Somewhere East of Eden

by Michael McKeown

  MOVEABLE ARTICHOKES

  Some of Nature’s most exquisite handiwork is in miniature as anyone who has studied a snowflake under a microscope knows.

  - Rachel Carson

  Imagine, if you will, sitting down to a dinner a deux in a candle-lit restaurant accompanied by a bottle of full bodied French wine. You and your partner are enjoying a hors d’ oeuvre when a waiter appears beside you holding a wicker basket containing a live duck. “You ordered duck a l’orange for your main course, sir, “he confirms deferentially, “Would you like to us to cut its throat now, so that you know your meal is fresh?”

  By now your wife, or girl-friend, has probably swooned and you are sitting back speechless and open mouthed. But wait a moment. Before you rush to register a complaint with the Food Standards Agency, sit back and reflect that this is what happens daily in restaurants throughout Vietnam and China, where live pangolins are routinely brought to the table and despatched with a knife in front of diners – a sort of quality control assurance to confirm that this exorbitantly expensive meat is genuine and not a substitute. To while away the time, you may be even be offered a glass of the creature’s blood, regarded as a multi-purpose tonic, whilst watching your meal being prepared in the kitchen, on your waitress’s mobile phone.

  Now I know that we do not eat pangolins in the Western world and hopefully we never shall. The chances, in any case are that you have never even heard of, let alone seen, a pangolin, one of the ten animals that Sir David Attenborough has listed to accompany him on his personal ark. Nor, if the present trend continues, are, you likely to. For the pangolin is on the verge of being exterminated both for its meat and a wholly mistaken belief in the medical properties of its scales. In India and Pakistan, they are ritually killed by being thrown live into boiling water to soften their scales prior removing them. In China, where demand far outstrips supply they arrive alive, or frozen alive, their tightly packed bodies neatly coiled, suggesting that the terrified animal had attempted desperately to use its traditional form of defence and curl up into a tight ball.

  Officially listed as the most illegally trafficked animal on the planet (although since poachers are notoriously lax in submitting audited accounts, exact figures must be hard to come by) this small, shy and mainly nocturnal animal lacks the charisma of other more iconic endangered species like elephants, rhino or pandas. In consequence, the pangolin’s rating on the list of I-Want-To-Save species is depressingly low and its plight a reflection of our increasingly media driven world, obsessed with celebrity status and glamour.

  Having all but exterminated all four Asian species the animal traffickers are now turning to Africa to meet the insatiable demand in China and Vietnam where, amongst the wealthy to serve pangolin to your guests is a status symbol, like driving a Ferrari or a Porsche. Like cocaine, pangolins are sold by weight which has led to them being trapped and force fed on food they would otherwise never touch. So great is the demand that prices have now risen to over $600 per kilo.

  My own awareness of pangolins, described affectionately by those who know them as a walking pinecone or an artichoke on legs, was shamefully low until I met Lisa Hywood, founder of The Tikki Hywood Animal Trust, a 24-hour rescue and rehabilitation facility in Zimbabwe, caring for smaller and lesser known animals.

  Amongst the animals in her hillside home were civets, servals, African wild cats, hedgehogs, a caracal and, to my unconfined joy, a Cape clawed otter, called Naia. Growing up in the Scottish borders, I had enjoyed occasional sightings of otters along the banks of the river Tweed and later, like millions of others, blinked back tears whilst watching the film of Ring of Bright Water with Virginia McKenna. Naia’s daily treat was an evening dip in Lisa’s swimming pool, and later, standing in the shallow end, I watched spellbound as he moved with streamlined speed, power and grace leaping out of the water, submerging and then re-surfacing again in carefree abandon.

  Lisa had started the Tikki Hywood Trust in 1994, in memory of her late father whose love of nature and the wild still today underpin the basic tenets of the Trust. Her aim was to bring both local and international awareness to the dangers faced by lesser known endangered animals globally. A cool, composed and attractive woman in her early forties, Lisa radiated a quiet self assurance. As well she might be, for she probably knows more about the care, husbandry, rehabilitation and eventual release of captive pangolins than anyone else in Africa. She was also I quickly discovered a human dynamo, tirelessly devoted to her conservation charges and her aim of raising conservation awareness through education. Dressed in shorts and a crisp white T-shirt she appeared the very personification of boundless good health and was soon conducting me on a tour of the various enclosures scattered around her steep hillside domain, at a pace that soon left me lumbering gaspingly behind her. At some point, during a brief pit-stop for coffee at her house, she explained why reproduction was key to the pangolin’s survival as a species.

  “In the wild they produce only one offspring a year. With their numbers being so drastically reduced by poaching they are being pushed to the edge of extinction.”

  Nor I discovered was captive breeding a solution – at least not in the foreseeable future. “So far it has proven extraordinarily difficult with all eight species,” she told me shaking her head in frustration and went on to describe the pangolin’s apparent total dependence on living in a natural ecosystem. “Put them in a captive environment and they quickly become depressed and die. It’s as if they can’t cope with it.”

  Despite all the multiple problems Lisa was hopeful that a solution could be found. As she wryly pointed out, with supplies dwindling in Asia, the mafia wild-life syndicates were turning to Africa as their source for the trade. So, it’s up to us to prevent them.

  “And we will,” she added with her inimitable air of unshakeable conviction. “They really are special little animals; extremely shy but when they get to know you, so friendly and trusting.”

  During my time with Lisa, and for a week or so after, I shared in her optimism. Numerous organisations have all launched campaigns to raise awareness of the pangolins plight and all eight species are listed on the International Union for Conservation [IUCN] Red List as being animals threatened with extinction. But the harsh, sad fact is that these humble, armoured-plated creatures, no bigger than a house cat and whose evolution spans eighty million years, remain largely unknown and uncared for. A minor irrelevance in a long list of small, unglamorous species that are fast disappearing. No one knows how many pangolins are left in the wild and no one can tell how soon it will be before they are eaten to extinction.

  Does it matter many will ask? What difference does it make in the context of the Arctic ice-cap melting or the destruction of the Amazon rainforest if one rather minor species disappears? Only this perhaps – the natural world is a marvellously complex mosaic of inter-connectivity. Destroy, or unravel one thread and another will come loose, then another and another. Until one fine day…

  THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE DOVE

  Just living is not enough, said the butterfly. You must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.

  - Hans Christian Andersen.

  In Woody Allen’s romantic-fantasy comedy The Purple Rose of Cairo, Cecilia, a waitress during the Depression, spends most of her spare time at the movies trying to escape the bleak reality of life and a loveless marriage. One morning at work she confides to a colleague: “I met the most wonderful man. He’s imaginary but who cares? You can’t have everything you want, can you?”The answer of course in our pre-packaged, consumer driven world is that this is exactly what we want – and demand. It’s known as instant gratification and manifests itself in almost every walk of life including, regrettably, an increasing number of visitors to African national parks. Only the other day I had heard a tiresomely whining couple from Manchester bemoaning the fact that they had not seen a single lion during their time in the Kruger. As if animals should appear on cue so they can be photographed and crossed off tic
k lists like the masterpieces hanging in the Louvre or the Rijksmuseum.

  Cecila’s words came back to me recently at the end of a long hot and fruitless morning in Hwange National Park during which, apart from a small group of zebras, a morose-looking wildebeest and some banded mongooses, we had seen nothing. But then as anyone who has experienced game viewing knows, this is exactly how it can sometimes be – rather like watching a Chekov play and wondering if anything is ever going to happen. That morning, the animal kingdom had withdrawn itself completely in that mystifying way it sometimes does. But, their apprehended presence was everywhere, a cohort of unseen but searching eyes registering our presence, their senses here infinitely wiser and more intuitive than mine. It was nearly three years since I had last visited Hwange and now I was back again, staying at Bushbuck Lodge, a small, unpretentious camp on the northern edge of the park fringed by camelthorn acacias and overlooking a vlei, run by an old friend, Alan Ridgeway whom I had first met fifteen years earlier at the World Travel Market in London. During the four-day dining and wining jamboree, for that is what these things essentially are, we ended up on the final evening having dinner together at an Earls Court trattoria, La Buona Notte. Towards the end of the meal and over a second bottle of Chianti he suggested that when I was next in Zimbabwe I should visit Bushbuck’s for a few days and write an article about it. The look of bemusement on his face when I turned up at his Harare based office over a year later, is something I have enjoyed reminding him of ever since.

  Covering over fourteen thousand square kilometres, approximately the size of Wales, Hwange was once the coveted jewel in Zimbabwe’s wildlife crown. Sadly, as with so many aspects of the country’s life, its present decline could be laid at the door of one of Africa’s most odious and brutal dictators, Robert Gabriel Mugabe. At its independence in 1980 and through the early 1990s, Zimbabwe enjoyed one of the most structurally developed economies and effective state systems in Africa. All of that quickly changed however with the chaotic land reform measures and subsequent ‘white farm’ invasions implemented by Mugabe in 2001.

  The policy proved to be not merely misguided but economically insane. Commercial agriculture, once the breadbasket for central Africa, collapsed and by the end of 2008 hyperinflation exceeded 250 million per cent, totally eroding the purchasing power of the local currency. Over two million Zimbabweans – one sixth of the population – emigrated, and investors and tourists prudently stayed away. Consequently, it was no great surprise to discover on my arrival at Bushbuck that, apart from a biologist engaged in a lion-collaring project, I was the only visitor.

  Before leaving for Hwange I had spent a few days in Harare. Step for a few hours outside the city’s affluent residential suburbs into one of its sprawling townships and you enter a different world. Here is the harsh face of urban Africa, ugly, dispiriting and stripped of dignity, a life that has absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly scripted Out of Africa safaris portrayed in glossy brochures at international travel fairs. A place lacking sanitation of the most basic type and, for the most part, water or electricity, whose narrow lanes are a maze of open, raw sewage around which the inhabitants of the peeling, dilapidated tenements negotiate their way over decomposing mounds of garbage. I tried to imagine how they managed to live with the knowledge that this was probably about as good as life got, and failed. God knows what it must be like to wake up at five every morning and walk a mile or more carrying your galvanized iron bucket in order that that you can wash before starting out on the long journey into the city and your work place. But – and this never ceases to amaze me – despite all the deprivation and injustices that are a daily part of their lives they somehow not only cope with it but manage to smile, laugh and sing.

  Only a few weeks earlier, with well over seventy-five percent of his people unemployed and famine stalking the land, the ageing tyrant had hosted his family and political cronies to a 91st birthday banquet held at a Victoria Falls safari lodge. In scenes, reminiscent of the Emperor Caligula an elephant, a lion, two giraffes and several antelopes were ritualistically slaughtered in tribute to the self-styled Hitler of Africa who had bankrupted his country. Imagine therefore my astonishment when later that evening in the bar I came across a three-day old copy of the state-controlled Herald daily newspaper with an article entitled Zimbabwe: Africa’s Promised Land. “There is no doubt”, the author wrote glowingly, “that Zimbabwe is an African El Dorado whose citizens joyfully share in their country’s rich cornucopia of natural resources such as gold and diamonds, tea, tobacco, wheat and dairy produce under the governance of our wise and bountiful president.”

  I couldn’t believe it. It was like reading that Donald Trump had said something sane and meaningful and I read on with mounting disbelief. True, Zimbabwe had once been the breadbasket of southern Africa. Now however, the once fertile farmlands lay derelict and unproductive and from being a net exporter of wheat and maize the country relied almost entirely on imports of maize from Zambia to feed its people. Undeterred by his blurring of fact and fiction, the writer triumphantly extolled the government who, “despite battling valiantly against the shortages occasioned by unfairly imposed UN sanctions, nevertheless managed to provide exemplary health care for all of its citizens.” Unable to stand any more of these blatant lies I put the newspaper down at the same moment as a tall, rangy figure with thick greying hair materialised at my side.

  “Patrick Hamilton. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you. Alan told me you were coming.” He shook hands. “Settled in alright? Things not too spartan, I hope.” He helped himself to a Zambezi lager from the fridge, uncapped it and took a long, appreciative swallow. “The chef says he will be ready for us in twenty minutes or so. I don’t know about you but I’m famished.”

  Patrick was a relaxed and easy going South African in his early fifties with a long, chiselled nose and a firm, determined mouth who was currently assisting a UK sponsored conservation project with satellite based GPS tracking collars on lions in the park that transmitted signals for up to five km. This it was hoped would allow the team to monitor the trans-boundary movement of lions and determine how any potential conflicts between lions and villagers could be marginalised.

  Over dinner of pumpkin soup and slowly barbecued pork ribs coated with paprika and sweet chilli sauce in the open-sided dining room, we discussed the drought threatening Zambia and Malawi to the north, the declining lion population and the latest high-jacking of a Zimbabwe Airways Boeing 747 for a shopping spree to Dubai by the First Lady of Shopping, as Grace Mugabe the president’s wife was widely known.

  “Your very own Marie Antoinette?”

  “Only she would never suggest giving them cake. Sadza, more likely…” He broke off; glass raised half way to his mouth, his sentence uncompleted. The bull elephant had quite literally ghosted out of the trees. Slowly, and without breaking his stride, he advanced to within three or four metres of the table before coming to a halt. His massive looming presence was almost disorientating and I sat there transfixed and exhilarated by his proximity, a small part of my mind simultaneously aware that a single sweep of his trunk could send the candles, glasses and plates on the table flying – or for that matter, us. For a minute or so he contemplated us impassively and then with the briefest shake of his head turned and evaporated into the trees.

  “Close.” Patrick cleared his throat. “Any closer and it’s goodbye to the wine.” He raised his glass and winked.

  I nodded, waiting for the saliva to work its way back into my throat. The candles created flickering pools of light and shadow along the polished mukwa wood table, setting fire to the red wine in our glasses and lighting up our faces Caravaggio fashion, against the surrounding darkness still charged with the omnipresent presence of our visitor. Sometimes, there are rare, precious moments in life when you can only give thanks for being alive and this was one of them.

  At the time of my visit Hwange was making front page news for all the wrong reasons. The sale of sixty-th
ree baby elephants, forcibly removed from their families and flown to a theme-park being built in China’s smog-laden, heavily industrialised Guangdong province had provoked worldwide condemnation from conservation and animal welfare groups. Elephants are recognised as being highly intelligent and cognitive animals with strong social bonds. Separating calves from their mothers causes lasting emotional trauma both to the captured calf, as well as the remaining herd. Photographs taken by a Chinese project manager with Nature University, an animal rights organisation based in Beijing, showed baby elephants in cold, concrete cells clearly in poor health and behaving aggressively to one another, a sure sign of stress. They had nothing natural to relate to or to take comfort in and had started to exhibit stereotypic behaviour. None of these reports however appeared to concern the environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri who claimed, contrary to all evidence, that the elephants were ‘happy.’ “They are our elephants,” she said in an interview with the Herald. We are not going to apologise.”

  I asked Patrick if he thought this was a blue print for the future.

  He considered for a moment and shrugged. “If you mean, will they now start exporting other animals like giraffe, hyenas or baboons, the answer is almost certainly, yes. At present the country is in debt to the tune of US$9 billion and, as the lady said, the animals are theirs to do what they like with.”

  The ‘lady,’ as I knew was a strident advocate in Zimbabwe’s on-going campaign to legalise the trade of stock-piled ivory which was currently banned worldwide. Her widely proclaimed position was that poor rural communities would benefit from the proceeds which would provide roads, clinics and school. It was a suggestion that other southern African states supported and I asked Patrick what he thought.