My life at Walker’s Islands had not begun the way I’d intended. I’d wanted it to be a sanctuary; a Shangri-La, I suppose, free from the stain of sufferings encountered elsewhere. I hadn’t wanted to allow myself to bring in anything but my best. A foolish ambition. Circumstances, seemingly so cruel, had been more merciful. I’d been brought here just as I was, with all my inner chaos. Anger, resentment, pain and anguish – all unresolved. Walker’s Islands was to be my place of healing.
EPILOGUE
The good remains
IT’S MORNING, AND I’M LOOKING EAST. A perfect wilderness sky – nothing to dim or dirty that clean, crisp break of day. All around are the rustlings and calls of birds: weavers, hornbills, francolins, glossy starlings, orange-breasted shrikes, black-crowned tchagras, a lone crested barbet, its unbroken chirrrr like a thin thread unspooling over the grass. And further away, reaching me from a rocky ridge still dark and featureless against the pale sky, the descending cadence, hurrying as it falls, of an emerald-spotted dove.
When I approached 80 years of age I discovered the unsuspected pleasure of lying-in in the morning. Without feeling guilty I could wait, cosily in bed, for the sun to strike the bedroom windows before getting up. But on some mornings, like this one, my love of the fresh, complex fragrance of Waterberg air still lured me out to greet the day as the other-than-human residents of Walker’s Islands did, out-of-doors.
The sun arrives and with it the many greens of rainy season savannah. The grassy field this morning very still – a pale lake in which the treed termite mounds rise like dark green shadowy islands. At the closest one, two giraffe are browsing, leisurely and delicately picking off the soft new growth in the canopy. Not visible now, but they’re there: the rest of our giraffe family, kudu, grey duiker, impala, warthog, blue wildebeest, mongoose, jackals, many others. Last night I heard lions roar.
There’s a sudden burst of activity on the veranda behind me as two small dogs come racing out of the house: Jelly and Dinky, the Jack Russells that joined the family after Button left us at the age of 14. She’s buried here at Walker’s Islands, as are our children’s and grandchildren’s pets that have passed away. Astounding as it seems to me, my grandchildren are now teenagers, old enough to have experienced the grief of losing a pet that had reached the end of its natural life.
With Jelly and Dinky around I knew that Clive was up, and after invoking a silent blessing on all the lives at, and connected to, Walker’s Islands, I turned and went indoors to begin the day. It was to be a busy one because, as I’d anticipated, there had come the moment when Clive hurried across from his converted-stables studio and called out, “Conit, listen, I’ve been thinking…”
As I’d expected, it was not to be retirement. Many friends cautioned us, with tactfully worded concerns about the physical fragility that comes with advanced age. Surely we’d done enough; it was time to leave the battles to the younger generations; we’re out of step with a changed, less-safe world … They were right of course, and also dead wrong. Who better to fight than those who’d been tested, bloodied and strengthened in many battles before? Who better to fight for the preservation of some precious, threatened thing than those who knew, in their bones, through their own hard experience, that such fights can be won, that they have been won before? Who better to lead the herd than the old matriarch who preserves – on behalf of all the others – the memories of routes and resources and survival?
In 1945 it was the war-scarred people of Dresden who were best equipped to inspire the eventual rebuilding of the Frauenkirche. Weak, wounded, and starving, they were the ones who began the work by facing the ruins and vowing that that would not be the end of their story. They knew the value of what had been destroyed there and would keep it alive until it could rise again, 66 years later. They had nothing left, just that dream, and the pieces of blackened stonework they began to gather.
Perhaps that is all one needs: a few basics and a dream that is big enough.
So at Walker’s Islands we set about creating the Waterberg Living Museum. We’ve always believed that many people tend to forget just how important such places are. Museums are a repository of a society’s memory and awareness, they curate collections that are a resource for research and study, they preserve knowledge and history, and help us to understand our place in the world. Like botanical gardens and art galleries, museums are tranquil havens in a busy, noisy world.
It took all the stamina, determination, wisdom and especially patience acquired during our many decades of fighting against the odds. And it took courage. I cannot deny that the obstacles were considerable, and the temptation to become discouraged was, for a while at least for me, a foe to be fought and defeated. But this daughter of stoic Lutheran missionaries found that enough of their grit and, yes, missionary zeal, had remained in her veins.
Our wildlife manager son, Anton, somehow found the time to take the lead in concept and design. We roped in our old-time builder and friend from Lapalala days, Klaas Mashasha, and construction began. It was to take some time, because the Walkers, true to form, were not about to start dreaming small: a main public area and tea garden with five individually themed museums spread out over a 1.2-kilometre botanically informative garden walk. We were enormously heartened by the fact the Parker family (through Mapula Trust), joined us in the project. Duncan Parker, son of the late Dale Parker, and his board have enabled a more extensive level of educational resource than would otherwise have been possible.
Then we began constructing the bomas, because it was meant to be a living museum. This phase of the project was extremely sobering for me because these days, if you want to keep wild animals in a setting that allows some measure of public access, your first concern has to be security. Fences and a locked gate are no longer enough. I listened as Clive and Anton talked about bringing in various endangered species – wild dog, roan antelope, rhino – and felt my heart clench.
If ever there was a time for a conservationist like myself to do battle with the big questions it surely has to be now, when the news that assails me most acutely is that of the relentless drive to extinction of wildlife species – elephant, lion, leopard, cheetah, pangolin, many others, and especially rhino. Moêng’s poaching in August 2008 signalled the beginning of the greatest rhino war we’d seen. Terrible as the previous rhino war had been, conservationists had won and the rhino was saved. The current situation seems to me more dire, with threats more wide-spread and varied and intensifying all the time. Gone are the days when one looked forward, with undiluted pleasure, to news from your conservationist friends and colleagues. Now I dread it. It has become a news of numbers: so many rhino slaughtered; so many more rhinos poached during the course of this year, this month, this day; so many rhino calves orphaned, rescued, lost; so much closer to extinction. Whereas I used to love full moon nights in the bush, I now fear them, because that is now the Poacher’s Moon, when the deadly tally of daily rhino losses invariably increases.
With the honour and morality of the South African political regime, under President Jacob Zuma, seemingly plummeting towards extinction at an even faster rate than the rhino, there seems little chance of our environmental and conservation concerns being prioritised. But whenever I feel despairing about what seems to me like our country’s tragic slide into chaos, Clive will not encourage that mood. In fact, at Walker’s Islands he appeared to have gained a second (or third, or fourth) wind. With Anton as co-author he wrote The Rhino Keepers telling the story of rhino conservation in Africa, and outlining the threat to their survival as this latest rhino war gathers momentum. It wasn’t an easy book to write. Much more enjoyable was the completion of a 10-year co-writing project documenting the life of, and around, the Limpopo River. And then, perhaps even more enjoyable than Limpopo: River of Gold, came Baobab Trails in which he charted his own adventures through Africa searching for, photographing and painting the biggest, oldest, most majestic baobabs. Some of those journeys I’d shared with him, so it was a p
articular pleasure for me to follow the writing as it progressed.
He documented another journey of ours in a book. The Management of the Lapalala Wilderness Reserve wanted a publication that would be both a record of its genesis and a celebration of the stunning wild sanctuary that it had become. My Lapalala years had been such a crucial part of my life that this book, with Clive’s text and photographs by Dana Allen, is deeply meaningful to me. And what a solace it has been to know that it isn’t simply a historical record of something that had been, but is no more. Lapalala is still there, still negotiating its way through the tricky socio-political and economic climate of the day, always with the aim of preserving that original dream, jointly held by both Clive and Dale Parker, which became the Lapalala Wilderness Reserve. And there, on the banks of Dale’s beloved Palala River, our other dream, the Wilderness School, also still continues.
As I look back on our journey from Doornleegte to Walker’s Islands I accept that some things were lost, but not all. Of the Waterberg Cultural and Rhino Museum at Melkrivier, nothing remains. For me it is now simply the place where Bwana and Moêng were buried, along with those parts of me that died with them.
When you work with animals, as closely as I had done, you sign on for much more than the duties of a conservationist. It is not a job. It is an investment of your heart and soul. Perhaps this is why it was best that I’d stumbled so naïvely into rhino care. Had I known the risk of pain and heartbreak that would come with little baby Bwana I wonder if I’d dared. But I didn’t know, and will be eternally grateful that I did dare, because I’ve learnt – and I had to learn it the hard way – the answer to that most challenging of the big questions facing conservationists today: Why? Why keep on fighting? When everything seems to point towards destruction and loss, why keep on hoping?
Because the good remains. Life will find a way. It is the way nature works. One generation dies but another will have been seeded and life continues. So make sure the seeds are there. There’s a rhythm to things. We don’t always see it, because sometimes the scale is too large for us with our short life-spans. Conservationists know this: it is foolish to look for rapid outcomes. The rehabilitation of an animal can take weeks, or months, even years; the recovery of a wildlife population, or an ecosystem, can take decades; a shift in public perceptions and policies may take a generation or more. It requires our endeavours to be sincere and sustained and hopeful. That is how wars are won.
And this is why Clive, while fully aware of the perilous state of affairs in rhino conservation, refuses to despair. He wields his hope for a better outcome like a weapon – a deliberate effort of will and of goodwill that strengthens his resolve and mine.
So we will dedicate our Living Museum to that cause. We’ll keep on pouring as much of ourselves as we can into the fight for the preservation of what is precious, and wild, and voiceless in a callous world.
Because it matters. Because I believe that we are diminished by the loss of so many of the other-than-human lives who share this planet with us. Every rhino that is killed, and killed with cruelty, is an accusation – a black mark against our capacity to be fully, responsibly, human custodians deserving of our place on Earth. I believe that the rhino war is not just about rhinos; in the final analysis it is a call to the human species to rise to a higher understanding of what it means to be human.
I have to believe that we can rise to that call.
About the author
CONITA WALKER IS THE WIFE of South African conservationist Clive Walker and has been a driving, dedicated force behind their combined conservation careers almost as long as their 50-year marriage. Since the founding of the Endangered Wildlife Trust in 1973 Conita has been the backroom engine of his long career. She became co-director of their adult wilderness trails organisation, which operated in the Okavango Delta, the Mashatu Game Reserve and Klaserie in the eastern Lowveld, managing organisational functions, charter flights, catering and professional field guides.
With the founding of Lapalala Wilderness Reserve in the Waterberg of Limpopo in 1981 she became the Alternate Director to the owner, Dale Parker, and managed what was to become the ‘bush camp’ operations for more than 23 years. As a trustee of the Wilderness Trust she was instrumental in establishing the Lapalala Wilderness School, which to date has seen more than 80 000 children, teachers and university students pass through its doors.
With the introduction of black rhino to the reserve in 1990 she took on a role she never thought she would have to face and that was to become the surrogate ‘mother’ to wild orphans. An abandoned black rhino male calf named Bwana grew to adulthood in her back garden; a female hippo calf grew up in her washroom and eventually returned to the Palala River where she has produced numerous offspring; a white rhino female calf was rescued, re-wilded and eventually returned to present her own calf to Conita.
The supreme test of her mothering skills was the raising of a very seriously injured black rhino female named Moêng who was saved in the nick of time by the dedicated work of veterinarian Dr André Uys. This rhino calf along with her predecessor ‘siblings’ were to be viewed up close by thousands of school children who came to her garden while attending the environmental school nearby. In August 2008 Moêng was poached, marking the commencement of South Africa’s latest, most deadly rhino war. Since that date, more than 6000 rhino have suffered a similar fate.
A Rhino in my Garden chronicles Conita Walker’s life as mother of two sons, foster mother of wild orphans, and supporter of her husband’s conservation work. Always in the background, seldom in the limelight, her story reveals an extraordinary life, from fleeing the advancing Russian army as a war refugee in 1945, growing up in the realm of Modjadji the ‘Rain Queen’, flying all over the world with Trek Airways, to sharing a life with her husband in the Waterberg. There she still resides today on a small sanctuary where her family is creating a ‘living museum’ and botanical garden.
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