Somewhere East of Eden

by Michael McKeown

  Some years earlier I had visited the Bambata Cave, a major archaeological site in the west of the national park where I had stood marvelling at marvellously rendered friezes of giraffe, elephant, antelope and warthogs. There were, I knew, several rock paintings sites located within the park and I was pleasantly surprised to learn from Alison that one was situated quite close to the lodge.

  “How far is quite close?” I enquired. She came from the kind of pioneering stock that considered trekking thirty or forty miles or more across rough, broken terrain in blistering heat as a stroll in a sunny suburban avenue.

  “Oh, twenty minutes or so,” she replied blithely and I mentally doubled her estimate.

  By the time I reached the cave, snagging myself on thorns and disentangling myself from the tangled undergrowth that clutched stubbornly at my ankles, it had taken me nearly an hour. But in the end, it was all worth it. The larger of the two caves has an extensive display of animals, including rhino and numerous stick-like figures of trance dancers. They were all drawn with a graceful fluency that renders a natural sense of movement. As well as depicting instances of their daily way of life they are an insight into the spirit world that so deeply engaged their minds. In the San world, animals and birds shared the cosmos equally with mankind and they appear to have enjoyed an almost mystical understanding with them. In the beginning, so it is said, wild animals used to talk to humans and everyone was on friendly terms.

  Rhinos feature prominently in San paintings. In long-ago times, they were to be seen in their hundreds but by the early 1990’s the black rhino population had all but been wiped out. A group of twenty white rhinos from South Africa had been successfully introduced in to the park but with a resurgence in poaching the rhino were now guarded by armed patrols with orders to shoot on sight.

  I moved outside. The air was thin and clear, the sky an intense lambent blue with only the faintest hint of cumulus away to the west. Two Verreaux’s eagles slowly circled the thermals, their laser-like eyes alert for their favourite prey species – the luckless rock hyrax. I looked across the green, wooded valleys and the giant granite boulders that climbed haphazardly on top of one another like the discarded play things of some capricious god. How many aeons of geological history was I looking at in this wild, tumbling landscape? Figures of one and half, or two billion years darted uncomprehendingly around in my mind. It was like being in a time travel film. And in all the rolling vastness there was no sign of human habitation, of roads, of houses, or smoke. Not even an electric pylon. Edison, if he happened to be looking down, would scarcely believe it. And far below me were some of those very same animals – rhino, tsessebe, warthog, and giraffe – that I had seen depicted in the caves. I don’t know which enchanted me most, the exquisitely drawn figures from an inconceivably distant past, or the fact that they were still here in this marvellous open-air gallery untouched by human hand.

  The longer I remained the stronger a feeling of the past in the present became. It was the strangest sensation. Perhaps I was imagining it but for long moments I felt the sense of presence here, a spirit, an atmosphere; something almost sentient and actual but never for a moment hostile. The silence of the past hovers over these hills like the long shadows cast by eagles’ wings and at times the sound of the lumbering ox-wagons of the trekking Boers, or the ostrich-plumed legions of Zulu impis who King Mzilkazi led northward across the Limpopo can be apprehended in the wind.

  The brooding splendour of these hills made a lasting impression on three key figures whose destinies were interwoven in the making of modern Zimbabwe – Mzilikazi, the Ndebele king, his son Lobengula and Cecil John Rhodes, who in 1888 and at the age of thirty-four had already amassed separate fortunes in the gold and diamond industries. His colossal ambitions, to say nothing of overweening vanity, embraced the vision of an empire stretching from the Cape to Cairo and included the rich mineral deposits known to exist in what later became Rhodesia.

  “Do not speak to me of gold. It brings more dissension, misfortune and unexpected plagues in its wake, rather than benefits,” said Paul Kruger, president of the small Boer republic of Transvaal in 1885 when he learned that deposits had been discovered inside the country’s eastern border. “Every ounce taken from our soil will have to be paid for in rivers of blood.” Kruger’s prescience was remarkable. In less than a decade his country had been overpowered by the British who coveted, and eventually controlled, the word’s richest gold mines in the Witwatersrand.

  At the height of his powers Lobengula ruled over some of Africa’s richest and most coveted lands. He commanded a superbly disciplined army whose training and tactics were modelled on those of Shaka Zulu, under whom his father, Mziikazi, had served. In a memorable description of someone irreversibly caught in the web of fate, the novelist Evelyn Waugh likened the Ndebele king to ‘a deeply tragic figure from Shakespeare, combining as he did, elements from Lear, Macbeth and Richard 11.’

  A shrewd statesman, Lobengula tried to concede as little as possible while keeping his regiments firmly in check.’ For he knew that however brave his impis were they were no match for English maxim-guns or artillery and so tried to protect his people through diplomacy and by conceding as little as possible in negotiations. In a perceptive and poignant observation to the missionary, the Rev Charles Helm, Lobengula asked.

  “Did you ever see a chameleon catch a fly? The chameleon gets behind the fly and remains motionless for some time, then he advances very slowly and gently first putting one leg forward and then the other. Finally, when well within reach he darts out his tongue and the fly disappears. Well, England is the chameleon and I am the fly.”

  Lobengula was right to be wary of Rhodes, for it was the latter’s Machiavellian web of deception and intrigue that finally duped him into signing away his kingdom. Today Rhodes is regarded as an icon of British imperialism and Lobengula’s name is commemorated in a major bakery in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare.

  It was somewhere in the region of Rhode’s grave that on my last visit I had encountered a retired parks ranger widely known as the Lizard Man, because the rapport he had established with the hundreds of lizards who inhabited the rocks in the vicinity. He would sit with his back against one of the boulders as if in meditation and then after a while produce a small clump of dampened mealie-meal, at the same time emitting a distinctive high-pitched call. This was the signal for dozens of lizards to miraculously materialise from cracks and crevices in the boulders, or from behind the small, succulent grey-green aloes and surround him as they nibbled at the mealie meal in his outstretched hand, some even climbing up and over his arm in search of a better vantage point. Towards the end of the performance he would hand out the remaining pieces of mealie-meal for nearby spectators to distribute to the lizards who, for reasons best known to themselves, would ignore the offerings and scuttle away. Alas, the lizard man was not there when I finally scrambled my way up to his usual site. I enquired from various people if he still came but no-one seemed to know. Eventually, a grizzled old man fishing by one of the dams, told me he had left and gone back to his village krall, near to Khami. That had been a year back and as far as he knew nobody had seen him since.

  The lizard man had been lived in the Matobos for much of his life and I wondered if the lizards missed him.

  On my penultimate evening, I joined John Burton for a couple of after dinner drinks in the bar. There we discussed, amongst other matters, a nearly completed fence around part of the national park to protect the black rhino population, a project that was being undertaken by the Matobos Rhino Trust of which John was the chairman. The plan was to confine the rhino inside a protective zone with a high anti-poaching presence and to establish a community benefit scheme by which members of the community would be responsible for external fence patrols and derive financial benefit from a percentage of the tourism revenue to the park.

  “At least that’s what we hope,” John concluded, sipping at the last of his whisky.

  “And do you th
ink it will work?”

  “This is Africa.” He raised his eyebrows quizzically. “Anything can happen. But we have to keep trying.” It was a maxim I had heard many times from people working in conservation in Africa often in unfavourable conditions, and as always, I saluted their tenacity and resolution.

  It was after ten by the time I left and it was only on reaching my room at the foot of the kopje that I discovered I had left my key in the bar. Mildly annoyed at my negligence, I returned to reception only to find both it and the dining room locked and in darkness. Somewhat surprised that everything should be closed and shuttered so quickly, I walked around the building banging on doors and windows and calling out, none of which elicited any response. John and Alison, I knew lived two or three miles away and even if I wanted to contact them, I didn’t know their number. Nor did I have any idea where the staff lived.

  For the next twenty minutes, I wandered with a sense of increasing unease around the grounds visiting the workshop, the stables, the vehicle maintenance yard and always returning to the firmly locked and shuttered reception. The surroundings that had been so friendly and familiar earlier in the day now seemed alien and menacing. I was standing by the large wooden ostrich boma contemplating the sleeping birds and wondering what to do next when suddenly from somewhere high up on the kopje a baboon barked harshly, disturbed perhaps by his ancient foe the leopard.

  Leopard! My mind went into overdrive. Leopards are night cats superbly adapted to hunting both on the ground or in trees. Stealthy, solitary animals they are the perfect predator. I quickened my step – as though that would have done me any good. Even now it was probably slipping between the shadows, stretching its muscles, testing its reflexes preparatory to launching itself at me and tearing my body in to small, pulpy pieces. Baboons form a large part of a leopard’s diet and they kill them in the same way that they do humans, their front paws hooking into their victim’s shoulders whilst the rear claws disembowel the stomach with swift, clinical precision. I imagined my scalp torn from my head in a single lethal feline swipe and watching it dangle, dripping with blood, from one of the leopard’s paws in the bright, cold winter moonlight.

  I stumbled on dry-mouthed with no clear idea as to where I was heading, willing my whirring mind to block out the inch-high newspaper headlines that flickered across it:

  TOURIST FOUND DISMEMBERED IN

  NATIONAL PARK… LEOPARD KILLS MAN,

  HEAD STILL MISSING.

  I recalled with abject self-pity that the last human words I was likely to hear in my life were John Burton’s; “This is Africa. You never know what will happen.” How prophetically and unfairly true.

  And then, strolling down the dusty moon-washed path leading from the workshop, appeared the familiar figure of Moses, the chef. He smiled and greeted me as though there was nothing untoward in my wandering around the grounds at that time of night. I wanted to throw myself on him in gratitude but I knew it would have embarrassed him greatly, so instead I warmly took his hand. He walked with me to the kitchens from where I could access the bar and retrieve my keys. Overcome with relief, it was only then that I remembered the leopard waiting to claim me on my walk back to the chalet and began to consider the option of remaining in the bar all night. But to do so would have involved explaining my fears to Moses and so with a nonchalant smile and a carefree gait I stepped out into the night.

  A few days later. I received an email photo from Alison. A leopard had entered the ostrich stockade during the night and killed the male. I studied the mangled, half-eaten body of the handsome bird that I had watched as he imperiously shepherded his three females around his domain and reflected bleakly how easily it could have been me.

  SILENT SPRING

  In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.

  - Napoléon Bonaparte

  Political satire could arguably be said to have died when that messianic warmonger Tony Blair was made a peace envoy to the Middle East. In the case of the environment, its passing may be traced from the end of 2013 when in the run up to the general election the British prime-minister, David Cameron, instructed his aides to “get rid of all this green crap.” This, it is worth recalling, was the same Cameron who three years earlier had famously posed for the cameras hugging a husky in the Arctic, professing his deep and unshakeable resolve to protect the environment and vowing to preside over ‘the greenest government ever.’

  Times had changed however and, with recession in full swing, playing the green card was now considered to be an electoral liability. It was time to tear up the well-worn hymn sheet about ‘climate change being one of the biggest threats facing the world,’ and perform a U-turn. Scrap the green crap, became the order of the day and, unsurprisingly, many people wondered whether Cameron had ever believed anything of what he had said in the first place. When the polls showed that green issues were not the vote winners he had believed them to be, he jumped ship. Small wonder that so many voters regard politicians with such contempt.

  I was reminded of this on a recent visit to Lake Nakuru, one in a chain of East Africa’s spectacular Rift Valley soda lakes and the site of one of the world’s greatest bird spectacles. Twenty or so years ago, the sight of more than two million greater and lesser flamingos lining its shores in a shimmering pink stain was one of the great iconic images of Africa. Now, as a result of DDT pollutants and heavy metal poisons from agrochemical industries in the catchment area being dumped into its algae rich waters, the birds have largely deserted the lake in favour of neighbouring Lake Bogoria. Even supposing all agricultural and horticultural activities were to cease tomorrow, the damage already inflicted on the lake is by now probably irreparable.

  Let’s for a moment be brutally honest about this. A healthy functioning planet is essential to all 7.5 billion of us humans. Not to put too fine a point on it, our existence depends upon it. Climate change, carbon pollution and over consumption of natural resources are slowly but irretrievably trashing our planet. And once we pass a certain level the Earth will continue warming even if somehow, we managed to rein in our carbon-burning frenzy.

  Most of us, it should be said, are vaguely aware of all this, although I daresay we would be a lot more concerned if only we could glimpse those pesky carbons whizzing around on their Earth-destroying missions. Seeing is believing after all, and so we console ourselves that it’s probably not as bad as it sounds and, in any case, it’s the government’s problem. Let them take care of it. The trouble with the environment though is that it can’t be ‘sexed up,’ as the spin doctors like to do, and so news of carbon emissions and biodiversity loss remain topics to be acknowledged with a rueful shake of the head and a regretful shrug of the shoulders. Unless of course it happens to be shmoo pictures of baby elephants dying from a drought, or stranded bottlenose dolphins with fatal lung injuries following the BP oil spill in the Mexican Gulf.

  All of which brings us back to David Cameron. Had he chosen to revisit the Arctic a few months after his seismic U-turn, he would have witnessed a scene that confirmed the truth of the convictions he had now abandoned. Thousands upon thousands of walruses were to be seen lying, head-to-tail, along shorelines and beaches. Normally, they would have been reclining on massive ice floes but now the ice was visibly shrinking. Life had suddenly changed for the worse and a lot of confused animals, baffled as to what was going, on were faced with the reality of what climate change is doing to the environment and its inhabitants.

  In 1962 Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist, published her ground-breaking book, Silent Spring. In it, she described the disastrous consequences of indiscriminate DDT spraying in the United States and questioned the logic of releasing large amounts of potentially dangerous chemical sprays into the environment without a sufficient understanding of their effect on ecology and human health. Almost immediately it created a groundswell of public outrage and condemnation of the major chemical and industrial companies, such as Monsanto and Bayer, for their pollution of the natural world.


  Widely credited with launching the American environmental movement, Carson meticulously documented the effect of pesticides on birds and animals. She accused the chemical industry of disinformation and public officials of uncritically accepting the anodyne assurances of the companies concerned. The title of her book – and I love the concept of this – was intended to evoke a spring in which no bird song was heard because the birds had by now nearly all vanished from it and was inspired from a line in a poem by Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci: – The sedge is wither’d from the lake. And no bird sings.

  The publication of Silent Spring had an immediate impact on both sides of the Atlantic in raising public awareness of the issues involved from chemical poisons and is now recognised as the single most important book in the formation of the environmental movement during the sixties. Her warnings finally led to a ban of pesticides for agricultural use in the USA and a strengthening of chemical insecticide regulations. The response to Carson’s world-changing book left politicians in no doubt where the public stood on the matter and as a result President John F. Kennedy instructed his Advisory Committee to review Carson’s claims. Predictably the committee’s vindication of her work led to a vicious smear campaign by the major chemical companies and right-wing, market-regulated republican newspapers who attacked her credibility as a scientist and derided her as a ‘hysterical female agitator’.

  The consequences that Carson warned us about have multiplied fifty, a hundred times or more since then with billions of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians being lost all over the planet to the extent that scientists are warning of a sixth mass extinction, as ever more powerful assaults on biodiversity continue. But so long as the IMF and the leaders of the G8 nations continue to regard the growth of their domestic economies as more important than a sustainable planet, the chances of meaningful change are as remote as the Maldives winning the world football cup.