Dark Star Safari

by Paul Theroux

  I had seen so few – some jaw-snapping hyenas in Harar, shy gazelles in Kenya, a few loping giraffes and the trudging elephant from the windows of the Kilimanjaro Express, some mottled hippos in the Shire River, an ostrich glaring at me in Zimbabwe, dikdiks and baboons here and there, birds everywhere. No rhinos, no leopards, no herds of anything. But I could relate to animals in their awkwardness, for they looked like loners in the bush and all of them were more or less fleeing. The gazelles had fled with sharply lifted knees as though in a steeplechase.

  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.’

  ‘Ach. Yaw. Everyone. And do it alone if we lost our partner – as sometimes happened. I mean, I lost my part
ner, 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.

  Rattray, in his vigorous mid-sixties, was a horse breeder and horse racer, with a stud farm in the Western Cape Province. He had become an environmentalist at a time when hunters were still blasting away at anything that moved. He was a bon viveur with a knack for running hotels; a stickler for details, something of a taskmaster, a financier of public works – his tall, Italian-made road bridge over the
Sand River had withstood the terrible flood of 1999. He was a teller of rich stories and also a fund of good ideas.

  ‘Rhino are taking a beating – what?’ he said to me in the bar one night, waving his stick for emphasis. ‘Being flogged something awful. And why? Because a rhino horn, retail, is worth $75,000 in Macau – or so I’m told. What’s the answer, Paul?’

  ‘What’s the question, Mike?’

  ‘Whither the rhinos, their fate? I say’ – and he whisked his stick – ‘rhino farm! A farm that produces rhino horn. People groan like blazes when I mention it, but you see a rhino horn is like a fingernail. You cut it off and it grows back. So you start a farm with white rhinos -the black ones are bolshie, never mind them – and you harvest the horns by sawing them off. That way, you cut out the poachers, cut out the middlemen, and the horn grows back in three years, ready to be trimmed again. But will anyone listen to me? No, they think I’m dilly.’

  I stayed in a lovely thatched hut in Main Camp and went on game drives in an open Land-Rover with a ranger before dawn until mid-morning, and at dusk, and now and then in the darkness, the time of night when the lion and the leopard were creeping through the high grass, looking for cowering impala to eat. My ranger was young and expert, Chris Daphne. His assistant, John, who was a Zulu, sat with a rifle across his knees.

  The bush was dry and dusty in the South African autumn and on the first drive we saw buffalos and a herd of elephants, a mating pair of nyala, a bachelor herd of kudu, and some battered torchwood trees – battered because elephants loved the taste of the oily peanut shaped fruit.