AFRICAN DIGRESSION

(where no one seems to have heard of Vermont...)

Kalahari elephant at Chobe, Botswana

The Beautiful and the Bad

Cape of Good Hope

Cape Town itself was more familiar than foreign–excepting the road signs warning of baboons, and the knowledge that actual zebras were grazing unseen on the escarpments above.  It has a great deal to like:  rugged coastline alternating with idyllic sandy beaches (patrolled on occasion by great white sharks), dramatic mountains, an alluring waterfront (called the “V&A,” as in “Victoria and Albert” – really), terrific food, and pleasantly situated overall.  Yet there are walls and barbed wire enclosing nearly every attractive home.  Where there are shantytowns and people living at the margin, there are those who turn to crime. (Black South Africans blame Nigerians for much of it and for bringing drugs.)  It isn’t advisable to go strolling after dark, even near busy waterfront areas.

Kirstenbosch Gardens, Cape Town

Johannesburg, city of Jacaranda trees, is also a city of walls, guarded entrances, barbed wire, shanties and crime.  Yet there is so much going on that is good.  We visited Soweto, the middle class Soweto and the poor Soweto, specifically the Klipstown Youth Program sector run by and for poor young people. We were more welcomed than we’d have expected.  The scars of apartheid and race are still relevant and urgent issues.  The generation now in its 20’s or 30’s may have had little experience of apartheid but their parents did.  Apartheid only ended, after all, in 1994.  A fine play we saw at the famous Market Theater, “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” dealt with such things that divide us – race, language, history. 

A street in Lower Houghton, Johannesburg, with Jacaranda Trees

A street in a shanty part of Soweto

Animal Time at Mala Mala

Mala Mala, is a game reserve surrounded by other private game reserves on the one side and by the vastness of Kruger National Park on the other.   Each day has a rhythm: 5:30am wake up for coffee or tea followed by a game drive in open vehicles led by Shaun, our personal guide (shared in our case by a couple from Spain), return for an outdoor breakfast at 9 or so.  Free time until lunch at 1:30, game drive at 4pm that continues until well after sunset, followed by a late dinner in the boma or on the patio.  After dessert the black camp staff sing a cappella in strong voices. Mala Mala Main Camp looks over the Sand River.  Paul Theroux devoted an upbeat chapter of his otherwise gloomy portrait of Africa in his 2003 book “Dark Star Safari” to MalaMala and the Rattrays who founded it.  And upbeat it should be.  This is a class operation in all respects.  

The animals we saw were all in good health, and despite the intimacy of our contact (mere feet away from lions, leopards), were un-intruded-upon. Happily we heard there is no poaching in this area.  In fewer than two days we’d seen our “Big Five” (lion, leopard, elephant, Cape Buffalo, rhino).  Maybe we were just lucky as we also saw a cheetah, spotted hyena (so close I could have touched him), and were able to follow four lions as they stalked a herd of Cape Buffalo.  After a lot of buffalo observation, they simply fell asleep, evidently not hungry enough and risk averse.  Lions sleep a lot.

There was both abundance and endless varieties of antelope.  We couldn’t help but wonder about the evolutionary logic of dividing a species into so many sub-species:  impala, nyala, kudu, puku, roan, sable, duiker (2 types), klipspringer, suni, dik-dik, oribi, lechwe, bushbok, reedbok (2 types), steenbok, grysbok (2 types), rhebok, gemsbok, waterbuck, and eland – all beautifully marked, the males with exceptional horns. (Lion food! Leopard food!)  

A beautiful Nyala

Not exactly beautiful but more fun to watch were the dung beetles, each one laboring to roll his ball of dung somewhere, usually uphill for some reason, while facing backward, stopping to thwart rivals, climbing on top of his ball quickly to get his bearings lest the ball roll backward which it tends to do, then zipping back into position to push his burden onward over lumps and bumps, tenacious to the last.

Dung Beetles

Animals:  Which is the most vicious?

It’s hippos, hands down.  More people in Africa are killed by hippos than by any other animal.  Cape Buffalo also have a reputation for being ornery.  But pound for pound the honey badger has an even worse reputation.  Lets say a lion came upon the hole of a honey badger and killed and ate its babies.  WIth most animals, that would be that.  Not for the honey badger.  When the mother honey badger returns to the nest she is likely to pick up the scent of the offending lion, track it and stalk it, likely wreaking considerable damage on that lion, making him sorry he ever ate a honey badger.  

Hippos in the Chobe River

We saw no snakes (puff adders abound) but during a night drive with a guy from Botswana he stopped the Land Rover and said “There's a black mamba here, I can smell it.”   We didn’t find it, but there really was a faint odor in the air, something between spicy and rancid. 

Musa

Musa picked us up in the town of Hazyview a couple of days after Mala Mala.  A family man and strong Christian Musa said he thanks God every day.  He seemed not to hear other questions we asked about religion.  He has four children, the last named Syabonga or "thank you" in Zulu as in "Thank you God, this is the last one." “Do people in your country have more than one wife?” he asked.  He has only one, you see. But his brother has five. The king of Swaziland has as many as seven!  During apartheid, there were more men who had many wives, but when apartheid ended in 1994 they got electricity. This made life easier, so there was no more need to have one woman to tend the crops, another to fetch water, another to watch the children, and so forth. Musa also railed against Nigerians (as would many other black Africans we were to meet later) because they bring drugs and other bad things to South Africa.  He deflected questions about Zimbabweans who have been flooding into S.A. and straining the economy, yet we knew there have been serious problems recently including beatings, even murder, of Zimbabwean refugees not far from here.

Tribes

Our guide one day was Khulesi.  He lives in Soweto but is originally from a small village on the Limpopo River. If he could live anywhere in the world, money no object, he would choose to live in his village.  His tribe is Venda.  He speaks six languages including  a click language of the Bushmen. Khulesi can click quite beautifully, sounding almost like a xylophone, clicking with each vowel. It’s fun to listen to.  We tried to make the sounds with mixed success.

We hadn’t thought about the fact that Nelson Mandela is Xhosa, the dominant tribe in South African politics up until now when the current president is Zulu.  This has brought about political change with Zulus, long the majority tribe in South Africa, ruling for the first time and, unsurprisingly, appointing members of their tribe instead of Xhosas.

Christine, from Kenya, the chef of our small hotel in J-burg who awaits her parents' payment of cows as dowry before she marries; she stands next to her chef's certificate, per her request. 

Having just finished reading Peter Godwin’s “Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa,” I have a far greater awareness of the importance of tribe.  We were in Zimbabwe, a country long dominated by the Shona and near where there had been horrendous conflict with the Matabele in the 1980’s.  In Botswana I assumed our guides would be speaking the language of the country,Tswana.  Not so simple, two of the guides laughed, I speak my tribe’s language and he belongs to another “so we speak 'international!'”

Two nice ladies, Soweto

Rob and Joy

Rob and Joy manage the Muchenji Lodge in Chobe, Botswana. (Chobe has one of the highest elephant concentrations in Africa.) To live this kind of life, managing safari camps and whatnot, they decided long ago to have no children.  Their work timetable is about four years on, followed by a whole year off.  (The one year they spend everything they earned in the four, said Joy.)  Rob has worked all over the continent as a representative, or maybe it was mechanic, for Land Rover.  After that he worked in construction, rebuilding places damaged by wars.  No lack of work there, sadly.  He’s the kind of guy, the “old Africa hand,” who’s seen it all, and who just scoffed when we mentioned the temperature in Victoria Falls had been been pretty high (43 Celsius,109F; several locals complained about it –“too hot for spring”), Roy just said huh, wait until you’ve seen 50! (That would be 122F.)

Rob and I discussed some books about Africa.  I had found Paul Theroux’s “Dark Safari” in the lodge’s library that has an entire chapter on Mala Mala that I quickly reread.  I wasn’t surprised that Theroux thought highly of the management of Mala Mala; he just didn't care for the tourists.  And he has a point: whites come here to see African animals, but have little or no interest in Africans.  Ron shrugged at “Dark Safari.”  Too dark?  Well, no.  Not realistic?  Well no, there’s some truth in it.  How about Mala Mala, I asked. That did it.  Mala Mala, well, said Rob, they have fences (they actually don’t), and there are roads all over the place whereas here in Chobe we have no fences, and it’s so big, over 7,000 square miles (or 4,000, depending on your resource), animals roam completely free.  (Well, yes and no to that.)  Roy recommended "Cry of the Kalahari,” saying he was in on many of the experiences Mark and Delia Owens report in the book, knew them well. The names struck me as familiar. Later I remembered The New Yorker had a major article about the Owenses last year that concerned some controversial events including poaching, a shooting, and a divorce, details I couldn’t recall at the time.  Anyway, Rob claimed there was nothing in the news about the Owenses implying if there was he would know.  I emailed him the article.

Botswana’s biggest industry is mining, and also livestock, but Rob says the money is in beer (St. Louis brand) and towels.  Most towels sold all over the world are made in Botswana.  Who knew!