A Rhino in my Garden Read online

  Shortly after we got married, on one of our regular Sunday afternoon “Just looking, I promise” stops at a second-hand bookshop, Clive discovered a treasure: a 1929 publication that had found its way there from Herald’s Bookstore in Salisbury, old Rhodesia. Denis Lyell’s The Hunting and Spoor of Central African Game was the only book he’d ever found which showed life-sized animal tracks for the purpose of identification. Another Sunday afternoon, another bookshop, another find. Dr Reay Smithers’s The Mammals of Zambia, Rhodesia and Malawi with small animal tracks accompanying the text. I could see where we were headed, and halfway through dinner with a friend who said, “You’ve got to include dung,” I pushed away my schnitzel and tried to accept my fate. Across the table Clive and Koos Bothma, Professor of Wildlife Management at Pretoria University, were enthusing over the prospect of a first-ever fully comprehensive authoritative field guide to the spoor and signs of the mammals of Southern Africa. I was making mental lists, beginning with rubber gloves, plastic bags and industrial-strength disinfectant.

  In the course of the next few years it sometimes felt to me as if every animal that had walked anywhere between the Kgalagadi in the west and the iMfolozi in the east had had its spoor measured, photographed, described and identified. If it had defecated anywhere within the range of vision of Clive and the various scouts who accompanied us from time to time, the remains of its last meal found its way into my meticulously labelled plastic bags. If it had dug a deep hole or tunnel both my sons would volunteer to investigate. Renning was older and already fascinated by the natural world, but Anton being the younger was smaller and often won the right to crawl into that dusty unknown while I panicked about snakes, scorpions or indeed the owner of that hole which could still be lurking down there, foul-tempered and hungry.

  For the boys it was an adventure that continued over many holidays. They became expert dung collectors, sharp-eyed and unflagging. I gave up on rubber gloves and joined in their contests: with our fingers thrust deep into elephant dung we’d each offer our best guess – this morning, last night, yesterday. The scout was the judge. He was usually also the one to keep watch and send us all racing madly back to our Land Rover station wagon to escape the ire of lion, rhino, buffalo or elephant that resented our poking around their ablutions.

  The aftermath to our study and collection trips was much less fun, and with that Clive was on his own. Banished to a room as far removed from the rest of our living space as possible, he soaked the dung specimens in tetrachloride and then had them drying for days on end in grim little heaps on sheets of newspaper before they could be deposited in labelled glass jars. The boys and I resolutely refused to assist. Carnivore dung, especially, was bad enough out in the open air of the Okavango or Savute or the Klaserie Game Reserve; at close quarters in a Johannesburg house we found that the romance of the wild was utterly gone. It was dung, it stank and was wholly and solely Dad’s affair.

  Signs of the Wild was published in 1981 and is still in print to this day. Popular and useful as it is among safari guides and tourists, for me it has even greater value. I see two small boys with sun-bleached hair shouting their excitement to me as they run up with their hands full of animal droppings. And, striding up behind them, their father, laughing.

  That might well be my favourite image of Clive: on foot in the veld, and since 1975 that is how he spent much of his professional time – walking in the wild.

  We had created Educational Wildlife Expeditions by then, an organisation aimed at bringing man and nature closer together. EWE took small groups on walking trails into unspoilt wilderness areas. Sometimes I was able to go along, but mainly, together with the responsibilities of full-time motherhood and part-time teaching, I was part of the team that ran logistics support from Johannesburg. These days wilderness trails have become one of the mainstays of nature-based tourism. All flavours of trailing: backpacking, slack-packing, every possible variation of eco- and wild- and green-, horseback, elephant-back, every degree of indulgence from hard-core no-frills, to ultimate no-sweat with every luxurious attention to your comfort.

  It was different then. The renowned conservationist Dr Ian Player had introduced his pioneering Wilderness Leadership School trails in KwaZulu-Natal. There weren’t many other enterprises of the kind, and his model was the one closest to what EWE wished to achieve. The goal was straightforward. People, ordinary everyday people, were to encounter wild nature on foot. No more, no less. The focus was not the splendid designer accommodation or gourmet cuisine – we aimed for basic campsite comforts and hearty refuelling after a day’s trailing.

  It was all about Mother Nature. Nature’s sounds and silences; nature’s rhythms; the dramas of the wilderness playing out without being scripted and coerced by humans, without being commercially packaged for consumption by humans. Elephant, buffalo, lion, rhino, leopard: they weren’t the Big 5 – each one was a wondrous, irreplaceable component of the natural creation, along with rivers and rocks, trees and flowers and clouds and stars.

  I began to notice something. Trailists might have arrived with no greater ambition than to have a fun holiday, an adventure maybe with a moderate helping of adrenaline on the side. But by the time they said goodbye their conversations had changed. They were talking about feeling part of the natural world in a way they hadn’t felt before. I knew exactly what they meant. It was that same quiet miracle of transformation wrought by the wilderness that I myself had experienced. As a way to win converts for the cause of conservation it was and still is to my way of thinking, unsurpassed. Best of all, of course, if you can catch them young.

  That was another of Clive’s missions: environmental education. Together with some like-minded colleagues, he created The Wilderness Trust, with a similar aim to that of EWE but with children as the target. Children of all races who were to become the inheritors of this country and be responsible, in their turn, for preserving it in a way that was worth inheriting – with its natural environment, its glorious wilderness areas, intact.

  The response from children to this kind of exposure to the wild was extraordinary and intensely rewarding. We were fired with a desire to reach as many children as possible, and to do so in a way that would make a wilderness experience not just a privilege for the already privileged, but one that was available for every child regardless of background or finances. At that time the political dispensation in South Africa, still in the grip of apartheid, wasn’t ready to embrace any such goal. But I’d grown up on a mission station: I was schooled in the pursuit of big dreams and faith in large causes. When Clive started talking about the creation of a wilderness school as a centre for nature-based education he had an easy convert in his wife. We were living in a city, hardly the place for such a school, but no matter. We had no finances with which to acquire land and build such a school – no matter. Our own two boys were at school in Johannesburg and still needed us as hands-on parents. No matter, we would find a way.

  Clive scouted bushveld areas for suitable locations. He returned again and again to a little-known area in what was then the Northern Province and is now named after the river which defines its northern border, Limpopo.

  This was the Waterberg, one of the major mountain ranges of South Africa – 14 500 square kilometres of outstanding natural beauty and ecological diversity lying just about halfway between the urban sprawl of Gauteng and the silence and vast horizons of the great Kgalagadi. Halfway in more than geography too: with a kinder climate than the desert and therefore a less punishing environment for both man and animal, it was in some areas still wild enough to have the identifying stamp of true wilderness.

  To the conservationist’s eye the greater Waterberg area showed some worrisome signs: an erstwhile wildlife paradise had become badly degraded, hunted out, leaving in places little more than a maze of cattle farm fences. But there were encouraging signs too: some landowners had chosen another direction and begun to restore and protect pockets of wild Waterberg as private nature reserves.


  After those trips Clive came home and one name started recurring: Dubbelwater. Five thousand hectares of rugged bushveld through which two rivers, the Palala and the Blocklands, had cut winding courses to their confluence in the north-western part of the property before continuing on north to the Limpopo.

  He was ready to make a decision, but wanted me to see it. “Pack something,” he said. “You might want to celebrate.”

  Early the next morning, while all of Johannesburg was commuting to work, we set off in the opposite direction, out of the city. First the tarred national road aiming straight north, then a narrow secondary road, less straight, heading north-west, then gravel. With every turn-off the road became narrower, the surface rougher, until more than four hours later we were on a little-used jeep track, crawling up onto a plateau where we ran out of road. Clive led the way to a game track disappearing into dense vegetation. Under the trees the air closed in. I could detect the smells of animals that had passed that way. There was zebra spoor, and kudu. Then the unmistakable twin pits made by small klipspringer hooves – a sure sign that we were in some high, rocky place. After a few hundred metres the gritty sand and stones underfoot gave way to solid rust-coloured rock and we emerged from the shade into brilliant light. I was standing on a cliff-top. Two hundred metres below was the bend of a river, and to the right, the flat-topped hill which had dominated every view of our approach.

  “That’s Malora,” Clive said. “And this,” his walking stick tracked the river as it snaked towards us, tumbled over black rocks and angled off to our left, “this is the Palala.”

  There, on those towering rocks, we had our celebratory picnic on what Clive told me was Lapalala, part of the Dubbelwater farm. I couldn’t see any signs of development; it seemed completely wild, as if it had never been disturbed by humans. But that was deceptive. The area had once been settled by groups of the Nguni people – remains of their Iron Age stone walling could be found on top of Malora. Certainly in other places too, Clive thought, once one started looking. The archaeological record would add immeasurably to the scope of the curriculum one could offer at a wilderness school in such a place.

  We clubbed together with our friends and colleagues of The Wilderness Trust and began to negotiate with the owners, a South African and a former Kenyan hunter, one Eric Rundgren, godson of Karen Blixen’s husband, Bror Blixen. We paid over the deposit. The remainder of the purchase price had a deadline attached to it. As month followed month that deadline seemed to be approaching faster than our prospects for raising sufficient funds. But at that point Lapalala drew another player.

  On one of Clive’s EWE trails some years earlier, in the Okavango in Botswana, the group had included a couple from Cape Town, a businessman and his wife, Dale and Elizabeth Parker. Already predisposed by an interest in Africa’s natural environment to be sympathetic to the cause of wildlife conservation, the Parkers expressed an interest in Clive’s causes. It wasn’t long before Dale became a trustee of the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

  In 1981 Clive was in Knysna in the southern Cape Province. Through EWT he was involved in a last-ditch effort to save the rare Knysna elephant. These animals had assumed almost mythic status: in the dense indigenous forests they were extremely seldom seen. There had been no sightings for a considerable time. This was a survey to determine how many, if any, elephant remained. Dale Parker volunteered to fly some more people down to join in the search. They found evidence of three elephants. That was the good news. It was also the bad news: human pressures on their habitat had allowed the survival of only three elephants.

  At the post-survey dinner that night, in the course of a discussion around strategies for the conservation of large herbivores, Clive mentioned what he’d seen in the Waterberg: landowners moving into wildlife conservation. The Waterberg was so poorly known at that time, some of the people around the table needed to have the place described to them. Clive did, and he didn’t hide the fact that he’d lost his heart to one particular part of it.

  The next morning Dale had to fly back to Cape Town, but first he wanted a private word with Clive. If he were to purchase this place, Lapalala/Dubbelwater, he asked, would Clive join him in developing it as a wilderness reserve, and take care of the hands-on management?

  Clive didn’t hesitate. They shook hands on the deal.

  A month later the Parkers flew up from Cape Town to have a look for themselves. Clive took them to that same spot above the Palala. It was enough.

  Lapalala grew. Additional land was acquired – eventually 18 farms in all – veld was rehabilitated, fences dropped, wildlife species re-introduced, infrastructure created, management and staff trained. The initial 5000 hectares grew to the 36 000 hectares of the Lapalala Wilderness Reserve, and in the heart of it, on the banks of the Palala, rose our wilderness school.

  Be careful what you wish for, they say. I learnt to do with much less sleep. We were now living and working in two places several hours apart, Johannesburg and Lapalala. At the same time other conservation work had to continue. In the course of the 1970s Clive had become involved with investigating and on several occasions exposing threats to free-roaming wildlife. In the Kaokoveld in northern Namibia, for example, he discovered a situation perilously close to whole-scale slaughter of desert elephant and black rhino. The usual culprits of course, but in this instance the havoc wrought by poachers was further increased by elements within the government and defence force. Under such circumstances one doesn’t walk away. Through EWT and the Rhino and Elephant Foundation Clive joined with others in fighting the battle on that front. In 1981, as we embarked on our work in Lapalala, that battle wasn’t merely ongoing, it was intensifying. And not only in the Kaokoveld.

  Privately, well out of the public view, I had my moments when it felt like a losing battle. It seemed that wherever I looked there was a red flag: some creeping devastation threatening the survival of some part of the natural environment. And often, by the time the alert went out, there was an all but irreversible fait accompli: a development green-lighted or even already half-built; a wetland laid waste; species numbers decimated; carcasses rotting in the sun.

  Through EWT Clive was frequently the one who had to sound the alarm. He didn’t flinch, although the sight of my husband on his soapbox was not always welcomed by authorities. I’d realised long before that I’d married an idealist, a dreamer. Now I discovered that his particular brand of dreaming was that of the crusader, the kind that caused wives to lie awake worrying at night. He seemed to be relentlessly positive. Both publicly and in private he resisted anything that resembled a defeatist attitude. There was always a plan to be made, some action to initiate or support. A battle was there to be fought, not to be lamented.

  I learnt that, with conservation, you signed up for the long haul. The most effective strategies tend to be the ones with the long-term view. They may not make the headlines and they won’t deliver in the short term, but they seed a future with more favourable conservation prospects.

  Wilderness trailing with EWE was just such a strategy. So was the wilderness school. Lapalala also opened the opportunity for another. Dale was skeptical. I have to admit, it wasn’t the kind of business plan that would have sounded convincing in a corporate boardroom. But at his request, albeit without his whole-hearted belief at first, we as EWE took over the three very rustic self-catering bush camps which had originally been established by a friend of Eric Rundgren. The camps operated on a somewhat unusual basis. For the most nominal of fees it was placed within the reach of ordinary people, families who would otherwise not have been able to afford an experience of that nature. This was only possible because Lapalala was privately funded, the owners were willing to absorb some of the additional costs and gracious enough to trust us with such an enterprise on their land.

  Since EWE, operating from its base near our Edenvale home, was already a fully functional walking trails operation, we were perfectly placed to absorb these three camps. That soon grew to six rustic, unfen
ced camps in stunning locations. In time four more were added. Ten idyllic, wild hideaways. There was a single rule for guests: drive to your camp and then no more driving until the day you leave. Explore on foot, wherever you like, for as long as you like. No guards, no guns. There was also an unwritten guarantee: for the duration of your stay the expanse of wilderness around your camp (many square kilometres of it) belonged to you only and to the wildlife of the place. You could watch, quietly, a family of antelope or baboons or warthogs going about their undisturbed business for hours; you could lie basking in the sun on a black basalt slab in the middle of the river, or walk around all day in whatever state of dress or undress you preferred, searching for rock paintings or butterflies, photographing rare plants or spotting birds, or questing for inner peace. No one would notice except the wildlife, and as long as you didn’t bother them, they wouldn’t care.

  Lapalala hadn’t re-introduced elephant and lion, and buffalo were kept in separate sections of the reserve, but everything else was there. It was wild – a living laboratory for the encounter of man and nature. Lapalala soon had its regulars and devotees. Over the years, thousands of them. Parents would bring their infants to a favourite bush camp to meet the world into which they were born, and a new generation of conservation-minded children would grow up to become supporters and activists for the cause of conservation – taking on, if you will, the missionary mandate for Africa’s wild places.

  Our own children still had their primary home in Johannesburg, but whenever possible they were there with us, learning to enjoy and trust the bush. The Parker children’s primary home was also in a city, Cape Town. But every year, on their family break in Lapalala, they too were exposed to the best the Waterberg had to offer. For Dale that meant the Palala: at first in Marula, overlooking a 150-metre pool which, like most of the other camps, was ideal for the Canadian-style canoes we had co-opted from our EWE operation in Tuli. Later the Parker holidays moved further upstream, to Lepotedi, their own special riverside camp at the foot of the cliff where in 1981 Dale and Elizabeth had had their first glimpse of the Palala.