A Carrion Death & The 2nd Death of Goodluck Tinubu

by Michael Stanley

  “It’s definitely a man,” said Andries unnecessarily.

  Bongani was staring at the bodiless head.

  “It’s not one of our people,” Andries continued. “Would’ve heard that somebody was missing. It’ll be one of those bloody poachers that have been causing trouble up north. Damned cheek, coming this close to the camp.” Andries gave the impression that the man had got his just deserts, given this lack of proper respect for the authorities.

  Bongani looked at the area around the corpse. Thorn acacias, trees typical of Kalahari stream verges, were scattered along the edges of the dry river. Vultures brooded in the branches, waiting for another chance at the remaining scraps should the men and the hyena withdraw. The riverbanks consisted of mud baked to hardness by the sun. From there scattered tufts of grass spread away from the bank, becoming less frequent as they battled the encroaching sand. Beyond that the desert had won, and the first slope of loose sand ran up to the Kalahari dunes, which stretched endlessly into the haze.

  The two men stood under one of the trees, its canopy cutting off the heat, its roots sucking moisture from the subterranean water. The body sprawled on the edge of a mess of twigs, leaves, and branches that had fallen to the ground over the years. Behind it lay the sand bed of the long-vanished river, patterned with tracks of animals, some old with the edges of the imprints crumbling, and some as recent as those of the disturbed hyena.

  Bongani spoke for the first time since they had spotted the vultures circling. “Do you have problems with white poachers here?”

  Andries just looked at him.

  “Look at the head. There’s still some hair left on the scalp.”

  Andries knelt next to the skull and examined it more closely. Although the hair was fouled with blood, one could tell it was straight and perhaps two inches long. This was a disturbing development. These days game reserves survived on tourists rather than conservation imperatives, and bad publicity would be unwelcome.

  “You wouldn’t expect to find a poacher down here anyway. You just said so,” Bongani pointed out. “And why on his own in a dangerous area? They don’t operate like that.”

  Andries was reluctant to give up his simple diagnosis. “Some of them aren’t in gangs, you know. Just hungry people trying to get some food.” But he knew it would never wash with that straight hair. “But not the white ones,” he admitted. “It’ll be some damn fool tourist. Has a few too many beers in the heat and decides to take off into the dunes to show how macho he is in his four-by-four that he’s never had off-road before. Then he gets stuck.” The retributive justice of this new idea made him feel a little better.

  Bongani focused farther up and down the river. The wind, animals, and the hard stream verge could explain the lack of footprints, but a vehicle track would last for years in these conditions. It was one of the many reasons why visitors had to stay on the roads.

  “Where’s the vehicle?” he asked.

  “He’ll have got stuck in the dunes and tried to walk out,” Andries replied.

  Bongani turned back to the body. The lengthening afternoon sun highlighted the dunes and concentrated his attention. “Wouldn’t he follow his vehicle tracks back to the road?” he asked.

  “No, man, he’d realize that this stream would join the Naledi farther down—nearer the camp—and take the short cut. You’d be three miles at least from the road up there,” said Andries, waving vaguely upstream, “and you’d be climbing up and down through the dunes all the way.”

  Bongani grimaced and turned to stare at Andries. “So let’s see. Your tourist has too much to drink and sets off into the dunes, probably in an unsuitable vehicle—by himself, since no one reports him missing. He gets stuck and then has enough knowledge of the local geography to realize that following the watercourse will be the easy way back to camp. However, he doesn’t realize how much dangerous game he may encounter in the river. And, by the way, he’s working on his suntan at the same time, because he sets off naked.”

  Andries looked down. “What makes you think he was naked?” he asked, ignoring the rest.

  “Well, do you see any cloth scraps? The animals wouldn’t eat them, certainly not with bone and bits of sinew still left. And what about shoes? Animals won’t eat those either.” Bongani continued to watch the changing light on the sand dunes while Andries silently digested this new challenge.

  “Let’s take a look up in those dunes,” Bongani said at last. “Maybe he came from up there. Let’s go round the side of the tree, though. I don’t want to disturb the area between the body and the dunes.”

  Something in the way the sand looked struck him as not quite right. For once Andries didn’t argue. They clambered up until they could see beyond the crest of the dune above the streambed. Two sets of tire tracks stretched away from the river, the fat-shoe tracks of vehicles designed for the desert. The tracks came toward the dune and then stopped abruptly as though the vehicles had been lifted into the sky.

  “Oh, shit!” said Andries. “It drove out here and then went back. It was one vehicle, not two.”

  “Yes,” Bongani agreed. “And they had to turn around on this dune when they saw that they’d come to the river. They smoothed the area where they turned so that you couldn’t see the tracks from the riverbed.” They walked together toward the spot where the tracks disappeared. Once there, they had no further doubts. There were boot prints aplenty, and close up, they could see the sweep marks on the sand that the wind had not fully erased. Whoever had been there had been careful to use the hard ground and debris from the trees to hide their progress into the river course.

  “They knew what they were doing, these people, whoever they were.” Bongani had grudging respect in his voice. “They wanted that body destroyed, and they knew that was more likely to happen along one of the river courses than in the relatively dead dunes. And they left it naked because that way nothing would remain to show it was human. In another day or so they would’ve had what they wanted. And in case by bad luck the remains were found, they took care to hide the tracks, which might be visible from the river. Your tourist, or whatever he was, was murdered, Andries. I think we have a big problem.”

  Andries nodded. “We can get the camera from the truck and take some pictures. We’d better get the tarpaulin to cover the remains. And we’ll have to wait here until we get some men to keep guard. They’ll have to spend the night here. We won’t get the police out until tomorrow morning.”

  Sitting in the sand with Bongani and a corpse for several hours was the last thing Andries felt like doing, but there was no choice. The hyena was still waiting. It had moved much closer when they climbed into the dunes.

  Chapter 2

  Assistant Superintendent “Kubu” Bengu of the Botswana police hoisted his not inconsiderable bulk onto the front seat of the police Land Rover and settled himself for the long drive. This involved selecting a CD of one of his favorite operas with a baritone part. He fancied that he had a reasonable voice and sang with gusto, but restricted this to periods—of which there were plenty—when he was on his own. Most of his friends were not opera lovers, and the others knew him too well to be polite. After selecting Mozart’s Magic Flute—he would sing Papageno—he checked that he had enough fuel and drinking water for emergencies and pulled onto the main road. It would take him four hours to get to Dale’s Camp, the bush resort near where the body had been found, on the verge of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

  Two hours later, Kubu ejected the CD, satisfied with his singing. He had modestly given himself only two encores of the bird-catcher aria. The opera helped him remain patient on the congested road from Gaborone to Molepolole. One had to be aware of so much: pedestrians, who insisted on playing chicken with oncoming vehicles; real chickens that foraged for food in the road; and of course the other vehicles, the drivers of which claimed right-of-way over all others. Especially terrifying were the minivan taxis, which stopped whenever and wherever they chose, passed on either side of other vehi
cles, and were not above using the sidewalk as a highway.

  At Molepolole, Kubu turned north, and the traffic dropped off. Now there were no fences, and one had to watch out for livestock. The slightly raised road meant that what little rain the area received was channeled to the verges, where the dry grass was tinged with green, attracting the animals. Kubu wasn’t concerned about the goats. They were smart and got out of the way. However, sheep, if scared by a vehicle, were as likely to run into the road as away from it. Since his Sunday school days Kubu had thought that goats had been unfairly judged. Sheep were as likely to be led into temptation as redemption and would be too stupid to tell the difference. He would rather be a goat himself. As for the cows, they preferred to examine the danger of an oncoming car at their leisure from the middle of the road. No amount of hooting or shouting would shift them. The cows were the worst.

  After twenty-five miles the road narrowed so that there was just enough room for two cars to pass in opposite directions, but not enough if one was a heavy vehicle. Kubu had to pull onto the dirt shoulder twice when trucks approached. He concentrated on the driving and set aside his musings, as well as his music.

  As he approached the town of Letlhakeng, Kubu relaxed and slowed. A new roadside poster focusing on HIV safety momentarily caught his attention. When he looked back at the road, he was horrified to find an enormous pig crossing just ahead of him, moving toward his side of the road. She was dark and almost invisible against the tarmac. And she completely ignored him as she made her way purposefully to the far side.

  Kubu swung the Land Rover onto the dirt verge, controlled the threatened skid, and stopped the vehicle in a spray of sand. As he cursed and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief, he watched the sow’s progress in his rearview mirror. Although he must have missed her by only a whisker, she had not even glanced in his direction, nor had she broken her stride. And now she was joined by the excited piglets that had motivated her near-death experience. Kubu had not seen them in the shock of the close encounter with their mother. He started to see the funny side, and his mouth twitched into a doubtful smile. What an obituary it would make! The overweight detective and the monster pig! As he watched the huge creature waddle with her brood into the thornbushes, he promised himself that he would take his diets more seriously in the future. Then he started to chuckle.

  After Letlhakeng the road became a track, and there were no other vehicles. Kubu drove on through the endless grass and thorn scrub of the Kalahari. There is something special about this land, he thought—its desolation, its vastness, its emptiness. A hard land that plays havoc with people who are not self-sufficient, but reluctantly gives up secret prizes to those who understand it.

  Just look at the Bushmen—amazing small people with the ability to survive in this harshest of environments. Hunter-gatherers who had lived in southern Africa for more than 20,000 years, over the centuries they had been squeezed both by blacks and whites, the former moving south from central Africa and the latter moving north from the Cape of Good Hope. And the ambivalence remained. Currently there was tension between the Kalahari Bushmen and the Botswana government. The government had removed the Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve into settlements to the south, asserting that this would help them to survive and adapt to modern society. Opponents argued that the true reason was to allow diamond interests to prospect on traditional Bushman lands.

  Kubu owed the Bushmen a debt of gratitude. His childhood Bushman friend, Khumanego, had shown him how the desert was alive, not dead as he had thought. He remembered vividly how in one school holiday Khumanego had taken him sweltering miles into the arid landscape and drawn a circle in the sand a few yards in diameter.

  “What do you see?” Khumanego had asked him.

  “Sand, stones, and some dry grass. That’s all,” he had replied.

  Khumanego shook his head gently. “Black men!” he chided. “Look again.”

  “I see sand and stones, some small and others a little bigger. Also some dry grass.”

  An hour later the world had changed for Kubu. Khumanego had shown him how to look beyond the obvious, how to explore below the surface, to notice what no one else would see. In that small circle thrived a teeming world—ants, plants that looked like stones (lithops, he found out later), beetles, and spiders. He loved the lithops—desert plants cunningly disguised as rocks, almost impossible to distinguish from the real things. They blended into their surroundings, pretending to be what they were not.

  The trap-door spider also impressed him. When one looked carefully at the sand, almost imperceptible traces of activity clustered around one area. On his knees, Khumanego pointed to the barely visible crescent in the sand. He gestured to Kubu to pick up a twig and pry the trapdoor open. Kubu complied, nervous of what he would find. The open trapdoor revealed a tunnel, the size and length of a pencil, made from grains of sand and some substance holding them together. Khumanego tapped the tube. A small white spider scurried out and stopped on the hot sand.

  “This spider,” Khumanego whispered, “knows the desert. He digs a hole and makes walls of sand with his web. He makes his home under the sand where it is not so hot. He listens and listens, and when he hears footsteps on the sand, he opens the door, jumps out, catches his meal, and brings it back to his home—appearing and disappearing before the insect knows what is happening. Very clever spider. You don’t know that he is there, but he is very dangerous.”

  Kubu thought that the spider and the lithops survived in the same way—avoiding attention by blending into the background.

  It was the experience of seeing so much when there was so little to see that had the greatest impact. Khumanego had taught him to open his eyes and see what was in front of him. “Black people don’t see,” Khumanego had said. “White people don’t want to.” Kubu returned home that afternoon and vowed he would never be blind again. From that day, Kubu had trained himself to be observant, to see what others did not and to look beyond the obvious.

  Kubu was startled out of his reverie by a stretch of corrugation on the road. He owed much to Khumanego. He hadn’t seen him for several years. He should check up on him, Kubu thought, especially with all the problems between the government and the Bushman people. Kubu sighed. Why couldn’t people respect each other? Why did they need to be at each other’s throats so much of the time?

  Kubu continued along the hot, sandy road, leaving a cloud of dust in the still air. He was lucky there wasn’t a car in front of him.

  He wondered about the reason for his trip. A ranger and a researcher had found the body of what they thought was a white man being eaten by a hyena. It puzzled him that there were no missing person reports for a white man, only the usual few of black men, who probably had gone to South Africa in the forlorn hope of making their fortunes. They had also mentioned tire tracks. Perhaps the labs could match tread patterns, but it was a long shot. The wind did unpredictable things with sand.

  An hour later, Kubu drove up to the entrance to Dale’s Camp. Next to the wooden welcome sign with the letters burned into it, there was a galvanized steel gate hanging over a cattle grid. He stopped the vehicle. There were no bird calls, just the persistent trills of cicadas in the oppressive air. Kubu found himself oddly reluctant to open the gate. The bush beyond looked no different, and yet it had an unwelcoming feel—a feel of unpleasant secrets to be revealed only at a cost.

  Kubu lingered a few moments with this feeling. He had learned to trust hunches. Then he shrugged and opened the gate. He pulled through, stopped to close the gate behind him, and drove to the reception area. Three uniformed attendants with huge smiles ran up to open his door and help him with his luggage. They were surprised to find that he was not a white man. Kubu waved them aside and told them he could handle his own overnight belongings. “Yes, sir!” they said, all smiles, but disappointed they were not going to get a tip.

  A few minutes later Kubu stood inside a thatched area, with horns of kudu and eland on the walls
, and a huge elephant skull standing in the corner. Soapstone animal carvings clustered on the floor and tables. He paused under one of the ceiling fans that labored to cool things off, and sighed with pleasure. He looked around, noticing that the dining area was under the thatch but open to the outside, where there were reclining chairs around the pool. Kubu recovered momentum and walked to the desk, made from a thick piece of mopane wood, skirted with bamboo. The designer African-bush look, he thought.

  “I am Assistant Superintendent Bengu,” Kubu told the receptionist. She had the beautiful features of the Bayei tribe of the Okavango Delta. “I was notified a body had been found near here.”

  “We are expecting you, sir. You will stay one night with us? You have tent number 28. It’s the last one on the right. It has a good view of the waterhole.”

  “Thank you. Please could you arrange to have two large steelworks sent to the tent, with ginger beer, not ginger ale, and extra ice in a bucket? I am going to have a quick shower before lunch. What time is lunch, by the way?”

  “Twelve to two o’clock. The waiter will bring the drinks right away. I will also tell Mr. Botha that you are here. He’s the one who found the body.”

  “Thank you. There should be a police Land Rover on its way to fetch the body. Please let me know when it arrives.”

  Kubu picked up his bags and walked to his tent, waving away yet more porters. He was sure he had been given the end tent not because of the view but because the resort would want to keep a potential murder as low-key as possible.

  It was a typical “permanent” bush tent, about twelve by sixteen feet, with a large bed covered with a locally woven bedspread in rust colors. There were two riempie chairs—their bases interwoven with strips of animal hide—with side tables, a chest of drawers with a mirror, a place to hang dresses and jackets, mosquito netting knotted above the bed ready for use, a can of mosquito repellent, a large thermos of cold water, two drinking glasses, candles in candleholders, two boxes of Lion matches. No one wanted the noise of a generator spoiling their bush experience.