With the headmaster’s house sealed against anything that might want to burrow, crawl, tunnel or slither its way in, I was ready to go. I roused my assistant. She had earlier got the message that her efforts were not valued and had retired to a corner in what looked like a sulk. At the first signs of what she recognised as packing up, however, she bounded up with as much exuberance as she’d shown earlier in scrabbling after mice and worrying packets of putty, and raced around my ankles, tripping me up at every opportunity until we were out of the door.
Button was mostly fox terrier and wholly personality. As a six-week-old puppy she had turned up at the Melkrivier Museum one morning, a disconsolate little bundle at the end of a wire tied to the chain of a bicycle. Also at the museum that morning was my animal-lover daughter-in-law, René. The outcome was inevitable. The owner of the bicycle, socialising with museum staff, found himself confronted by a petite blonde on the warpath. He was clearly not fit to be in charge of a baby animal. What would it take for him to remove that wicked wire around the poor animal’s neck? It took 30 rand.
Clive was presented with a perky and perfectly groomed puppy as a gift, a much appreciated consolation for our beloved Staffordshire terrier that had died shortly before. Button adopted both of us and became fiercely protective. In the shortest space of time we couldn’t imagine Doornleegte without her feisty energy. She seemed to have no sense at all of her limitations as a small dog. Mothlo and Munyane were playmates she could outrun. Bwana, at full speed, was too fast for her but she kept on trying, dashing underneath his belly, sprinting within inches of his thumping feet. On one occasion she miscalculated. Bwana’s one foot came down squarely on her hip. I feared the worst as she clearly was in great pain. But miraculously there was no break. She recovered and was back to her fearless self.
While I locked up the headmaster’s house, Button raced ahead, taking a short cut through the restaurant’s outdoor seating area en route to her ride home. I followed in her wake, with apologies for my dog threading between chairs and table legs. I heard foreign accents – tourists from Europe and America. As a young girl I’d also dreamt of travelling the world, a dream that came true during my flight-attendant years when it was my job to see all those alluring faraway places. Some of my compatriots discovered localities on other continents where they felt more at home than in Africa. I didn’t. Home was the place I returned to. Once Bwana had entered my life, that was Doornleegte.
Twelve kilometres from the museum there was someone at the reserve gates who knew me and my family as well as I knew him and his. A brief conversation, and in my rear-view mirror I saw him still smiling and waving after me. I was on a road of which I could describe every twist and turn. Didn’t that feel like home? The Palala flowing past Doornleegte also flowed past Lepotedi and Munadu and the reed beds of Tambuti. The paperbark albizias with their peeling, flesh-coloured sheets, the sandstone cliff throwing the night’s frog chorus up to the camp at Umdoni … Maybe home was more than just that rustically comfortable farmhouse with its rhino enclosures among the umbrella thorns. Maybe home was all of Lapalala.
But what of those moments when, standing alone among broken, lichen-covered stone walls on top of Malora, I felt overwhelmed to the point of tears by 360-degree views of such peace and beauty, of the charcoal-green bush-clad bones and sinews of the land all the way to the edge of sight? There, scarcely real in the shimmering haze where the Waterberg gives way before the hills of Botswana, lay the northern extreme of Makuldubane, End Mountain. Maybe my borders were drawn more generously. Maybe home was the Waterberg.
TEN
Waterberg rain
NO ONE LIKES A BACK-SEAT DRIVER. I don’t myself. But on the night of 31 December 1999 I subjected poor Clive to a full range of instructions, cautions and squeaks of alarm. Luckily the ferocious rain made all except my loudest protests inaudible. The windscreen wipers were all but useless. In the headlights we had intermittent, flickering glimpses of the flooded world outside. Torrents of muddy water where there used to be bridges, stretches of washed-away road which transformed our route home into something that for me became virtually unrecognisable and felt never-ending.
We had considered turning back, but Clive thought we’d get through. He’d been in worse. In fact so had I, but that was when I was still young enough to believe that fortune favoured the terminally optimistic. As we crawled beyond the point where turning back was an option, it seemed that Clive still believed that high spirits conquered all. “Good rains!” he bellowed above the din.
We reached the hair-raising descent from the plateau, the road gouged now by rushing streams carrying stones and red soil to the valley floor. A few more slithery kilometres further along what was left of the access road we guessed at our turn-off, the familiar landmarks lost in volumes of water that bucketed straight down. At last the headlights revealed the farm gate with its uniquely drunken list – an early encounter with a strapping young hippo, Mothlo. Clive volunteered to get out and open it, but I was already on my way. Drenched in seconds I waved him through, dragged the gate shut and squelched to the back door. The homely comforts of Doornleegte had never been more welcoming than on that night of severe flooding in Limpopo Province.
The weather seemed appropriately apocalyptic. If the media were to be believed the world as we knew it was about to end. The year 2000 heralded Something. The dawn of a new era, the final flowering of the Age of Aquarius, or according to the doomsayers, Armageddon. At the stroke of midnight the Millennium Bug would strike in a global electronic meltdown: computers would malfunction and satellites plunge to earth, banks wouldn’t be able to operate, planes wouldn’t be able to fly, things that shouldn’t would blow up. Only those with well-stocked bunkers would survive.
But on the whole, even for the doomsayers, it was party time. In front of television screens in millions of sitting rooms like ours at Doornleegte, in pubs, town squares and closed-off streets around the world, people watched as nations, longitude after longitude, counted down the seconds to the New Millennium.
Outside, the storm was gathering strength. Telephone communications were already down; a power cut wasn’t far off. But we had candles and champagne. Clive raised his glass: “To you, Grandma!”
It was true: we were grandparents. Our nightmare drive back that night was the return from a New Year’s Eve celebration with our children and not-quite-two-months-old Ayden.
Our family now spanned four generations. Clive’s mother was over 80 and as independently spirited as ever. But with every subsequent visit to us in Lapalala I noticed bigger changes. Her short walks to Bwana’s enclosure became slower, the time she spent there to watch him or me working with him became shorter. She wouldn’t admit to pain. For her children a difficult decision was suddenly made easier when we found a kinder alternative to the frail care options in Johannesburg for which she simply wasn’t ready: we’d bring her to live with us at Doornleegte. If all went well, she’d be there with us long before the next New Year’s Eve.
Clive, philosophically inclined as he was, yet found the frailty of the only parent he ever really knew hard to witness. The fact of our mortality hit him young, with his father’s death when he was only eight. After that he was never able to take life for granted to the same degree as so many other young people did and still do.
I looked at him, sitting across from me in his comfortable old easy chair. Thirty-two years earlier I did the same. We were living in Johannesburg then, we’d been married for just over a year and he was holding our one-month-old firstborn son on his first New Year’s Eve. Now we were what could politely be termed “mature”. His hair and beard were streaked with grey; his eyes, like mine, needed glasses. The South Africa we were living in would have been unrecognisable to that young couple in the 1960s.
Apartheid had gone and so – at least from the political arena – had the most famous post-apartheid icon, Nelson Mandela. With the 1999 national elections he was as good as his word and did not stand for re-e
lection as president. His successor, Thabo Mbeki, was facing fearsome tests on all fronts. The initial euphoria of the new freedom had worn off. Too many South Africans were becoming impatient with the non-delivery of too many election promises; health and social services and educational institutions were buckling under over-idealistic reforms; every so often a member of the new ruling elite was found to be considerably less noble than his or her Struggle persona. The Reverend Alan Boesak, a shining beacon in the fight against apartheid, was found guilty and jailed for defrauding European donors through his Foundation for Peace and Justice. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela – though she was ultimately untouchable – had to stand trial for, among other crimes, murder. We reluctantly had to give up on the naïve mythology of a shift in South Africa’s socio-political order delivering also a morally impeccable governing authority.
However pragmatic a view one took of nations in transition, the facts were not reassuring. Crime was on the rise, significantly so even in a society where such things were known to be grossly under-reported. In 1999 violent crime was up by 22% since 1994. A third of all recorded crime was violent.
Still, elsewhere it was much worse. There was growing political and social instability in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. News of land invasions, summary arrests and torture of journalists and political opponents began to reach us. There was a noticeable increase in refugee movements across the border. We were uncomfortably aware that the only thing preventing Zimbabwe’s problems from becoming South Africa’s was that porous border along the Limpopo, a scant few hours’ drive north of our home-base in the Waterberg. Like a Waterberg veld fire, your neighbour’s politics affected you too.
Our field of operations was not primarily political; we worked for a cause which we believed was greater than that. But under apartheid we’d learnt that in the end everything is political. Nothing is immune. The agendas that drive the politics of the day will draw borders between countries and between people. They will affect your life and work, no matter how high the moral ground on which you think you stand.
Conservationists would like to think that conservation priorities trump political ones. That is not always the case. In 1998 the South African Land Claims Court published a landmark ruling. It decided in favour of a claim by the Makuleke community. The claim comprised almost 20 000 hectares of pristine wilderness in South Africa’s oldest and largest nature reserve, the Kruger National Park, run by a parastatal organisation, the South African Parks Board.
Protracted and difficult negotiations were undertaken in the hope that the claimants would support, to their own financial and social benefit, the continued utilisation of the land as conserved wilderness. It was match-making between politics and conservation. An agreement was reached: the Makuleke Contractual Park was formed and would continue to operate as part of the KNP. What seemed at first to have been an ominous sign turned into a favourable outcome for both the claimants and for a national conservation asset.
In the 1950s Clive’s mother had taken her two small boys on trips to the old Kruger Park, and many years later as young parents ourselves it was our turn to do the same. Pafuri, the northern area around the Levuvhu River, including the triangle between the confluence of the Levuvhu and the Limpopo which was to be claimed by the Makuleke, seemed a paradise then. At the end of 1999 it was good to know that it was to remain so.
In that mysterious and deceptively comforting way one has of dealing with the passing years, we still felt like those same much younger people, as if all the changes were only in the world outside. But every so often life hands one a moment when, even by the light of candles – so much more merciful than electrical light – one has to quietly acknowledge to yourself that the years have left their mark on the one who is closest and most dear to you.
It could hardly be otherwise. The Waterberg Environmental Centre and Museum at Melkrivier were up and running; Clive was appointed to the Limpopo Province Tourism Board; a book, Larger Carnivores of the African Savanna, which he’d illustrated, got published and he’d begun writing a co-authored book, African Elephants. He still served on the African Rhino Specialist Group of the IUCN and was heavily involved in the campaign for the formation and ratification of the Waterberg Biosphere Reserve. All of this in addition to his responsibilities in Lapalala, his ongoing patronage and support of the Endangered Wildlife Trust and his chairmanship of the wilderness school. Whenever there was a spare moment he painted and donated his art works to raise funds for conservation.
It was the life he wanted and he went at it with the vigour of a young man. Sometimes with the agility of a young man too, as I reminded him when the evening and the champagne reached the stage where I was brave enough to risk mention of The Day of the Leguaan.
Clive’s studio was situated about 15 metres from the house. In summer, when the Palala valley lay shimmering in the heat, he left the windows open to the surrounding bush and the occasional lazy stirring of heavy, perfumed air. The stable door was of unusual design; Mothlo’s attentions and the necessity of effecting repairs that would keep her out while still allowing Clive in saw to that.
One morning he opened that stable door and realised that someone or something had managed to get in. Not Mothlo. For one thing the door was intact, and for another no hippo could have caused that smell. A silver beer mug, a 21st birthday gift from way-back-when, was lying on the floor surrounded by the collection of paint brushes normally stashed in it. Some of the animal skulls with which he cluttered up the place – decorated, he said – had been moved.
It might have been a squirrel or a vervet monkey. They were always around. But so were the black mambas – the hill behind Doornleegte was alive with them. From his collection of “knob-kieries” he selected as good a weapon as could be found in an artist’s studio and starting poking around. He tracked the source of the smell to a generously-sized white, yellow and black deposit next to a large wooden architect’s cabinet which housed his art paper and finished works. Leguaan, he thought.
The culprit had to be underneath the cabinet. He bent down to peer into the dark space, then carefully retreated and shouted for back-up. While he waited he ran through the number of options available in such a confined space. There weren’t many. His back-up, Fred and Rosina, arrived and armed themselves with their pick of the knob-kieries. Then they retreated. In order to do their best work, they felt, they required lots of room, well away from the action, outside the studio.
Clive entered alone. The few centimetres of tail he could see sticking out was attached to something which filled up all available space under the cabinet. Not all reptiles are venomous, but most of them can bite, and almost all of them if grabbed by the tail will do the same thing: whip around with lightning speed and sink its teeth or fangs into you. If it had neither teeth nor fangs it could clamp bony jaws onto your hand or arm with enough force to draw blood. So you didn’t do that, you went for the back of the head. If you couldn’t, you grabbed what you could and trusted to speed.
The sight of Clive flying through the open door, trailing a 2.5-metre snake and then with adrenaline-fuelled strength sending it sailing over the grass, stunned Fred and Rosina into horrified inaction. As the large rock python made a bee-line for the undergrowth Fred was the first to recover. He was highly indignant. Didn’t Clive realise what strong medicine could have been made from a snake that size? For probably the first time in his life Clive had absolutely no interest in indigenous culture and said so.
Much of our reminiscing that night involved wild animals. Naturally – they so often dictated the shape of our days. The duration if not the distance of a trip either within the reserve or to any destination beyond the reserve gates was determined by the truculent rhino blocking the road, or the herd of antelope refusing to be hurried out of the way. A sudden heart-stopping stampede of a group of eland could have you slamming on the brakes. A magnificent kudu bull might cross right in front of you and you’d find you simply had to wait to see its family materialise out
of seemingly impenetrable bush, looking as poised and graceful as only kudu cows with their young can. Or a field ranger might radio in an emergency and all at once whatever plans you had had for the day would be scuppered. The rescue of a baby rhino, for example, sending your whole life veering in a direction you’d not foreseen.
Little did I know when I first agreed to become foster mother to a wild animal that I’d relinquished control over even the time I got up in the morning. As with a new baby in the home I knew that there’d be initial disruptions and discomforts, but I naïvely assumed that at some point we’d settle into a routine. In any case, I’d never been a late sleeper – I’d be up long before anyone else. Bwana took care of that illusion.
I have vivid memories of Clive and me scrambling out of bed and like a well-coordinated if bleary-eyed team sprinting to our allocated stations: I to get my hands on a bucket of game pellets, he to open the gate to Bwana’s enclosure. Once in position we’d proceed to phase two: attracting the attention of the black rhino bull busy sharpening his horn on that long-suffering studio door. This was Bwana during his carefree days of roaming the Lapalala wilderness. In the dim, uncertain light of dawn he appeared colossal and every bit as dangerous as he was, especially when viewed by people in their pyjamas. I would call out to him and with the aid of the pellets lure him along the verandah, manoeuvring to a point where he could catch sight of Clive who, now poised at the entrance to the garden, was semaphore-ing to initiate phase 3. From that point on timing was everything.
Bwana spots Clive and gives chase; Clive bolts into the enclosure and, with Bwana’s charge a heartbeat from his fleeing heels, heads for the highest fence pole; I race after Bwana, frantically rattling the pellet bucket; at the last moment Bwana, unable to resist a racket that implies food, wheels around and comes for me; I stop breathing, pole barrier and bribe-bucket between Bwana and myself; Clive shinnies down his pole, vaults the fence, gallops around the outside, slams the gate and triumphantly locks it.
A Rhino in my Garden Page 15