Somewhere East of Eden

by Michael McKeown

  “It’s totally flawed. A complete non-brainer, as they say.” He spread his hands to indicate frustration, or perhaps incomprehension. “Firstly, it has been conclusively proved that legal trading stimulates an illegal trade into which poached ivory can easily be laundered. Secondly, in nearly all cases, the revenue from stockpile sales is embezzled by corrupt officials and never reaches the communities for which they are intended.”

  Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri, I knew, was a political appointment with connections close to the seat of power, one of the close-knit coteries whose malfeasance over the past thirty-five years had led to the country’s total economic collapse. Later that evening as I tucked myself up under my mosquito net I pondered what qualifications, if any, she possessed to be given stewardship of the county’s wildlife. A degree in zoology, or animal biology perhaps? Somehow that seemed unlikely. Gradually I drifted off to sleep and dreamed of the minister being chased by an enraged herd of trumpeting elephants along the Great Wall of China. I awoke feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. Karma.

  The next morning, I was up early and over a cup of freshly ground coffee watched as a group of banded mongooses cautiously emerged from their communal den in an old termite mound. Twittering and ‘churring’ to each other they foraged the territory for grubs and insects with all the single-minded diligence of FBI agents. Every so often they would find some vantage point and raise themselves, like meercats, on their hind legs to scan the terrain for approaching danger. Amongst them two young pups, still blissfully unaware of life’s many hazards, romped happily together. It was probably their first few days of daylight since pups are kept underground for three to four weeks before being permitted to emerge from the den.

  My simple but airy East African style tent, pitched under a camelthorn tree, was tastefully decorated with African prints and with the shower and loo open to the sky I wasn’t about to write Alan a letter of complaint. Bushbuck’s, in fact, is exactly the kind of unpretentious camp I feel at home in. Call me an unreformed Luddite but as far as the current penchant for up-market, boutique-styled lodges with swathes of silk and organza curtains, en-suite saunas and facial and pedicure salons, I am in no doubt on which side I stand. Only last week, I had read of a lodge in Londolozi that boasted a spa-treatment centre equipped with gold-tapped saunas and a flotation room. Exactly what that is, I have no idea. A room perhaps where you relax on a helium inflatable capsule and float your shares on the stock market? Whatever the case, it was hard to see how it improved the wilderness experience, which is presumably the reason why people go on safari in the first place.

  Few sounds evoke early morning, or high noon in the African bush as memorably as the murmuring call of a Cape turtle dove and I paused in my contemplation of the mongooses perpetually busy lives to concentrate on a couple serenading each other seductively from a nearby msasa tree. As often happens, it recalled the lines from the Song of Solomon: For winter is past, the rain is over and gone and the voice of the turtledove has been heard in our land.’

  Can I be alone in thinking that the Song of Solomon is one of the loveliest and most intimate love poems ever written? Certainly, it is unique in the Bible for its unabashed celebration of love. The unequivocal eroticism of its verses – at one moment a woman is speaking: “Dark am I, yet lovely, you daughters of Jerusalem,” the next a man – is so at odds with the rest of the Old Testament that many maintain it was slyly slipped in by the Devil himself. Take for instance the lyrical imagery of such verses as: Thy breasts are like twin fawns that browse among the lilies, or Kiss me and kiss me again, for your love is sweeter than wine. Not, you will agree, the customary exhortations to moral rectitude and probity that are the normal fare in the Old or New Testaments. What on earth, I wondered did the devout desert fathers, the forerunners of Christian monasticism whose lives were dedicated to solitude and abstinence, make of it all?

  Later, I drove down to a nearby waterhole presided over by egrets, black-headed herons and a small flock of Egyptian geese. On the far side, a pair of hyenas moved slowly along the water’s edge, with their customary shifty, hangdog look. Overhead a hawk hung motionless in the blue arc of sky before drifting weightlessly away beyond the horizon. Within minutes, a small group of elephants arrived at the waterhole. They spread out and began to drink, sucking the water up with their trunks and spraying it into their mouths. One of the calves, probably only a couple of weeks old simply sank to its knees at the edge of the water and drank from its mouth. Manipulating a complex device like a trunk with more than forty thousand muscles involved is a lengthy learning curve and it might be another five or six months before it learned to drink like its elders. I watched as two young bull calves jousted with each other until one of the matriarchs intervened and separated them before things became too boisterous.

  I can watch elephants for hours, for days, probably to the end of time itself. Partly, because it is a marvellously healing therapy, partly because they are such demonstrative creatures with emotions like ours and partly because sooner or later they will do something completely unexpected and new. But perhaps more than anything else it is the way they care and look after each other with such loyal and lasting affection. And yet elephants are not just an emblem of wonder and mystery. They are a keystone species who create and maintain the ecosystems in which they live and make it possible for a myriad of plants and animal species to live in that environment as well. Without them there would be major habitat changes that would impact negatively on the many species that depend on that environment. To lose an elephant is like losing an environmental caretaker. It is as simple, and as important, as that.

  There was a sudden vivid flash of red and green and a small bird with brilliantly green upper plumage, a red belly and glossy green and blue tail-feathers took up its perch on a nearby thorn-bush. Much though I lament it, a flawless ability to pinpoint and identify small birds is sadly not my forte. All those colour combinations, stripes and bill sizes that I have spent hours pouring over in bird guides seem to morph into a confused whirlpool of colours when I am confronted with them in the bush. In this case, however I recognised it as a Naron trogon, named by the French ornithologist and explorer, Francoise de Vaillant, after his young Xhosa mistress, Narina. Once settled on its perch however – and as if to demonstrate the myriad pitfalls of bird-spotting – the trogon immediately became invisible.

  De Vaillant was an intriguing character who, had he lived today, would probably have enjoyed celebrity status with his own adventure-travel TV show and Twitter following. A dapper Frenchman from Alsace, he set out from Cape Town in 1781 at the behest of the Dutch East India Company with a contract to collect animal, bird and insect specimens. Lavishly sponsored and provisioned with fine food and wines, he travelled in a covered wagon through the unexplored wilds of 18th century southern Africa, wearing an ostrich plume hat and silver buckled shoes and accompanied by a tame Chacama baboon named Kees. Regarded by many of the early colonists as a naïve and rakish interloper, de Vaillant nevertheless bought to his diaries a freshness of perception and rich detail that enabled him to portray the social behaviour of the indigenous people, the country’s vast landscapes and the wealth of wildlife that abounded in it – an abundance to be virtually beyond comprehension today. He was the first person to employ colour plates for illustrating the new species of birds he discovered and opposed binomial nomenclature, prefering instead to use descriptive French names such as the bateleur, meaning tight-rope walker, after the eagle’s distinctive tilting movements, which he likened to the adjustments made by a tight-rope walker as he traverses his wobbling line.

  During his journeys, de Vaillant became sufficiently fluent in the local language to be able to converse with his companions, and at night would sit around the campfire with Kees at his side listening to their stories, many of which he later recorded in his book Voyage dans l’Interieur de l’ Afrique. As can be imagined, his dalliance with his youthful Xhosa companion was roundly condemned in the rigidly censorious
society of those times – a mindset that was to linger on in many parts of that region for the next two centuries. On his return to France, de Vaillant described South Africa as ‘one of the most fascinating and exotic destinations in the world.’ It was probably the country’s first recorded tourist endorsement but one that, as far I can establish, has never been used by the South African Tourist Board.

  It was now after eleven and with the Matabele midsummer heat encouraging an exodus of wildlife, I retired to my tent and sat outside in a dappled pool of shade rereading a faded paperback copy of Romain Gary’s novel The Roots of Heaven, which I had discovered in the camp’s small but select library. It must have been well over thirty years since I first saw the film on a rainy Saturday evening in London. Much later I came to realise it was a defining moment. Until then I had naively supposed that Africa’s wildlife was well-nigh infinite. The Roots of Heaven, like Bernhard Grzimeck’s Serengeti Shall Not Die, was a wakeup call, a recognition of the fragility of the natural world. The film, shot on location in Chad, told of a maverick Frenchman, Morel, for whom elephants became the ultimate symbol of freedom and space during his captivity in a German prisoner-of war camp. With the war over he heads to French Equatorial Africa determined to stop the slaughter of elephants by trophy hunters and ivory poachers. There he is joined by an American journalist, a disgraced English army officer, a black freedom fighter and Minna, a beautiful but enigmatic young German girl who had survived the horrors of rape and pillage in post-war Berlin. Both the book, and the movie were years ahead of their time in terms of species and habitat protection, and although Romain Gary’s novel won the coveted Prix de Goncourt prize the film, notwithstanding its stellar cast, was a disappointment with the depths of the book only fitfully hinted at.

  Re-reading the novel, images from the film crowded in; wide-screen, Cinemascope shots showing the huge herds of elephants still then to be found in a country where today less than fifteen hundred remain; the radiant ecstasy on Minna’s face as she marvels afresh every morning at the view from her window of the thousands of water birds on the shores of Lake Chad and the astonished looks on the faces of the motley group of hunters and zoo collectors at the uncontrolled fury of Morel’s thunderous outburst: “You can’t wipe out a whole species just to make billiard balls”Woven into the film was a subtext, a classic example of art imitating life, involving the French actress and chanteuse Juliette Greco, whose smoky voice and bohemian life style made her the ultimate Left Bank icon for French post-war artists and writers like Jean Paul Sartre and Francoise Sagan. Greco was sixteen when she was arrested in Paris by the Gestapo for her involvement with the Resistance and imprisoned in the infamous Fresnes gaol. It was an experience that was to leave her with a life-long obsession for space and freedom – a yearning that is replicated in her role in the movie.

  I closed the book and slipped a marker into it. A light, cold pasta collation with salad and fresh fruit followed by a siesta and late afternoon game-drive awaited me. Someone – I have no recollection who – once wrote that “We don’t know when we are happy, only when we aren’t.”At that moment, I was in no doubt that I knew.

  Postscript

  Nearly a year after my visit to Hwange, the killing of Cecil the lion by a wealthy American dentist, Walter Palmer from Ohio, had occasioned world-wide anger and revulsion. A superb male, in peak condition, who controlled two prides with females and cubs, Cecil was lured out of a protective area with bait and shot with a bow and arrow. He wasn’t killed outright and was eventually found eleven hours later before being shot dead. He was then skinned and his head removed as another trophy for the odious dentist’s living room wall. All the arrogance and contempt for life that symbolises sport hunting was demonstrated in a You tube video clip that went viral shortly after Cecil’s death, showing a young South African woman, Reta Ooosterhuis, taking a selfie of herself as she stuck a beer can into the mouth of the lion she had moments before shot.

  Louis Muller, chairman of the Zimbabwe Professional Hunters and Guides Association, and a die-hard advocate of blood-sports, dismissed all criticism and claimed that Zimbabwe’s lion population was in fact extremely healthy. “Few people seem to know about the contribution that hunting makes towards safeguarding conservation,” he concluded demonstrating his consummate ability to misread public opinion globally.

  There was a time when I felt an almost adrenalin fuelled hatred for people like Muller who maintain that Homo sapiens has dominance over all other sentient beings. Now, however, I have stopped trying to understand what motivates them, or why. He and his brethren perfectly represent Neanderthal Man, or some other sub-species of our fossil kin left behind in the evolutionary descent. Not, of course, that it makes them any less repulsive or objectionable. As usual, their weasel-like excuses for their actions put me in mind of the notorious U. S. Army command statement at the time of the My Lai2 massacre in Vietnam: “We had to eliminate the village in order to save it.”

  It is hard to know what will happen in the future to a park like Hwange, run by corrupt and self-serving officials, where underpaid rangers, at constant risk from increasingly sophisticated and well-armed poachers, frequently wait months for their salary. The list of indictments is long and reaches back over more than two decades now – a chronic shortage of funds, or to be precise, a persistent misappropriation of funds, uncontrolled hunting quotas, herds of elephants poisoned by cyanide, Cecil the Lion… Amongst the many obstacles to reforming these issues is the lack of any exposure and call for change in Zimbabwe’s generally moribund press. On the other hand, if Robert Mugabe was to be fatally gored by a rogue buffalo on a visit to the park (and we can always dream, can’t we?) that would-be headline grabbing news for the next three months, although whether it would lead to any improvement is quite another matter. For unless, and until, a coherent conservation strategy is instituted under professional management, this once great park will continue to steadily decline. By which time the process may well be irreversible and the voice of the turtle dove stilled in the land.

  * * *

  2The Mai Lai massacre refers to the mass killing of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, including men, women, children and infants in the village of that name, committed by U. S. Army soldiers in South Vietnam on March 16th, 1968. Many of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Twenty-six soldiers were charged but only one, Lieutenant William Calley Jr, a platoon leader was convicted.

  REDNECKS IN PARADISE

  Men Are So Primitive.

  BORGEN: Award Winning

  Danish TV political drama series

  “I thought you might like to read this,” a dryly ironic voice murmured in to my ear and a week-old copy of the New York Herald Tribune, opened at page eight, dropped on to my lap. “Maximus horribilis,” the voice continued. “Red-necked psychopaths, if you ask me.” I sighed resignedly. The last thing I wanted on a beautiful, freshly-minted Zambian bush morning was something disagreeable.

  But maximus horribilis was exactly what I got.

  Reluctantly I examined the photograph of a middle-aged man with closely cropped grey hair, reclining against the shoulder of a magnificent bull elephant that he had evidently just shot. Jesse. J. Jackson 111, the caption said, was a member of the Arizona based Safari Club International (SCI) and this was his twenty second elephant kill. Even without reading further, the content was clear and I realised at once that it was not going to brighten my day.

  Jesse Jackson had the complacent air of a man who considers he has just done something exceptionally clever and brave for which he deserves our applause. But even allowing for the fact that most members of the SCI are seminally unbalanced, Jackson was surely shooting the breeze when he claimed that hunting elephants is, “one of the most intimate and real relationship’s one can have. Nothing in life,” he boasted, “is more satisfying than an elephant hunt. The actual hunt tests one’s physical capacity, endurance and limits, as well as one’s courage and strength of character.“r />
  What an undiluted horse-load of merde – as mired in mistruth and deception as the reasonings used by Bush and Blair when they propelled the western world into the abyss of Iraq, a calamity from which it has still not recovered. What kind of dysfunctional being argues that slaying a defenseless animal is courageous and character building? Or, that hunting, as hunters repeatedly maintain with breathtaking arrogance, assists in preserving wildlife. Justifications such as these are totally perverted which of course, come to think about it, is exactly what trophy hunters are.

  For a long time, I couldn’t make up my mind whether hunters were simply mentally retarded red-necks, barren of ideas and feeling, or dangerously insane. Then one evening in Dar-as-Salaam I came across a group attending a hunting convention and realised they were both. It took me less than five minutes to grasp the impossibility of conducting a rational, considered discussion with any of them. Like all fanatics, they were armoured with a layer of conviction and self-righteousness as impenetrable as a Sherman tank. They are dangerously obsessed people who even in my most non-judgemental moments I have difficulty in regarding with anything less than repugnance. They will deny being repugnant, of course, and trot out the usual tired clichéd statements about loving and caring for the animals they shoot in a way that the rest of us simply cannot understand.

  Considered as a sport, trophy hunting has all the competitive elements of clubbing baby seals to death with a baseball bat. There can only be one winner – the hunter with his latest high-powered telescopic rifle. Not that for one moment the hunting brigade regards it that way. Almost without exception, they see themselves as being cast in a manly and virile mould. Never mind that in many cases the animals they pursue are not born in the wild, but bred and raised on game farms before being released into hunting concessions. Never mind either that the concept of ‘fair chase’ is about as relevant as a race between a greyhound and a crippled tortoise, or that by concentrating on the healthiest specimens for trophy purposes, they are decimating the gene pool. What counts at the end of the day is that their goal is achieved – the hunting of an exhausted, terrified animal killed at no risk to themselves. This they regard as a laudable and commendable act of sportsmanship and courage. Heroes, they are certainly not.