to feedom A relocated bull elephant named after the former president keeps returning to the Kruger park Fiona Macleod When “Madiba”, the biggest bull elephant yet relocated from the Kruger National Park, was moved to a small game reserve in Northern Province two weeks ago, he decided captivity was not for him and set off on a long walk to freedom. Within days of arriving at the reserve in the Waterberg owned by Douw Steyn – the insurance tycoon and sometime funder of the African National Congress leadership – Madiba broke through the fence and started heading home. He was taken back and seemed to be settling down, but last week he broke out again and hightailed it eastwards for more than 60km before the Kruger park’s capture team took him home. Various reasons have been offered about why Madiba did not want to stay in the Waterberg, but it is clear that both times he escaped he was making a beeline straight back to the Kruger. Along the way he crossed mountains, a river, numerous farm roads and smallholdings, pushing down hundreds of fences in his way and slightly injured a farmworker who got the fright of his life when he bumped into the large bull on his way to work. The capture team caught him shortly before he reached the N1 highway last Friday morning.
“This elephant was clearly not prone to captivity,” says Steyn’s representative, Stoffel Goosen. “Maybe he was lonely, he just wanted to go home.” Steyn paid more than R200E000 for the 3,8m- high tusker, who was nicknamed Madiba because of his stature. At about 45 years old, he is a mature bull with his own ideas about the way things should be. Steyn has also imported a family group of seven elephants from the Kruger and had plans to further research on elephant contraception at his 10 000ha reserve, but Madiba had no interest in those plans. “This was proof that working with elephants is not an exact science,” says Steyn’s environmental consultant, Johan Louw. Perhaps Steyn will have better luck with the bull’s namesake: the tycoon is building a house for Nelson Mandela on his reserve, called Buffelsfontein. He also has mansions in London and Johannesburg where he hosts the Mandela family and other ANC luminaries. Questions have been raised about whether the Kruger should continue selling large bull elephants to small reserves after a number of break-outs in recent months. Two bulls sold to Northern Province hunting outfit Limpopo View Safaris were shot dead on a neighbouring farm last month – in an almost exact replay of an escape by two other bulls moved to the outfit last year. “This kind of movement of elephants hasn’t been done anywhere else in the world and we need more data,” says Marion Garai, head of the Elephant Management and Owners’ Association. “We are looking into whether the fencing specifications should be different, as well as property sizes and the size of elephant groups being moved.” Meanwhile Madiba is back in his home range near Shingwedzi in the Kruger park and is keeping company with three other bulls. And that is where he will stay, says Douw Grobler, head of the park’s capture team. “We’ll leave Madiba alone now,” says Grobler. “We may have to replace him with two other bulls at Buffelsfontein, but that’s still being discussed.”