The Last Train to Zona Verde (22 page)

The process of this misunderstanding he calls “Death by Myth,” the title of one of his last films. It is the myth that they are still hunter-gatherers, that they can go back to it and flourish that way. “The myth is inherent in our thinking about Bushmen.”

The traditional mode of living is long gone. A Ju/’hoansi born after 1950 would know little or nothing about hunting and gathering. “The cycle of knowledge was broken.” Apart from a handful of Ju/’hoansi who allowed themselves to be co-opted into the choreographed charade I had seen, the vast majority want to join the mainstream, go to school, work, live in a stable and safe place, and never again have to depend on the insecure life in the bush. They have drifted to town, where manual labor, even pick-and-shovel work, is easier than hunting. Some welfare was available at Tsumkwe, and the new clinic was installed to deal with the new diseases.

In this grim fate, the Ju/’hoansi had gone from a fleet-footed bush-dwelling people who chased down game, to sedentary town dwellers plagued by drunkenness and hunger. In the past they had been able to move their settlement, to search for animals or water. But by living in a static way, in a cash economy, in a house on a small plot of land, this was not possible, so they became more dependent on government assistance.

The myth of the Bushman has shaped the plans of the NGOs that try to help them. For the many charities and NGOs (the Living Museums program was the most visible one), which were sentimental like me, hankering for the days Before the Fall, Elizabeth
Marshall Thomas had a shrewd rejoinder: “Such organizations have no choice but to carry out their missions,” she wrote in
The Old Way
. “No wonder that they wish to save traditional Nyae Nyae, a place where an indigenous population occupied an ecosystem for 35,000 years without ruining it. Who would not want the survival of a life style that could accomplish that?” And she added, “The myth was that the Ju/’hoansi wanted it.”

So they don’t hunt as they once did. They eat junk food and too much refined sugar, and they drink themselves into stupefaction, yet even in dysfunctional Tsumkwe the Ju/’hoansi retain their social culture of interdependency. With this mode of survival and generosity, they help each other through hard times.

There was no future for them in being dependent on tourists’ visits, or the leftovers from trophy hunting, or government handouts. It seemed to me that, at bottom, Tsumkwe was one vast welfare scheme funded by NGOs. But in the face of an indifferent government, what was the alternative? I had seen that in the recording of oral histories and folktales, and with the health programs, some success had been achieved by the agents of virtue from foreign countries.

And perhaps the Ju/’hoansi would manage to become small sustainable farmers, keeping cattle, feeding themselves, and overcoming the new diseases and the old hardships of hunger and lack of water.

I was disillusioned, of course, as anyone would be, knowing what I knew now. I had been wrong. Being wrong and disillusioned seems an inevitable consequence of any serious African journey. But I felt lucky in one respect. I had met the old man Dambó. He was undoubtedly a man from the past, and knowledgeable — wise, experienced, a patriarch. That part of my visit, I was convinced, was neither a travesty nor a charade. Dambó was a true relic who had somehow survived from an earlier age. He could have said, with Job and Ishmael,
And I only am escaped alone to tell thee
.

The image of the Ju/’hoansi we cling to — I did anyway — is that of a wild-dwelling, self-sufficient people. We seem to need them to be that way, not merely different from us, and purer, but more different than they really are — tenacious, resourceful, generous, peaceful, as if inhabiting Eden. They are reminders of who we once were, our ancient better selves. At one time, long ago, all of us were foragers on earth. What a relief it is in a world yearning for authenticity to know that though we have blighted our habitat, there is an unspoiled place on the planet, and a people who have defied modernity by clinging to their old ways. The past recaptured. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

9
Riding an Elephant: The Ultimate Safari

T
HE ENORMOUS EMPTY SKY
over the Kaokoveld Desert eased my mind with the prospect of freedom, and the flat land of grit and crumble was inspiring too — you could go anywhere under all this untroubled air and dazzling sunlight. Even on the worst day in the African bush the sky and the space offer relief.

At the end of a simple bumpy drive on a bad road east from Tsumkwe, just over the Namibia-Botswana border, the small stony town of Dobe baked like a biscuit in the sun — more hard-up Ju/’hoansi looking for a livelihood, anthropologists searching for subjects, and baboons with tragic faces picking through roadside garbage. Not far from Dobe, still easterly, in a channel of the Okavango Delta, there was a luxury camp for people who paid large sums of money to ride elephants across mushy ground, and through tall grass and swamps, to look at birds and big animals. No one else in Africa rode elephants. At Abu Camp all they rode were elephants.

I have a hatred of the taming of animals, especially large ones that
are so contented in the wild. I abominate circus acts that involve big befooled beasts — cowed tigers or helplessly roaring lions pawing the air and teetering on small stools. I deplore zoos and anything to do with animal confinement or restraint. “A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all heaven in a rage” — I agree, and canaries and parrots, pythons and panthers, too. Even drooling, needy, yappy dogs seem a bit sad to me. Early in the last century, Lord Rothschild broke four zebras and harnessed them to pull his carriage through London; Michael Jackson kept a demented orangutan in a barred cell at Neverland; a Chinese fruit vendor in my former neighborhood in Singapore trained his macaque to pick coconuts. Some people consider bull riding, or the sight of synchronized swimming of killer whales in a pool, a thrill.

There is a hint of sadism in all of this. But the notion of African elephants submitting to the conveying of tourists through the bush was something I felt I had to see, because it seemed overwhelmingly absurd, and besides, the man who ran the operation was a friend of mine. Knowing how I felt about domesticating wild animals, he had encouraged me to pay a visit to his safari operation, called Abu Camp.

After miles of gravel, upright spinning funnels of dust devils, the light brown scrub of the bush, and an immensity of woodland and camel thorns — after all that thirst, the Okavango Delta is unexpectedly drenched, as the desert deliquesces into a watery mirage, a deep green marvel that bubbles up and sprawls over the left shoulder of Botswana as a succession of swamps. Most river deltas — perhaps all of them in the world — occur at the edge of a land-mass, widening and dumping soil and water, enlarging the shore, pouring the river current into a body of water, the sea or a lake. The Okavango is unusual in being landlocked; the stream of the river, fed by numerous watercourses draining from a catchment area in the
planalto
of Angola, the wooded highlands of the far north, becomes a delta hundreds of miles wide. This river, lush and sodden
and silted, empties its flow into the middle of the Kalahari Desert. The precise and pretty term for this natural wonder of watery interstices and spreading rivulets is an alluvial fan.

The results of the sprawling torrent of water are channels, flood zones, lagoons, islands of palms, and water so clean from percolating through the papyrus beds that it is drinkable. Also seasonal swamps, wide trenches called fossil rivers that once carried water, ephemeral rivers, and permanent rivers — it is a water world. This fertile habitat for animals, birds, and flowers, one of the glories of Africa, is without traditional villages; the Tswana people live almost entirely on the perimeter, entering the delta only to fish or hunt.

In Africa, animals large and small are found at waterholes. The Okavango Delta, teeming with wildlife and still pristine, might be considered one of the great waterholes of the continent.

Abu Camp (“Meet your inner elephant”) advertised itself as a “unique opportunity to bond with elephants firsthand,” and went on, “Situated in a vast private reserve of 400,000 acres, guests interact with the resident elephant herd, whether riding or walking with them through the bush. The ultimate elephant education safari!”

The camp had originally been conceived in the late 1980s as a refuge for “rescue elephants” — elephants that had survived a cull, or had been orphaned in the wild as a result of the mother being killed, or had suffered the torments and teasing of a circus, or had been confined in a zoo or wildlife park. The elephant refuge was the idea of Randall Moore, an American who had begun his working life shoveling great crumbly muffins of elephant dung at an animal training school in Oregon. By an odd set of circumstances he had come to possess three elephants.

It happened this way. A pair of animal trainers, a man and woman who were his mentors at the school, were killed separately, but in quick succession, a consequence of the bull elephants being in musth, a condition of high-testosterone aggression. The woman
was gored and transfixed by the tusks of an enraged elephant — this occurred during a circus act, before a large crowd of horrified Québécois in a small Canadian town. Later, in Oregon, the man was stomped to death by his favorite elephant.

Since he was on the payroll and knew the ropes, Randall Moore inherited his trainers’ elephants, which — stigmatized and vilified as “killer elephants” — he resolved to save by relocating them to Africa, as he describes in his book,
Back to Africa
(1989). Failing to find a home for them in Kenya (red tape, obstinate officialdom, bush confusion), he was welcomed in Botswana, where as a wildlife entrepreneur he started a training program for rescue elephants and pioneered his unusual safaris. The idea for elephant-back safaris was initially that of the photographer, socialite, and Africa hand Peter Beard, who suggested to Moore in the 1980s that riding elephants through the bush was unprecedented and would be an incomparable safari.

Abu (“Father” in Arabic), for whom the camp was named, was one of the first rescued elephants, brought from a wildlife park in Texas. As the star of the camp and a natural performer, Abu had appeared in several feature films. Other elephants — enough to create a substantial herd — were added over the years, from distant parts of Africa and as far afield as Canada and Sri Lanka. They had names and pedigrees, they had distinct profiles and personalities; some were quite old, others were babies, either born at the camp within the motley herd or recently orphaned. They were attended to and trained by a large team of mahouts — they used this Hindi term for an elephant whisperer — mainly African, each one bonded to a particular elephant.

The appeal of Abu Camp was its remoteness in the delta, the uniqueness of an elephant-back safari, and the luxury of its accommodations. One of the boasts of the camp was that the purring refrigeration of its extensive wine cellar was inaudible outside the kitchen compound. The camp was also eco-friendly, depending on
solar panels for electricity and reducing all its kitchen waste into compost to fertilize its extensive vegetable gardens. The staff quarters amounted to a rather prim village with its own dining hall and recreation room — nearly all the workers had permanent homes in Maun, the Okavango’s main town and only substantial airport, at the southeastern edge of the delta. Most guests were flown from Maun to bush airstrips in small planes over startled herds of zebra and wildebeest.

The camp had only six tents, but “tents” gives a mistaken impression. They were more like canvas bungalows on high platforms, with showers and tubs and double beds with mosquito nets like wedding veils. From your tent at the edge of the lagoon you could prop yourself up on one elbow in a big soft bed and watch the resident herd of hippos gasping and spewing in the water below.

Michael Lorentz, who ran Abu, was my friend. He called himself a safari guide — and he was an inspired one — but he was also the moving force behind a reconceived and upgraded Abu, and was a great lover of the wild, with a particular affection for elephants. I had met him ten years before in Johannesburg, at the end of my
Dark Star Safari
trip, and we had kept in touch. His fortunes had risen in that decade: he had become an entrepreneur with his own high-end safari company. He was now married, his wife was an academic, and they had two small boys. He was clearly prospering in a competitive business — he still conducted safaris of his own all over the wilds of South Africa and Botswana, as well as in Zambia, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

A stout, imposing figure in bush hat and khakis, Michael was a perfectionist with a strong work ethic who had grown up in a large family — his father a surgeon, his mother a landscape gardener. Abandoning a career in law to be a trainee guide in Kruger Park, in South Africa, he rose through the ranks, started his own company, and had worked among the elephants at Abu for twenty years. And he was not much older than forty.