It paid off. One afternoon in August 2001 I found myself sitting among more than 150 Waterbergers in the auction hall of a game capture and auctions outfit 30 kilometres from Vaalwater. As I glanced around the predominantly male audience, khaki much in evidence, I realised that the wonder was not that the establishment of a biosphere reserve could have taken five years, the wonder was that it hadn’t taken longer. Represented there that day was the full spectrum of divergent opinions and agendas that had had to be brought on board – game rangers, hunters, farmers, community leaders, members of the South African Police Service, game dealers, representatives of municipal and governmental structures, of conservation organisations and tourism concessions. Every stakeholder an independent-minded operator who had to be convinced of the fact that this holistic model, holistically managed, would benefit him, on the ground, in real practical terms. In March 2001 the Waterberg Biosphere Reserve was ratified by UNESCO and five months later South Africa’s Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Valli Moosa, joined us at Mpatamacha to launch the newest of our country’s biosphere reserves, the first one in the savannah biome. A new beginning for the Waterberg.
The WBR logo featured, unsurprisingly since Clive had a hand in it, an elephant. The steering committee had agreed that as the totem animal of a Waterberg community the elephant would be an appropriate symbol. Clive submitted a design based on a San rock painting he’d seen in Masebe. The idea was good, the committee said, but the rock art image of an elephant didn’t read well enough. Couldn’t Clive just draw or sketch or paint, or whatever it is that he did, the thing himself?
In the studio at Doornleegte I saw it taking shape: a mature elephant bull striding across a Waterberg skyline. The colour brochure was familiar to me too: on the cover, waterbuck initially sketched on a hot November afternoon with the sound of cicadas and a crested barbet and the faraway drone of an airliner dragging its vapour trail across the sky.
At the WBR launch venue that day there was another waterbuck. A majestic animal that had had its trophy status accorded the tribute of being killed, stuffed and mounted. Like the others on the walls around us – buffalo, gemsbok, kudu, eland – it had outwitted, out-fought, and out-run every predator. Save one.
I was glad not to have been faced with a rhino in that setting. Could that day come? I’d heard all the arguments favouring rhino farming. Some of them, although uncomfortable to me, were not easy to counter. But I had great difficulty in seeing an animal like Bwana or Munyane as a commodity, a provider of harvestable rhino horn, or an earner of tourism dollars in the form of hunting licences. I simply couldn’t picture Bwana’s head on some trophy hunter’s wall.
Such thoughts are personal and not politically correct – I’d learnt to keep them to myself. But I was reasonably sure that at least two people present on that occasion shared my sentiments. We didn’t discuss it, but I’d seen Clive and Dale Parker with Lapalala’s rhinos – I didn’t need to be told that they infinitely preferred a live rhino to a dead one, regardless of the profit that might arise from such a death. The furthest thing from Dale’s mind at that point would have been to see Lapalala as anything other than a safe and protected sanctuary for his rhinos. The formation of the WBR was, in his eyes as in Clive’s, a little bit of additional insurance for Lapalala’s future. He didn’t want to miss an occasion that signified the successful conclusion to that particular phase of their efforts, so he’d opened up a few days in his schedule to fly up from the Cape and attend the launch.
With official proceedings concluded, Dale was itching to leave. The next day his brief Waterberg break would be over and he preferred to spend as much of his time as possible surrounded by the Lapalala bush. With Clive unable to get away so early, Dale and I said our goodbyes and set off. Our drive back was, as always for me, a shedding of the rest of the world. Once through the reserve gates, what we’d left behind seemed so much less real than what was around us – less real and less true.
A few kilometres in, at an extensive grass-field backed by a range of hills, we slowed down hoping to spot a white rhino bull that frequented the area. Dale had insisted on naming him Hatton, Clive’s middle name chosen in remembrance of his grandfather, that 16-year-old soldier from London’s Hatton Garden who’d brought this branch of the Walkers to Africa.
Dale braked, and pointed. There, less than 100 metres away, as impressive and as perfect for his setting as always, was Hatton. The heavy head lifted. Trophy horns where they belonged: on the rhino.
Tempting as it was to linger, I had responsibilities waiting at Doornleegte. Clive’s mother had been with us for close on a year now and although she didn’t make any demands, I didn’t like leaving her on her own for too long. There was also Bwana, of course, and as soon as Clive arrived home, it would be time for supper, which I still had to prepare.
I asked Dale to drive on. I wish I hadn’t done so.
TWELVE
Rapula
THE RAIN ARRIVED BEFORE daybreak that morning. No thunder, no lightning. None of the wild summer-storm drama to set your ears ringing and your heart racing. Still, long before I heard the first drops on the roof, I had felt it. Clive too had been wakened by the sense of distant, approaching weather – a primitive sense, like that of a wild animal, restored to humans by a lifetime in the bush. We were not the only ones in the Waterberg to lie awake waiting for the cool air to turn moist, or to get up and stand in front of an open window to breathe it in. But perhaps we were the only ones to realise that morning that for us something had shifted. Rain would never again arrive the way it used to. Much as our lives had always been tied to, indeed often been ruled by rain, from that point on the connection would be even more personal. With the rain would come a flood of memories of a man who’d borne the Sotho name Rapula, Giver of Rain.
Because of him every shower, every storm would be a commemoration. Renewal and loss, beginnings and endings all mixed up in the same memory. And that morning, the first time it rained again after he’d left, it hit home. Sixteen years ago now.
On the clearest of spring mornings, with Doornleegte’s garden glowing in early sun, I was on the verandah. I might have looked up at the sky as I so often did and still do with some idle speculation about the day’s weather, although I don’t recall that particularly. The moment that remains etched in my memory came next, when I walked back indoors to answer the phone. It was Elizabeth Parker. First I and then Clive listened as she told us what she herself found impossible to believe. Dale was gone. The previous afternoon, following a tree-felling operation during which he’d over-exerted himself, he didn’t feel well. She took him to hospital. Later that night he had a massive heart attack. He did not survive. On 7 September 2001, after just 61 years, his life was over.
There were phone calls to be made, people to be told. None of it seemed real. Later I walked out with Clive and watched as he went down the verandah steps and through the garden to his Pajero – he had a presentation to do at the wilderness school. All I could think about was that Elizabeth would never again have that: her husband’s voice, his way of going about his day. I couldn’t even begin to know what that meant, how one dealt with such a blow. Clive was five years older than Dale; they’d always joked about him going first, and I’d usually joined in with a wifely protest and some silly quip about women outliving their spouses. Now I smarted at the heedlessness of it.
After a while I went back inside. Mother, her wheelchair still pulled up to the breakfast table, looked up. Suddenly it struck me: widowed at 27, with two pre-teen boys. She knew. Whatever Elizabeth, also a mother of two, was going through, she knew. Quietly she wheeled herself out onto the verandah. With the pretext of clearing away breakfast I stayed behind and watched through the window until she’d settled at the railway sleeper table, her devoted little terrier at her feet.
I knew she wouldn’t want me fussing over her. She never did – she expected me to get on with my work. For much of the day she remained there, alone with her t
houghts, observing the life of the garden, the birds and the small wild creatures that visited it.
It was appropriate that there should have been someone at Doornleegte that day who was not caught up in the rush of life, who would go apart, who would be silent. It fell to Mother to do what, in a more respectful world, more of us would have done. I like to think she was there on the verandah on behalf of those of us who, for the whole of that day and long after, still kept hearing Dale’s voice calling to Clive to hurry up and join him for a sundowner.
That evening we spoke of Dale’s last day at Lapalala, just a few weeks before. On the day following the biosphere launch he and Clive had finished their inspection drives and taken whatever decisions needed to be taken about reserve business. As usual Clive was to take him to the airport and, as usual when departure time loomed, there was just one more thing they wanted to do, one more thing to see. On this occasion it was a spot about which our Anton, then already wildlife manager in Lapalala, had told Clive. Dale had to see it. I protested: it would take too long. It was in a particularly rugged part of the eastern section of the reserve and I was already anxious about the time. But deaf to my nagging, Clive grabbed his camera and they set off.
One month later almost to the day we looked through the pictures he took that August afternoon. And there it was, the last photograph: on a monumental cliff-top tumble of broken sandstone, surrounded by nothing but wilderness, nothing but Lapalala, was Dale.
He had found it difficult to leave, Clive said. His flight was due to depart from Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport in fewer hours than it seemed to Clive he needed to get him there. Dale refused to be hurried. Alone and without talking, he stood on those rocks, staring out for a very long time. Far below, flowing strongly that year even at the end of the dry season, was his beloved Palala.
Inevitably we were left with a heightened awareness of the fragility of life, of the precariousness of it all. Three days later it was 11 September. Planes crashed into New York’s Twin Towers, and all at once the world was a different place. Modern history forever divided into Pre- and Post-9/11. Millions of people entered a season where they saw every day, every experience, every love in their lives for what it truly was, a meditation on mortality. Never again, we told each other, would we take anything for granted. Life was precious. It was brief. It was uncertain.
On Elizabeth’s request, Clive flew down to the Cape to speak at the memorial service at the Parkers’ home, the Zonnestraal Estate in Cape Town. But even that unambiguously final and witnessed farewell, he said, did not make Dale’s absence any more believable.
As far as Lapalala visitors and most of the reserve personnel would have been able to see, things continued as before. Dale’s wishes, insofar as they were known, guided whatever new decisions had to be taken. I have no doubt that his heart would have been gladdened by everyone’s acceptance that the sanctuary that he and Clive had dreamt and sweated into being should continue. So business and work went on. The summer rains arrived, the hillsides turned fresh green, on the Doornleegte floodplain the umbrella thorns burst into flower.
The wilderness school trained another batch of environmental teachers and welcomed group after group of children. The bush camps kept running at full capacity. In the visitors’ books there were messages of condolence from old-timers, personal tributes to a generous benefactor whom they’d never met but to whom they would always be indebted.
Suddenly it was less than a week before Christmas. I was standing at the fire-pit at Lepotedi, the Parker family’s special camp. It was swept clean, the wood stacked ready for the next campfire. I looked up. Against the leaden cloud cover that had moved in that morning, two landmarks: to my right Malora, to my left the towering sandstone cliff where in 1981 Clive had brought Dale and Elizabeth for their first look at Lapalala.
Two decades on it still amazed me that a businessman could have chosen to seal this venture with something as un-businesslike as a handshake. I was less surprised at Clive’s part in it. As an artist and conservationist his ability to function at all in a cynical world required a fair measure of idealism and a stubborn, some might say foolhardy, reliance on man’s better nature. There was no contract. He gave his word, Dale gave his word. Unusually in this world of ours, it was enough. The enterprise would cost a great deal in hard currency, but an even greater deal in a scarcer commodity – trust.
The Lapalala Wilderness Reserve was 20 years old. Like my sons at that age, almost grown-up. But not quite. Not yet measured against the complications of the wider world. Its maturity lay ahead, further ahead than I could see.
I did my usual check-around. Lepotedi was ready for the visitors who would arrive the next day. Not the Parkers. It would be strangers, first-timers who in all likelihood wouldn’t know much of the history of the place, and who certainly wouldn’t know anything about the woman who’d finally stopped hurrying, who had taken the time to stand silently at the fire-pit before walking the few metres down to the Palala to join the man standing there.
Clive looked up. “Did I ever tell you about the time…” He shook his head. “Of course I did. You know all the stories.”
“Never mind,” I said. “Tell me again.”
Two belligerent little Davids, Dale and Clive, facing the Goliath of the apartheid security forces in defence of black kids at the wilderness school. The two of them in another fight, even closer to Dale’s heart, to stop the construction of a dam in the upper reaches of the Palala. One memory triggering another, and another.
I became aware of the chill breeze stirring my hair. Drops pitted the water in front of us, setting small silver circles racing across the dark surface. It got rapidly colder, the day’s warmth fading with the light. Clive put his jacket around my shoulders. We turned and walked back up the bank, away from the river. We left Lepotedi to the hushed rustle of rained-on leaves.
The storm broke just as we emerged from the river valley onto the western flank of Malora. It was a big one – full-throated, powerful and urgent as life. Rain as far as I could see. No horizon. No limit to a landscape ancient and vast enough to contain all the lives that had known it, and had been known by it.
Today a lone massive slab of Waterberg sandstone lies 2000 kilometres to the south, on the Elandsberg Nature Reserve in the Cape. It marks the grave of Dale Parker. Rapula, Giver of Rain.
THIRTEEN
Rescues
THE WALKER FAMILY TRADITION was Heiligabend (Christmas Eve) at Clive and Conita’s. From the first year of our marriage the spicy-sweet comforts of a German Advent kitchen have kept alive much more than just the recipes.
However much I resist the commercial exploitation which, from October onwards, has shiny made-in-China baubles and tinsel strings incongruously sprouting all over hot, humid, dusty Vaalwater, and “Frosty, the Snowman” accompanying me up and down supermarket aisles, come December I succumb. And with the preparations come the memories. My mother guiding my first attempts at the icing-sugar swirls and stars that seven decades on still decorate my Weihnachtsplätzchen. The plotting required to devise gifts and surprises on a missionary’s budget. My father at the piano: “Herbei, o ihr Gläubingen, Fröhlich triumphiernd.” The musical talent which could dazzle his listeners with Bach and Mozart made something unforgettable of the simple hymns and carols performed with his family clustered around him.
I count it as one of the great blessings of my life that Christmas time for me has always meant Family. Gifts, candles, my special-occasions-only crockery and crystal, the traditionally stuffed goose with enough side-dishes for several take-home freezer meals, and family. In 2001, as I sat with my grandson well past his bedtime wide awake on my lap, it struck me that all that was most precious to me in the entire world was in that room. And no guarantees for any one of those lives. The thought caught at my throat. Like the others I joked with Renning who was good-naturedly officiating as Father Christmas. I watched as he and Anton laughed over some shared childhood memories. My beloved sons.
I needed to fix that moment in my mind. I’d have been willing to negotiate anything for guarantees of protection, for them, for René and Ayden and Clive and all the others. Nehmen Sie mich, aber ersparen Sie ihnen. (Take my life, but spare them.)
It was a glorious summer. At Bwana’s enclosure festive season visitors told me they envied me – living in the bush, the opportunity to work with wildlife… It all seemed so wonderfully idyllic. I would nod and agree, of course. On my bush camp rounds I’d stop at river crossings to watch and listen to the rush of water; at Munadu swifts flew their slaloms around sandstone towers and scythed down to skim the surface of the dark waters below the camp; there were shrill calls of giant kingfishers echoing off the Umdoni cliffs, tinker barbets in the bush around the camp; at Molope and at Lepotedi woodland kingfishers were calling up- and downstream, hour after hour. Yes, it was idyllic. But there were other sides to the picture that the visitors didn’t see.
In January I stood on the Doornleegte verandah and waved to Clive as he drove away. His responsibilities with SANParks needed him in Cape Town for a few days. This wasn’t to be a lengthy trip, nor on the face of it a hazardous one, and we’d have daily phone contact. So why the feeling of uneasiness that I carried with me throughout that day? The next morning it was still there, and the next, until just before the week was out the phone rang around midnight. It was Anton. “Mom, I’m afraid we have a problem…”
A Rhino in my Garden Page 18