I enticed Moêng over to the feeding area, piled high with the most delectable selection of freshly cut summer browse. A handful of feed pellets, scattered among the branches to keep her interest, allowed me to dart back and take care of the gate.
Eventually Lazarus did appear, but by then I was too happy with Moêng’s presence in Bwana’s boma to even bother with reproaches. All that way from her old home to her new one she’d walked and run and explored and played freely. No crate, ropes or blindfold. No dart-gun, no shouting, no trauma.
I went home and updated my rhino-care records: “Moêng moved to Bwana’s boma.” Five words with no hint of what that walk signified. A far greater distance had been covered than the length of the track between the two bomas, and over much more treacherous terrain. But that is the way of all such record keeping and other factual writings – a mere distillation of the experience makes it to the page.
Every time I held the newly printed copy of one of Clive’s books I’d been aware of just how much more had been lived through than had been passed on to the reader. An example was Okavango from the Air, the result of a collaboration between Clive, aerial photographer Herman Potgieter and pilot André Pelser. The pictures are stunning and the writing eloquent, but it gives barely a hint of Clive’s love affair with the wild areas of Botswana, or how deeply meaningful those flying hours had been for him. Every day, from their headquarters at the camp of our friend, Lloyd Wilmot, they took to the sky to see the Okavango as its eagles saw it, and with him in the plane was Anton, spotting game to photograph and vultures to avoid. Anton flew with him too, as chief navigator, when the Rhino and Elephant Foundation conducted a major survey of white rhino in the Chobe National Park. Ten days of exhilaration shared with another close friend, Peter Hitchins, as project leader. Again the project report dealt only with the facts; it couldn’t fully convey their elation when the two-plane team located Botswana’s last five white rhino, nor their heartbreak at the realisation that all but those five had been poached.
If one really wants to see the scale of a problem, you cannot do better than take to the air. The extent of a fire or a flood, and the animals caught in it; a poaching band’s field of slaughter in a valley strewn with carcasses; the spread of pollution down a river or into a lake. But it’s from the sky too that I’ve had my favourite views of my favourite landscapes.
“You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve seen its shadow from the sky,” Amelia Earhart said, and how true that is of our African savannah.
When Renning and Anton were still schoolboys we used to fly up to Lloyd’s camp on the Savute Channel in Botswana. He was then just starting his operation there and it was an enormously exciting time for all of us. It’s a different Africa now, but in some places it’s paradise still. I’ve flown up to Xaxaba in the Okavango, to Chobe, to Xugana Lagoon, to Shakawe for the tiger fishing, and although you might now have to filter out some unwelcome signs of human encroachment, on the whole you look down on the same magnificent wilderness. Perhaps Botswana has done better than most in its custodianship of its natural environment.
Delighted as we’d been to discover Anton’s natural aptitude for flying, the day he phoned with the news that Ayden, at age six, had also joined the Flying Walkers, we were over the moon. Since that first flight with his father, Ayden has become completely at home in anything from ultra-lights and the micro-lights used for low-level reconnaissance and anti-poaching work, to the giant Russian helicopters used in rhino capture and relocation programmes. Whenever possible father, son and grandson fly together. And whenever duty relents, I’d be up there too.
August 2006 gave us another anniversary to take up to Lonetree: Mother’s passing. Born just two months before the start of that great war that had made allies of the bitterest of Anglo-Boer War enemies, she survived the terror of the 1918 influenza epidemic, as did another South African baby, born just a few months before the end of the war, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela. She saw apartheid come and go; she saw Mandela’s ascendancy to power and fame, and then, with considerable sadness, she saw what remained of the Mandela dream once he’d handed over to others less able.
It had been a long life, 92 years, and when Clive returned home after visiting her a couple of days before her death, he told me he’d known it would be for the last time; she was ready to go. On a lovely early spring morning in St Margaret’s Anglican Church in Bedfordview I watched as her casket was carried in, by her two sons and four grandsons, to a gathering of family and friends. It had been a life well-lived, with courage and honour. I was blessed to have known her.
There was another landmark that year, though its significance registered only well after the fact. It was a small thing at first. A rounded stone in the path that, annoyingly, shifts under your boot and breaks your stride. You kick it to the side and walk on. But tomorrow there’s another one, and the next day yet another, day after day, until you realise you’d better get a spade and start digging. So you spend some backbreaking hours excavating that section of your path, and rebuilding it with a more solid substructure, firm enough to withstand the impact of your and many other boots. For a while you walk easily. Then the first rains come. One day you set out for your walk, but your path is gone. Those stones you’d so carefully cemented in are lying tumbled and broken at the bottom of a muddy pit.
We were informed that a land claim had been lodged on our Melkrivier property. This wasn’t welcome, but hardly the biggest surprise. Land claims had become the background rumble to our national discourse. Whenever an election manifesto needed some punch, land redistribution shifted up the agenda – easy to promise, less easy to deliver. As it had been since 1994, it was again handy for sloganeering during the 2004 national elections and the government was able to assure the nation that by the end of that year more than 57 000 claims had been settled. That left around 22 000 outstanding claims and for that they allocated an additional 6 billion rand over three years. The numbers dazzled those people who’d been holding their breath until they could receive land, or have it taken away. Thousands of families had been living with their lives suspended – they would get moving, start working, start over, get their lives back on track, just as soon as the land claim was settled.
Sadly, for all its good intentions, the system was increasingly open to exploitation, mismanagement and soul-sapping delays. As deadline after deadline for settlement passed with many cases remaining unresolved, the deadline for new submissions of land claims was being extended. Inevitably the number of outstanding claims kept rising, and equally inevitably I suppose, so did the percentage of ones that would turn out to not have been legitimate.
Clive read the paperwork, pushed it across the table to me, and said: “Don’t stress. Let’s just make sure of our facts.”
It wasn’t hard. Before purchasing the land almost a decade earlier we’d done our research, and in 2006 another round of enquiry delivered the same conclusion: the claim was not legitimate. The stone in the path could be kicked to the side. The Melkrivier Museum would continue to operate as a cultural, environmental and educational service to the Waterberg.
A few months later that stone was back. It dawned on us that reason and rational argument had very little to say in the transaction. An annoyance and a waste of our time, but it could not be ignored. We would have to take the legal route and contest the claim.
I had little stomach for a legal battle. More than likely it would turn out to be a battle with intermediaries benefitting from the protracted process while making grandiose promises to their perhaps less legally astute clients.
It was on Lonetree that I discovered that Clive had even less appetite for such a fight. It was Sunday at the sundowner hour. Below us the valley of the Melk River was too pretty to be painted without the artist being accused of kitsch. Far below was our museum complex: a toy habitation in an ocean of Waterberg green. Impossible to look out over such a landscape and think of anything but peace. In the same way, at various times, we had sat on t
op of the sandstone cliffs of Mmammagwa in Botswana, and on Dale’s Rocks in Lapalala, on the Brandberg in Namibia, on the edge of the great Fish River Canyon there; many other places too where one is silenced in front of a vista beyond your full understanding. I had flown over the cloudscapes above Africa with that same sense of being given a glimpse of a truth beyond our human agenda.
“Who owns this view?” Clive shook his head. “No one owns the sky.”
We decided not to contest that claim on our property, invalid though it was. The whole point of the museum complex had been to serve the Waterberg; there was the potential that it could continue to do so even if we were to give it up. Since that unwelcome little stone in our path would not be kicked aside, we would go one better: get out the spade and begin to construct an alternate path, one to suit other walkers. We began by presenting a proposal directly to the claimants themselves. They would have ownership and if they did not see their way clear to keep the whole operation going by themselves, we offered to take on a 15-year lease; they would have title and income and not have to do any of the work. The offer was declined.
I was taken aback and quite frankly indignant. All our resources had gone into the development of the Melkrivier Museum complex – the investment was far more than financial. Yet we were prepared to give it away to people who had no proven or indeed provable right to it; we would maintain and promote what would be their asset, its real estate value accruing all the while, without them having to lift a finger, except to cash the generous monthly cheques for 15 years.
Did we misunderstand their needs or intentions? They didn’t have a plan for the site, they didn’t wish to run the museum complex themselves, they didn’t want anyone else to run it for them. Was there anything else they wished to do with the land? Apparently not.
I was disappointed enough to consider the prospect of a challenge in court with less reluctance. But it couldn’t last – belligerence had never been my strong suit. There followed some rather sombre walks up to Lonetree, to watch the day begin or end. Invariably we found more serenity up there as we watched the play of light all the way to the north where Lapalala too was dealing with a land claim. How many other people, all over the country, found themselves in a similar situation to ours? For most, if not all, it was probably an equally exhausting process. Even when all parties were willing to work together, progress was slow. It didn’t help that rumours had begun to surface: the Land Bank (the government institution responsible for financing land claim transitions) was running low on funds.
If we were to contest the Melkrivier claim the whole business could drag on for years, courting the risk that the Land Bank might indeed run dry, and we’d be left without even the nominal financial compensation due to us. So once more we got out the spade and tried to dig deeper.
Our next offer was for a five-year lease, with the Waterberg Biosphere undertaking to establish an office and auditorium at the museum, for which a considerable rental would be guaranteed to the new owners; we would also continue to carry all responsibility for maintenance and insurance. The answer came back and sent me up to Lonetree with the sure knowledge that no offer, however favourable to the claimants, would ever be accepted.
I cannot remember now what day of the week it was, or how it happened that I was able to take the time to go up there in the middle of the day. But I remember that down below, beyond my hearing and hidden from my sight, a vehicle was slowly pulling its trail of dust across my view. All I could see of the over-familiar Melkrivier road running from Vaalwater to Lapalala was that silent slashing of the land. For a long time I watched the brick-red gash, until it had thinned, bled out over the trees.
This then became the next marker on my calendar: the end of our path with Melkriver. It wasn’t a swift, clean severing of that life. It died in stages. At first, since we were on the premises and I had a grandstand view of the day-to-day affairs there, I felt compelled to help the claimants, but came the day I had to accept that my attempts at stemming the tide of neglect had achieved little beyond my own frustration and exhaustion.
Then it was time to pack again. We had to vacate our home and our place of work. No sale, no finalised transaction, no closure, but the museum, the old headmaster’s house, the little chapel, the restaurant, Walker’s Wayside, the garden where Bwana had been buried, everything we’d created there wasn’t ours anymore. With luck the giant Schotia would remain; the paradise flycatchers would continue to raise little ones there, but I wouldn’t be there to see it.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, we were able to move across the road to Magog’s, our erstwhile guest accommodation. Fortunately, because it was conveniently close-by and didn’t affect Moêng in her boma. Unfortunately, because it was so close-by – the signs boded ill for the continuation of the sole environmental and cultural museum centre in the greater Waterberg. I tried to look away, to not care.
Clive’s way, as ever, was to draw a line and move on. “Water under the bridge, Conit,” he’d say to me and turn the conversation to our future, to a next chapter to be lived beyond Melkrivier. Just like he did decades before when scouting for a location for our wilderness school, he again took the scenic roads to and from work assignments in order to investigate relocation options along the back roads of the Waterberg. He had my wholehearted support. His trip de-briefings over sundowners or supper were my therapy. We pored over his photographs and impromptu sketches of landscapes and landmarks. Another life began to seem possible, another home, something that still lay ahead of us. Something good. And heaven knows, I needed it. I’d told my children I was fine, and my grandchildren that it was all a grand adventure, exactly what we had wanted, but it was an unsettling time.
For some reason, or for many reasons, the Land Claims Commission just did not get around to finalising the settlement of the claim, leaving us in limbo. We still felt some responsibility to keep the museum complex afloat and functioning, since the collapse of the enterprise would affect the valuation of the property and hence the compensation due to us. Low as the promised compensation was, we could not make a new beginning elsewhere without it. But I’d had to put limits on my emotional investment there.
So, for two more flowering seasons of the massive stand of mountain aloes behind Magog’s, I resolutely kept my focus closer to home, on Moêng and on my family. And like all grandparents the world over we found in Ayden and Tristyn our greatest delight. Together we watched kudu, bushbuck and grey duiker coming down to drink at the stretch of the Melk River that ran below the house. There were birthday treats on trips to Polokwane, and on sleep-over nights at Magog’s we’d all snuggle up in front of the TV set for cartoons or a movie. They accompanied me to Moêng’s boma, helped to feed her, and often amazed me with their knowledge not only of rhino but of all wildlife-related matters. Of course they were growing up in a conservation family, and occasionally they were playing around the boma while I was teaching Lazarus. He was an eager student but fared best with plenty of repetition, so I suppose as Lazarus learnt, the little ones did too.
Moêng remained a drawcard for tourists and offered an opportunity for Lazarus to shine. When he handled a session I watched from the back of the visiting group and felt inordinately proud of that little partnership. A rhino who’d entered her life with so many odds against her, and a man who had had to face different, but equally limiting odds. My path with Melkrivier had not been for nothing.
There were many such moments around the boma. Small for her age and the possessor of the sweetest nature I’d yet seen in a black rhino, Moêng became the closest and least alarming contact with such an animal that some elderly or disabled people could have had. I always allowed them to take their time, to stay as long as they needed. Sometimes when I watched a child in a wheelchair reach through the boma railings to touch what every book would have told him is a fearsome beast, I did so through my tears.
What was Moêng’s experience? She obviously liked being stroked and fed and petted, but perhaps ther
e was more. Animals always know and understand more than we give them credit for, and they feel a whole lot more than is sometimes comfortable for us to admit. From her behaviour I knew that Moêng felt safe; she trusted the people around her and the strangers’ hands that stretched out towards her. I swore that it would always remain that way. And it didn’t even need to be mentioned between Clive and me: wherever our next home were to be, there would be a place for Moêng.
Shortly after the 2007 summer rains had begun, Clive’s scouting forays took him to the area to the north-west of Lapalala, the district of Lephalale (Ellisras). He looked at several properties there, found them wanting, and then one evening told me he was on the trail of another one which sounded promising. We were on the verandah, keeping that same appointment with the end of the day that we’d kept for more than 25 years on the Doornleegte verandah. A little bit of conversation, a lot of listening as dusk turned to night – the time for jackals and bush babies, nightjars, bats, crickets and frogs, when the eagle owl comes to perch on the roof of your house, according to Shangaan folklore a messenger of doom. Death is sure to follow unless you were to capture the owl and decapitate it, thereby ensuring that the evil spell, like some bewitched boomerang, speeds back to kill the sorcerer rather than you. I had no such apprehensions about our nocturnal hunters. At Doornleegte we had spotted eagle-owls, a couple, mated for life, whose softly hooted cadences and duets we heard after sundown. At Melkrivier we had barn owls, again a devoted pair, who nested above the door to Clive’s office. From Magog’s we could still hear their unearthly screechy calls as they set out to hunt at nightfall.
“Hope they’re allowed to remain,” I said. Many a morning I’d complained about having to clean up below their nest, but now I was feeling protective. Barn owls are known to use a single nest for many years, so if left undisturbed they would in all likelihood stay there and continue to keep the Melkrivier rodent population under control, a benefit to the new owners as it had been to us.
A Rhino in my Garden Page 28