The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild (19 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Anthony,Graham Spence

BOOK: The Elephant Whisperer: My Life With the Herd in the African Wild
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About 500 yards further along Max suddenly stopped and came onto full alert, glancing at me and staring. Eye movements are a major means of communication in the animal kingdom and I knew he had sensed something so I paused and followed his line of vision to the only place in the area which could seclude anything at all, a small bush standing proud in the short grass. A few minutes later I was certain there was nothing there and called him, but he refused to move. This had never happened before; in fact Max was one of the most obedient dogs I know. I called quietly and then called again, and he just looked at me briefly and continued staring. I glanced around again but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He must be imagining things.
‘Come, boy, there’s nothing out there,’ I said and was about to go and get him, when suddenly I heard a cough right next to us. A very distinctive cough – leopard! I seldom carry a rifle, the traditional accessory of every ranger on a bush walk. This time wishing I did, I grabbed for my pistol.
Quite impossibly there was a leopard hiding under that single tiny bush barely ten yards away. Even though I heard it and knew full well it was there, it was so inconspicuous that I still couldn’t see it. I grabbed Max’s collar and held him tight, and fired a shot into ground. I dislike firing a weapon in the reserve but the big cat was waiting in ambush too close by to do anything else.
In a lightning blur of dappled gold, a large male leopard came out of the shrub and bolted. If it had come at us from that distance it would have been a nightmare, but going the other way he was poetry in motion, one of nature’s most stunningly beautiful creations.
However, apart from that little adventure, I was extremely happy with the day’s events.
After Nana had deliberately let me ‘hang out’ with her and Mvula, everything changed. It was now easy being around them and even Vusi my guinea-pig ranger could
walk to within a reasonable distance without reaction. A little later I got four rangers to stroll past the herd a few times as if on a game walk and –
voilà
– we had done it. Even Frankie didn’t raise an eyebrow.
Nana had obviously taken her decision and communicated it to the rest of the herd. And from that I learned another important lesson. Previously traumatized wild elephants appeared to regain a degree of faith in new humans once the matriarch has established trust with just one new human. But it must be the matriarch. My close relationship with Mnumzane hadn’t altered the herd’s attitude towards me one iota, despite the fact that they obviously communicate all the time.
Now, thanks to Nana, guests could walk in the wild near these magnificent creatures, an experience to be savoured for a lifetime. Yet barely two years ago Frankie had tried to kill Peter Hartley the manager of the Umfolozi reserve while he was tracking them during the breakout.
That put it all in perspective. We were moving along well.
However, it wasn’t just us ‘tracking’ them. One evening when the lodge was full and a candlelit dinner was being served on the verandah to animated guests gushing about the day’s bush experiences, Nana suddenly appeared on the lawn right in front of the lodge, herd in tow.
‘Wow, she is a bit close,’ I thought, watching her movements carefully. And with that the cry went up.
‘Elephant, elephant!’ shouted two first-timers who, immediately shushed by more seasoned bush lovers, continued pointing excitedly, while others grabbed for cameras as the whole herd came into view between the lodge and the waterhole. It was a great game-viewing experience but the problem, as I quickly realized, was that they were not going to the waterhole, they were coming up towards the lodge.
Elephants operate on the steadfast principle that all other life forms must give way to them and as far as they were
concerned foreign tourists at a sit-down dinner round a swimming pool were no different from a troop of baboons at a waterhole.
Nana came towards us without breaking step. I waited until I knew that she was definitely not going to stop or alter course, and whispered loudly to the guests. ‘Let’s go! Go, go!’
This prompted a rush for the cover of the lodge.
But there are always some people who know better. They’re always men, usually in a group, and without fail choose to pick the most ludicrous occasions to ‘prove’ their manhood. As the guests hurried off to safety, one particular ‘big city’ group stayed exactly where they were, lounging exaggeratedly over the dining chairs and feigning indifference as the herd drew nearer.
Frankie looked up and flicked her ears at the unmoving group, who, unable to recognize the customary warning, stayed put. Not getting the appropriate response, she then took a few quick steps towards them, ears flared like a cape and trunk held high.
‘Bloody hell!’ shouted one. ‘She’s charging!’ Chaos erupted and chairs flew everywhere as the ‘macho’ men blindly ran into each other in a most unedifying every-man-for-himself stampede.
Satisfied that she had got the respect she deserved from this errant group of primates, Frankie dropped her ears and fell back in behind Nana as they all ambled across the lawn up onto the lodge’s tiled game-viewing patio. They stood huge and imposingly out of place, surveying their alien surroundings.
The coast was clear, and attracted by the strange paraphernalia of the fully decorated dining table they moved over to explore. The investigation of the delicate fare with their heavy trunks led me to believe that whoever coined the phrase ‘a bull in a china shop’ had never actually seen
an elephant in a china shop. Glasses and plates were swept aside by careless trunks and smashed all over the place. Similarly candles and holders were tossed on the floor and then the tablecloth was violently yanked from below the remaining crockery and cutlery, completing the debacle.
Discovering that some of the mess was in fact edible, they delicately picked up and ate every bread roll and salad remnants off the floor, walking over glass shards as if they were paper. The table was roughly shoved aside, cracking open as it did so, and I watched in amazement as first one chair then another went airborne. Tiring of the dinner they focused on the now obvious purpose of their visit – the swimming pool.
‘That’s what they’re here for,’ I thought. ‘They know about the pool. They’ve been here before, probably late at night.’
The swimming pool was their new waterhole. All Nana was doing was simply clearing the guests away as she would do to any other animals so they could drink in peace.
She dropped her huge trunk into the pool and sucked gallons of the sparkling clear water up her elongated prehensile nose. Throwing her head back she delivered it messily to her gaping wrinkled mouth and gave the rumbling goahead to the others.
And they had an absolute ball. Mvula, Ilanga and Mandla to the delight of the now peeking guests cavorted around slipping on the tiles while the larger animals drank their fill and bathed themselves in huge squirts and sprays.
All was sort of going well until suddenly Nana picked up my scent. She slowly swung around and lumbered towards where I was standing next to a thatch pole just inside the lodge patio. I held my ground as she lifted the tip of her dripping-wet trunk across to my chest. The show of affection was understandably misinterpreted by several of the
hidden guests, who, by now certain of my impending death, bolted silently for the safety of the bathroom.
‘Clever girl! You found the cleanest water on the reserve – and managed to scare the hell out of everyone in the process,’ I added, with just a touch of discipline in my voice.
I took a step forward and raised my hand to the body of her trunk and caressed her. ‘But you really are frightening the hell out of the guests and you really do need to leave now.’
Nana decided otherwise, and five minutes later she was still standing there peacefully, while in the background Frankie stared and flicked her ears at any guest who so much as moved from their hiding places.
Nana really needed to go; the lodge certainly wasn’t the place for her and her family to visit, so I took my leave of her and backed off three or four paces under the thatch, clapping my hands lightly and encouraging her to move off.
Well, she didn’t like that at all. Moving forward she leaned her head on the support pole in front of me, and gave a heave. With that the lodge’s whole roof shifted and controlling my urge to shout I quickly moved forward again and resumed stroking her trunk speaking soothingly to her. Incredibly, she leaned forward again, this time with more force, and judging by the melancholic groaning of the timber supports it seemed that the whole structure was on the verge of collapsing.
I instinctively did the only thing I could and putting both hands high on her trunk pushed back on her with all my strength pleading with her not to destroy our livelihood.
And there we stayed, her leaning on the pole and me pushing back on her for an eternal thirty seconds before she stepped back, shook her head at me and walked away, taking a huge dump on the patio to show her disgust.
It was a game of course. Nana could have collapsed the
pole easily and my puny effort at pushing her off was but a feather in the wind. She was just making a point.
The rest of the herd followed as she walked down onto the lawn and eventually moseyed off back into the bush.
‘Now I know you are completely mad!’ shouted an astounded and angry Françoise coming out from behind the bar and ignoring the emerging guests. ‘What the hell are you doing? Do you want to die? Oh-la-la, you are crazy
non
, pushing an elephant!’ And with several loud shouts of ‘
Merde
’ she stormed off to the kitchen to try to resurrect the dinner.
The next morning we put up a single electric strand around the lodge grounds at adult elephant head height. To keep Nana happy, we also set up a water pipe from an underground well to a new drinking trough just outside the wire.
The arrangement works well and even if the wire is down, they never try to come back to the lodge.
A week later I got the sad news that my good friend
Nkosi
Nkanyiso Biyela had died. He was no longer a young man and had been unwell for some time. Despite expert medical attention from my own doctor, he succumbed. It was not unexpected. A fortnight earlier we were sitting outside together and despite the sub-tropical heat he shivered uncontrollably even with a blanket around his shoulders.
The tribe was in deep mourning and wailing echoed across the hills. Nobody came to work at Thula and we knew we would be operating with skeleton staff until well after the traditional funeral proceedings reserved for royalty, which would last weeks. All Zulu chiefs are kings for life, though colonialism degraded the title.
Nkosi
Biyela was a man of his times, a powerful traditional leader with a foot in both worlds. He had grasped both the value of tested tradition as well as the necessity of modernity. Using tact and wisdom, he had begun the absolutely thankless task of merging the proven ‘old’ with the prophetic ‘new’.
He was succeeded by his son Phiwayinkosi Biyela from his first wife, whom I only knew slightly. I attended the colourful induction ceremony bearing gifts.
The family members promised to arrange a meeting with him, which never materialized despite frequent requests.
The new
Nkosi
’s authority was soon tested. Shortly after
he took power a simmering tribal dispute boiled over into violence and from the reserve we could hear sporadic gunfire crackling about a mile away near the village of Buchanana. I placed guards on the boundaries to make sure nothing could possibly affect Thula Thula.
After a day of trying I eventually managed to get the local police on the phone.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked the captain, an amiable Afrikaner who had just taken over the station.
He sighed wearily. ‘Faction fight.’
Just what I had expected. Faction fights – as tangled and eternal as Appalachian feuds – are internecine tribal disputes. They are as messy and bloody and old and brutal as the ancient land itself. They can continue forever, from generation to generation, as a brother seethes over a sibling’s murder or a son remembers a dead father.
As is often the case, this feud was over land. Buchanana village, my immediate neighbour, was created in the late 1960s when Zulu tribes surrounding the town of Richards Bay were evicted to make way for the harbour development, the biggest in Africa. These unfortunates were simply dumped onto traditional Biyela land without
Nkosi
Biyela’s permission, such was the arrogance of the apartheid government of the day.
The displaced people’s leader’s name at the time was Maxwell Mthembu and they eventually became known as the Maxwell people. Faction fights between the Maxwells and the Biyelas predictably erupted and went on for years until Maxwell, whose clan was on the run against the numerically superior Biyelas, finally acquiesced and paid allegiance to
Nkosi
Nkanyiso Biyela. In turn, Maxwell was appointed a Biyela
induna
, a headman, and his people continued to live where they were on Biyela land and were integrated into the Biyela clan.
Thus
Nkosi
Biyela got his tribe’s traditional land back with minimum bloodshed. But tribal loyalties are rooted far deeper than treaties of convenience forged in a fireside chat. The people of Buchanana were still very much ‘Maxwells’.
Now with the death of Nkanyiso Biyela, the Maxwells revoked their pledge to be loyal to the Biyela clan. That alone was serious business, but the Maxwells also wanted to keep the land that historically belonged to the Biyelas. The Biyela clan was incensed. Groups from both sides took up arms.
The initial clash was short and sharp. Then the skirmishes went underground, taking the form of isolated attacks and ambushes at night. This was all happening right on my doorstep. My problem was that nearly all of our employees were Maxwells and came from Buchanana. So while Nkanyiso Biyela was my good friend and my relationship with the Biyelas sound, I also knew the Maxwell leader Wilson Mthembu, who had taken over when Maxwell died in the early 1990s. Mthembu had a tiger by the tail and I knew there was no way his people could win the war, but to openly support the Biyelas with the Maxwells as my immediate neighbours would be juggling with live coals. This was a lose – lose situation and I decided to try remaining neutral. I sat it out with fingers crossed, hoping that the new
Nkosi
Biyela could sort it all out soon.
To a Westerner, even someone as close to it all as me, Zulu tribal politics is mind-bogglingly complicated. I soon discovered to my dismay that instead of being an impartial observer, I was overnight a central issue in this imbroglio. Still lurking in the background of all this unrest was that powerful cattle-owning cabal who hankered deeply for the Royal Zulu land and wanted to torpedo the game-reserve project. I knew who they were from the hostile questioning I’d faced at tribal meetings while promoting the project, but
I knew nothing of their background. Whenever I asked, my informers would just shrug and say ‘they’re the cattle owners’.
Just as the Maxwells saw the death of Nkanyiso Biyela as a convenient moment to declare independence, the cattle cabal saw the death of the highly esteemed
Nkosi
and the hostilities with the Maxwells as an opportunity to wreck my relationship with the late Nkanyiso Biyela’s family – and especially with his son, the new chief.
Zulu society is prone to rumour and gossip. It’s the national pastime, and the cabal had been planting a host of ‘hearsay’ stories about me, claiming I was secretly supporting the breakaway Maxwell faction.
This was blatantly false. However, they had somehow discovered that, without my knowledge, members of the Maxwells had been using remote bush in Thula Thula as a hideaway at night during the fighting. The cabal then spread the word that I was harbouring the rebels. The story caught like wildfire.
But even worse, the malicious whispering campaign claimed that I was also supplying the rebels with guns and ammunition. Such rumour-mongering can have potentially fatal consequences. In a blink, my hard-earned reputation in the area was tenuous. I had been completely outmanoeuvred.
If Nkanyiso Biyela was alive, he would have guffawed at this nonsense. But he wasn’t. His successor, his son Phiwayinkosi, was a good man of iron integrity but he didn’t know me well and he was being force-fed false information by the bucketload.
I needed serious help to quash this rumour quickly. I phoned my old friend, the highly esteemed Prince Gideon Zulu, uncle of the Zulu king and head of the royal household and explained the situation. He was aghast and warned me of the potential danger I was in – as if I didn’t know.
Thankfully he agreed to use his considerable influence, stressing that the first thing I had to do was contact the new
Nkosi
directly and tell him what was going on, while he used his contacts to find out the source of the rumours.
I phoned the young chief and assured him that if some of his enemies had indeed been on my land, it had been done so illegally. There had been no consent from me whatsoever.
He listened politely. I knew about the misinformation swamping him, and the fact that he was giving me time to defend myself over the phone showed unequivocally that he was a fair leader. I felt infinitely better.
‘It’s good you phoned,’ he said. ‘There’s a meeting this weekend in Buchanana on this exact matter. Come and address us.’
I would far rather have had a private session with him where we could sort matters out face to face. Instead, I was going to have to confront the issue head-on. Being the only Westerner at a highly charged tribal gathering in the midst of a bitter fight was challenging enough – but to be accused of gun-running while people were dying was not good. Not good at all.
But I recognized the wisdom in his choice. He was giving me a platform to state my case. How I handled it was up to me. I thanked him, said I would be there, and then let Prince Gideon know of the meeting.
He tried to reassure me. ‘I will have some of my people there and they will do some work in the background, but they cannot speak for you or defend you. You must speak for yourself and you must speak strongly.’
Then, if the situation could possibly have got worse, it did. I got wind that Thula Thula itself was also under threat. In post-apartheid South Africa, tribes were encouraged to claim back traditional lands that had been unfairly annexed by the apartheid government. The Biyelas had years before lodged land claims against Thula Thula and surrounding
farms. The claims had failed legally and the matter had been amicably resolved on a social level with Nkanyiso Biyela. However, the cattle cabal, not content with just spreading lies against me, was also attempting to reactivate these discarded claims. Not only did they covet the Royal Zulu – they wanted Thula Thula as well.
I went to my office and began working on the most crucial address I would ever give. The future of Thula Thula depended on it. For if the cabal succeeded and moved into Thula Thula with families and cattle, our indigenous animals would be exterminated: including the herd. Nana and her family had at last found a place where they were happy. But because of the danger they presented to intruders, they would be the first to be shot if I failed at the meeting.
That thought sobered my fevered mind considerably and a plan started to take root. I knew the cabal was going to accuse me of harbouring combatants, thus I had to prove it was physically impossible to police every square inch in a reserve as vast as Thula Thula. I was certain that they had witnesses claiming combatants had been on my land. How could I know? If I knew everything that happened on Thula Thula, poaching would be eradicated overnight.
This meeting would be no clinical court of law and I had to provide graphic and practical proof to ordinary folk that would get me off the hook. My speech would not be dry legalese, but an appeal to reason.
Although the accusations could not be more serious, my good standing in the area would not be ignored by local leaders. It was well known that I abhorred apartheid and had worked closely with the national Zulu leaders in the years preceding the run-up to the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994.
I decided that the first thing to do was get a translator. Although my Zulu was adequate, the fact that each question
had to be laboriously translated from Zulu to English would give me more time to formulate answers. However, the translator needed to be acceptable to both sides otherwise I would face accusations that I wasn’t answering the questions properly.
Ngwenya, my security
induna
, gave me the name of a local priest, whom he said was an esteemed member of the community, to translate for me. The priest, a kindly old man agreed and suggested that I come to his church for a ritual blessing.
There are a host of ministers in Buchanana, but most are not what you would call traditional men of the cloth. They mix Christianity with ancestral worship and animism. In short, this is a truly hybrid spirituality, uniquely African and drawing inspiration from every source imaginable.
I arrived at his church the next day. It was a simple shack with walls and roof of corrugated iron. Inside were a few rickety wooden chairs. One had been placed in the centre of the room where he asked me to sit down. A simple white cross hand-painted on the tin wall was the only decoration.
He then put a large zinc tub of what looked like river water by my feet, sprinkled some powders in it and began circling around me, chanting in Zulu, imploring both God and the ancestors to hear his calls. While he did so he tore pages out of a newspaper, set them alight, waved them around and then threw them into the water. The pages were thickly wedged together and continued burning while floating.
After several minutes he stopped and stirred the smoky water. It wasn’t clean water to start with, and the liquid soon became a soggy mess of burnt-paper flotsam. Still chanting, he decanted the stuff into an old plastic water bottle.
‘This is good
muthi
,’ he said afterwards. ‘When you go
into the meeting, you must drink from the bottle, and the people must see you do that. This meeting will then go well for you because you have been blessed.’
I thanked him, took the bottle and said I’d see him later in the week.
 
Five days later I arrived at the Buchanana village hall with David. The sun was not even midway in the sky but the air inside was like an oven and the simple brick and corrugated-iron building squatting on the top of a barren hill was bursting at the seams with people. There was no way the tiny windows could ventilate the seething room and the air inside was fetid and rank with sweat. Hostility hung just as thickly.
Outside many armed tribesmen who could not find a seat milled about. Men pointed at us as I drove up. One shook his fist; another brandished an
iklwa
– a traditional Zulu stabbing spear, named after the sucking sound made as the blade is yanked from a victim. I didn’t feel too good about my chances.
There was a heavy police presence and I deliberately parked my Land Rover near their vehicles.
The cop in charge, a Zulu woman in a bright-blue uniform came across. ‘Why are you here?’ she asked, intrigued at seeing whites at a strictly tribal meeting.

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