MASHATU PRIVATE GAME RESERVE IS the largest concession in the Northern Tuli Game Reserve, a large chunk of natural bush that is bordered on the south by the “great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River” of Kipling’s Just So stories. A wedge is formed where the Shashe River, coming from the north, meets the Limpopo and where they meet so do Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Climatically the region verges on desert. On the South African side it was considered unsuitable for white farmers to chance their luck, until diamonds were found there. The rivers flow mostly with sand and only seasonally with water after heavy summer rains. When they do flow the water arrives with short warning and great ferocity, carrying a froth of flotsam at the tip of their tongues consisting of grass and twigs, insects, plastic bottles and flip-flops. These are followed by uprooted trees, animals caught in the surging waters and occasionally a human body.
It is arid and harsh, where one wet year is usually followed by seven dry. Then the brittle ground crackles like ancient parchment, crumbling to fine dust when touched by hand, foot or hoof. Tuli is a local word that means dust. Another is pula, meaning rain. When pula falls, humans and animals alike dance in celebration. The tuli forms mud and rivers that have lain dormant for dreadful months on end suddenly flow in angry brown eddies. Pula is so important it is the name of the Botswanan currency. Money and blood have the same name, madi. There is a local idiom that Madi ya Botswana ka Pula – the money (blood) of Botswana is pula (rain).
In summer the rain that does fall comes mostly in violent storms. You can sit on a sandstone ridge above the valley and watch the drama. Thunder clouds bruise purple until they can hold no more and they rupture. The water falls in great grey shrouds towards the desperate, dying earth. But here nature often plays cruel tricks. By the end of October the land is so parched and hot it feels like a vast frying griddle. That is when sometimes, before the rain can quench the supplicant ground, hot air rising from the furnace ground vaporises it and it vanishes in mid-air. Maybe a few cold, teasing plops splatter on the ground, only to evaporate as you watch them.
There was a phantom rainstorm over the hot Limpopo Valley as Ruff nursed his old Bedford forwards. Like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath he was searching for a promised land. Except instead of human companions Ruff had a load of horses to share it with. He called his truck 20/80 “because it goes 20 uphill but can get up to 80 down a mine shaft”.
Nailed to a marula tree near the diesel pump at Dendron, the last stop before he would be enveloped by the endless mopane woodlands of the Limpopo Valley, was a rusted Ford hubcap with crude hand-lettering. While the tank was being filled Ruff sauntered over and chuckled when he read: “The land of milk and honey” around the top curve, and “just bring your own cows and bees” along the bottom.
He knew that from there to the border the land would dip imperceptibly and become progressively hotter and drier. He made sure his first cargo-load of safari horses had enough to drink because it would be hours before they decamped at their new home across the river in Botswana. They were his most precious possessions and consisted of the four he had bought from Onderstepoort, namely Zulu and his three oldest companions, Fire, Tommy and Ironsides.
Ruff had winced at the price that Alec Gurney had extracted from him, for both men knew their value to the start-up safari man. Ruff knew he had little option but to cough up if he was going to start on a solid footing with horses he knew would be reliable, the kind you could throw any palooka on to and not have to fret that one of them would screw up. At least he knew the horses would not. Ruff could afford only three and chose Fire, Tommy and Ironsides but Gurney had insisted he take all four if he wanted a deal. He couldn’t refuse.
From Dendron it took an hour to reach Rhodes Drift border post. Ruff parked the trailer under a spreading mashatu tree on the riverbank, which was just as well because it took a further two to clear customs. Botswana was, is, a major beef exporter to Europe and has stringent foot-and-mouth disease controls. The paperwork was monumental and the reservoir of ink needed to fill them in and stamp them all oceanic.
Mashatu general manager Garth du Preez had selected the spot for the new operation and was waiting for Ruff at the Botswana customs building (he always arrived with a full cooler box in order to facilitate smooth passage for his staff and clients).
“Far enough away from the main safari lodge not to encounter our game drives. So you can’t hold them up and steal their jewellery,” the general manager grinned as he extended a hand to Ruff. “Good luck.”
And then suddenly they were there, Limpopo Valley Horse Safaris. Ruff led the four horses down the trailer ramp and looked around for the two helpers Du Preez had assured him would be there on the day, but they were not to be seen. More loads of horses would have to be transported later from their holding paddock at Kyalami but right now he had to begin a new camp, a new life.
The weeks preceding his arrival had been spent scouring the country for affordable and remotely suitable stock (if it’s breathing it can be ridden he would say). He visited horse breeders and traders; he called in at horse-meat butchers and abattoirs and even ventured into townships to look at cart horses, usually skeletal Saddlers that were covered with sores beneath crusts of flies. One thing he knew when he saw it was a good horse, no matter how badly neglected it might appear at the time.
For Ruff Stevens there were two kinds of women: those he wanted to bed and those he did not. For him there were also just two kinds of horses: those he wanted to ride and those he did not. Horses were easier because you weren’t expected to talk to them afterwards. Then there was the beer factor which got you to do things like dance badly, sing too loud and pick up “five-beer women”. Or buying second-rate horses when you were desperate.
When buying horses for his embryonic safari business, Ruff was not looking for horses he wanted to ride, but for horses that would be rideable by just about anyone else. “Hussies,” he called them. They would have to be tough, first of all, to put up with the rigours of bush life. But they would also have to have good bearing since he could expect to host good riders from around the world. He couldn’t put them on hags and expect them to return, or advise their friends to.
There was one breed of horse in southern Africa that fitted the profile almost perfectly, the Boereperd. They were stockier than regal and tougher than any fancy riding horse, of the type used by the Boer forces during the Anglo-Boer War. The relatively small and under-equipped Boer forces’ ability to endure against the British army for three years was in no small part attributable to their tough-as-taaibos horses.
None of the Onderstepoort four excited Ruff as riding horses, excepting maybe Fire, but he was too feral in the Cowboy’s eyes. When he spoke of “riding” he really meant eventing, for which you needed something more refined than a farm horse. For Ruff physique was everything, in horses as in women. Brains were all very well but half a brain would do just as well.
Nice character would also be handy, requiring less maintenance, but was not on his list of “must haves”. Which partially explained much of the troubles in his life with both women and horses. He would overlook the real stars of his stable, such as Zulu and Tommy, preferring to focus his attention on high-maintenance horses like the refined but haughty Moyeni.
Most of his horses ended up costing between R200 and R400 but Moyeni (the name meant air or wind) had come at the much heftier price of R2 000. Ruff would sometimes joke that he’d once won a race, by mistake. When he saw the big dark bay he knew he had to have it. He’d found it through an advert in Farmer’s Weekly: “Good riding horse, only one owner …” Yeah, yeah, thought Ruff, just a little TLC needed, as he drove through the leafy streets of Morningside where property boundaries seemed to go on and on and behind hedges and walls you saw glimpses of swimming pools, tennis courts, and occasionally a paddock with jumps.
When he pulled up to a smallholding with the number he had been given he was met by the master of the spread; beyond in a white-poled corral he could see a horse with its head and tail held erect, legs lifted high as it trotted towards the fence. Sixteen hands Ruff reckoned. From day one it was his favourite lead horse.
By the time they’d drained their second beers the owner had explained why he was selling. The horse had been his daughter’s and she had been a good rider and horse carer, until her first year at college. A new Beetle and boyfriend were the end of all that. One Saturday night she had arrived home in a miniskirt so short that as she staggered out of the car he could see she was not wearing underwear. He also noticed a tattoo where no stranger’s hand should go. The next day she lost her car, her apartment in town and her allowance. On the Monday morning he called.
“Farmer’s Weekly advertising department, how can we help you?” a pert East Rand voice answered.
From a dealer in Volksrust he brokered a “three for the price of two”, taking his cue from dealings with the bookie-wise professor at Onderstepoort. Most notable among them was a huge horse at 17 hands and a few fingers, a bay Clydesdale named Frankie. Ruff gave him the stable name of Frankenstein when the horse tried to nip him while being led out of his pen and onto the trailer. It turned out Frankie had had a sore in the corner of his mouth, but Ruff was slow to forgive. Frankie turned out to be among the more laid-back horses in the Limpopo Valley herd.
“Those two,” the trader pointed to Frankie and a grey Shire-cross elephant-size mount appropriately named Ndlovu, “were headed to Zimbabwe to pull a cart.”
Frankie became a star horse until a day when he was pushed too hard, while Ndlovu never really took to safari life and slowly lost condition. If it wasn’t the animals breaking cover in front of him that gave him the bejibbers, it was the over-rich feed that caused him to develop colic.
Next was a call to a horse breeder (some said rustler) on the Pongola River, the border between the farmers of KwaZulu on one side and Swaziland on the other. If the heat turned up he could skip over into Swaziland where it was said he had fathered a small tribe of café au lait offspring.
“Several wives,” they nodded over coffee and rusks in conservative Paulpietersburg.
The man said he needed the space for fresh blood coming in.
Only males, Ruff insisted. “I’ll have my hands full without having to deal with horse love issues.”
With them came a chilled 15-hand Boereperd gelding with no name. Not all horse dealers are horse lovers, some are more like slave traders. Which is why so many slave-descended Coloured people in the Cape are named January, February and so on. That was usually the month in which their ship docked. Ruff named him on the spot – Pongola, after the river on whose bank they were negotiating. On safari Pongola proved to be extremely sure-footed but was prone to wandering.
Last of that bunch was an Appaloosa, but this time the salesman had a name.
“Bought him from a Coolie, was why I named him. Geronimo,” the man said smugly.
Ruff did not bother to explain the difference between an Asian Indian trader in nearby Wasbank and a rebel Native American chief. Fools and drunks, as his father would say, were not worth arguing with.
No doubt its colouring stood out and would attract undue attention for the slave-horse trader. Ruff had not wanted the mottled, flea-bitten horse but the deal was too good to refuse. Geronimo had not been well cared for. His hooves were uneven and his mane and tail tangled. He must have come from stock shipped out from the United Sates during the Anglo-Boer War, Ruff figured.
After delivering the second load of horses across the border along with hay, tack and tools, Ruff did a final sweep of the butchers and abattoirs he knew. First this time came Rasta, whose mane and tail were so matted Ruff half expected to see a joint between his lips. Pale Face was a Palomino and Ruff could not believe anyone would want to turn such an attractive animal into dog food. Bazooka, a liver chestnut with a white face, earned his name when he shot out of the stable door the moment it was opened and disappeared into the surrounding veld.
Which was how Ruff came to find poor old Socks.
“Want to buy a horse cheap-cheap, boss?” asked one of the casual staff who helped round up Bazooka and load him onto the trailer.
When Ruff put his head inside the dark, rancid hovel it took some time before he could make out the starving strawberry roan standing backed up against the far wall. He was hardly a hair taller than 14 hands and just four years old but had already been retired as a cart horse “because he just cannot pull anymore” the back-yard coal merchant explained. Ruff had to kick away a pile of dirt to get the door fully open and inside the gloomy stall he could see why.
“What the hell is that?” he shook his head slowly.
“Just two-fifty rands. I think it’s a freak horse,” said its owner, unsteady on his own two feet.
Ruff glared at him until the man began to shuffle.
“Okay, 200 then kla, hey?”
“You’re the freak,” growled Ruff. “Have you got any tools?”
The owner disappeared and came back with a broken hacksaw blade.
“Is that all?”
“S’all boss.”
In the blink of an eye Ruff had ripped off a piece of the man’s shirt. The man just stood, his eyes growing wider. Ruff wrapped the cloth around one end of the blade and edged into the stall. The place was not only dark but so putrid and so thick with flies Ruff’s first instinct was to gag. But the horseman in him took hold. The thing’s pelvis and ribs were not so much showing as almost poking right through its scabby skin. But worst of all were its hooves with nails like those of Indian fakirs who never cut their fingernails so they grow in whorls around their hands.
Ruff whispered sweet kind nothings in the young horse’s ear, then lifted a hoof onto his thigh. He could buy new jeans. It looked like a surreal incarnation of one of the winged-footed horses of Roman mythology. One by one he cut off as much of the hooves as he could.
“We’ll have to clean you up back at the farm, old chap,” he told the horse. He threw two R100 notes into the dirty stall, pushed the man to the ground and gently led the horse out to the trailer without saying another word.
Socks was the smallest of the herd, the word dainty came to mind. When standing next to Ironsides, Frankie or Ndlovu, you could imagine he was not exactly of the same species. In evolutionary biology it has been noted that there is often more anatomical variance within a species than between two closely related ones. For example, all dog breeds are one species, whether German shepherd or miniature poodle and both, all, are descended from wolves. Consequently, German shepherds and wolves are evolutionary cousins, not brothers or sisters.
Once the horses were all delivered safely to their new home in Botswana, Ruff had to wait a few days before the help he’d been promised began to pitch up on the backs of rattletrap bakkies and on clunky old dikwiel bicycles. He slept the first few nights cowboy-style, on the ground beside a roaring fire. He didn’t know what animals might be around but he did know scorpions would be scuttling round in the night so he stuffed his socks into his boots.
The horses were tied to a long line and that was when the pushing and shoving began. Natural extroverts like Fire, Moyeni and Pongola pushed their weight around, while the more reserved horses, including Zulu and Tommy, stood back as the pecking order was being established. With Ironsides and Tommy as his allies, Zulu created his own circle and life in the paddock settled down to a working standoff. In that first year there would be no lock-up stables, starting with just lengths of rope strung tree to tree to create a delineated corral area. Enormous Frankie and Ndlovu kept to themselves and did not get involved in stable politics.
The next thing to do was get the diesel generator going so they could pump water up from the riverbed into a green JoJo tank. Once Ruff had put his new team on to the task of cutting mopane logs (the default building material of safari lodges) he set off back to South Africa on a shopping trip to Pietersburg (later Polokwane) to get supplies to feed and build a camp.
He ordered new safari tents as well as camp beds, mattresses, folding chairs and tables. In time they would make better stuff from fallen timber picked up around camp. The camp technology was pretty much farm-learned. Paraffin lamps, two long-drop toilets – his and hers, where “hers” had a canvas camp chair with a hole neatly cut out of the centre of the seat, and “his”, where you sat when you needed to on an elephant’s lower jawbone. Donkey boilers, for heating water, consisted of 44-gallon water drums on top of a wood fire. It was all really bush but it worked just fine.
The cool room was an ace bit of bush Heath Robinson engineering: old cooldrink crates filled with charcoal formed the walls of a shed that supported the main water tank, from which water trickled down to keep the charcoal permanently saturated. As it evaporated it cooled the interior on the same physical principle as a fridge – by drawing off heat energy. But in the scorching summer temperatures you still needed minus-40°C chest freezers in the kitchen for meat and the other perishables. Until the cash started flowing in they ate African style – putu and nyama.
While the camp was being built two of the vital positions were filled as if by the guiding spirits of Africa. First was the arrival of a wizened Bushman named Money, who soon became Moany. He was forever grumbling about this groom or that horse, or a guest who had had the impudence to interfere when setting up their mount for riding.
Moany could have been 40 or 400, it was impossible to tell. But he knew everything there was to know about being a groom. “Worked for a farmer,” was all he told Ruff when he arrived on foot, across the veld, and declared he was going to work there. The one downside to Moany was his predilection for the bottle that frequently left Ruff exasperated and more than once nearly broke. Every Monday the bow-legged man would arrive for work like a giraffe with three legs.
His new name came about from an incident as his earlier one probably had. One day when he arrived for work with a worse than usual hangover, the guide Sparkie quipped that he moaned like an unpaid whore.
With quick Australian wit he added: “You know Moany, it’s hard to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a grumpy Bushman.”
The little wrinkled man bent over giggling and the day was saved.
The other was Joyce, a cook of exceptional talent who could turn out not only fresh seed loaf but anything from baked Alaska to Thai green curry from her oven made in a hollowed-out termite mound behind the kitchen tent. She had worked at a top lodge in Maun but when she heard about this new horse safari operation she had hopped on a bus and headed south. She could not explain why. It took her two days to get to the Tuli fence where she had waited and instructed the first vehicle to pass to take her to the new camp. You could say in the early years that she singlehandedly kept the place afloat.
The idea had been that Ruff would set up the camp and once it was running more or less smoothly, Lois would join him. During that time she would distribute brochures at horse events and correspond with riding organisations. She had smart brochures made with the name and a natty logo – two horseshoes and a baobab tree – that she handed or sent out to everyone she could. But things never did get to run smoothly in “the valley”.
There were times when Ruff collapsed into bed after midnight feeling like the farmer he’d seen in some literary movie Lois had dragged him to see. Ruff felt like he too was caught in the eye of a storm that was carrying away his barn and his sheep. It was always one thing after another. If it wasn’t hyenas stealing cooler boxes from the kitchen, or eating guests’ riding boots, it was drunken staff or, worse, an empty camp with rising costs and diminishing cash flow.
To help keep costs down and admin to a minimum, as fast as they applied Ruff took on three-month wonders for camp staff and stable hands – young interns from abroad who did not need work permits and who actually paid for the privilege of working in the bush. They were young people, mostly women, from South Africa, Australia and England, occasionally France, Sweden or Brazil, all in search of adventure.
Inevitably there was also an excess of partying and “khaki fever”. More than one had to be packed off back home for indiscretions that included excessive intoxication, relationship conflicts and neglect of the horses. The camp rule was you could do what you wanted after hours so long as you did not scare the guests or the horses.
“You always feed and water your horse before you indulge yourself,” Ruff would warn them on arrival.
The main source of trouble was khaki fever: no matter what their age, when female guests (and sometimes it should be noted, male) saw the virile young rangers – there were only men in those early days – in khaki they seemed to lose all sense of decorum.
It was khaki fever that led to their first marketing misadventure.