The call of the wild: Part two

I have, of course, seen wild animals in game parks in Africa. The first of these parks I visited was in northern Cameroun, but I’ve written about that in an earlier column and mustn’t repeat myself or my long-suffering editor will reduce my fee for dishing out used goods. There was also Bakubung (Place of the Hippo) in the Pilanesberg, in South Africa’s North-West province. That was terrific.

Best of all, though, was the Delta Camp in the Okavango, northern Botswana. I’ll take some time writing about that.
I went there with two British friends and we were allocated three guides, one of whom was an expert bird-spotter. Most of the trips were by canoe on the huge network of streams that make up the

Okavango, with walking bits in between. On one of the walking trips I teamed up with a guide called Kamacho, whose first language was Kikongo, and we had a good time discussing differences between that language, Sesotho and Setswana (the latter two being mutually intelligible, but with important variations, such as when you use the phrase “ke fetile”). At one point the head guide,

Gabriel, called the three Brits together and set us a test. Using landmarks we may have remembered from the outward journey (a tree here, a tree there) we had to guide the group back to camp.

The guides would keep quiet, trying not to giggle as we headed off for Zambia, and would only correct us if we went very, very wrong. In fact we did extremely well and were given by the camp manager a certificate and a bottle of sparkling wine to celebrate.

One of the most spectacular animal sightings — every evening — was watching fish eagles plunge into the water from high above to catch their prey. I also had a canoe trip with Kamacho. At a point he stripped down to his underpants and jumped out of the canoe for a swim, leaving me to keep the boat steady. I was very nervous, as I’d seen several hippos poking their heads above the water.

Now as far as I know, hippos are gentle creatures, but there is always a risk they will surface and accidentally overturn a canoe. On the bank there were huge crocodiles, just waiting for a human lunch; why they didn’t attack Kamacho I don’t know, but he was making quite a lot of noise, mostly in Kikongo, and maybe they didn’t fancy foreign food.

Then there was an incident that directly relates to the main focus of this set of columns, the psychology that underlies our attitudes to wild animals — and our relationships with them, if we are lucky enough to have these.

At the camp our fellow-guests included an American couple and their two young children. The wife was pleasant enough, and the children very sweet, but the husband was (as we say in the UK) a right royal pain in the proverbial.

He worked as a specialist surgeon in Switzerland and his only topic of conversation was the amount of money he earned and the property he owned. I guess you know the type. As soon as he arrived he headed for the camp shop and — at an enormous expense — bought safari outfits for his whole family (in a kind of reverse snobbery, we three Brits were proud of how shabby we looked).

One late afternoon my group and I— Margaret, Ian and our three wonderful guides, Gabriel, Andrew and Kamacho — came back to the camp in canoes. We had been fishing and had caught quite a bit, which would be cooked and served for dinner.

On the way over on the bank we saw the American family with hi-tech fishing gear (no doubt especially purchased) and in their safari clobber, trying to catch something. I murmured “they’ll be lucky to land an old boot” and Gabriel muttered “it’s the husband’s fault. You know how they say it in America? What a putz.”

We arrived back to find the camp in a state of uproar. Motor-boats are banned from the nature reserve of the Okavango (apart from emergency boats such as water-ambulances) because of the ecological damage they cause.

Some idiot had motored through in a speed-boat and the hull of the boat had torn open the side of a hippo. The poor beast was now rampaging around the camp, demented with pain and anger. Park rangers had been alerted and three of them arrived with rifles.

One of the rangers shot the hippo in the forehead and that was that.
Or not quite. The American family turned up (without fish) and the husband demanded his wife take his photo, in safari gear, standing with one foot planted on the hippo’s belly, posing as the great white safari hunter.

I was reminded of Ernest Hemingway’s wonderful story “The Short Happy Life of Francis Micomber” and was about to regale everyone with that, but the ranger who’d shot the hippo burst into tears, so I hugged him (no hardship) and took him to the bar area for a drink. Once he’d calmed down he blubbed: “we are here to protect people. And to protect the animals. We love the animals. And then this….this….”

“Putz?” I suggested. Then I remembered — and used — the Setswana / Sesotho for “lump of poo.”

Chris Dunton