What about the poachers – would the promise of ivory bring even more of them out of the woodwork? What about having to electrify my entire reserve to keep these giant pachyderms in when I could barely keep thieves with high-velocity rifles out? What about having to build an enclosure to quarantine them while they got used to their new home? Where would I find the funds … the resources?
Also Marion didn’t shy away from saying they were ‘troublesome’. But what did that really mean? Were they just escape artists? Or was this a genuine rogue herd, too dangerous and filled with hatred of humans to keep on a game reserve in a populated area?
However, here was a herd in trouble. Despite the risks, I knew what I had to do.
‘Hell yes,’ I replied. ‘I’ll take them.’
chapter two
I was still reeling from the shock of becoming an instant elephant-owner, when I got another: the current owners wanted the herd off their property within two weeks. Or else the deal would be off. The elephants would be shot as the owners regarded them as too much of a liability. Unfortunately, when an animal as large as an elephant is considered ‘troublesome’, it is almost always shot.
Two weeks? In that time we had to repair and electrify twenty miles of big game fencing and build from scratch a quarantine boma – a traditional holding pen – strong enough to hold the planet’s most powerful animal.
When I bought Thula Thula, in 1998, it was 5,000 acres of primal Africa, the only improvement being an old hunters’ camp with outside ablutions. But its history is as exotic as the continent itself. Thula Thula is the oldest private game reserve in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa and thought to be once part of the exclusive hunting grounds of King Shaka, the near-deified warrior who founded the Zulu nation in the early nineteenth century. In fact it was so exclusive that anyone caught hunting there without the king’s express permission was put to death.
From Shaka onwards, for most of its existence Thula Thula’s teeming wildlife has made it a hunting magnet, attracting wealthy clients seeking trophy antelope. In the 1940s the owner was a retired Governor General of Kenya,who used it as an upmarket shooting lodge for the gin and tonic set.
That’s all in the past. Hunting was scrapped the moment we took over. The characterful but dilapidated old biltong and brandy camp was demolished, and in its place we built a small luxury eco-lodge set on expansive lawns leading down to the Nseleni River. The beautiful Old Dutch gabled farmhouse overlooking the reserve became home and offices for Françoise and me.
But to get there has been a personal odyssey. I grew up in ‘old’ Africa, before the days of mass urbanization, running barefoot under big skies in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. My friends were rural African kids and together we ranged the wild world that was our backyard.
During the early 1960s my family moved to the sugarcane-growing coastal belt of Zululand, South Africa. The hub of the area at the time was a hamlet out in the boondocks called Empangeni. It was a tough town with character. Stories of leathery farmers partying all night and skidding their tractors through the main street swigging ‘spook ’n diesel’ (cane spirit mixed with a smidgen of Coca-Cola) are still told to this day. For us teenagers, you had to hold your own and play a hard game of rugby to earn respect.
My shooting skills, honed in the deep African bush, also stood me in good stead and farmers sent me out on their lands to bag guinea fowl and grouse for the pot. The backwoods was my home; I could hit a can thrown into the air at twenty paces with a .22 rifle and think little of it.
After finishing school I left for the city, establishing a realestate company. But my youthful memories of wild Africa followed me. I knew one day I would return.
That happened in the early 1990s. I was poring over a map of the area west of Empangeni and was struck by the profusion of unutilized tribal land, far too feral for even thehardiest cattle. These trust lands gallop right up to the borders of the famous Umfolozi-Hluhluwe reserve, the first game sanctuary established anywhere in Africa and where the southern white rhino was saved from extinction.
The trust land, a massive tract of gloriously pristine bush, belonged to six different Zulu clans. An idea light-bulbed in my head: if I could persuade them to join in conserving wildlife instead of hunting or grazing, we could create one of the finest reserves imaginable. But to do this I would have to convince each tribal leader to agree individually to lease the land to a single trust. It would be called the Royal Zulu, and benefits such as job creation would go straight back into the struggling local communities.
Thula Thula, with solid infrastructure already in place was the key to the project. It was a natural wedge abutting the tribal lands and forming a crucial eastern gateway to the reserves. And for the first time in fifty years it was on the market. Destiny? Well … who knows?
I took a deep breath, spoke nicely – very nicely – to my bank manager and Françoise and I ended up as the new owners.
I fell in love with it from the moment I went walkabout. It’s something I still do, jump in the Land Rover and drive out onto the open savannahs or into the thickest, most thorn-scrubbed veldt I can find, and go for a walk. There is nothing more energizing than inhaling the tang of wilderness, loamy after rain, pungent with the richness of earth shuddering with life, or taking in the brisk dry cleanness of winter. In the outback, life is lived for the instant. The land thrums with exuberance when everything is green and lush and is stoically
