by Chris Marais
Caprivi Stripped
One hundred thousand elephants were said to be among the casualties of the Angolan War, which dragged on from the 1970s until the turn of the Millennium. Take one Angolan elephant and, using mental computer graphics, multiply that by 100 000 in your head. Add God knows how many rhino and herds of smaller game to that picture. Now imagine hunting all of that. Think of all the gunfire. Think of those happy chaps in helicopters, rubbing their hands with glee. Relishing all that ivory. Killing off a potential tourism business that could have preserved the lives of the animals and sustained hundreds of thousands of inhabitants for centuries.
Jules and I have a friend called De Wet Potgieter, undoubtedly one of South Africa’s finest investigative journalists. De Wet, despite many threats and coercion attempts, produced a controversial book called Contraband, dealing with South Africa’s role in the international trade in ivory and rhino horn. Much of the book deals with the area through which Jules and I now found ourselves: the Caprivi Game Park.
This is what environmentalist Craig van Note of Monitor, the Conservation, Environmental and Animal Welfare Consortium, told Washington in August 1988:
“According to reliable sources in Africa, a massive smuggling ring has been operating for years, with the complicity of South African officials at the highest levels of the government and military, to funnel ivory and other contraband out of Africa. None of this ivory shows up on any customs book in Africa and very little at destinations in the Middle East, India and the Far East,” he said.
“Aircraft, trucks, ships and even railroads bring the booty south to depots where huge stockpiles of ivory are maintained in South Africa. That CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) member nation, which projects the image of a conservation-minded model for Africa, is in reality one of the largest wildlife outlaws in the world.”
Jonas Savimbi and his Unita rebel forces in Angola, he added, “largely supplied by South Africa, have ruthlessly liquidated perhaps 100 000 elephants to help finance the war”.
“South African taxpayers financed the war,” I exploded at no one in particular as Jules read to me from De Wet’s book while we drove through the eerily quiet and green part of the Caprivi Strip, where those now dead elephants once criss-crossed the area with ease and in great numbers. “Me, I think those tusks went to finance some individuals’ rich and famous lifestyles.”
I later found out that while I was running around Angola, worrying myself sick about the efficacy of a Russian tank, piles of rifle cases packed with ivory were being shipped out of Rundu marked as “dental equipment”. There was, indeed, a total onslaught. Just ask the ghost-elephant herds of Angola. They know.
One hero looms large in this area, in the unlikely form of South Africa’s legendary Colonel Jan Breytenbach, founder of the much-feared 32 Battalion and, earlier, commander of 44 Parachute Brigade.
Back in the 1980s, the late great photographer Herman Potgieter and I met a remarkable man named David Barr. This, however, is not the story of David, so I’ll be brief. A Vietnam vet, this Californian lover of Harley Davidsons ended up as Colonel Breytenbach’s gunner in Angola during his stint with the 44 Para Brigade.
They tripped a landmine one day and David ended up under the vehicle.
“Colonel Breytenbach saved my life,” he told me. “For that, and for the way he led his men, he will always be my hero.”
David Barr lost both his legs. That did not stop him from strapping on some special prosthetics and taking up skydiving, however. Nor did it stop him from riding his Harley (called The Old Dog) around the world, several times. Herman and I saw David again in the Outback town of Kununurra, in north-east Australia, eight years later. He was lean, fit and strong (no more Jack Daniels and hard rock living) and he’d fought Tuaregs off in the Sahara with one of his metal legs. And he still asked after Jan Breytenbach.
Unusual family, the Breytenbachs. One brother was the “terrorist-poet” Breyten, and I met him while covering one of his treason trials in the Pretoria Supreme Court. The other was top photographer Cloete, with whom I worked on various magazine assignments in the 1980s. I had never met Jan, but no one in uniform back then could possibly be unaware of his legend.
I often wondered how dinner with the Three Brothers Breytenbach would go …
They made Jan Breytenbach Chief Conservator of the Western Caprivi. He entered the conservation fray with the same single-minded focus that he had deployed in the field of battle.
De Wet Potgieter writes that, after confronting one of the highest ranked SADF officers over the matter of an Air Force helicopter laden with ivory from Savimbi on its way to Defence Minister General Magnus Malan, Jan Breytenbach was removed from the Caprivi.
“It was Jan Breytenbach’s strong belief in nature conservation and the stubborn way he had refused to yield to demands by certain of his superiors that cost him his position as part-time nature conservationist for the Western Caprivi while still a serving SADF officer.”
In one of his books, Eden’s Exiles, Breytenbach says:
“It was almost a passion among a great many South Africans who served on the border to return to the Republic with a well-matched pair of elephant tusks. The second most desirable item was a leopard skin.”
And there was my friend Mal Smit from Grootfontein, innocuously sending home no more than his old, beloved jackhammer in little chunks, while the “real soldiers” were trading in tusks…
In the year before Namibia’s independence, according to Potgieter, “the stream of trucks moving tons of contraband from Angola and Namibia increased”.
“Just let it go,” Jules said, as we left the park and entered the Kongola checkpoint at the Kwando River. But I couldn’t leave those days just yet, because pretty soon we were driving past the now-cleared site of Fort Doppies, where Jan Breytenbach once ran a “guerrilla school” with the aid of a young lion called Terry.
We all eventually heard about Terry, especially after a particular occasion when some apartheid cabinet ministers visited the camp. After they had been wined and dined in grand style, one venerable cabinet minister was busy using the “long drop” toilet when young Terry tackled him through the hessian wall. The politician screamed in terror, grabbed his trousers and ran straight through the wall, with the lion “snapping at the minister’s bare buttocks”, according to the irrepressible Breytenbach.
“Now there’s a story I like,” said Jules, as our Isuzu got its first real taste of Namibian “slip-slide” through the Great Caprivi Sand Forest. We were following Lance Young of Susuwe Island Lodge through the towering jackalberries, leadwoods and Kalahari apple-leaf trees. Then we encountered African mangosteen, raintree, Rhodesian teak, Natal mahogany and good old camelthorn. All around us were traces of elephant dung. And then, through the trees, we spotted a breeding herd. They flapped their ears warningly and fixed us with bloodshot eyes.
We arrived at the landing next to the papyrus-lined Kwando River, put our stuff in a flat-bottomed boat and drifted across to the lodge on the island, serenaded all the way by carmine bee-eaters in their little pink-and-turquoise evening suits.
The very long trip was winding down to a natural geographic conclusion. The last section in the Caprivi had, for me, been bittersweet. It was just great to be out on a flatboat an hour later, with nothing to worry about except getting a little bee-eater to sit still for a photograph. I thought about Jan Breytenbach a lot, but then a squacco heron flew overhead, an enormous coppery-tailed coucal crash-landed into the reeds nearby and I was into the Mystic once more.
In the morning we were out again before dawn. The smooth river was creased by the wake of our boat, and the fluffy phragmites glowed pink in the rising sun. Jacanas, the early birds, trotted over sleeping water lilies, their flowers closed like the fists of babies. We puttered slowly along, rousing a pod of hippos that popped up behind us like indignant corks.
It was strange to be in a land of plenty, of water, grazing and trees, after the
delicately calibrated desert ecosystems we’d been through these past weeks.
When the afternoon light grew rich, Lance took us by vehicle to the Horseshoe, a nearby lake fed by the Kwando.
“Not long ago I saw more than 500 elephant here,” he said. Yeah, yeah. And now you’re going to show us fresh air, I thought. As travel journalists, we get that all the time. Wow. You should have been here last week. Then you would have seen Narina trogons by the dozen. Black rhino by the gross. Palmnut vultures in their hundreds. And so on. But I was enjoying the drive, and didn’t really care.
“The elephants go to Angola for the early rains first,” he continued, “and when they come back here they’re edgy. I think there’s still a lot of poaching going on in the north. But they calm down as the season goes on.”
We found a city of baboons enjoying the soft sunlight of the day. There was a Chacma soap opera going on by the waterside, and we sat and watched Bush TV. Apes of our Lives. Newborn babies stumbling about, youngsters chasing each other up a tree, aunts deep in conversation, the family drunk lying listlessly on his back in the shade. And, from a vantage point, a very large boss baboon watching over everyone, wearing a serious frown.
Then the elephants came out to drink, their babies sheltered among the great pillared legs and round bellies. The herd matriarch lingered, nonchalantly edging along the shore towards us, occasionally lifting her trunk as if to gauge the mood of the people watching. Needless to say, she could only have detected a kind of enchanted reverence wafting from us. Nevertheless, she took her herd around us. Bush TV had just got a whole lot better.
When elephants get near water, they always make you smile. They act as if they can’t contain themselves a second longer and surge forward, kicking up vast amounts of dust. This large herd of elephants – about 100 of them – jostled for position along the shoreline and settled in for a long drink-up.
Having read so much about the horrors that their ancestors had faced not so long ago, I was hugely relieved to see part of the great Angolan herds of yore.
Susuwe is part of the New Deal sweeping through the Caprivi, in which local community members benefit from tourist enterprises in their tribal areas. The lodge hired more than 20 local people, it was run on a shareholding basis with the area tribe and guests paid a voluntary levy that went towards “good works”, like schools and water pipelines. There were craft and firewood projects and education systems in place. This is where life gets better for everyone, I thought.
After breakfast and farewells we headed for Katima Mulilo, past the sign that read “Speed Kills, Condoms Save”, the Pass Me Not Food Supply shop and the Think First Village. We bought a slightly aged Namibian newspaper that told us how Oprah Winfrey had given away 276 free Pontiacs on her show. We drove on through the border post for a brief swerve into Botswana.
Shortly after entering the Chobe National Park, Jules and I had to stop for a while and watch a gaggle of ground hornbills laughing their heads off while one of their number did a famous snake-swallowing act. We only left once the last millimetre of snake-tail had disappeared down the bird’s bulging crop.
Lunchtime found us with hamburgers and beer under slow fans on the veranda at the Chobe Safari Lodge, watching South Africa lose a televised cricket match to a rampant West Indian side.
At 3 pm we passed back through Botswana Customs. Albert Muyoba from Impalila Island Lodge picked us up in a boat and we sped over the cool waters of the Chobe River to Impalila Island Lodge.
I had hoped they wouldn’t recognise me from the previous time. A year or so before, I had road-tested a bottle of Karoo Agave (which tastes like five-star Mexican tequila), pronounced it great, embarked on a course of anti-malarial Larium, had a huge breakfast at Johannesburg International Airport, taken a scheduled flight up to Bulawayo and arrived in Zimbabwe shaken, sweating and homicidal from the chemical cocktail inside me. Colin Bristow, a pilot, safari guide and expert caller of furious bird parties (he made like an invading pearl-spotted owl), took my measure, loaded me in his Cessna 210 and flew me right up into a midday thermal.
We landed at Impalila where I nearly murdered a British tourist for greeting me, and hid in my lodge unit waiting for the Jekyll-Hyde feeling to pass. The next day it was still there. While interviewing the manager, Simon Parker, in his office, I saw a black mamba creeping around the rafters. I thought it was the Agave-Larium talking, until Simon said:
“That snake makes me uncomfortable. Let’s go and do this outside.”
“How are you, Chris?” were Haydn Williams’ first words as he greeted us. Damn. Haydn had taken us tiger-fishing last time. Africa might forgive, but she never forgets.
The next morning we went to a fishing village with Albert on our way to Botswana Customs. These were the descendants of the Zambian Lozi people and we were visiting their temporary fishing camp, which looked disappointingly empty. I should say “almost”, because there were in fact two men there who had the look of all-night drinkers.
While the patient Albert tried to take us on a cultural tour of the fishing camp, one of the drinkers began to heckle us via Albert. We found out they’d all been making “seven-day sorghum beer”, and possibly there had been too much sampling. Albert relented, giving the man one American dollar, and turned to me:
“OK. You can photograph him now.”
I was incredulous.
“What? A photograph of a drunk next to a hut? I don’t want it.”
Albert shrugged his shoulders helplessly, as if to say work with me here, OK? I got the message. Posed the lolling man in front of a fishing net. Snapped once. Thanked him. Climbed back into the boat. And as we left the island, the rest of the villagers all poured out of the bushes in their droves. Not all cultural visits are a roaring success …
Without much ceremony, we pointed the dusty Isuzu south for the very first time on the trip and drove through Botswana’s many cattle disease checkpoints, run with military precision.
We stopped at Nata Lodge for a bite to eat and decided to stay over because the price was right and the beer was cold. There we were, at the edge of the great Makgadikgadi and Nxai Pans, without an ounce of curiosity left to go out and experience them.
Instead, we settled into our safari en-suite tent, cooked up some two-minute noodles, drank single malt and played the Nxai Pan Rummy Challenge with Black Twos Wild Thing. Admired my tough old Swakopmund kudu veldskoene covered in diesel and dust and, in the morning, drove back past two dead donkeys being devoured by white-backed vultures.
As we pulled up in front of our home in Wendywood, the odometer gave us a reading of 10 004 km.
“Which is quite incredible,” said my fact fundi wife, “when you think that the diameter of the Earth is only 12 000 km.”
“What’s for supper?” I asked …
Chapter 28: Palmwag, Damaraland
Rock Star Safari
Never say goodbye to Namibia. I’d done this rash thing once before, and look where it landed me. After that 10 000-km journey, Jules and I thought maybe we’d stay out of the desert for a decade or so. I even gave my Namibia map to an interested friend.
Yet here we were eight months later, drinking good old Tafel Lager at Windhoek Airport, waiting to meet our very own charter pilot. Like rock stars or something. On a return engagement, five nights only.
The compact Ingrid Benson arrived in her Sefofane Airways Cessna (ZS-Papa Foxtrot Romeo) and loaded us up, along with Steve and Maggie Lomax from Manchester, England. She was booked to drop us off in Damaraland and continue north to the Kunene with the Lomaxes, an affable couple on a pre-honeymoon honeymoon. Sort of a romantic practice run.
The winter landscape of Namibia, at a height of 3 000 metres, is like the patterned back of a sleeping Nile crocodile. Rocky outcrops, dry river courses with their drainage lines, the claw marks of natural erosion and dark mountains were all interlocked into a tawny jigsaw shape. Madagascar makes biologists froth with excitement as new species constantly reveal them
selves. The ancient and natural stone temples of Namibia do the same thing for geologists. Every rock trauma, every scar, is splayed open and telling a story.
“Am I mad?” wrote Jules in her journal that night. “Looking down, I felt the mountains were beginning to sing together in deep baritone voices, like the private conversations of elephants, just below our level of hearing. A silent opera in a very old amphitheatre.”
After two hours in the air, the Cessna descended sweetly onto the gravel plains amid the wolf’s milk bushes, to finally kiss its own lost shadow. This was Palmwag, Damaraland.
Kapoi Kasaona from Wilderness Safaris’ Rhino Camp was there to meet us. Kapoi straddles two cultures. He’s a modern Himba from Purros whose father had been determined to educate him well. On the drive, he spoke to us about his dad, whom he obviously admired greatly.
“My father says if a thing is not planned, it’s not worth doing at all,” he said.
Kapoi began working locally for the Save the Rhino Trust some four years before, doing camel patrols to track the rhino on this huge wilderness concession of half a million hectares next to the Skeleton Coast National Park.
“In the 1960s this used to be farm land,” he told us. “Cattle, sheep and goats were here, but there were also about 300 black rhinos. Then the border wars began, and so did the poaching for rhino horn. The locals mostly did the shooting, the South Africans mostly did the buying.”
Soon, there were only about 30 rhino left in the whole area. Then Blythe Loutit formed the Save the Rhino Trust. Today, if you ask the environmentalists about numbers in the Palmwag area, they’ll naturally be coy about answering. But it’s believed that the rhino population is back to about half of its 1960 count.
“It’s a very special animal,” said Kapoi. “We’re talking about Diceros bicornis bicornis – the desert-adapted black rhino.”
Wilderness Safaris and the Save the Rhino Trust had brought tourism to the area, and the community was seeing the benefits. Schools and clinics had been built, and locals were being trained as guides and trackers and lodge staff. Rhino Camp had become an international lodestone for students and scientists; a day spent in the gravel fields of this moonscape in search of wandering rhino had become one of the country’s top adventures.
