A Rhino in my Garden

by Conita Walker

  So a land claim had been gazetted on more than a third of Lapalala’s 36 000 hectares. There was no need to assume that the outcome would be disastrous. The claim might be legitimate and all parties willing to negotiate in good faith. It might be possible to avoid the worst-case scenario: 12 000 hectares of wilderness carved up into dozens, even hundreds of fenced, overgrazed parcels with its unparalleled biodiversity reduced to four species: humans, cattle, goats and half-starved dogs.

  “That won’t happen,” Clive said. “Not in this instance.”

  The Motse Community claim was made up of many individual claims, some people resident in the area, some not, some more affluent than others, but all of them looking to land restitution to better their lives. Clive had always maintained that a conservationist, and especially a conservationist-landowner, occupied treacherous moral ground when he had neighbours who did not have access to clean drinking water, adequate healthcare and decent schooling for their children. It is inevitable that for such neighbours conservation messages would ring hollow if they were delivered in the absence of concrete, shared benefit. A game reserve boundary could easily become a hated symbol of division: poverty versus privilege, and in South Africa unfortunately all too often still black versus white. An unsustainable situation in which everyone ultimately loses.

  If Lapalala’s future could be one in which a wide variety of legitimate stakeholders shared equally in both benefit and responsibility, with its core business still wildlife conservation, it could stand a much better chance of being sustainable.

  “Let them just start talking to each other,” Clive said. “This could be a win, for everyone.”

  We didn’t know how the land claim might affect Anton: he was the wildlife manager there, and the house that he and René occupied was in the claimed section of the reserve. But apart from that, Lapalala was no longer our concern. It was time for the next generation. And beyond them another one, I hoped, who would watch over the claimed section’s rock ledges and forested gorges, the white-water bend of the Palala below Dales’s Rocks, the martial eagles that nested there, the blue-leaved cycads, the slender three-hook thorns – every spring the first to flower on the winter-brown slopes; the buffalo, rhino, giraffe that roamed that area; the herd of zebra which, early one chilly morning, thundered past me across a field of rose quartz pebbles; the group of eland that leapt, one after the other, across the road in front of me – muscular bodies in flight against a red-copper sunset. I hoped my grandchildren, and especially the grandchildren of the claimants who had yet to discover something so wonderful about their world, would get to see it all.

  Our first spring at Melkrivier found me settled and contented. Living as we were right in the middle of our own investment it was satisfying to see the numbers of visitors streaming through the museum and Walker’s Wayside. Although I’d never wanted to be in charge of a restaurant (a point which I’d made very strongly to Clive) it had proved to be an excellent marketing strategy. People who might not take a detour to visit a museum might do so for coffee or a glass of wine and a meal, with the museum as an added attraction. The result was that we weren’t only getting members of the public already converted to the cause of conservation, people who were coming anyway. We were also getting parents who merely wanted a break from travelling with their bored and hungry children and, having fed them, thought they might as well hang around into the afternoon so the kids could have a chance to see and feed a real live rhino. Bwana’s sessions became an enormous drawcard, and as we moved towards summer I could look back on a good year, at Melkrivier and beyond.

  Conservation had landed on the world agenda. Not only did the Kyoto Protocol finally come into force in late February, there was a general push from developed nations to focus more attention on assisting African countries with biodiversity conservation. The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, urged greater cooperation between Africa and the UN in order for Africa to achieve its Millennium Development Goals in 10 years, by 2015. The 7th of the Millennium Goals (Environmental Sustainability) aimed, with even more urgency, to achieve a “significant reduction in the rate of loss” of biodiversity in five years. By 2010 there should be more protected areas, it stated, and fewer species threatened with extinction.

  Laudable goals – we could only keep our fingers crossed for sustained political will. I find it difficult sometimes to not become cynical about high-level summits and their crop of resolutions that barely last as long as the vapour trails of the planes taking the departing signatories to those resolutions back to other agendas and other priorities.

  But we had reason just then to be optimistic about political will: the South African government had bowed to international persuasion and to the pleas of its own people and revised its policy on HIV/AIDS. A nationwide roll-out of anti-retrovirals was underway. Perhaps Nelson Mandela’s public statement at the beginning of the year that he had lost a son to AIDS might have tipped the scales. Be that as it may, President Mbeki’s turn-around had extended the lives and hopes of millions of South Africans, and in April his legitimate concern about the impact of poverty on health status was the focus of a World Health Organization meeting, held in Durban. The majority of people living with HIV in Africa could not access or afford even a basic healthy diet. Then came two statements from the UN Food and Agricultural Organization which, when taken together, painted an even more dismal scenario: climate change was set to impact food security, further reducing nutritional options for the most vulnerable people in developing countries. Most vulnerable of those: sub-Saharan Africa. And most vulnerable in sub-Saharan Africa: 11 million AIDS orphans.

  As I read those reports I had to wonder, as I’ve had to do so often in my life as a conservationist: how could my concerns for wildlife not be swept off the agenda by such dire and pressing human needs? Of course I had my answer to that: conservation strategies that result in sustainable human-versus-environment relationships. But it was a long-term answer, one that required farsighted implementation of unpalatable options. Politicians don’t like those. Neither do the news media that need dramatic headlines about dramatic interventions that deliver dramatic, preferably immediate outcomes. That’s how you sell newspapers and win votes most easily. The slow, undramatic, considered option that will only pay off in a generation or two struggles to get political support, and long before the argument is adequately made and disseminated to the public the media will be racing off to the next news hotspot that allows for screaming headlines. The world will always offer a sufficiency of those. 2005 was no different. In July terrorist bombs exploded during London’s morning rush hour: 52 people died, more than 700 were injured. It dominated international news media, quite rightly. But then in August Hurricane Katrina came along and stole headlines as she slammed into the US Gulf Coast: New Orleans was devastated, 1836 people died. It was a huge disaster, appropriately deserving of its headlines. But in due course it too had to yield those to the next dramatic happening, someone else’s big disastrous news.

  Good news gets fewer columns, smaller headlines and seldom lands on the front page. One of those came on 30 October. In Dresden the Frauenkirche, rebuilt after being destroyed during the WWII firebombing of that city, was consecrated. I read the story a few days later.

  In March 1945 when my family fled on that refugee train out of Berlin I didn’t know the extent of the destruction we were leaving behind. Of what had been happening in the other cities of Germany I knew nothing at all. It was only well after the war, once we were back in South Africa and I was old enough to be able to understand such things, that I could look at post-war photographs in newspapers and books that came my way and begin to wonder at the wilful destruction of beautiful things. Architecture of the most exquisite design and execution, buildings that had graced skylines and served people for hundreds of years reduced to rubble. I knew the arguments of the war, I knew what had been at stake, but how could one not feel outrage at the loss of such beauty and heritage? I never knew the Old Germany
of my antecedents, but I wept for it.

  The Frauenkirche, built in the early 18th century on foundations from the 11th century, had been a Lutheran church, the denomination of my parents. It had a magnificent organ on which my father’s great musical hero, Johann Sebastian Bach, had performed. The crowning glory of the church was a 96-metre-high, 12 000-tonne sandstone cupola, said to have rivalled Michelangelo’s dome for St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It had been one of Germany’s most treasured landmarks.

  Two days of bombing in February 1945 and it was destroyed. For the next 45 years, while East Germany was under Communist control, the blackened mound of rubble that had been the Frauenkirche lay undisturbed. In 1966 it was declared a “Memorial against war”. Sixteen years after that it became the gathering site for peaceful protests that were to grow and spread until eventually the Berlin Wall fell and Germany could become a re-unified nation. The remains of the Frauenkirche continued to be a rallying point, as much for the rebuilding of the German people as of the city of Dresden and of the church itself.

  Teams of architects, engineers and historians gathered at the site to begin the painstaking process of sorting and labelling each individual piece that could be reused. But they were not the first to do so. More than 60 years earlier, in 1945, Dresden residents who had miraculously survived the devastating firestorm emerged from the ruins to try to salvage something of the Frauenkirche. One by one they chose distinctive stone fragments, numbered them according to the position in which they’d been found, and took them away, not as keepsakes but for safekeeping, should the day ever come when, Gottes Wille, the church could be rebuilt. An act of faith in more ways than one.

  A lifetime later and thousands of kilometres to the south I sat in the lounge of my Melkrivier home, bathed in the warmth of a late spring afternoon, and tried to imagine myself into a wartime winter in a ruined city. I tried to see the handful of people, cold and starved and wretched beyond my imagining, as they scavenged the wrecked remains of their lives for something that could speak of hope and of a future. I was greatly moved by those survivors with their bits of consecrated stone. They’d seen something irreplaceable destroyed, but refused to accept that that had to be the end of the story. They were not powerful people, rulers who could write and rewrite the course of history. Yet they stumbled, crawled and limped up to the rubble and started doing just that.

  It took many years and many of them did not live to see it, but after an international fundraising effort and inspiring participation from the descendants of Germany’s former enemies, the Frauenkirche did rise again and at the end of October 2005 it was filled to capacity for its re-dedication as a place of refuge, of faith and of healing.

  I put down the newspaper and got up to look out through the window at my safe, pretty world. What if everything around me lay in ruins? Was there enough in me of my German roots? Could I, like the courageous people of Dresden, face destruction and yet be the one to begin picking up the blackened and broken stones?

  Not needing to find an answer, I didn’t. With a few flowers from the garden I walked past Walker’s Wayside, away from the visitors and the relaxed murmur of their conversations, and took the footpath down to the chapel. A while later Clive came home and followed Button’s barking to me. We sat there, quietly watching the light move across the floor, until the sun dipped and then we went home. Everyone else had gone, leaving us the birds and the sunset and the contentments of that day.

  Then November came.

  Armistice Day, of course, and a few birthdays: my sister-in-law, my eldest son, my grandson. But this time it wasn’t the anniversaries that sent me up to Lonetree.

  When I strode up the footpath at first light it was because I couldn’t bear any longer to be among other people. Too many voices down there, and unbearable silence when they ceased. So I fled. I didn’t head for Lonetree particularly. I headed for nowhere except away. Finally I managed to pull out of the suffocating whirlpool of my thoughts to find myself cast ashore on a dewwet sandstone ledge far above the shadowy places that I didn’t want to see. My gaze stayed close, on my hands, on wilted syringa flowers gathered in, piled up and coaxed into little domes, 12 of them. A dozen little cupolas that broke when Button came racing back from some olfactory adventure. She scrabbled up onto the rock and along my ledge, scattering syringa flowers, to bring me her panting breath and muddy paws and unquestioning devotion. She licked my face and didn’t get chastised for it. I pulled her onto my lap – something warm and solid to hold onto. Something alive.

  More flowers dropped around us. A biting little breeze had stolen through the syringa branches and into the day just ahead of the sun. I looked at my watch: 5:14. Button and I sat, marooned and unmoving, as the light flowed over us and on down Lonetree’s slope, canopy after canopy, spiny thicket, flaming creeper, the beseeching arms of a great tree euphorbia, on and on until the whole lowland of the Melk River was filled, a basin spilling light to the horizon.

  And right in the centre – not its centre but mine – there was on this clear young morning with its birdsong chorales and fallen shrines of Tree of Heaven flowers, a smashed-up Toyota to prove the nightmare of the night.

  It began with loud shouts and a banging on the kitchen door. Bwana had broken out. Late on a Sunday night with people, singly or in inebriated groups, finding their way home along a public road, a mature black rhino bull had broken out.

  What was I expecting? A replay, I suppose, of our early morning coordinated manoeuvres a couple of years earlier at Doornleegte when Bwana returned from his nights out to give us an adrenaline-charged wake-up sprint into his enclosure. We managed then, we’d manage again.

  From some distance away already the sounds told me what we were to discover in the light of our torches: Bwana was demolishing the gate between Lonetree and the road. It was a determined single-minded assault. Explosive bursts of raw power from an animal that only a few hours earlier had eaten from my hand. He didn’t see me, he didn’t hear me. Clive told me to go home and phone the vet – Bwana might need to be darted.

  Six, seven sleepless hours later, alone on Lonetree to do battle with my questions, I wondered if that had been the decisive moment. I could have disobeyed Clive, stayed there longer; Bwana could have calmed down and eventually allowed me to lead him back to his enclosure. But what if the gate had given way before his mood did? There were people shouting, some of them stupidly drunk – that didn’t help. Clive ran to fetch his Toyota bakkie: he would block the gate while we waited for the vet to arrive.

  From the pool of kitchen light I watched as he drove off, then listened in disbelief as the vet told me No, he wasn’t coming. Dark night, a black rhino already enraged – no, he was sorry, but he couldn’t help, the risks were too great. I didn’t take it kindly: What about our risks? Just stay out of his way for the rest of the night, he said. In the morning, if we still thought it necessary, he’d come and dart our rhino.

  I put down the phone and hurried out again. There was suddenly more noise. Shouts and the dull percussive crashes of rhino on metal. I ran. My torchlight caught Clive sprinting across the road towards me, managing to leap at the museum’s high game fence and clamber up and over, a heartbeat in front of the charging rhino. He dropped down at my side. Bwana wheeled and raced down the road, then up again past us, deaf to my calls.

  Should we have left Bwana out there, to run off his over-excitement until, adrenaline spent, he got tired and felt ready to seek out the food and familiarity of his enclosure? But what about those people, shrieking from the bushes next to the road, escalating his excitement and their own danger? Three years earlier David Bradfield, an experienced rhino-tracker, had faced Bwana with all his wits about him, and nearly lost his life. Those Sunday-night revellers wouldn’t have stood a chance. Should we have tried to get them out of the area before one of them became his focus? But Bwana didn’t leave us that option. He attacked the gate to the museum grounds and broke through, to the consternation of the onlookers who�
��d been drawn there by the noise. Clive ordered them indoors and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to do the same. I refused. I’d noticed a change: Bwana was now also curious, no longer just blindly aggressive. I approached just far enough to be sure he could see as well as smell and hear me. His attention narrowed: the human he knew best, the voice he knew best – his movements slowed. A few more snorts, his head jerking in the direction of the men, and then he stood absolutely still. I continued to call and retreated into the garden, further away from the road and from people, further away from Clive. Bwana followed.

  I was relieved when, after several tense minutes, Clive and Lazarus left to inspect the breakout site and effect whatever makeshift repairs might be possible, or to determine if an alternative plan should be put into operation, to have Bwana, once he’d been darted, moved back to Lapalala until his enclosure could be secured.

  We were alone. My rhino and I again exploring a garden, as we had done so long ago when he’d arrived, a baby, at Doornleegte and he followed on my heels, tree to tree, leaning against my legs when he felt tired or in need of mothering. The beginning then of an almost 13-year-long conversation: murmured endearments and sniffing, snorting, moo-ing responses. I switched off my torch and accompanied him as he moved between hedges and around trees and tall aloes, a greater shadow among lesser ones – moved so easily, so confidently, so untroubled by the night. A magnificent creature, the mysteries of instinct and genetic memory so perfectly integrated in him, so superbly served and protected by an evolutionary design millions of years in the making, and by his fierce spirit and staggering power. His was an animal intelligence I could glimpse but not share or fully understand. What was he making of this night, this place? What subtle signals spoke to him, but not to me?