Kalahari Dream

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Kalahari Dream

Chris Mercer & Beverley Pervan

Chapter 1

Chance

Our lives are governed by chance. We take a chance every time we drive a car or fly in an aircraft. Living as specks upon a speck in a violent, active universe puts us all at the mercy of chance. And we live in fear of that mysterious force.

But chance is a force which can be harnessed for good things too. People can take control and change their lives for the better by not being afraid to cast their fate to the wind.

And so it was in 1998 that a red Isuzu double-cab pick-up (bakkie) came swishing down the soft, fine sand road from Harnas Lion Farm, raising a plume of billowing white dust which must have been visible from space. It came to a smooth halt at the main tar road from the Botswana border to Gobabis and Windhoek. The dust cloud caught up with the now stationary vehicle, and settled upon it, silent and unwelcome. The occupants, a man and a woman in their early fifties, looked left and right. To the left lay Botswana and, two days drive further, were the lush green hills of Natal in South Africa. To the right lay Gobabis in Eastern Namibia and south of that unprepossessing town, a thousand kilometres of gravel road led to the Rietvlei border post with the Northern Cape province of South Africa.

The two destinations could not have been more different: the arid Kalahari semi-desert to the south, or the Eastern Transvaal mountains and bush veld to the east. But which one to choose?

They decided to allow chance to make the decision of their lives, and tossed a coin. Heads it was. And on that unplanned – some would say irresponsible – basis, their fate was decided. The Isuzu bakkie turned to the right and headed for the Kalahari. Buoyed up by that elation one feels when truly living life for the present, the occupants had no idea what to expect. What they got were the best seven years of their lives. Also the hardest.

Thus they found themselves bumping along the sandy riverbed road from Gobabis to Mariental. There were a surprising number of farmsteads along the way, considering that in that dry country there were no flowing rivers for hundreds of kilometres in any direction. The use of boreholes allow livestock farmers to invade and populate wilderness areas, much to the detriment of these fragile ecosystems.

Stunted bushes clinging tenaciously to rocky hillsides provided some spots of green foliage in the otherwise Martian environment. Hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of almost the same scenery. Yet it is only monotonous to people who do not know how to drink in soul food from great open spaces and vast distances of big sky country.

Near Mariental the road left the river bed and turned west, crossing the line of the valleys which lie in a north-south axis. Here the earth’s crust has wrinkled, forming a succession of steep-sided parallel valleys.

Crossing such a unique terrain caused some consternation. They drove up to the first rise, breasted it and then the ground fell away beneath them. The vehicle became airborne for a split second, before nose-diving into the dip with bilious results. The roller coaster lasted for several kilometres.

The occupants recovered their composure shortly before Mariental. They considered carrying on to Mariental to fill up with diesel, for the fuel gauge was getting low after five hundred kilometres. But the road was long and they had so far to go, without adding more miles to fetch fuel. Surely there would be a filling station somewhere along the way? Perhaps at the border?

The flat gravel road swung south again and then, shortly afterwards (only a couple of hundred kilometres) they encountered what looked like an outpost of the French foreign legion and this turned out to be the Rietvlei border post. No diesel there.

The whole ambience changed after they entered South Africa. This is a country where the land is used hard by its people. In Namibia, they may have been raising a dust cloud of startling proportions as they travelled, but the gravel road was smooth and well graded. Now the gravel road was corrugated from heavy traffic.

In Namibia, arid as it was, clumps of grass could occasionally be seen, their seed heads waving in the breeze. Now the bush had that forlorn look from constant overgrazing. No seed heads could be seen on the close cropped grass, and everywhere the natural grassland was being encroached upon by the hardy invasive shrubs, mostly swarthaaks.

A word about swathaaks. Try to imagine rods of iron sprouting from a central point, studded with double fish hooks. Now cover this vicious device with clusters of small green leaves and there: you have synthesised a swarthaak. During the colonial wars in German West Africa, (now Namibia) both sides used to give prisoners the same cruel treatment: the unfortunate prisoner’s arms and legs were broken and he was then thrown on to a swarthaak, where the rigid, barbed branches would hold its victim in a deadly embrace until merciful death ended the prolonged agony.

The travellers expected to find fuel at the crossroads where a hotel lies, at the southern entrance road to the Kalahari Gemsbok Park (now required by obscure politicians to be referred to as the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park) but there was none. The fuel gauge was now uncomfortably low. The Isuzu had covered nearly eight hundred kilometers that day.

They passed the turnoff to Askham, but did not want to risk a possibly fruitless detour. For the same reason, they ignored the turnoff to Van Zyl’s Rust. They were now really worried about running out of fuel on the lonely road. The odometer showed over nine hundred kilometers. The fuel gauge registered empty.

Night had fallen. There were eyes everywhere, as the headlights reflected the presence of all the nocturnal birds and animals of the Kalahari. Nightjars, dazzled by the headlights, flew up at the last minute. From this vehicle, at least, they were safe, for it was travelling very slowly in order to conserve fuel.

Finally, at about 9.00pm the weary travellers drove into the petrol station at the turn-off to Black Rock mine, on the tarmac road, and thankfully filled up with diesel.

They had travelled a thousand kilometres on one tank full in an Isuzu double- cab pick-up with a 3 litre turbo diesel engine.

That was how Bev and I found ourselves in Kuruman in 1998. And if I ever meet an Isuzu engineer I want to shake his hand and buy him a drink.

Chapter 2

The land purchase

We over-nighted at a guest house in Kuruman. One hundred and fifty years before, David Livingstone had set off from Robert Moffat’s mission station at Kuruman to explore Africa and to find the source of the Nile.

One can still visit the Moffat mission, now a museum popular with tourists, but Kuruman, providing services for the large mines in the area, has grown around the plentiful water that bubbles up from an underground river. These include Sishen iron ore mine, Mamatwan manganese mine, Black Rock and Hotazel (aptly named) . The line of hills at Kuruman, which separate the low Kalahari from the higher Ghaap plateau, are full of asbestos, and at the time of writing, a long- running legal battle in London High Court had ended with a settlement of compensation for the many poorer people of Kuruman who had suffered ill health from working in the asbestos mines for British companies. Some had even died from cancer before the settlement was agreed.

After breakfast, we sought out a local estate agent and found a Mr. de Villiers, who also happened to be the local attorney. No big-city specialisation here. Did he know of any land for sale in the area which would be suitable for a wildlife rehabilitation facility? Yes. There was a farm of about 600 hectares, but it was on the point of being sold to the neighbour and we would have to see it and make an offer urgently or we might be too late. Without further ado, the industrious Mr. de Villiers accompanied us in our bakkie and we drove out west through the pass in the Kuruman hills.

Almost exactly one hundred years before, a Boer commando had set out from Kuruman one dark night to escape a British Army detachment, and had ridden out west through the same pass. With them was riding Siener van Rensburgh, the famous Boer prophet, whose psychic powers had alerted the Boers to the approaching British soldiers. As they emerged from the pass, and the vast plains of the Kalahari stretched out before them in the inky blackness, Siener van Rensburg was recorded as saying: I see lights as far as the eye can see. One day this will look like Johannesburg at night.

How could he have known, more than a century ago, that a motorist emerging from that pass would see the dusty night sky lit up in the south with the garish glare of Sishen iron ore mine and the street lights of Kathu. Ahead would be the floodlights of Mamatwan mine, while to the north burn the brilliant panoply of lights from Black Rock and Hotazel manganese mines.

There is no true wilderness left anywhere in South Africa. The magnificent wilderness retreats before the grasping, poisonous hand of mankind.

The bush that lay between the mining operations was occupied by livestock farmers. The wildlife had been shot out and replaced by cattle, sheep and goats – a poor bargain, I always thought. The wide open spaces had been marked out and fenced off, strangled by wire. The older residents of Kuruman could still remember the last wildebeest migration, which took place shortly after the second world war. Until 1948 the Kalahari area of the Northern Cape Province was still a royal game reserve but in the early fifties, a water pipeline project brought that precious commodity all the way from the Vaal River, and opened up the Kalahari to farming.

The fencing off of hundreds of square kilometres of land had cut across ancient migration trails and the old people told us how the wildebeest had come in countless thousands, driven on by instinct and habit. Maddened by thirst, they had crashed into the strong steel fencing and milled about, confused, while the farmers had fired into the mass of bodies until their rifle barrels had become too hot to hold.

But all this we only learned later. For now it was just another cloudless, hot Kalahari day.

De Villiers directed us past Red Sands Lodge to the turn-off to Mamatwan mine. We turned right onto a gravel road, much hammered by heavy mine vehicles, and we motored through some bare, tree-less bush for about twelve kilometres before stopping at a farm gate, and turning in. We were entranced. Unlike the countryside we had just driven through, the access road now wound it's way through groves of shady camel thorn trees. On the right hand side opened up a vlei, a broad grassy plain which swept down to a large pan, which, though empty then, would evidently fill up with any significant rainstorm. A kilometre long and half a kilometre wide, it was flanked a both sides by camel thorn forest. We would come to refer to it as our little Serengeti.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ef5ADuhx5g

Six hundred hectares (about 1500 acres if you think imperial) of lovely veld.

We drove around the perimeter fence, a distance of ten kilometres. Every few hundred metres, our way was barred by yet another internal fence, and we had to stop, open the gate, drive through and then close it behind us. At the bottom of the property was another natural pan, dry also, but clearly just waiting for rain. The larger camel thorn trees and wag-n-bietjie thorn bushes that fringed the pan testified with mute eloquence to the pan’s ability to hold rainwater. This would become known as Springbok pan to us, owing to the sighting of one lone springbok, whose panicky flight at the sight of us told of previous owners hunting from their vehicle.

We explored the property for half the day. Mr de Villiers was patient.

The homestead was inadequate for our purposes. Originally a shed, with steel girders supporting a corrugated iron roof, the shed had become a house when someone filled in the gaps between the girders with bricks.

There was also a surprising number of large brick and plaster reservoirs, whose existence told us that at one time the borehole water was strong enough to support irrigation. Finally an incongruous aluminium- panelled shed, large enough to take our three- tonne truck, squatted next to the house. Everything about the so-called improvements lacked charm.

But when one is buying property one has to use one’s imagination. And then refine that by discussion. Bev and I needed to talk.

We drove Mr. de Villiers back to his attorneys/estate agency office and promised him a decision within the hour. Then we stopped in at the local coffee shop and put our heads together.

How could we bring the property up to our satisfaction and what would it all cost? The internal fencing would all have to be dismantled but we could then use that material to increase the height of the perimeter fence, turning the constricted livestock farm into an open game reserve. That would take a team of three competent farm workers about three months and would not cost too much.

The overgrazing had caused patches of swarthaark infestation, but these could be removed, and the grass would then take over if it was allowed time to do so.

The house was a headache. It could have to be gutted and substantially re-built. Walls would have to be knocked out, the floors smashed out and replaced. That would be expensive, noisy, and unpleasant. We would have to camp outside the house for months while the builders shattered the peace - and our nerves.

In short, turning this unproductive, degraded livestock farm into a stunning private wildlife sanctuary would be a challenge.

The clinching selling-point was this: our purpose was to establish a wildlife rehab centre and sanctuary for at that time there was none in the Northern Cape Province, the largest and wildest province in South Africa. And this property was perfect for that purpose.

And so it was that after the cup of coffee and chat had clarified our thinking, Bev and I presented the helpful Mr. de Villiers with an offer to purchase the property. He acted swiftly and the offer was accepted. We arranged to transfer the purchase price into his trust account, and then left Kuruman to make preparations.

Late in 1998 we took occupation.

Chapter 3

Infrastructure

There were three pressing needs. First, we had to make the house liveable. Second, the over-fenced little livestock farm had to be opened up to make a game reserve and third, we could not start to accept wild animals for rehab until we had built some enclosures.

The house was Bev’s responsibility, while I focused on the land. She moved quickly to get a quote from a building contractor in Kuruman and within a couple of weeks, there was a hellish din from morning till night. There were workers everywhere and the noise was indescribable. Some attacked the walls with heavy hammers, smashing them out until they lay in rubble, the electrical conduit pipes hanging free from the ceiling. Others were bashing on the floor tiles with 14lb hammers, beating ceramic tiles that refused to break up, and that resisted removal tenaciously.

As if this racket was not enough, the contractor himself took up position at a large motor-driven diamond saw, and shaped heavy ceramic floor tiles in a way that produced a scream of such pitch and intensity that we were nearly driven mad. And this went on for weeks. There was no privacy. The house was gutted. Our beds lay outside the house, open to wind and dust, on a shallow verandah.

Next to the beds, caked with dust, was a small camping gas cooker plate on which Bev prepared all meals. We used to joke about whether it was going to be a 1,2, or 3 pot meal, depending on how many pots were needed to cook a simple meal. To keep the contractor at work, supervising his staff, we undertook to go in to town in our three tonne truck to collect materials, sand, cement, crushed stone, poles, bricks and all the fittings and fixtures that such a major refurbishment entailed. All thoughts of wildlife rehabilitation were postponed indefinitely.

The effect of all this noise and activity upon our pet animals was unsettling, to say the least. We felt so sorry for them. Our ginger cat, Gus, fled into hiding every day, only emerging nervously long after the workers had gone and night had fallen. The two boerbull dogs, Shumba and Nyati, stuck to us like glue, following us around like shadows, so that if we stopped walking for any reason they would bump into the back of our legs. They did not know where to put themselves.

Our black Rotweiler, Donna, turned nasty. Never very fond of strangers, she decided she would lie in wait and pick off any stragglers. The stragglers here meant labourers who detached themselves from the main body in order to go to the outside toilet, which was a good thirty metres from the house. After a couple of feint attacks, we decided not to risk any injury and thereafter workers had to be accompanied by one of us to and from the loo.

While Bev was battling to get the house renovated, I took to the job of converting the land into a natural game reserve. I needed contractors to strip out all the internal fencing carefully, so as not to damage it, and then to use that fencing material to raise the height of the perimeter fence to two metres. This would allow us to obtain a Certificate of Adequate Enclosure from conservation authorities in Kimberley, the administrative capital of the Northern Cape province. In this matter, I had a secret weapon – one Amos Funiro.

We had farmed for more than ten years in the adjoining North-West province, near Mafeking. And when he was not in prison for murder, Amos was our foreman and right-hand man. On the job Amos was a competent and hard-working semi-skilled farm labourer. But, like many farm labourers in South Africa, he used to get paralytic drunk over the weekends, and that was when he got into trouble. His wife, no doubt in the same alcoholic state as him, attacked him with a knife and poured boiling water on him. He responded by killing her and was sentenced to seven years hard labour. I used to visit him at Lichtenburg jail, and deposit money into his prison account. In the end, he only served two years of his sentence, because Nelson Mandela had a birthday and declared an amnesty. The next day Amos was back on the farm as if nothing had happened.

When we had left the farm to go and work with wildlife in the Kalahari, we had given our loyal workers a year’s wages. I believed that Amos would still be in the area, and set off in the truck to find him. Enquiries at his old haunts led to a road gang near Mafeking, and there I found Amos. He was touchingly pleased to see me, and agreed at once to put together a small team of reliable men and accompany me back to the Kalahari. Together we assessed that the job would take about three months to complete and so it proved.

Amos and his team lived on the property in the old staff quarters about a hundred metres from our house and they steadily and methodically began the big task of dismantling the existing internal fences and stacking the poles and rolls of wire for me to collect each day in the truck, and to transport to the perimeter.

The first three months passed swiftly in this uncomfortable but productive manner. By the fourth month, the house was at long last liveable, although the contractor was still on site finishing off. We would not feel that the place ‘belonged’ to us until all the contractors had left and we could settle in. To make the homestead more of a bush lodge, we decided to erect a large outdoor lapa (verandah) which would be our living space on those long, hot summer days, and to cover it with a thatch roof. This brought in yet a third group of contractors, the thatchers.

Thatching is a craft and it was interesting to see how expertly they handled gum poles and thatch, climbing to dangerous heights on gum poles quickly knocked together with nails. We discovered they were all Zimbabweans, no doubt working illegally in South Africa, and sending their hard-earned money back to deprived and perhaps even starving relatives at home. This was ironic really, for I was also an ex-Zimbabwean and here we were, building together, except we were doing it in South Africa, not in our native land.

The dependable Amos and his team had finally completed the fencing work. We now had an uncluttered private nature reserve of 600 hectares with a two metre high perimeter fence. I drove Amos and his team in to Kuruman and paid them off, expressing my gratitude with a substantial bonsella (bonus). Then I paid for their bus tickets back to Mafeking and shook hands with them. I wished them well in the harsh employment environment of South Africa, where more than half the working age population is unemployed, and many employers so ruthlessly exploitive.

Up until now, we had always naively assumed that we would be welcomed by the provincial conservation department in Kimberley. After all, there were no wildlife rehabilitation facilities anywhere in the Northern Cape province, a vast province larger than Wales and cut in two by the Orange river. So what happened to all the injured and orphaned birds and animals that were brought to conservation officials by farmers or members of the public? We wondered about that. We were setting up a facility which would become an asset to provincial conservation services. The centre would provide rehab facilities for releasable animals. As for those animals which were un-releasable, in the sense that they would not be able to survive if released back in to the wild, we would provide lifetime care with some quality of life in a sanctuary.

So when the public brought orphaned or injured wild animals to conservation offices, there would be a reputable, well-managed sanctuary to receive them and to care for them. There could surely be no objection to that scenario. Could there?

It never crossed our minds that we would have any trouble with conservation authorities, with whom we expected to enjoy a close, mutually beneficial working relationship. And if someone had said to us that the time would come when we would face off at our front gate, with a whole convoy of armed policemen and conservation officials, Bev with a shotgun in her hands and me with a loaded pistol on my hip, we would have laughed at such an absurd statement.

Chapter 4

Rehab

Next, two events took place. This started the painful process that brought the Kalahari Raptor and Predator Sanctuary into existence.

The first event was the arrival at the Centre of our first orphan, a meerkat. More meerkats followed, all from different sources. The word had got around that there was a new wildlife facility in the Kalahari. There was clearly a dire need for our centre, because birds and animals were being brought to us long before we had even finished building our house, let alone facilities for rehab.

There were also the bat-eared foxes. The first batch of these to arrive at our home were four little creatures the size of mice, courtesy of the building contractor. He was out on a hunting party one night when one of the hunters shot a heavily pregnant bat eared fox. When they inspected their kill, they saw the dead fox’s stomach move with the unborn kits inside her. The contractor took out his knife and cut open the stomach - and out fell four tiny baby foxes. The contractor took them home to his wife who in turn told him to bring them to us. They arrived in a very weak condition, clinging uncertainly to life. Bev worked day and night to save their lives. One of the little females died within two days, and the second female did not last much longer. But Bev did save the remaining female, and also the male. Later, when the surviving kits started to acquire their distinctive black face-masks, we named them Bonnie