Stephen Gray : Unspoilt places
`Madikwe!” said Oom Schalk Lourens, “yes, I know it. That’s what the Tswanas call our Marico River, because of its rusty colour – the River of Blood. But now with all this new community involvement, we don’t talk of all the bloodshed in those forgotten wars. It’s peace time now, in the Marico District.”
He was going to get nostalgic again, about the treacherous leopard that licked his veldskoens when he was dozing at Abjaterskop. Or about the widow of Zwingli who buried her husband under the threshing floor, where the oxen could do a good job of treading him flat. Or about his youthful rustling over the Botswana border from Ramotswa, avoiding the police with their new Union-issue double-bores. Or even about that terrible drought when only the crows were left …
But I asked him about Operation Phoenix, during which the world’s largest restocking of game took place there from early 1991. Seventy-five thousand hectares were set aside within an electrified fence, 140km long. More than 10 000 historically indigenous animals were brought in, of 28 species, translocated from as far as Namibia, like those custard-coloured giraffes. And the four missing of the Big Five, the leopards which he had failed to poison being still there, of course.
All that had to be reckoned with, plus the central selling point of the Madikwe Game Reserve, now the fourth largest in the country: as he well knew, it had always been malaria-free.
“Phoenix,” he said doubtfully, knocking his pipe out on the leg of his canewood chair. “My memory may not be what it used to be, but we have Marico sunbirds, Marico flycatchers and all sorts of other birds. Phoenix, I think, must be something exotic.” The breeze blew the dottle of his pipe across the stoep and into the dry thatch.
So ecotourism as a concept was a bit of a novelty to him. But if you wanted to learn about those collapsed mountains, known as inselbergs, rising out of the thornveld, taking on a reddish glow at dawn, or about those black clays that prevent day-trippers entering as they would not be able to travel in their own vehicles along the Dwarsberge, or the encroaching pink Kalahari sand covered in gemsbok and kudu and springbok and impala spoor, all together under a sensational sunset, he was your man.
I tried him on the wonderful Madikwe River Lodge, with its luxurious camouflaged chalets with their superb tribal decorations. “Ah, that must be where the Lutheran mission used to be, tucked alongside the river. There also Mzilikazi returned at last and was finally defeated, in the north-east corner after Dwaalboom, there by Sikwane or so. A funny thing not very well understood about our Marico River is that it flows from its eye through dolomite, and in a northwards direction too, and you know, it never dries up …”
In fact, today it supplies the city of Gaberone with piped water, but that name was a bit new to him also.
Oom Schalk Lourens doused the sparks in the roof with the slop of witgat root at the bottom of his coffee-mug. “Gaberone,” he mumbled, “but wasn’t that the old BaTlokwa chief, and there at the Tshwene Tshwene hills he once had a city as big as Cape Town was, in those days?”
I smiled at his ignorance. “And haven’t you heard of the Bop Parks Board?”
“Bop?” he stared at me.
“Yes, it was really called that. They were responsible for the largest restocking programme in the world, right on your doorstep. Now it’s called North West Parks Board.”
“North!” exclaimed Oom Schalk Lourens. “But we were always the western Transvaal of Southern Africa, and now it’s supposed to be north. I suspect it’s just this ANC conference rearranging everything around so that we don’t recognise even ourselves anymore.”
Just then Krisjan Lemmer arrived in his donkey-cart to drive the old patriarch to the newly restored Herman Charles Bosman school-house. Clutching his jug of 70% proof kei-apple mampoer, he was due to do his Patrick Mynhardt impersonation at their jumble sale. And pose for all the tourists coming from as far as Pretoria, and from Switzerland and Japan and what.
There is a story gleefully told by the splendid Madikwe River Lodge personnel about the memorable night when the wilderness got its revenge. That most resilient of actors, Patrick Mynhardt himself, was flown in to do his Oom Schalk monologue for them. Togged up in his rank veld hat, moleskin and whiskers, surrounded by lanterns, there he was in the boma on the earthen stage. The enormous buffet with pots of wild meat and pap and gravy had been cleared, the leadwood logs were glowing, the stars twinkling down on this island in the perennial watercourse under huge African skies. Guests, freckled and tanned after being driven out gamespotting in Landcruisers, were rehearsing their applause by slapping the odd insect in mid- air.
And then, every time poor Mynhardt opened his mouth, a lioness interrupted him with a blood-curdling roar. The old trouper had never before been so upstaged. He tried again. Grr…
Apparently the lioness in question had broken through the car park and was drinking at the rock pool, when she heard that projected Afrikaner drawl. Evidently she did not trust those cattle-ranching Boers who, after all, were the ones to degrade the landscape and hunt them down.
Madikwe River Lodge is a fine, real place, reached from Johannesburg by car via Zeerust on tar (five hours) or via Rustenburg and the R565, then on dirt following the signs to Derdepoort (three and a half hours).
Walking, horseback and even balloon safaris are offered, but most visitors enjoy the lazy way of game drives in Toyota 4x4s, led by trained guides as eloquent as Oom Schalk ever was.
For further information contact the lodge’s inimitable hostess, Patricia Swaney, at (014778) 893