A Rhino in my Garden

by Conita Walker

  At midnight on 3 January Astride made landfall near Mogincual in Mozambique, causing heavy downpours. Subsistence farmers in the area probably wouldn’t have been unduly concerned – it was after all the appropriate season for heavy rains. Perhaps, like us, they were just grateful to have escaped that dreadful African scourge, drought.

  But they would not have known that the seas off Diego Garcia were spawning another disturbance, Tropical Cyclone Babiola, also aiming for the coast of Africa. A few days later a tropical depression had settled over the Mozambique Channel, and farmers on either side of that 1600-kilometre-long passage between Madagascar and the Mozambican coast might well have been thinking that they’d had enough rain now. But there was no let-up. Two weeks later Intense Tropical Cyclone Connie appeared on the meteorologists’ watch list. She hovered north-north-west of Mauritius for three days and then turned her 190-kilometre-per-hour winds south-west on course for the African coast which, like a magnet, seemed to be drawing one storm system after another. While still hundreds of kilometres away Connie was increasing the rainfall on Mozambique’s already saturated soil. In low-lying areas farmers’ shambas were under water. In Nampula Province the Zambezi was steadily rising. Further south, in Gaza Province, the Limpopo surged against the supports of road and railway crossings. The rains continued.

  Within days storm watchers were once more looking south-east of Diego Garcia. A low pressure system there was rapidly building into a tropical storm. This was Damienne. But two days later, of more concern, came a warning from the Cyclone Warning Centre in Perth, Australia: a storm was strengthening off Christmas Island, and moving west-south-west. Tropical Cyclone Leon, which merited a second warning from the Joint Typhoon Warning Centre. On 5 February Leon reached hurricane strength and bore west, honing in on that magnetic African coast. Three days later Leon passed from the Perth meteorologists’ watch to that of the Mauritius Meteorological Service, and was renamed Eline. The Mozambique Channel countries already had had enough to contend with, but this was the name they would remember.

  With Eline still on her approach Southern Africa was dealing with widespread flooding. We heard from our friends in Botswana that in just three days they’d had three-quarters of their annual rainfall. I could clearly picture the run-off into the water courses of Clive’s old stomping grounds. Many times I’d seen those streams turned into rivers and rivers into raging torrents. Water as unstoppable as fire. There was news from further south-east: South Africa’s Kruger National Park. There also large volumes of water made river crossings impassable. Having seen the Kruger in all its moods we were not at all surprised to hear that the military had had to be called in to airlift people stranded by floodwaters.

  From the comfort of our armchairs it was safe to speculate on the possible benefits to Kruger and Tuli, to their other-than-human inhabitants at least, of such a scouring of their water courses. Mother Nature has her own way of spring-cleaning. Face to face with her in that guise, man is very small indeed: already 26 dead in South Africa. That number would rise.

  Further west, we had a much milder time of it. In breaks between rain squalls the Lapalala maintenance teams got started on the most urgent bridge and road repairs. From the wilderness school I heard their vehicles grunting up the incline on the further side of the Palala valley. As I slipped and slid down an animal track the throb of the engines receded and so did the call of the red-chested cuckoo. The nyala’s spoor led to the river bank and then angled into vegetation too thornily formidable for me. I climbed onto a slick black rock that was only just above the foaming rapids. To my right the waters, freed from the rocky chute below the school, spread out into a wide pool grown into a small lake. From my vantage point it seemed to be stretching across the floodplain almost to the foot of Malora. I wondered if more than just the usual flood debris had washed downstream to come to rest here among the reed fringes. Where was Mothlo? Had this powerful Palala surge been a danger to her, or a liberator, forcibly freeing her from her safe and familiar growing-up territory? There was no way of knowing.

  I clambered down and walked out of the noise of the rapids, back to the school and to that cuckoo call that heralds our every spring. From somewhere up north in Africa they migrate down, timing their breeding to the abundance of food in our rainy season – one of nature’s countless perfectly synchronised rhythms that we shared with the children who passed through the wilderness school.

  On the whole they tended to come from two very different frames of reference. There were the ones we sponsored and brought in from impoverished communities; some of them had never encountered wildlife, and had little awareness of the world beyond their rural villages. Others came from greater privilege with a frame of reference significantly enlarged by their access, through travel and media, to global realities and made much more complex because of it. They posed as much of a challenge to us as those who had never been in a position to view an animal as anything other than either food or vermin. How could our conservation message compete with everything else clamouring for their attention and their support? How could I tell them that, even in a world with millions of destitute people and dying children, the survival of a wildlife species mattered?

  They came to visit Bwana and as I held out the bucket of game-feed pellets for the hands – brown, black, white – to dip in and then offer to Bwana a small portion of his favourite treat, I tried to puzzle out who these young people were. I was out of step with their generation. For all I knew they were ill-equipped to care about the things that mattered to me, desensitised on the one hand by greater survival needs, and on the other by an oversupply of distractions and crisis-news from around the world. How could my dedication to an animal like Bwana make sense to them? And how on earth could I, an old lady in their eyes, inspire in them a passion, to match my own, for the natural world?

  I couldn’t. All I could do was to meet a need where I saw it, and for the rest keep doing what Clive and I had always done: facilitate their exposure to the natural environment. Mother Nature herself would do the rest. On that lovely riverside campus with its monkey thorns and wildlife she had as good a chance as we could manage. And the next intake of young people would meet her in her most generous, voluptuous guise.

  But for Mozambique that same rich season was a nightmare. Roads and infrastructure, power supplies, health services and sanitation – it was all falling apart. The numbers of homeless people rose to hundreds of thousands. On 11 February the Limpopo, swollen by its many flooding tributaries, including our Palala, burst its banks, inundating the vast Limpopo basin. A natural disaster became a humanitarian crisis.

  And all the while Intense Tropical Cyclone Eline was still advancing, closing in now on Mauritius, Reunion and Madagascar. She hit the islands as a Category 3 hurricane. She hit Mozambique as a Category 4, with winds of 260 kilometres per hour. It was devastation. And a month later, in a cruel stroke, Very Intense Tropical Cyclone Hudah arrived.

  Madagascar was left reeling, its vanilla crop wiped out, its people facing floods, famine and a cholera epidemic. On the other side of the Mozambique Channel conditions were, if anything, worse. At least 113 000 of Mozambique’s small-scale farmers lost everything, most had to flee for their lives, some into trees where they survived to be rescued, days later, by helicopter. From the air they looked down on their broken world, perhaps not yet realising that another horror would await their return: thousands of landmines – that deadly legacy of the civil war – dislodged by the floods, carried and deposited all over roads and tracks that had previously been cleared and pronounced safe.

  At Doornleegte we took to having our suppers in front of the television set to watch the drama as it unfolded. Pictures of drowned landscapes, rescues of desperate people. Clive and I knew Mozambique, but not like this.

  It wasn’t the first time Mozambique had been crippled by ruinous floods, but the previous times there weren’t television cameras in the rescue helicopters hovering above the floodwaters, and the new
s commentators weren’t speculating about increasing volatility in weather patterns that might or might not be the result of climate change. The previous times I wasn’t looking out at the sodden landscape around Doornleegte with as comprehensive an understanding of our vulnerability to weather systems spawned half a world away. I felt that the planet had somehow become smaller. The troubles of other people in other places had come a whole lot closer.

  Of course, and this is not wrong, it is the plight of the human population that got news coverage. As a conservationist I had to wonder, though, how this disaster might play out. More of the dwindling bush cleared for the re-settlement of so many people; further destruction of the remaining hardwood forests for the already damaging charcoal trade; funds desperately needed for conservation diverted to pressing social needs; subsistence farmers having to look to bushmeat to feed their families. When communities of people get hit by disaster, natural or man-made, the environment always pays a price.

  Mozambique wasn’t the only country to enter the new millennium on its knees. In January 2000 there were wars in Sierra Leone, Algeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Chad, Eritrea, Liberia, Burundi, several in the Republic of the Congo. There were others: Nagaland in north-east India, Afghanistan, Nepal, East-Timor, Chechnya. By the end of January the Balkans, hardly at peace after Kosovo, again erupted with the Macedonian insurgency. Months later there were clashes on the Bangladesh-India border, and the never-yet-at-peace Middle-East flared once more into escalated Palestine-Israel hostilities – the Second Intifada.

  And every one of those conflicts over territorial and resource rights. All of them, without exception, extremely costly to the biodiverse environment as well as to the human population.

  Such was the world my grandson was born into. Billions of people on a crowded planet battling against each other and against the forces regulating the natural systems of the earth. As a child of the internet age, Ayden would know of the world’s crises virtually instantaneously, as they happened – in Japan, in Europe, in South America, in Africa. He’d know about the polar ice caps melting and the glaciers disappearing off Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. And he’d know that all of that, in one way or another, could impact his life. Childhood, it seemed to me, had been robbed of some of its innocence.

  On the day Ayden was introduced to Bwana I stood back and watched as his parents, Anton and René, comforted his initial whimpers and later guided his tiny hands to touch Bwana’s massive, prehistoric-looking head. A meeting of fates, I thought. The one in the hands of the other. If the highly endangered black rhino managed to avoid extinction for a few more years it would be up to my grandson’s generation to help it avoid it for a few more.

  If I could have poured all my hopes for Ayden into that scene, I would have done so. I didn’t want him to grow up overwhelmed and weighed down by the immensity of challenges that we’d brewed up to bestow upon his generation. More than anything I wanted him to be a hopeful child. Even with a global perspective on humanity’s troubles and misery, I wanted him to believe that there’s good to be achieved through being alive during such times.

  In his father’s arms Ayden had cheered up and wriggled to be allowed closer to Clive who was feeding Bwana, answering each rhino vocalisation with one of his own. Before long we were all laughing and I thought: maybe there’d be an advantage to growing up in a conservationist family – if ever there was a resilient and hopeful bunch it’s the conservationists of the world. No matter how chilling the odds, they don’t give up. They take on governments, multinational corporations, the apathy of voters and the greed of those who get voted in. They tilt at windmills and risk ridicule. They don’t win every battle, they may lose their life-savings and break their hearts. But they don’t sit on their hands. If an opportunity offers, large or small, they’ll muster their dreams and jump right in. Our elephants were a case in point.

  When we first came to the Waterberg the only elephants to be seen in the region were the ones fading on rock walls. This despite the fact that the elephant was the totem animal of the Langa people in the Bakenberg community – the owners of the community-run Masebe Nature Reserve. There were beautiful San rock paintings in Masebe, in Lapalala and in other places, but live elephants had been gone for at least 150 years. With more and more Waterberg landowners converting to game farming and wildlife tourism, Clive thought it would only be a matter of time before someone was ready to undertake the first re-introduction of elephants – an enticing prospect for someone with his life-long fascination with the species.

  In 1989 I was still living with one foot in Johannesburg and one evening, after the long trek north, I arrived at Lapalala to find my husband big with news. As he helped me off-load he said, “I’ve been thinking…”

  A game dealer had three young semi-tame elephants for sale at (a princely sum for those days) 10 000 rand each. Dale Parker was attracted to the idea, but in the end shook his head and said if Clive wanted to go for it himself, he was welcome. Clive was sorely tempted. Truth to tell, so was I. We sat down to do our sums. The purchase price would not be the only cost. As item after item got added the total crept closer to the absolute ceiling we could set for ourselves. But when we went to bed that night the decision had been made.

  In due course Rambo, Rogan and Rachel arrived. If all went well, we thought, it could turn out to be another step closer to that fully restored Waterberg ecosystem for which Dale and Clive were aiming.

  It began well enough. During the day the young elephants roamed, in the evening they were lured back with the aid of lucerne to the old white rhino bomas near Rhino Camp and locked up for the night. This was not far from Doornleegte, and a fantastic area for elephant, with sufficient water and browse and a grassland plateau for their grazing.

  Then, after six trouble-free months, we had a visitation from The Authorities.

  So we had elephants: Fine. We wanted them to roam free: Not so fine. Unless their entire roaming area was electrically fenced. The Authorities had been Reliably Informed by A Source (our suspicions fingered a neighbour) that Appropriate Measures had not been taken to Securely Confine The Animals Under Consideration within The Area Under Consideration. We exhibited our permits, which clearly stated that we had permission for the enterprise, the only proviso being that the animals had to be Contained.

  We argued that term: “Contained.” They were in a fenced area in the middle of a huge well-managed wilderness reserve that was itself fenced, and at night they were more than contained, they were locked up. Surely that was enough?

  They countered with the clincher: Were we aware of Paragraph 481 of The Law Pursuant to The Ownership and Confinement of Wild Animals which governs Liability under Roman Law, specifically the actio de pastu, the edictum de ferris, and most particularly the actio lex aquilia which states…

  The Animals Under Consideration, by now happily adapted to their environment, roamed their corner of the Waterberg for a little longer while their fate hung in the balance. The then Transvaal Division of Nature Conservation could neither budge nor assist. Neither could Dale. The Walker finances could not stretch to the electrification of a 10 000-hectare enclosure. All the same, we had no wish to tangle with The Law Pursuant. Our three young elephants went back to the dealer.

  To this day I wonder how that might have turned out. If our plans had succeeded there might in time have been a small herd and who knows, I might one day have found myself rearing an orphaned elephant calf, rather than or in addition to, hippo and rhino calves.

  In an ideal world no wild animal would get orphaned and require the help of a human foster mother, but our world is not an ideal one and wild nature does not play by our sentimental rules. Neither do poachers. There will always be orphans.

  At the time I did indulge in the occasional fantasy, inspired by television programmes in which adorable baby elephants were rescued and hand-reared by people like David and Daphne Sheldrick in Kenya. How I admired them! I remember lying awake one night, trying to picture mysel
f in that kind of role and speculating about how I might have managed if I’d ever found myself with a large and potentially dangerous wild animal on my hands.

  Life has a way of answering our questions: less than two years later Bwana was born.

  Our three young elephants remain a slightly conflicted memory. There was disappointment initially, of course. But since then the conservation world has changed along with the socio-political landscape. Electrified fences have become a non-negotiable requirement of wildlife conservation. Not only are there now many more people living along the borders of wildlife preserves, it has also become impossible for landowners to keep poachable wildlife without allocating a sizeable slice of their budget to security, including armed personnel to patrol those electrified fences. And, as we know, even that is not enough.

  There is also the matter of habitat loss. It is no news anymore that the land available to be set aside for wildlife is not increasing. Confine an elephant population to a fenced-in reserve, and you may well find that you’re placing your botanical diversity under threat. This was a factor in Dale’s reservations about introducing elephants into Lapalala.

  Elephants, unable to migrate, will eat their favourite food until there is no more of it left. In the Waterberg, unless you have a vast wilderness at your disposal and the means to manage its utilisation by elephants, trees like the knobthorn, marula and kiepersol would be heavily browsed, so heavily that they might soon disappear altogether. The first to go could be the mountain syringa (Kirkia acuminate), the Tree of Heaven. And along with those losses the integrity of the entire ecological system that had evolved around them would be under threat.

  Every conservation-minded landowner wrestles with such dilemmas. Solutions are not simple and don’t come from shortcuts. Much though one might like to, you cannot bulldoze your way to your goal. In a socio-political context that seems hell-bent on destroying what remains of the natural world, all the easy tricks are on the side of your opposition. So you talk and listen, negotiate where you can, re-group where you can’t, and then talk some more. Especially when your goal is a biosphere reserve extensive enough to accommodate all species and all interests. In the five years since Annemie de Klerk, representing the Limpopo provincial government, phoned to suggest that Clive, representing the Waterberg Nature Conservancy, should join her in spearheading the formation of a biosphere in the Waterberg, Clive had had to do a lot of talking. To his amusement he earned, and no wonder, the appellation of Walker the Talker.