The most dangerous creatures I had seen so far in Africa had been the shifta bandits firing their rifles over the truck I was riding in just north of Marsabit: wild men. The most exotic were the Ugandan hookers in their nighttime plumage, hissing at me from the roadside trees in Kampala: wild women.
A year or so before my African trip, there was a massacre of tourists on a gorilla safari on the Uganda Rwanda border. Not content with leaving this pathetically diminished number of poor beasts alone, and aiming to intrude on their shrinking habitat so that they could boast of having had the ultimate primate experience of paddling paws and pinching fingers with a 600-pound silverback gorilla and his mates in the dripping seclusion of the bewildered apes’ bower, a dozen trekkers panted into the high Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda and were mauled — not by apes but by gun-toting Hutu rebels. Eight tourists were murdered, the other captives managed to escape. While tittering insincerely that Africa was full of dangerous and unpredictable animals, most foreign visitors were much more preoccupied by the thought of dangerous and unpredictable Africans. By comparison, the Big Five were rather sedate and safe and standoffish.
Tourists in Africa were whisked to a game park, and within a few days could boast of having bagged photos of the Big Five without a single horror story. At the end of the safari the foreign travelers, sounding like the rambling over-privileged fat-heads of a century earlier, would rate their trip, as I was to read later in an American travel magazine.*
‘[African staff] try to make you happy’… ‘[African staff] do everything — you really feel pampered… ‘[African staff] wake you gently with a small breakfast treat at bedside’… ‘[African] waiters are willing to set up a picnic wherever you like’… ‘No bugs to contend with,’ and of a lodge in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, ‘After the guided safaris and cultural tours, have your butler draw you a bath.’
This was the tidier, deep-pockets-in-the-safari-suit, small-bore-in-Africa safari, the romancers’ one of deluxe howdahs on elephant expeditions in the Okavango, picnic hampers in Amboseli (‘Pass the Gentleman’s Relish, Nigel’), and luxurious tents in the Masai Mara Reserve and the Serengeti. It was the ‘Yes, bwana’ Africa of escapists and honeymooners and so-called ‘consumer travelers’ in designer khaki. This Africa in which Hemingway’s gun-bearers had morphed into Jeeves-like butlers and game spotters was available to anyone who, like Ernie, had lots of money and no interest in Africans. In a moment of candor, in a travel essay written in the seventies, Martha Gellhorn, the penultimate of Hemingway’s four wives and a sometime Kenya resident, confessed her indifference to Africans. Writing breezily in Travels with Myself and Another, unaware of giving offense, she said how her love for Africa’s natural world ‘did not extend to mankind in Africa or its differing ways of life.’
The safari-as-charade included charter flights, obsequious Africans, gourmet food, bush jackets by Harrods Field Sports Department, pith helmets by Holland and Holland, $500 boots by Gokey, ‘guaranteed to be snake-proof,’ and an Elephant Cloth Bushveld shirt by Orvis, this last item pitched with a colorful flourish:
Our African Train Safari will take you from Pretoria to Victoria Falls in 9 days, stopping along the way for hunts in the ‘bushveld’ country, with more than a hundred beaters driving the guinea fowl and francolin over the line to you. In the desert, you’ll shoot Namaqua sandgrouse from traditional stone butts, where 1000 or more birds fly to water holes in the early morning. This shirt is designed for that kind of adventure.*
This was a far cry from my safari-as-struggle, including public transport, fungal infections, petty extortion, mocking lepers, dreary bedrooms, bad food, exploding bowels, fleeing animals, rotting schoolrooms, meaningless delays and blunt threats: ‘There are bad people there’ and ‘Give me money!’ Consumer travelers raved about flying into Malawi to spend a few days in a lakeside resort; but in Malawi I had been appalled — as a Bible-pious Malawian might put it — at the years the locust had eaten (Joel 2:25).
But while I hated nuisances, I did not mind hardships; and if I had endured some miseries I had also discovered some splendors, enjoyed some adventures, and found friends. I had crossed many borders, picnicked by the Sixth Cataract of the Nile, navigated Lake Victoria, paddled on the Mozambique Zambezi and spent a day with my old friend the prime minister of Uganda. En route, whenever someone asked me to sum up my safari I just stammered and went mute, for it was less a trip than an experience of vanishing, a long period in my life spent alone improvising my way through the greenest continent. I was proud that I could not say, ‘Africa’s great!’ ‘Our servants were neat!’ ‘I got a facial in our game lodge and Wendy got a pedicure!’ ‘We had eland bourgignon!’ ‘There was, like, a riot in the capital and we didn’t even know it!’ or ‘My butler drew me a bath.’
Yet I was so immersed in my trip I hardly questioned it. After a week in Johannesburg I had the appetite for much more. Looking at the map of Africa I saw that I was not very far from Cape Town, and so I took a detour in the other direction.
Mala Mala, a game reserve that adjoined Kruger National Park, was highly recommended to me by a trusted friend. It was just north of the fruit-growing dorp of Nelspruit, about 300 miles east of Johannesburg, so near to the Mozambican border that Mozambican elephants wandered over to chew the trees. One of Mala Mala’s virtues as a game reserve was that it was located on a twenty-mile stretch of a good-sized river, far away from any village or the intrusion of poachers: big game were happiest among plentiful greenery, near a safe year-round water source.
On my way to Nelspruit I met Hansie, who was half Boer and half English. He seemed rather slow to answer my questions, rather absentminded or at a loss for words. He said, ‘Sometimes my brain works faster than my tongue.’ I asked him a little about himself and understood fairly quickly the reason for vagueness and his stunned way of speaking. He had been in the South African Army fighting the bush war for five years and had had a harrowing time.
‘I was in the Koevoet,’ he said and explained that the word meant ‘crowbar’ in Afrikaans. ‘It was the military branch of the Intelligence Service. I was only eighteen.’
‘How did you happen to join?’
‘I don’t know why. I guess, because everyone was joining. But it was a tough group,’ Hansie said. ‘Our commander flew to America and went through Navy Seal training, then went to Britain and was put through the SAS course. He adapted those courses for our training.’
‘What a grind that must have been,’ I said, thinking of the physical demands of such training. ‘What was the worst of it?’
‘The worst? Ach, well, I wasn’t prepared for killing people — I mean, killing that many people. The actual killing was the one thing we couldn’t train for, see.’
He had misunderstood me: I thought we had been talking about long marches or swimming underwater, the physical effort of commando training.
‘But it was either them or us,’ he said, still talking quietly. ‘Ach, we had to or we’d get it in the neck. We were in Namibia, fighting SWAPO guerrillas.* I did counter-insurgency. I think I was good at it, but even so, it was terrible, man.’
‘What was your particular mission?’
‘We had to be able to go to a guerrilla camp and destroy it, and leave no trace that we had ever been there.’
‘That would mean killing everyone.’