany the men on a long drive up into the eastern section of the reserve. Our last stop was Lookout Camp – four safari-tents hidden among cliff-top vegetation right on the edge of a headland. The kind of place and the kind of moment best enjoyed in companionable silence. Dale stood gazing at the view, a breath-taking sweep to the horizon with flat-topped Malora etched against the sky. Without clouds to flame the sunset it was that still, muted blue of day’s end. Suddenly he turned to Clive and me, and pulled us both into a hug.
“We’ve done it,” he said. “We’ve really done it.”
He tried to say more, but seemed uncharacteristically moved and couldn’t. After all the notes and letters of thanks he’d written to us over the years, I thought I knew how much Lapalala and our role in it had meant to him. But in that moment there was an openness very seldom on display.
We lingered on, hoping for a glimpse of giraffe browsing the tree-tops far below. If we were lucky, although we might not realise it at that distance, they might be rather special giraffe.
Ten years earlier: a flurry of phone calls and cryptic messages, and I was summoned to a council of war. Dale wanted to celebrate his 50th birthday in style; the main attraction was to be Lapalala. They wondered if I might like to be involved.
Of course, how lovely, Dale is our friend. What did they have in mind? They had a lot in mind, and as we worked our way down the column of items (catering, provisioning, accommodation, transport, staff) a second column grew next to it. I was startled to find my name sprouting in several places. I began with the most crucial item when entertaining in the bush: how many mouths to feed how many times over how many days.
D-Day arrived and I discovered that one rather crucial item had slipped through the cracks: my wardrobe. This was not quite as frivolous a concern as it sounds. The birthday bash was to last a weekend. As the wife of the Managing Director of Lapalala and the Alternate Director myself, I had to look the part. Bush casual, I thought, though not too casual. And for the gala dinner: something rather less bush and decidedly less casual. I had nothing to wear.
Clive was no help at all. With typical male myopia he thought that as long as the guests were comfortably accommodated (in bush camps with well-stocked fridges and freezers) and well-fed (including a slap-up multi-course dinner at Kolobe Lodge) they wouldn’t notice anything out of place. He was wrong, but there was no time for debate. He had worries of his own. This was the part of the festivities about which Dale knew nothing. I knew, but had been sworn to secrecy. On the whole I thought I’d rather have my own worries than those of anyone who had to coordinate the logistics of Dale’s birthday surprise. While I was hurriedly trying on and discarding, trying on and discarding, I kept darting to the window to listen. Dale was flying his guests up from the Cape in two Dakotas, and their arrival at the airstrip would be my signal to get into position to welcome them.
“But how will I know when?” I asked Clive.
“You’ll hear them. They’re loud.”
“But there could be other planes. How will I know it’s them?”
He gave me the sort of look a man gives a woman when she displays her ignorance about something which every man is apparently born knowing.
“Because they’re DC3s. That’s why. They’ll sound like DC3s!”
“But what’s that like?” I wailed.
He looked non-plussed. Then he said, “Like old movies. They’ll sound like old war movies.”
They did. That memorable weekend began with the sound of the Allied Forces flying over my childhood Europe at the end of WWII.
Every single Lapalala-staffer got into the spirit of the occasion, from the manager, Clive Ravenhill, on down. Even our EWE office staff came up from Johannesburg to help with afternoon teas and the gala dinner, expertly managed by the lodge manageress. Dale had the pleasure of showing off his Waterberg treasure to his friends, and they in turn had the excitement of springing the surprise. This was planned with the precision of army manoeuvres.
To keep Dale occupied and out of the way a game drive had been organised, the route planned to take him and his guests out of view and out of ear-shot of the main access road. Eventually they wound up at the old reception area in the western section of the reserve where Dale discovered a boma that had been prepared in secret. Within it was his birthday gift: five giraffe (Lapalala’s first), which had been off-loaded a bare minute before the game drive vehicles arrived. Dale was thrilled, but scarcely more so than the conspirators who’d pulled off the split-second operation.
It remains a lovely memory. And so does that afternoon, years later, on Lookout’s wooden deck facing west when I realised as I hadn’t before, that Dale’s response to that patch of earth was very simple: he loved it.
A man of decided opinions, Dale’s choices did not always jump with mine, but this bond we had in common. This dream for wilderness was stronger. I understood why Clive took the risk way back in 1981 of trusting someone on the basis of a dream and a handshake. I understood why the two of them did not have to compete with each other. Dale called Clive “Bwana” and was called “Bwana” in return – a tacit acceptance of equals working together for a greater purpose.
We stayed there on the edge of the cliff while the heat leached out of the day. Between us and faraway Malora with its ancient stone-walling and ghosts, the lowland was falling into shadow. A sudden clatter of hooves on loose stones among the trees at the foot of the cliff set off a commotion of screeching panic. This was deceptive: guineafowl don’t panic. They shriek and squawk and whinge, peevishly broadcasting their exaggerated upset – they’re Mother Nature’s moaners. When we left they were still complaining.
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p; Our way home passed through one of the few cellphone reception spots in the area, but none of us felt like phoning or checking for messages. We dropped down from the plateau into the deeper dusk of the Palala valley. Richer air, heady with the sweetly astringent fragrance of flowering sekelbos; more spoor, more stops to read them. By the time we got to the bridge over the Palala the light was virtually gone.
If there is a more soothing sound than that of a flowing river in a wild place I have yet to discover it. And somewhere in it, or grazing next to it, was Mothlo. I hadn’t seen her for a long time. As far as I knew she was fully part of the wild, free life of Lapalala now. One of those extraordinary occasions when losing something or someone you love is a source of happiness rather than sorrow.
Dinner was the usual relaxed occasion. Stories, jokes, plans, silences when some wild sound reached us and we stopped to listen. Life at Doornleegte was simple. Unfussy food, the unglamorous routines of working with earth and animals. Yet Dale, a dedicated businessman, settled into it with relish.
In our far-from-grand lounge with its 1930s furniture, piles of books, art works by African and European artists, and on one wall, the skin of a lion which Dale himself had shot in Zimbabwe when it was still Rhodesia and he a much younger man, he leaned back and stretched out his legs. “Home from home,” he said.
His words niggled at me the next morning as I drove to the Waterberg Museum at Melkrivier. What is home? Not necessarily the place where you live – ask any exile. It is not where your family is, or your furniture, or your books and clothes, or where you spend most of your time. It may not be the place you’ve bought or constructed with your own hands. It doesn’t even have to be a built structure – ask a child who grows up in a refugee camp, who sleeps in a donated army tent among a dozen others who, like him, know only war and fleeing from war. Whatever home is, it isn’t the same for everyone.
Ask an old man of Bushmen blood where his home is. He’ll go quiet and look away somewhere into the distance, past the trappings and conveniences of the place where he with his remaining clan members had been resettled, and then he’ll begin to tell you about the sky and about the wind and the stories that it used to bring to him. He’ll tell you the distance between water sources, and the names of the stars that showed him the way. The place somebody died, or survived. In his memory he goes home.
Not everyone is content with that. History might have moved on, but they are not ready to. Among all the apparent injustices, the nastiness and cruelty that people perpetrate upon one another, there is one that is more suited to recourse than most of the others. If you have killed my child, I (with or without the law) can make you pay for that, but it will not bring my child back to life. Punish you as I might, he will live only in my memory. But if you have taken my home I, with the full support of the law, will demand adequate recompense. Give me back the place where my forefathers lived, where their graves are.
In this way thousands upon thousands of South Africans looked to the law pertaining to land claims to redress generations of humiliation and want. A compensatory gesture.
For a government beset on all sides by an array of legitimate causes for discontent among its voters, land claims had to serve as the panacea. In September 1999 the Chief Land Claims Commissioner was called to report to the government’s Agriculture and Land Affairs Committee. He was challenged on the apparent slow pace of delivery. In his defence he stated that to date 600 380 land claims had been settled in favour of the claimants. He promised that in another six months, by March 2000, he would have settled 3000 more. And in each subsequent year he would rule in favour of land claimants in at least twice, perhaps even three times, that number of cases.
Well-intentioned as that sounded I had to wonder about its practicability, and the likelihood that the process would be able to confer not just land on the claimants, but what everyone hoped would be the deeper rewards of healing. A successful legal challenge to land ownership is a transaction. A legitimate or in some cases a legitimised redistribution of land. Look beyond the paperwork and the court’s proclamation and the question remains: what qualifies a particular place for a particular person, in his heart of hearts, as his home? Is it roots – some deep ancestral memory that binds him to that specific configuration of landscape? A unique composition of geology and seasons and memory, of growing up and growing old? No doubt.
But what then of those instances where ancestry plays no role? At least not in the obvious nationalistic sense. Take Kuki Gallmann, Italian born and bred. But no one can doubt that for her, “home” in the fullest, most complete sense of being the place where you belong, is Ol Ari Nyiro on the Laikipia highlands in Kenya. She lost both her husband and her son in Kenya – the one in a car accident, the other, most tragically, after a puff-adder bite. But she stayed.
I remember sitting on the Doornleegte verandah listening to her as she spoke about Ol Ari Nyiro and her work there – conservation, social engagement, education. That was in 1991, the first time she visited us at Lapalala. Around us it was the Waterberg, but in her telling – so passionate and evocative – I was there with her, on the edge of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. What she was talking about was not just the work, her house, or the 100 000-acre ranch, splendid as it was, but the depth of her commitment, her love of it. Her enduring bond with the land. Home. An Italian, yet African. There are many like her. “Colonialists” some would say and not intend it as a compliment. In my view they would be wrong. Europeans in Africa are not always a curse. They may find great pain, like Kuki who held her dying son in her arms, but they cannot leave. Africa had taken them captive.
What of us, the Walkers? Clive with his British forebears, I with my German roots – where did we belong?
I turned in through the museum gates. Whose was that bit of the Waterberg before the first of the pioneers who had sold it to the first of the Nels, the ancestor of the generation of Nels who sold it on to us? Despite all the research we had done prior to purchase, we hadn’t been able to discover such an original owner. No doubt the earliest inhabitants, the San, moved through the area en route to those places where we had evidence that they remained for a while. It was only appropriate, I thought, to site a museum honouring the Waterberg’s pre-history at what was then, as it remained up to our day, a crossroads – a meeting point of people and history.
The restaurant, Walker’s Wayside, was doing brisk trade in coffees and late breakfasts. A school group was trailing into the building on the right. I trailed in after them. Eavesdropping on visitors gives much more accurate information about the success or otherwise of your enterprise than any number of tactfully or carelessly filled-in questionnaires. This teacher had done her homework and fortunately it seemed that there was enough of interest for her to be able to hold the attention of her students. As expected the rhino exhibits got the best response – foetuses in formaldehyde bottles, the collection of rhino skulls, and backed by outsize posters of rhino in full charge, the complete skeleton of a white rhino.
That was Rocky, Clive’s pride and joy. In 1982 he had bought him for 1200 rand to add to Lapalala’s white rhino numbers, and to benefit the gene pool of the resident population. Rocky did extremely well until the day, a decade later, when a devastating veld fire swept through Lapalala. In his terror Rocky fled into an eroded riverbed, but his burns were too severe and he died there. It wasn’t until a survey team spotted his remains from the air that his fate became known and Clive could retrieve the skeleton.
The school group moved on to a section devoted to the Save the Rhino Trust, and there I stopped listening, my thoughts going to the courage and commitment of the woman in the large photograph facing the door. Blythe Loutit. As well known as Dr Ian Player’s name is in the story of the white rhino in South Africa, just as well known should Blythe’s be in the story of the survival of black rhino in Namibia. Through SRT she had mobilised everyone from news media to mining organisations, government officials to tribal chiefs and geological prospectors a
nd managed to halt the relentless butchering of rhino and elephant she’d seen in that country. Rhino conservation has its own Hall of Fame – she had richly deserved her place in it.
I left the students to the rest of their tour and got stuck into the task that had brought me there. The old Melkrivier headmaster’s house was not required for museum business, and although the basic renovation was well underway, it was not yet habitable. I’d come equipped with a generous supply of putty and other materials for sealing gaps and holes and cracks where tiny field mice tried to gain access to their former homes and nesting sites.
That’s the bush: so much vigour that if left alone it will quickly overtake our efforts at “taming” it. All over Lapalala I’d seen how evidence of the former agricultural use of the land disappeared under pioneer plants, albeit in this instance with human help encouraging the process. Season after season more life returned as the wilderness reasserted its own, prior, claim to the land.
In many places we’d come across heavy grinding stones, sometimes perfectly preserved as if they’d been used to grind corn only that morning, sometimes cracked by centuries of sun and frost. The users of those stones would have been women taking care of the domestic round as I was doing with my trowel and packets of putty. They would have fetched water from the rivers and there they would have seen the rock paintings left by people who’d lived there long before they did. Did they wonder about them? Did they care? Did they think the remaining traces of that long lost culture worth preserving? Ancient oral cultures, like our modern literate ones, had an acute sense of history – at what point did it begin to stretch beyond their own? We can guess, but we don’t know. Museums are a more modern invention. And in any case, a museum only preserves what remains – the kind of cultural artefacts housed in the Waterberg Museum. Grinding stones, pottery shards, a weathered Bible, hand-printed schoolbooks, faded photographs – evidence of many generations of people who each, at some point in the long history of the Waterberg, called it home. Who’s to say who was right or wrong to do so?
A Rhino in my Garden Page 14