‘Ach. Yaw. Everyone. And do it alone if we lost our partner — as sometimes happened. I mean, I lost my partner, but not in the bush. He was black, a Namibian. He went to a pub to celebrate his birthday. A SWAPO informant was there and called some chaps and reported that four of our men were there. The SWAPO chaps came to the pub and started shooting. But see, the birthday party had started, and a woman there knew my partner was celebrating. She threw herself in front of him to protect him.’
Amazing.
‘Yaw. But they just shot her, and shot him, and shot the others. Four dead, and they left the woman there to bleed to death.’
It was a horrible story, without a moral, but after it sank in I asked Hansie what birthday his partner had been celebrating.
‘That’s interesting,’ Hansie said. ‘Yaw, he had seen his whole family killed by SWAPO gunmen, so he joined when he was fourteen. He was a big chap, and they have no ID cards up there, so no one knew. He was celebrating his sixteenth birthday.’
And SWAPO got into power.’
‘All the people we fought against are now in power — in Namibia, and Zimbabwe, and here.’ Hansie chuckled grimly. ‘It’s crazy. They were called Communists. Well, were they? They were trained by Russians. They got their weapons from China and Cuba. They knew how to use them. And the landmines! They had a Russian landmine made of Bakelite plastic that you couldn’t detect. It was really lethal. Friends of mine got blown up that way. I lost so many friends — and for what?’
After telling this sad rambling story, Hansie was quite upset. My questions had led him too far down this bleak path of bad memories. But that was often the case in South Africa. A few idle questions inspired reminiscences, and brought back the past, and the past in South Africa was dark with martyrdoms.
‘Ach! If I lost one of my kids in something like that I’d go doolaly,’ Hansie said.
The closer we got to Mala Mala Main Camp the more chewed and trampled the trees, as though a tornado had whirled through, stripping and smashing the woods.
‘Elephants,’ Hansie said. He explained that because of hunters the place had been almost devoid of elephants in the 1960s. There were now more than 600 elephants here in an area that should have been supporting about 150 — thus the damage.
He pointed out a herd of browsing buffalo with ox-pecker birds on them, some of them stabbing at insects, others cleaning wounds. Also a pair of warthogs. ‘That bigger one’s injured. Probably from a leopard. Some of them get away, see.’ The warthogs frowned at us with knobbed tusky faces in an appearance of indignation that was gaping animal alertness.
But I was hardly looking, scarcely listening, for I was still thinking of what Hansie had told me: Ach, well, I wasn’t prepared for killing people — I mean, killing that many people. I heard stories of maulings and tramplings and gorings but this ‘Crowbar’ counter-insurgency mayhem was ever so much worse. The boy who had enlisted at fourteen because he had seen his whole family murdered; his sixteenth birthday party at the pub; the snitch; the arrival of the enemy with guns blazing; the woman shielding the birthday boy, and Hansie’s remorse. While ‘dilly’ was just peculiar, ‘doolaly’ was the extremest form of military madness, from Deolalie, the name of a nineteenth-century nut house in Bombay.
At this stage of my trip, having seen so much of Africa, it was impossible to be heading for a safari lodge without comparing animal cunning with human savagery. I believed that I had reduced the risks in East and Central Africa by admitting that as a white stranger I was prey, and by avoiding predators — doing what animals did, moving quickly in the daytime, staying alert, and not going out at night. Predators are mainly nocturnal — lions and hyenas just sleep and lollygag in the daytime. And it is a fact that except for the cheetah, all the wild predators in Africa are slower than the prey — warier, twitchier, fleeter of foot, prey had evolved into hard-to-catch creatures.
In that same spirit, decent Africans tried to outwit the rascals, warned each other of dangers, warned strangers too. Theft and assault and rape were generally nocturnal crimes, not merely because darkness helped the perpetrator in his stealth but mainly because the thief or rapist who was caught could be blamelessly beaten to death under the terms of the unspoken African law that sanctioned rough justice.
Territory defined behavior. Different species might co-exist — giraffe and zebra, warthog and kudu. But two rhinos could not inhabit the same general space, and they always battled for dominance, as the gangs did in Soweto.
Yet the bulky mammals and the decorative birds — impressive for their color and size — were predictable. They did what animals do: ate, slept, looked for water; groomed and head-butted each other, vocalized and snorted, competed, fought; made a career out of learning how to subsist while saving their skin. But none fought so cruelly or so pointlessly as the humans, and none, not even the elephants in their fits of trumpeted grief, had the redeeming quality of remorse. As Professor Berger had said, humans were vicious, we had invented mass slaughter, but we were also the most peaceable animal — both much better and much worse than other mammals.
Of all the creatures that inhabited the 45,000 acres of Mala Mala — and that included the regal waterbuck and the brown snake eagle, the nimble klipspringer and the four-foot monitor lizard, as well as the majestic Big Five — the one that fascinated me most was Mike Rattray, the owner and driving force behind the reserve. Though approaching from a great distance, and waving his stick and vocalizing, he much resembled one of his own strutting red-wattled hornbills, he was another species and altogether more colorful and subtle, the jolliest, the fiercest, the least predictable, the hardest to photograph, and usually followed by his attractive mate, Norma.
He was never without the stick. He used the thing to make a point or to single someone out of the crowd or, in a threat posture, as a weapon. He looked a bit like Captain Mainwaring, the same drooping cheeks and deadpan expression, the same drawling way of speaking, always something unexpected.
‘Going to “fight to the death”, is he?’ he would say somewhat adenoidally. ‘Well, let me tell you, whenever someone says they are going to fight to the death they’re ready to surrender. They are dead scared. Your move? Get a stick. Like this’ — and he flailed his own — ‘Give them two clouts on the backside. A good hiding. “Stop playing the fool.” They’ll stop their nonsense soon enough. Know what the nyala bull does?’
I said I did not know much about this large antelope.
‘The nyala bull is a very narrow animal,’ Rattray said, and demonstrated its narrowness by lifting his stick to a vertical position and pressing the palm of his free hand against it. ‘Very narrow. But when they want to frighten an enemy, they swell up’ — he scowled and blew out his cheeks, to look fierce and florid and full-faced — ‘blow their faces up to look dangerous. It’s just air!’
What had been cattle ranches and a hunting lodge and a large game reserve in the 1920s was acquired in the 1960s by Mike and his father, who had owned a ranch nearby. Rich in animals the land had attracted hunters. As many as 200 lions were killed in a single season — for sport and also to protect the cattle. But because of the insects and the weather, the cattle business had never been much good. When they appeared on the market, more abutting ranches and reserves were added to the central piece. Two more lodges were added to the luxurious Main Camp, an atmospheric farmhouse was improved to make Kirkman’s Kamp, and budget (but pleasant) accommodation, Harry’s Camp. Altogether, Mala Mala employed 250 people. In 1993, with Mike’s encouragement the many-miles-long game fence that was also an international frontier, dividing Kruger Park from Mozambique, was taken down. After that, the animals roamed freely, choosing to live nearer Rattray’s watercourse, the Sand River.