Elephant Dawn Page 5

  One drunken ‘gentlemen’ once offered the male friend who just happened to be by my side at the time three baboons for one night with me. I realise it was just for one night, but three baboons! This is not an animal the local people value at all. We giggle about my erratic worth.

  What we don’t giggle about is the documented promiscuity and associated high prevalence of HIV in Zimbabwe. While currently one in four people are known to be HIV-positive, in the younger age brackets the figure is even higher, with over 40 per cent of those in their late twenties believed to be suffering from this virus.

  It’s also commonplace here for a married man to have ‘a small house’ (a kept mistress) and ‘a big house’ (the marital home) along with other casual lovers on the side. That Zimbabwe has expressions like ‘small house’ is evidence of a polygamous culture. It’s wise to be mindful.

  ‘I think I’ll pass on the three baboons,’ my friend said, unnecessarily.

  Baboons give me another giggle while having photographs developed in Bulawayo. Austin and Patrick, who work in the back room of Camera Centre, want to know about the animals in my country.

  ‘Is it true that a kangaroo has a pouch here?’ Austin asks me, patting his belly.

  I nod. I already know what is coming next, aware of the trouble local people sometimes have with baboons in their small mealie (corn) fields, which they grow to help feed their families.

  ‘Imagine if a baboon had a pouch there!’ Austin exclaims. ‘That would be a big problem; he would stuff so many stolen mealies into it.’

  I now tell the local people that I’m married to the elephants—which only serves to confirm their suspicion that there must be something a little wrong with me. I have no children after all. This is lamented. When I go on to say that I choose not to have any children (a delicate decision I made when I was 30), this is clearly cause for alarm. In many ways, we are worlds apart. What’s more, the gap now appears to be widening rapidly.

  To date, most locals in my immediate surrounds have been friendly and welcoming. While there are those who will always try their luck, repeatedly asking for things simply because I am white and therefore perceived to be very wealthy, I’m generally made to feel that I belong. While I was away selling my house however, Robert Mugabe won another presidential election, in a vote widely reported to have been rigged. His ruling party, ZANU-PF, continues to violently seize property without payment, solely on the basis of skin colour. Just as worrying, he has begun a ‘Go back to Britain’ chant to the whites—many of whom are actually third and fourth generation Zimbabwean, and who have never been to Britain in their lives. These public tirades are actually directed at all whites, since few seem to care about the difference between white Zimbabweans, white British, white Americans . . . white Australians.

  Alas, this rhetoric has succeeded in inciting increased violence and amplified white hatred in some quarters, particularly among the unscrupulous and the assorted bands of highly impressionable, aggressive and power-hungry black youths who blindly follow directives from the Ruling Party elite. Twenty-two years after racial reconciliation (following Independence in 1980), this is for many young men and women a learnt hatred, a learnt bitterness, since so many weren’t yet born, or were primary school age at best, when the war ended. It is hatred taught and instilled by a ranting president and egged on by some similarly prejudiced government ministers. In televised speeches, the president now frequently utters such things as, ‘To those of you who support whites, we say down with you.’ And, ‘Our Party must continue to strike fear into the heart of the white man who is the real enemy.’ To which he gets wild applause. Great presidents guide the moral compass of a country. Understandably, President Mugabe’s morality is now under fire. Such racial hatred in the 21st century is difficult to comprehend. All light-skinned folk are targeted, but white Zimbabweans are the most deeply affected. This is the country of their birth after all. Many have nowhere else to go.

  I sit back and try to imagine how it must have been for the black people in this country that was once called Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe at Independence), who lived through the white supremacist era. They overwhelmingly outnumbered the whites, accounting for approximately 96 per cent of the 7 million-strong population at that time. I try to imagine how it must have felt to be treated as inferior, in practically every aspect of their lives. Whites who wouldn’t walk with you, sit with you, eat with you. All while black people raised their kids, cleaned their houses, prepared their meals and worked in their fields. Some white employers did have genuinely devoted and caring relationships with their staff during this supremacist period, and solid friendships were formed between the races, even back then. Still, bad memories certainly linger for a lot of people.

  ‘Mugabe is 78 years old. He won’t be president for much longer,’ is what I hear people saying everywhere I go.

  I go out and sit among the elephants. They don’t care about skin colour.

  In spite of it all, I am high on my new life with elephants.

  Lady, the grand matriarch of the L family, leads a small close-knit group of sixteen. I already love her and her family, and am thrilled when they’re out and about in the open areas where I can easily spend time with them.

  ‘Hey, Lady; hey, my girl,’ I greet her fondly.

  She is an enormous pachyderm, easily identifiable with a longer left tusk and a distinctive hole in her left ear. I estimate her to be in her mid thirties, just a few years younger than me. This is based on the ages of her offspring and also her body shape. Female elephants, unlike males, stop growing in height when they’re around 25 years old and proceed to get a little longer and less round with age. I’ve had more sightings of this family than others, which has allowed me to piece together their family tree quickly and easily.

  I talk to them constantly, and after initially giving me only sideways glances, they now observe me closely and appear to enjoy my presence. Like Lady, Leanne, her closest sister, is particularly grand. Sitting among them one day, I recall the Kenyan researcher, Joyce Poole, admitting that she used to sing to the elephants in her study group, and all of a sudden I’m singing the first verse of ‘Amazing Grace’, over and over and over again. And sing I definitely can’t, but goose bumps spring up on my arms nonetheless. I think for many, regardless of religious persuasion, it is a song of hope and these days I really see all of the wonder around me. Standing her ground, a few metres away from my 4x4, Lady crosses her back legs and rests her trunk in an L shape on the ground, evidence that she’s feeling particularly relaxed. Adults Leanne, Lucky and Louise do the same. They stay like this for several minutes but are soon bored (or perhaps can’t stand my incredibly bad singing for even one second longer) and then they casually wander off. After those few minutes I feel warmed, my spirit instantly replenished, for I know that I have more and more friends in wild places.

  I never wear or rarely even carry a watch, as the time it tells has lost all significance. The position of the sun in relation to the horizon tells me how much sunlight is left in the day. My elephant friends don’t know or care what hour, or day, it is—and neither do I. I move from one family to the next, until the evening cries of the black-backed jackals, the roosting commotion of the guinea fowls, and the hysterical raucous cackling of the seemingly tone-deaf red-billed francolins bring a feeling of all-pervading peace to the end of my day, and I know that it will soon be dark.

  The family I’ve called the Ws are a much larger group than the Ls. They don’t always wander together as they’re an ‘extended family’, who meet up together quite frequently, all five sub-families becoming one. Eventually they go their separate ways once more, with weeks sometimes passing before they meet again as a complete group. In the meantime, I see various combinations of the five smaller sub-families together.

  I have firm favourites in this family group too. We humans choose our friends based on traits that we like and respect, finding ourselves attracted to some people more than others. There are
those we opt to spend time with, a few who really brighten our world, but not everybody is the sort of person we want to hang out with. To my surprise, I find this is exactly the same when it comes to the elephants. They all have different personalities, just as people do. There are definitely some I prefer over others.

  Whole is one of the matriarchs in this extended family. I named her so because of the large hole in the middle of her left ear, but of course it needed to begin with W. Although Whole is huge, I think of her as a marshmallow, a giant one for sure—all sweet and soft and gooey inside. One of her daughters is Whosit, who has small tusks that curve inward on her trunk. Whosit is an accomplished clown, always managing to make me laugh out loud at her playful antics. And then there is Willa, with a square notch that juts from the middle of her left ear, who happily lingers in the background. But she always seems to be checking to see if I’m watching her. ‘Did you see that, Sharon? Did you? Did you? Did you see me do that?’ I imagine Willa saying under her breath, with a longing glint in her eye.

  When Whole’s family meet up with the gorgeous Wilma’s family, or another W sub-family, there is a big commotion, that at first I didn’t understand at all. I finally realised they’re greeting each other, with loud screams and open-mouth rumbles that fill the air. They urinate in excitement, back into one another with their ears waving wildly, and then affectionately rub their faces together, such is their level of jubilation at being back together once again. In the excitement of the moment, liquid streams from their temporal glands, which are located just behind their eyes. This streaming liquid indicates something different in adult males, where it’s an indicator of musth: a period of heightened sexual activity that periodically grips males over 30, during which they charm oestrous females and mate. What I learn too, in time, is that it can also be an indicator of terror and distress, in both males and females.

  I particularly love meeting up with Anya and Adele from the As, Belda and Brandy from the Bs, Cathy and Courtney from the Cs, Emily and Eileen from the Es, Joyce from the Js, Grace from the Gs . . . and my list goes on and on. And there’s Mertle and Misty from the Ms, who I adore for different reasons. I’m drawn to Misty because she’s so gentle and polite. She’s a pretty elephant with unusually small ears, sad eyes and a dignified aura. Mertle, I think, is Misty’s mother. Given that both are adults, it’s impossible to verify this assumption even after hundreds of sightings. They may in fact be sisters. Whatever the case, they’re always wandering together. Mertle has spunk. She takes no nonsense from anybody, her sheer size alone commanding respect. I make a mental note never to tussle with her.

  It is already apparent to me that elephant family bonds are incredibly strong, and that female elephants do indeed, as prior research has found, stay together for life. Males, on the other hand, are forced out of their families when they’re teenagers, presumably to reduce occurrences of inbreeding. They go on to form bull groups, and later to lead more solitary lives, while skilfully passing on their genes and decades of wisdom to their companions. Because the males are so transitory and can travel huge distances, often gone for long periods, I concentrate my efforts primarily on the family groups. Given how frequently I see each family, I know that they don’t wander far.

  When I sit with elephants in the wild, even for a short time, I always feel immensely humbled to be sharing their lives. They are the world’s largest land mammal, and are remarkable in every way. When not harassed, they are incredibly calm, quiet, gentle and inquisitive, something you cannot imagine such enormous animals could be.

  Just as I’ve learnt to know more of them by name, I’ve learnt to understand their individual joys and their sadnesses, their losses, their gains and their relationships. Their moods and emotions have become familiar and I’ve become completely intertwined in their lives. There is a downside to knowing elephants so intimately. They’ve already touched a place in my heart so deep that I sometimes feel almost paralysed by this passion. When tragedies occur—and it’s perhaps even more inevitable in this troubled country that they will occur—I already understand how heartbreaking this will be.

  I fully expect troubled times ahead.

  V FOR VICTORY

  2002

  I have moved to an even smaller abode: a one-room roundhouse with a pointy thatched roof known as a rondavel. It is typical of what many rural folk live in, but at least my version has been made with cement, rather than mud. It was previously used only for storage, but I decided that it would do. My bed will not fit, so I reduce my furnishings to just one sofa, which I fold out each night to reveal the thin piece of foam I sleep on, two small cupboards, a tin storage trunk, a couple of wooden coffee tables I bought from John, and not much else.

  The fact that John is getting rid of furniture worries me. It certainly looks like he’s going to be the next one to leave. ‘This place has gone to the dogs,’ he says, and I listen patiently while he lets off steam.

  I’ve bought him a tin of his favourite mixed fruit jam, refusing his pennies that he offers to me in payment. This small tin alone costs nearly as much as his monthly pension. John is bitter and I certainly don’t blame him. On top of everything else, sightings of snared animals are increasing and gunshots are heard in the night. It is, understandably, all driving John a little crazy.

  I drag him to see my new little home, in the hope that he might better appreciate all that he still has. I have five by four metres in which to live. (A concrete partition separates this space from another that is one metre wide, containing a cement shower cubicle, hand basin and toilet.) With my scattering of furniture placed around its edges, I have just three metres by two metres of free space.

  Beside my fridge, I cook (now and then) on a two-burner hotplate that sits on top of one of John’s coffee tables, with cardboard boxes of utensils beneath it—my kitchen. I eat while sitting on my sofa—my dining room. I sit on the floor on my grass mat with my computer on my lap and my printer on the floor beside me—my office. I laze on my sofa to read a book—my living room. Every night I unfold the sofa and make up my bed, tucking the edges of a mosquito net under the foam mattress to protect me against malaria—my bedroom. I hand-wash my clothes in the small hand basin on the other side of the partition—my laundry.

  ‘Count your lucky stars you don’t live in just three metres by two metres of space,’ I urge John.

  While Zimbabweans like him prepare to leave, expatriates like me still happily stay in this country, our foreign currency making life inexpensive.

  I accept an invitation from Julia to travel to Mana Pools, a World Heritage wilderness in the far north of Zimbabwe, accessible from the capital Harare. This is an opportunity to make new friends and it seems to me that I’m going to need them if too many of my mates go off to greener pastures. We are with Dinks. Carol is with us too. She and her friend Miriam, also present, are American schoolteachers living and working in Harare, and with ties to wildlife projects in Hwange.

  As a result of international warnings against travel to Zimbabwe, we have this huge wilderness area practically to ourselves. It is extraordinary, and a great time to be visiting these areas. If only tourists knew what they were missing out on.

  On our first night we wander down to the riverbank after dark. ‘I hope we don’t come face-to-face with a hippo,’ I mutter nervously, but apart from a few smiles, nobody takes much notice of my unease.

  The next evening I dig out a spotlight to see what is making such an incredibly loud munching noise. ‘Holy shit, hippo,’ I squawk. The hippo is grazing less than 10 metres away from us, but my friends calmly continue chatting. ‘What is wrong with you ladies?’ I squawk again. ‘Is this really so normal?’

  Nothing too much is said either the next morning when a vervet monkey whisks away an entire loaf of our bread, although there is definitely more leering from my friends this time around. When the vervet later returns for an avocado, Carol is incensed as well as me.

  ‘Here,’ I shout, holding up the Worces
tershire sauce bottle. ‘You’ll need some of this!’

  We drown our sorrows over this loss of food rations. The G&Ts are strictly for medicinal purposes, of course. It’s a sound local theory: the quinine in the tonic helps ward off malaria. There is a lot of water around Mana, and a lot of mosquitoes. We all agree that we’d better have a few.

  There is a sign in the area that warns us in bold type: driving off-road is strictly prohibited, especially up to lion kills. leaving your vehicle and walking is permitted.

  I frown, and read it again, just in case the G&Ts are impairing my senses. But no. It still says exactly that.

  ‘Really?’ I shake my head, bewildered. ‘Well, good luck with that.’

  I feel like I’ve taken a step back in time. I do so love it, of course, every last bit of it. But I find myself wondering—on this weekday afternoon as we casually observe the herds of elephants inside this national park—what boardroom meetings are going on Down Under, what strategic plans are being written, and who is flying first-class to what part of the globe. I, on the other hand, am in a place where zebra crossings are really zebras crossing, and families of elephants form the only traffic jams.

  Stopped by the roadside, looking in wonder at the long pendulous seed-pods of the sausage tree, which can grow to an incredible metre in length, I can’t help but giggle at their phallic appearance. I decide that I absolutely have to have one, and collect a pristine specimen from the ground. Then, after an outing to visit Lol and her son Drew who, since Andy’s death, have settled in this eastern side of the country, we drive my sausage eight hours back to my rondavel in Hwange. I display it proudly in my garden, a reminder of a memorable excursion.

  I spend time with the small anti-poaching team of four men, now in place, dedicated to patrolling the Hwange Estate. Tall and athletic, Jabulani is a reliable and conscientious leader, with a real determination to catch poachers. He regularly appears on the doorstep of my rondavel to show me great handfuls of wire snares that he and his team have located and destroyed. SAVE Foundation of Australia, a wildlife conservation group based in Perth that focuses its energies primarily on assisting rhinos, has kindly donated overalls, boots and sleeping bags. This relatively small gesture makes a huge difference to the morale of the team. They are clearly proud of their new role in the community, and their new look.