The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild

by Lawrence Anthony

  A few weeks later I decided I had to go back. I wanted another’s opinion. Not from a Zulu for I already knew what they would say, if I could even get them to go. I wanted a Westerner’s opinion. David would be the one. So I waited for dusk and then said to him, ‘Come with me, I want you to see something.’

  We drove down the river road just as it was getting dark and I stopped below the rock and turned the motor off.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ David asked.

  ‘This place …’ I said, ‘that rock, what do you think of it? Take your time.’

  David knew we were here for a reason and looked around unhurriedly, and then I watched as his gaze slowly went up to the concave edifice as if drawn there. My skin started to prickle as he did so, and after a while he turned to me. David, who is as tough as they come, smiled strangely and said to me quietly, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here – now.’

  We stayed silent until we were almost back at the lodge and then he laughed and said to me, ‘What the hell was that?’

  ‘A tagati,’ I said, laughing back, ‘a bloody tagati, that’s what it was.’

  Sangomas rule the roost in rural Zulu society, not overtly, but behind the scenes, where they are very influential and highly respected. Many are charlatans who manipulate superstition for their own ends, but there are those who are legitimate, practising an ageless art which is as far removed from Western science as you can possibly get. Any interview with a good sangoma is a more than interesting experience.

  A sangoma is born, not made. One cannot just decide to be a sangoma, you have to be chosen or otherwise accepted under unusual circumstances, and historically this takes place at a very early age. Sometimes the sangomas will even arrive at a home and announce to the parents that their child is a sangoma, perhaps the incarnation of a deceased sangoma and tell them who. This is a great honour for the family and not so long ago they would even give up the child who then goes away to live with these spirit doctors for indoctrination, taking on the mantle of sangoma for the rest of their life.

  Sangomas, unlike inyangas who are herb doctors or medicine men, deal exclusively with the spirit world. Typically an interview will have the sangoma go into a trance, communicating with the ancestors, principally your own ancestors; your long-dead family members. Messages will be passed to you from one ancestor or another, advice given and sometimes the future foretold.

  If you have an ailment it must be divined by the sangoma. This is the opposite of Western medicine where one must tell the doctor the symptoms. With a sangoma you may not say what is wrong with you. It is the sangoma who must make the diagnosis entirely without your help. Their reputations depend on it.

  I once gave a sangoma a lift and in return he offered me a session which I accepted out of interest. I happened to have a back pain which he diagnosed. It is uncanny to sit there with an ailment and have it identified and be given the cure via an ancestral-induced trance.

  Since then I have attended several such trances and the results can sometimes be absolutely remarkable, though it is not for the faint-hearted since sangomas tell it like it is.

  Françoise had an idea that overseas guests would be interested in this, so we made an arrangement with a local sangoma to receive lodge guests who wanted to ‘have their fortunes told’. He started doing well with the extra fees he was receiving and the guests loved it.

  The next thing we knew he was showing off a brand-new, shiny briefcase which he carried with him wherever he went. We spoke to him, explaining that his image and regalia of skins and beads were important for overseas guests, and that he must always hide his new briefcase when they arrive. He agreed most reluctantly, because, as he explained, it was such a beautiful briefcase and the guests would be most impressed.

  As his income increased his accoutrements grew to include a new cellphone which he strapped to his belt with Zulu beads. We also had to reason with him about that because he had taken to making calls in the middle of his divinations, explaining to his clients that this special phone didn’t need wires.

  With Françoise and me it is very much ‘when in Rome’, so we respect the local beliefs. Periodically when staff get sick too often, or there are unusual mishaps, we will call in a respected sangoma to put muthi or protective spells around the reserve, and it is important for us to be seen to be doing so. For without white magic, they believe tagati will get bold, take human form, and ride through the night on the back of a baboon striking terror and spreading evil.

  But there are many other lighter and sometimes humorous manifestations of the ancestors and other spirit presences at Thula Thula, such as the infamous tokoloshe. A tokoloshe is an evil, mischievous little demon, in character somewhat like Loki, the Norse god of chaos, but much smaller in size. Tokoloshes are the minions of a tagati, and they are sent out all over Zululand every night to create mayhem. Almost every Zulu on Thula Thula has his bed mounted on bricks, two or three under each leg. This is to prevent the tiny tokoloshe from bumping his head while he scampers around the floor, and thus earning the sleeper unwanted attention. It is said that only innocent young children can see a tokoloshe, who also causes bad dreams.

  I have always found it interesting that if you take a Zulu to task about the tokoloshe they will often make light of it, laughing at the notion derisively, but go into their room and sure enough, there will be the bricks under his or her bed.

  Witchcraft has a more sinister side though. One day I was with Brendan and a ranger called Zungu, watching smoke rising from half-a-dozen places around the village.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Brendan asked Zungu.

  ‘Today they are burning out the witches and wizards,’ he said matter-of-factly, as if it were an annual event. ‘Some have even been seen riding baboons at night.’

  ‘Are they killing them?’ Brendan asked worriedly.

  ‘No, no, in the old days they would kill them, now they burn their houses and all their belongings, and chase them away from the village. Some may be beaten but they do not kill them. But they must go,’ he added with a note of conviction in his voice.

  ‘What do you mean, they are witches, how do they know they are witches or that witches even exist?’

  ‘Everybody knows they are witches,’ he replied comfortably.

  Brendan decided not to give up and pushed forward with a line of questioning that had way too much Western logic in it.

  ‘But what would happen if they said your mother was a witch and came for her too,’ he asked.

  ‘They wouldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because everybody knows she is not a witch.’

  ‘OK,’ said Brendan, nonplussed. ‘If they have done such bad things, why aren’t they taken to court?’

  ‘Because the court will ask for proof,’ said Zungu.

  ‘That’s a good thing,’ said Brendan. ‘Surely there must be proof of wrongdoing before punishment.’

  ‘There is no proof,’ said Zungu. ‘Of course there is no proof, and there can be no proof with witches, that’s why they are witches.’

  Brendan walked away shaking his head. What Zungu was saying made some sense though. What judge would ever believe that a man died of a snakebite, or crops had dried up because a witch had put a spell on the household?

  The news of my strange communication with elephants, coupled with my refusal to allow anyone to kill even a deadly snake or scorpion had spread, and many in the village considered me to be somehow mysteriously connected to the animals. I mean, what sort of person would shun normal life and live in the African bush preferring to commune with elephants, rather than his own kind?

  Now, if I can just tame a big baboon …

  chapter thirty-one

  ‘Here, Mkhulu, here!’ shouted Bheki, leaning over from the back of the Land Rover into the driver’s window. ‘Left, left!’

  I yanked hard on the steering wheel, bumping roughly off the lip of the rutted track, then swerved to keep the wicked overhanging thorn
s from raking the rangers standing in the Land Rover’s back.

  Max, who had his head out of the passenger’s window, spilled across the cab and onto my lap.

  ‘Straight, straight!’ shouted Bheki, thumping on the roof to get my attention. Ducking the barbed branches and navigating from his elevated position he directed me through the tangled bush and a few jarring minutes later we arrived at the carcass.

  It was a wildebeest, albeit barely recognizable as the corpse had been messily butchered. But that was not why we were here. Lying close to the carcass was a dead vulture and further afield I could see another. Both of them had their heads hacked off.

  One of the most accurate indicators of a vibrant game reserve is a healthy vulture population. I remembered when we first arrived at Thula Thula searching vainly for breeding pairs. If you don’t have large numbers of game you’re not going to have resident vultures. In those early days these great, graceful scavengers used to flock in from the Umfolozi game reserve, tiny specks in the sky surfing the thermals at incredible altitudes as they searched for carrion.

  Today, with our healthy game population, we had plenty of breeding pairs ensconced in their nests at the top of the great trees lining the river, raising their chicks seasonally and generally doing well for themselves. But now out of the blue, vultures had become top of the poaching hit list and for bizarre reasons that no conservationist could ever have guessed. The once-belittled vulture had become an extremely potent good luck totem among the sangomas.

  The reason was simple: money. A national lottery had recently been introduced with huge weekly payouts. If you guessed the six winning Lotto numbers you were an instant millionaire. Most of us know that playing a lottery is pure luck. But in Africa, predicting the winning numbers has become a mysterious art verging on the occult. A growing number of South Africans believed that there was only one way to scoop the pools, and that’s to consult your ancestors. And who was the vital link between mortals and spirits? Why, the sangomas, of course.

  This is not just primitive rural superstition; ancestral guidance is practised by all kinds of people, from illiterate herd boys to multi-degreed university professors. If you don’t understand the power of this belief, you will never truly grasp the rich albeit often incomprehensible spirituality of Africa. According to some unscrupulous sangomas, the most powerful Lotto muthi was dried vulture brain. So as the race to become an instant millionaire heated up, the humble vulture was being poached almost to extinction in some game reserves.

  Muthi is a collective Zulu term given both to magic spells and to the foul-tasting potions prepared by sangomas. It can be good muthi, or bad muthi, the latter always associated with witchcraft. Dried vulture brain was considered to be very good muthi indeed. So much so that sangomas told their gullible clients that if they placed a slice of it under their pillows at night, their ancestors would whisper the winning Lotto numbers to them in their dreams.

  One of the most inconceivable aspects of vulture muthi is how someone blindly places so much faith in something so manifestly unreliable. Thousands of desperately poor peasants, totally ignorant of basic gambling odds, were placing all they could afford into a lottery in which there were precious few winners. Each week, millions lost their hard-earned wages, with or without vulture brains under their pillows.

  This translated into big business for sangomas. A tiny sliver of vulture’s brain cost about ten US dollars, which is a lot of money in outback Zululand. Yet despite there being only a few winners, visits to sangomas skyrocketed. And no matter how much they lost, villagers continued forking out wads of cash for more vulture brains, which they religiously placed under their pillows, waiting for their ancestors to murmur the magic numbers.

  The end result was distressingly obvious: people squandered lifesavings and vultures continued to die – so much so that in some game reserves breeding pairs were becoming increasingly rare. In fact, the true Lotto winners were the sangomas.

  We clambered out of the vehicle, dodged a series of tall brown termite mounds which had blocked the Land Rover’s passage and closely studied the gory remains of the wildebeest, looking for the cause as we always do with an unnatural death. Other vultures, attracted to the carcass like iron filings to a magnet, either circled above or gathered atop nearby trees, disturbed by our presence.

  For obvious reasons, a contagious disease fatality is our biggest fear as it can spread in a blink to other animals. We first checked for nasal discharges, tick loads, injuries, and what the overall condition of the animal had been prior to its demise. This wildebeest had been fit and healthy and the cause of death, while not immediately obvious from the hacked remains, seemed to be a bullet.

  Bheki and Ngwenya put down their rifles and were moving in to turn over the body so we could inspect the other side, when something made me stop them.

  ‘Poison,’ I said, slowly realizing what had happened. ‘I think there is poison here. Don’t touch the body until we inspect the vultures.’

  They looked up surprised, but said nothing and stepped back, following me as I walked to the first headless bird.

  I kept a close eye on Max, ordering him to ‘heel’ often enough to let him know he must not leave my side, not even for a sniff of the dead creatures. A noseful of strychnine, insecticide, or whatever it was they were using would certainly do him no good.

  I had never been that close to a white-backed vulture before. With a seven-foot wingspan it is a big, impressive bird by any standards, but how undignified and ignominious it looked in death. This superb sultan of the skies lay there headless, sprawled awkwardly with one huge wing jutting into the grass. There was not a mark on it and judging by the distance from the wildebeest carcass it must have died very quickly, perhaps even while trying to take off. It was the same with the other one, which had managed to get a little further away. After a thorough search of the immediate area we found four in all.

  The wildebeest carcass must have been loaded with toxin to cause death that quickly. Any smaller a dose and the bodies would be dropping miles away and the poachers would never find them.

  We walked back and stood leaning against the Landy’s hood, surveying the carnage. The rangers also remarked that the wildebeest’s tail had been sliced off.

  ‘They have died strangely. There is witchcraft here,’ Ngwenya said ominously.

  A wildebeest’s tail is much prized by sangomas who use it as the Zulu equivalent of a magic wand. Ngwenya was correct in believing witchcraft was behind this killing, but for the wrong reason.

  ‘Yes, there is witchcraft here,’ I said, confirming his suspicion, ‘although not in the way you think.’

  I then told them the story of dreams and vulture brains, of the sangomas and the Lotto, and waited for their reaction.

  Bheki was first to respond. ‘I have heard of this. Far away up in the north near Mozambique, but never here.’ He shook his head. ‘We do not do this.’

  ‘But it is with us now,’ said Ngwenya. ‘These people do not think. If the vultures die, who is going to clean up all the dead animals in the bush? Disease will come from the rotting meat left behind. It will be bad.’

  Ngwenya looked around. I could sense with all the talk of disease what he was thinking. ‘The poison is still here, we must burn everything – the wildebeest, the dead birds, everything, or more will die,’ he said, pointing at the vultures circling above. ‘And tonight the hyenas and jackals who think they have a feast will also die. We must do it now or …’

  ‘No. Not yet,’ interrupted Bheki. ‘The thieves can see the birds above us from faraway and they’ll come back to check for more. Let us rather hide now and we will catch them later today.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I agreed. ‘I have also heard that these vulture poachers act as impimpi – informers – for other poachers. If we don’t catch them this time, the elephants and rhino will be in serious danger as well.’

  I looked at my watch; it was already early afternoon, and there was always som
ething else that needed tending to on the reserve.

  ‘I have to go now, but radio me so I know what is going on. But whatever happens, do not let any more birds – or anything – eat the meat.’

  ‘Of course, Mkhulu. We will find you here later.’

  A couple of hours afterwards I was driving along looking out for either Mnumzane or the herd when a gunshot barked a couple of miles away. I braked hard … then the calm voice of Ngwenya staccatoed over the radio.

  ‘Mkhulu, Mkhulu, come in, Mkhulu.’

  ‘Standing by.’

  ‘We have them,’ Ngwenya said, jubilation incongruously creeping into his usual phlegmatic voice. ‘Two of them.’

  ‘Already! Well done. OK, stay right there – I’m on my way.’

  As I passed the housing quarters an idea came to me. Perhaps we could play the sangomas at their own game …

  I drove to the storeroom next to the garage and selected several items, placed them in two large hessian bags and loaded everything on the back of the Land Rover. Then I went into the kitchen and took three packs of beef ribs out of the fridge, wrapped them up and shoved them under the driver’s seat where Max couldn’t get at them.

  Then I radioed two other Zulu rangers, one a middle-aged man whose impressive gravitas would ideally serve my purpose, told them to change into civilian clothes and where to meet me.

  Finally I called Ngwenya and asked if he had quizzed the poachers about the poisoned carcasses.

  ‘Negative,’ came the reply.

  ‘Good,’ I said relieved. ‘Don’t say anything about the vultures or the poison. Just pretend you’re arresting them for killing a wildebeest. I’ll explain when I arrive.’