A Rhino in my Garden

by Conita Walker

  We’d always end up laughing and, still out-of-breath over coffee, assure each other that of course he wouldn’t have hurt us. But the next time it happened it would be as nerve-wracking as before. After the night when Bwana was attacked by another rhino bull it was the end of his freedom. I know now that I’d have been willing to endure any number of his uniquely fraught wake-up calls if he could have remained free.

  Inevitably, that New Year’s Eve also became a stock-taking of our life’s work. All was not well with conservation in South Africa. If one looked hard enough you could find hopeful signs but on the whole it wasn’t a matter of advancing nature’s cause, more a case of fighting to slow the retreat. Biodiversity conservation made for good green slogans, but was in reality slipping ever lower on the political agenda. Organisations in charge of natural areas – botanical gardens, provincial nature reserves which were in fact national assets – were warned that they’d have to survive on greatly reduced subsidies, or on no subsidy at all. Places of refuge for wildlife and lovers of wildlife had to become commercially viable. Only if it pays, it stays. Biodiversity conservation would be determined by the marketplace, dictated by the whims and vagaries of consumers. I wished I had more faith in the wisdom of consumers.

  My faith in the wisdom of governmental structures was already rather threadbare. Very good at talking, they’d make a statement, call a meeting, form a task group, launch a consultative process. But far too often an unacceptable situation would only improve if a private individual stepped in. And that wasn’t only true for conservation.

  In the early 1990s I had discovered that there was no school nearby where Lapalala’s 70 staff members could send their children. For a teacher like myself that was an unacceptable state of affairs. My appeals to the relevant authorities resulted in a lot of forms to be filled in, not much more.

  Finally, frustrated with the wait-and-see attitude of the Department of Education, I phoned a farmer, Louis Nel. “Come over,” he said.

  He showed me a piece of land, right on the boundary he shared with Lapalala. “Will this do?” he asked. I assured him it would. His ready cooperation shouldn’t have surprised me, and perhaps it didn’t. Louis, like so many other farmers I’d come to know, came from pioneer stock – farm schools were simply an accepted part of the farming landscape. His wife, Ansa, promised to teach the first two grades.

  I drove the 120 kilometres to Nylstroom (Modimolle), withdrew my personal savings and sent a message to Klaas Mashasha, a builder who worked at Lapalala. On 18 February 1994, a crowd of well-wishers and prospective pupils joined the Nels, Klaas and me for the school’s opening. Glowing red facebrick, proper ablution facilities, a playground with jungle gyms and swings and various other opportunities for exercising and strengthening young limbs. We named the school Refihlile: We have arrived.

  Almost six years on the school was thriving, the learners now on their Christmas break. All of them have also passed through the Lapalala Wilderness School, their education rounded out by learning about the environment that determined their own survival to an extent our rulers weren’t ready to fully acknowledge, even when they were ready to fully understand it in the first place.

  Clive got up to look out at the night. I joined him at the open door. The world had disappeared. There was only rain. Fragrant, blessed rain.

  I wondered how Mothlo was faring in the fiercest storm she’d yet had to survive. I asked Clive whether we ought to be concerned about the level of the Palala. He refused to worry. If the water was over the bridge, or had already damaged the bridge, there was nothing to be done – no right-thinking person would be outside and trying to cross. As for Doornleegte itself, the Palala might burst its banks, but short of a flood of biblical immensity we’d be above the flood-line. In any case, he said, looking at me over his glasses, a shared bottle of champagne was nowhere near enough alcohol to make him go out in the middle of the night in the middle of a storm to go stare at a flooding river on the impossibly remote chance that he might be able to spot his wife’s hippo.

  With Doornleegte’s candles burning low, the last of the champagne served to toast Ayden, the newest of the Walkers, too young to know that what he was hearing that night, just like his grandparents, was hard Waterberg rain on a tin roof. Where would his fate take him? He might grow up to live and work, like his parents and grandparents, in the Waterberg. Or he might leave one day to make a life elsewhere and discover that he is forever longing for the smell of Waterberg rain.

  Conita Walker, née Hagens, and Joan Dobson, née Keyser, at Barcelona airport in front of Trek Airways’ ‘Super Star’ Constellation 4 engine propeller-driven aircraft in 1965.

  Clive and Conita at an Endangered Wildlife Trust function at the Johannesburg Zoo offices in 1980. Clive at the time was the trust’s director.

  Ladies’ Committee members of the EWT. Front row, left to right: Val Whyte (Chair), Jill Morrison, Joy Cowan. Back row, left to right: Petra Mengel, Conita, Anne Deane and Wendy Farrant.

  Dale Parker, owner of Lapalala Wilderness, visits the black rhino orphan Bwana at Karen Trendler’s orphanage for the first time. Bwana was by then a month old.

  Karen Trendler with the three-week-old black rhino orphan, Bwana

  The Natal Parks Board transport vehicle, which was kindly made available to bring Bwana to the Walkers’ home at Lapalala Wilderness.

  Bwana being treated for polyarthritis in his knees by Karen Trendler while Conita gets his attention with a milk bottle.

  Black rhino calves require large quantities of fat-free milk.

  Karen Trendler’s Jack Russell gives baby Bwana a friendly lick at her Pretoria rehabilitation centre.

  Rosina Baloyi, Conita’s right-hand assistant, feeds the now one-year-old black rhino with game pellets.

  Bwana and Conita take time out on the veranda of her home, Doornleegte, at Lapalala. Note the swimming pool fencing to keep him off the verandah.

  Mothlo the baby hippo orphan, badly scarred from hippo bites on the day she was found, receiving her first bottle from Conita.

  It was not long after Mothlo was found that we built her a swimming pool in our back garden. Here she is taking a dip while her keeper, Fred Baloyi, splashes water over her.

  A very different, contented hippo with Conita in the front garden. Mothlo grew to hate human males, other than Fred, which made life very difficult for any male visitors, including Clive.

  Half asleep, a rapidly expanding, fully recovered Mothlo allows Conita to tickle her.

  Conita and Mothlo on the one-kilometre walk to the Palala River for her daily swim.

  Mothlo watched over by Conita in her favourite swimming hole in the Palala River to which she eventually returned permanently. Clive returned the first three wild hippo to the river system in 1985.

  Around 3000 school children from our environmental school came to visit our orphans yearly with their teachers. For many this was a life-changing experience listening to Conita’s stories of their histories.

  On rare occasions we were able to slip away to one of Clive’s favourite places – Savute. Old friends, Avril Shepherd, Conita, Lloyd and June Wilmot, David Shepherd and Clive here at Pump Pan.

  Fred and a sleeping Mothlo in front of Bwana’s enclosure, here being fed cubes by his keeper Titus.

  Munyane the white rhino female orphan dozes next to the seated note-taking Conita in her driveway at Doornleegte.

  Munyane’s favourite toy was an old motor car tyre, used here as a pillow.

  Munyane preferred to drink her milk from a ploughshare, rather than a plastic bottle.

  Conita with her two boys, Renning, the eldest, and Anton enjoying sunbathing at her Glendower home in Edenvale.

  Conita’s human family in the Waterberg – Back row, left to right: Renning, our eldest son, Cynthia and Charlie Odendaal, Rene’s parents. Middle, left to right: Enid Walker and Conita. Seated in front row, from left to right: René and Anton, and Ayden Walker seated on Clive’s lap.

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sp; Conita with the now full-grown, magnificent black rhino Bwana in his enclosure adjacent to their home at Lapalala Wilderness

  Daily lectures were given to children visiting the Wilderness School and members of the public. Nothing quite prepares you for standing up close in front of one of these animals. Since 2008 more than 6000 rhino have been killed in South Africa.

  Munyane, the white rhino, brings her calf, Mokibelo, to her feeding station outside her garden. Munyane was by now a free, wild rhino.

  Bush baby, Clive and Conita’s granddaughter, Tristyn Amber Walker.

  Conita in a moment of happy reflection.

  A close-up of the prehensile lip of a black rhino.

  Conita spent many patient hours encouraging Bwana to eat wild plants, which she carefully noted. Rhino have their likes and dislikes, which can include poisonous plants.

  Moêng, the black rhino female orphan whose terrible injuries came close to killing her only for her to be gunned down in her enclosure by persons unknown at the start of the South African rhino war in 2008

  ELEVEN

  Ayden’s world

  OUR NEW MILLENNIUM BEGAN much as the old one ended, wet and getting wetter. No sooner would we have cleared away the soggy lucerne and mud-trampled browse from Bwana’s feeding area, and replaced it with freshly cut branches, than another ear-splitting salvo would roll down the valley and the heavens open once more. Bwana, untroubled by thunder and lightning, would waken from his doze under the trees, stretch, amble over to a favourite rubbing post and stand there rocking gently while the rain poured down his glistening flanks. Then, the last of his sleepiness washed out of him, he’d look around for entertainment. He’d find it. Titus and I had taken to placing the fresh browse on top of the enclosure railing, wedging it there within Bwana’s reach but well clear of the mud. It was no use. Bwana didn’t share my fears about contamination risks and in no time at all the branches would be yanked down and swung and shoved all over the place. It was playtime. Rain never failed to plunge him straight back into puberty. He’d jump up and down, splashing mud over himself, his food, over Titus and me. He’d race off to the furthest corner of his huge enclosure and then come charging back, blowing like a bellows in that glorious rain-fresh air and making me laugh with his sheer delight in life.

  This side of his nature showed very early on, during his first rainy season at Doornleegte. He was just over a year old. We were halfway up our hill on an exploratory ramble when the rain started spitting. As the first heavy drops steamed away off his back and off the rocks around us there was that unmistakable sense of charged air with the smells of the bush intensifying. Within minutes we were in a drizzle and Bwana’s dusty shoulders darkly streaked. The hard rain arrived, so loud I could no longer hear Bwana’s rapturous sniffing at every wet bush or branch. I was drenched and wouldn’t have minded a rapid retreat down the hill, but he had other ideas. He clearly loved being out in the rain, pushing through the sodden vegetation, taking sips from small puddles, and smelling, smelling everything. I didn’t have the heart to cut short his excursion. I squelched up and around and eventually down that hill back home, soaked and shivering with my contented little rhino by my side.

  His love affair with rain and mud continued. As an adult bull he still revelled in trampling every patch of water-softened soil into a mini mud-bath and then trying to get as much of his bulk as possible into it. When the high heat of summer forced most creatures into the shade he’d spend a lot of time lying in his water hole, getting out from time to time to scrape in more mud from the perimeter and then wallowing in that richer, stickier bath. That whole water-logged 1999–2000 season, whenever I passed his enclosure or glanced out through the kitchen window, there he was: an enormous adult black rhino bull endeavouring still with the single-minded enjoyment he’d shown in his first years to coat every inch of himself with Doornleegte’s thick rust-red mud. It’s an indelible memory in which my summers are anchored.

  Since heavier rains made heavier work I have memories too of that season’s weariness, of power cuts and clothes that wouldn’t dry out; of my old Toyota’s grinding, slithering progress from one bush camp to the next; of getting out in the pouring rain to first test river-crossings on foot before low-gearing into the rushing, swirling waters. For a brief time the Waterberg was living up to its name in a way it hadn’t done for many decades. Everywhere there was the sound of water: thundering in foam-fringed rapids, trickling in rills across and in between rocks, dripping from the thatched eaves of a bush camp.

  There was one morning… Before the start of the school year, I was at the wilderness school campus with my perennial list of items to be checked or repaired or improved. A red-chested cuckoo was calling – three liquid notes endlessly falling in counterpoint to the river which tumbled and roared less than 100 metres away. Hoping to spot the cuckoo somewhere in the canopy, I rounded a corner and stopped in my tracks. Under a stand of monkey thorns, covered in golden flower spikes and abuzz with bees and insects, a nyala ram had its head down, nibbling at the carpet of flowers and the previous season’s split seed pods. Saffron-tipped horns with their elegant twist, dark charcoal-brown coat, cinnamon shanks against the cream of the fissured and flaking tree trunks. I remembered the planting of those monkey thorns 15 years before – slender saplings to mark our hopes for the school. Now they towered into the summer-blue sky. The nyala moved off down to the thicker vegetation of the river bank. I stayed under the fragrant trees mesmerised by the play of refracted light in drops suspended from recurved thorns and feathered leaves. Each one, falling, flashed purple or crimson or gold. Little jewels to be shown to an infant grandson.

  Lapalala that season was an Aladdin’s cave of treasures that I looked forward to sharing with Ayden. Nursery groups of baby impala staring at me with wide un-afraid eyes, a blue-headed tree agama in its breeding livery, garishly bright on a tree trunk at Kolobe Lodge. I tried to see again with the fresh perception of a small child. The delicious surprise of everything discovered for the first time, when you’re free to marvel without needing to understand any of it. When you still have permission to be awe-struck, to see wonders everywhere. Mysteries and miracles. When you can give your heart so unreservedly, without calculation.

  My grandson, by the extraordinary everyday miracle of his birth, brought me this gift. I looked at my world anew, and gave myself full permission to express the joy it gave me. I’d been entrusted with a wondrous life, and I allowed myself to be openly in love with it. So what if South Africa had problems? There was still a future full of possibilities. What of the many conservation battles that still had to be fought? If we were still fighting it meant that we hadn’t lost yet. If we were still fighting it meant that we still had the conviction that it was worth the fight. One look into Bwana’s eyes, and I had all the conviction I needed. Here was a cause worth fighting for. Wildlife conservation was so much bigger than any of us, too big for individual agendas, I thought, too big and too important to allow for the possibility of failure. With all of the Waterberg around me bursting with new life I felt up to the fight, whatever it took. So what if mine was a rosy-hued perspective, sentimental, unrealistically optimistic? I didn’t care who knew it. I was older; I felt younger.

  Every day, several times a day, I pulled on my mud-stained no-longer-white rubber boots and splashed through the puddles to Bwana’s enclosure. Every day the railing creaked as he leaned towards me and moo-ed his welcome. Most days I pushed back the hood of my waterproof coat and lifted my face to the rain. I was happy.

  That same rainy season that brought such loveliness to us in the Waterberg, brought misery to others. Night after night I stared at the television screen and felt undeservedly protected. I also realised – ever the teacher I suppose – that if one wanted a perfect illustration of the fact that nothing stood apart from everything else, you need only look at the weather. Our nail-biting drive home through torrential rain on New Year’s Eve was due to a weather system that had formed thousands o
f kilometres away – south of a mid-ocean coral atoll, Diego Garcia – just before Christmas. Storms brewing off Diego Garcia were hardly unusual: we were mid-way through the South-West Indian Ocean cyclone season when meteorologists were always tracking such things. But this one, Severe Tropical Storm Astride, was the harbinger of terrible news headlines. In the early hours of the first day of the new year, as Clive and I stood at Doornleegte’s verandah door, the strong rain we saw was but the furthest fringe of Astride’s reach. At that very moment its centre was pounding the northern tip of Madagascar, and edging into the Mozambique Channel.