The untimely death of veterinarian Nthethe Raditapole was a loss for the animals – and the country.
Nthethe Raditapole recognised the value of life after he pricked one of his fingers with a needle while injecting cattle in former Bophuthatswana. The cattle had been imported by the homeland’s leader, Lucas Mangope, and because they were not used to veld conditions they were suffering from tick-borne diseases.
Raditapole, who was working as a state veterinarian at the time, was due to fly overseas the next day with a batch of ostriches for export. But he woke up to find his hands swollen and his fingernails filled with blood.
For the next three weeks he lay in a hospital bed, hovering between life and death as his limbs swelled and his blood pressure soared. Doctors never managed to determine exactly what caused his illness, but they were sure he was lucky to survive. “While I was lying there, I started thinking seriously about how precious life is — not only my life, but all life,” he recently told me.
It was the beginning of a personal transformation that was to see Raditapole become one of the most important and influential members of the animal protection movement in South Africa. As a vet, he started volunteering his services to help domestic animals in townships and informal settlements. He worked with an NGO called Community-led Animal Welfare (Claw) and moved on to advise the South African Veterinary Association on transforming the organisation by extending its services and encouraging black professionals.
“He believed that vets should work in the townships for free as a community service,” says a colleague. When residents of Diepkloof in Soweto and a pack of free-ranging dogs declared war on each other in 2001, leaving one woman and a number of dogs dead, it was Raditapole who stepped in with a team from Claw to engineer a truce.
He also became increasingly involved in the treatment and rehabilitation of wild animals. One of his favourite projects was the baboon sanctuary and rehabilitation centre run by Rita Miljo in Limpopo province, called the Centre for Animal Rehabilitation and the Environment (Care).
His support for Care resulted in several troops of baboons being released back into the wild. Last year he scored a coup by getting Nelson Mandela to help release baboons at a game reserve in the Waterberg.
About three years ago, he became a vegetarian and animal rights pioneer — at a time when most mainstream animal groups reject animal rights as an infringement on human rights. He started a determined quest to get animal rights enshrined in the Constitution.
“He would say, ‘Look at me, I was your typical uncaring, unthinking meat-eater and through coming into contact with animal issues on the ground, I realised that there is an interconnectedness in the struggles for justice. If I did this, so can many others,” recalls Michele Pickover of South Africans Against Vivisection.
He was employed by the United States-based International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw) four years ago and moved to Cape Town last year to become Ifaw’s campaigns co-ordinator. In this role, he started tackling “canned” lion-hunting and the abuse of seals by the fishing industry.
So when Raditapole was killed at the age of 39 on February 9, it was the animals and their interests who became the biggest losers. He was killed in a head-on collision with a run-away truck close to Maseru, Lesotho’s capital.
His identical twin brother, Tefo Raditapole, works as a lawyer for the human rights firm Cheadle, Thompson and Haysom in Johannesburg. He says Nthethe had followed in the footsteps of their father, Norman Napo Raditapole, who was the first black veterinary surgeon in English-speaking Africa.
The Raditapole family is well-respected in Lesotho, where the twins were born. Members of the royal family joined animal lovers from around the world at the funeral in Maseru on February 15.