Rogue Male
At the time of writing this book the South African National Parks service is considering reintroducing the practice of culling elephants in Kruger National Park. Although the park has been expanded across the border into neighboring Mozambique, creating what is now known as the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park, it is still a finite area. Elephants were once able to migrate freely over huge swathes of Africa, but these days farming, the growth of cities and towns, and other land uses have confined them mostly to national parks and game reserves. In Kruger National Park, the experts have deemed that unless elephant numbers are managed then the ecosystem will suffer because of overgrazing. Adult elephant bulls eat between a hundred and eighty and two hundred and seventy kilograms—nearly six hundred pounds—of vegetation per day and will knock over fully grown trees to get to roots or leaves out of their reach. While this clearing of the bush has some benefits for the environment, including clearing paths to water for smaller animals and creating microecosystems around the trunks of felled trees, if there are too many elephants in an enclosed area they will destroy their environment faster than it can regrow.
Whatever you might think of culling—the deliberate and planned killing of animals for management purposes—past experience has shown the national parks authorities that the most humane way to control elephant numbers was to take out an entire herd at a time. In the early 1980s, protests from some sectors of the community resulted in the culling teams sparing some young male elephants from targeted herds. These young males were translocated to other national parks such as Pilansberg, near the Sun City hotel and casino complex, and Hluhluwe-Imfolozi in KwaZulu Natal.
Elephants are social creatures and young ones are brought up in a family environment where they learn how to live and how to behave. The practice of relocating individual young bulls, while done with good intentions, proved to be a disaster. The youngsters grew up in their new homes without the benefit of discipline from older males, or being taught life’s lessons from their mothers. As a result, they went crazy. They began attacking other animals and vehicles, and there were even examples of elephants sexually assaulting rhinoceroses. In Hluhluwe-Imfolozi alone they killed thirty-eight rhinos. To remedy the situation, older bull elephants had to be introduced into the reserves to knock the youngsters into shape.
When I was in high school I was like one of those young orphan bull elephants.
One Friday, when I was about twelve, I came home late from my school, Highlands North, after visiting a friend’s house. This wasn’t unusual as I was never all that keen to get home and I’d almost become the adopted extra child in a couple of my friends’ families.
Dad was out of work and was spending more and more time at home. Waiting for me outside the house was my uncle, the one who had given me Paddatjie. I immediately knew something was not right, as we only saw him two or three times a year. My sisters were both working after school at the Dion retail store. My uncle stopped me as I walked in the gate and said, “Come, we’re going to fetch your sisters.” On the way to the store he spilled the beans, blunt and to the point. “Kevin, your father’s passed away.”
I knew my dad had been for a job interview that day and as part of the process he’d had a medical exam that morning, to make sure he was fit. My brother Gareth was at home and Dad had told him that he was just going for a lie-down. Dad apparently asked my brother to make him some soup, and while Gareth was away in the kitchen doing that for him, my dad passed away from a pulmonary embolism as he lay on the couch. On the outside Dad hadn’t seemed a sick person, although he smoked like a chimney and we all knew he drank too much.
My first thought when my uncle told me was, “Oh no, what’s going to happen now?” But, even though I’m ashamed to say it, then I felt a small sense of relief. Three years before he died, he’d lost his job completely and went on a bit of a drinking binge. When that happened, even though he was our father, my brother, sisters, and I didn’t even really want to be around him. I know that sounds a bit strange, terrible even, but I remember thinking that now we could get on with this life of ours, as a family. It was almost like he was a burden rather than one of the household. It was a bit of a relief for my mom, too. My dad was never violent, but things had been strained between them and she’d been the sole breadwinner for a couple of years by the time he died.
When I work with lions I find that if I’ve known the lion since birth or a very early age, and I’ve spent plenty of time with him when he’s young, then I’ll have a much better relationship with him when he matures. As the saying goes, “As you sow, so shall you reap.” I think it’s the same with fathers and sons. A dad who has spent time with his boy during his childhood will have a better relationship with him later as opposed to, say, one who has been missing from his life until his teens, and shows up late in the piece saying, “Howzit, China, let’s go out on the town and be buddies.”
Even if my father had not died and there had been a big change in his life—maybe getting another job—and he had decided to pay more attention to us kids, I still think there would have been too much water already under the bridge for him to be able to stop me behaving the way I did over the next few years. The one strong part he had played in my life, that of the strict disciplinarian, was gone forever the day he died.
Things settled down for a while in the family after he died, but the difference for me was that I didn’t have anyone controlling me anymore. As time went by and the grieving process ran its course, I started testing the boundaries of the new situation I found myself in. I’d started off fairly well at high school, but by the age of thirteen I started drinking and going out at nights—jolling, as we called it.
My brother’s identification book, a document everyone of legal age had to carry in South Africa, had gone through the washing machine, and when he applied for a new one I managed to get my hands on the old, partially ruined one. I took a picture of myself and put that through the washing machine, deliberately, then carefully placed it on the old one where Gareth’s photo had been. I did the same thing with his driving license. Basically, I stole his identify and became Gareth Richardson, aged eighteen, which allowed me to drive, drink alcohol, and get into night clubs.
I was driving from the age of fourteen, and that was partly my mother’s fault, though through no intention of hers. I learned early on in my teens how to take advantage of the kindness of others and my mom was a prime target. I wanted to learn to drive so she started by letting me drive the car up and down the driveway, practicing driving forwards and in reverse, and getting used to the stick shift and the clutch, brake, and accelerator. “Mom, if I wash the car, will you take me driving on the street?” I would pester her, even though I still hadn’t reached the legal age to start learning to drive on public roads.
When Dad was alive she had taken the bus to work and had never needed to drive, but as the sole parent she now had to learn all over again. She saved her pennies and bought a smart little yellow Mini Clubman. My sisters were old enough to start learning—legally—so all of us would cram into the Mini and go out for driving lessons together. We would find a quiet road or a parking lot, and my sisters and I would teach my mother how to reverse park. It took Mom ten tries to get her license and we all cheered when she finally made it.
Once I learned to drive I realized that it would be a piece of cake for me to take the car out at night, when everyone else in the house was sleeping. I had a couple of mates, Dave and Dino, whom I used to get into trouble with. Dave was Jewish, Dino was Italian, and I’m Anglican, so we were a representative sample of the kids at Highlands North, which was a government-run school. We also had quite a few Lebanese kids, and our school had a richly deserved reputation for fighting with other schools, as well as among ourselves. Dino was a big oke—a six-foot guy who played rugby, and his size and strength came in handy when it was time for me to steal Mom’s car. Dave and Dino would come over after dark and wait for me outside. I would creep into Mom’s room and make sure she was sound asleep, then tiptoe outside and meet the boys.
“Right. Coast is clear,” I would say.
Our driveway was quite steep and it slanted uphill away from the house. We had a heavy steel security gate and the three of us boys had to lift it carefully and slide it along its rails so that it didn’t make a screeching noise. I couldn’t risk starting the car’s engine in the driveway, in case the sound woke my mom or sisters, so Dave, Dino, and I would scrum down, as if we were playing rugby, and push the car up the hill and out onto the street. It would have been impossible without Dino. As we rolled down the street I would start the car on the move once we were out of earshot from my house. After that, it was time to drive and time to party. I used to race that car as fast I could, ramping it up over pavements and pushing my own boundaries as a driver more and more.
“Come shopping with me, Kevin,” Mom said to me one Saturday morning as I lay in bed.
Hungover, I rolled over and rubbed my eyes. My mouth tasted like the bottom of J.R.’s cage and my head throbbed from too much cheap brandy. I mumbled, “If I’m going to go shopping with you, then you must give me money to go jolling, Mom.”
She gave in, and on the way to the supermarket, she kept glancing down at the dashboard. “Kevin, I think there’s something wrong with this car. I filled it up yesterday, but now the gauge is only showing half full.”
“Ja, Mom, I know all about that.” I wound down the window to get some fresh air and burped, hoping she wouldn’t smell the booze on my breath. Despite my state I was still thinking fast. “I found a little hole in the fuel tank, but I fixed it for you. Since I did that for you, can we go driving this afternoon?”
Mom believed everything her darling baby boy told her. By nine o’clock she’d be in bed, and by ten my mates and I would be at a club. We’d go to places such as Balalaika in Sandton; Bella Napoli, the Dome, and the Summit, which was a strip club. Back in the late eighties discos were big. It wasn’t the whole rave and drug era that goes on today, but we were drinking anything we could get our grubby little paws on. We’d buy the cheapest stuff that would get us drunk the quickest. Our specialty was a two-liter bottle of Coca Cola topped up with cane spirit—spook and diesel, it was called. We’d fill up on that and then we’d charm girls into buying us beers at the clubs. I’ve never really been a smoker, though I would take drags just to get a head spin. I tried dope, but it just made me sleepy and hungry. There was no way I wanted to get the munchies and be stuffed full of food and in bed by ten. We just wanted to go out, party, and get laid.
If we weren’t going to a club we’d find a house party. Rich kids from Sandton, Parkhurst, and Rosebank would make money while their parents were overseas on holidays by putting on a party and charging an entrance fee. Once inside there was free alcohol and women galore. On nights when I couldn’t risk taking the Mini we would walk or hitchhike all over town, and have an all-nighter. I couldn’t imagine doing it in Johannesburg these days, because of the crime problem in the city.
We were invincible and not even the cops could stop us. I was pulled over one day by a policeman for no apparent reason while driving a friend to a weekend rugby game. The cop asked to see my license and I produced my fake identification. I told him my driver’s license had also gone through the washing machine, but was in even worse shape than my ID and that I was waiting for a new one to arrive. He wasn’t satisfied with my excuse and told me that I, Gareth Richardson, would have to report to the local police station the following Monday with a valid driver’s license. When I got home I called my brother, who was at vet school at Onderstepoort. As luck would have it, he was coming home for a few days.
“Howzit, bru?” I said to him with unusual friendliness. “Guess what? You have to report to the police station on Monday.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re you, and I’m you, but the real you needs to prove you’re the real you . . . to the cops. All right?”
Amazingly, and to his credit, Gareth did this for me. I owed him one, but somehow I doubt I ever repaid the debt. I abused the goodwill of my family, and even took advantage of my sister Corrine, who for some reason would often stick up for me when I got in trouble. I convinced her to give Dave and me a lift in the Mini when she was on her way to work, at a restaurant in Sandton City. I told her we were going to go to the movies. She dropped us at the mall and went to work, but a short time later I went to the restaurant and asked if I could borrow her car keys, telling her I’d left my jumper in the car.
I got in the car and started her up. For the next two hours—the duration of the movie we were supposedly watching—I put the Mini through its paces, driving hard and fast through the suburbs of Johannesburg. I knew I was cutting it fine, to get the car back before she became suspicious, so I was still speeding when we drove up to the shopping center. The tires squealed on the smooth concrete surface of the multi-storied car park and when we hit the speed bumps, all four wheels left the ground.
My brother Gareth had borrowed the Mini and crashed it into a brick wall some time earlier. I had conned Mom into letting me drive the car occasionally in exchange for repairing the vehicle. I didn’t have the money for all the proper replacement parts so I had organized for a whole new front end—left and right fenders, hood and grille—to be made out of fiberglass. As Dave and I crested the last speed bump in the car park, the impact of the Mini crashing down on its suspension caused the whole front of the car to come loose and fly off. I put the car into a slide and skidded into the same space where she had been.
Corrine, who had been wondering where we were, walked into the car park as I was slotting the front of the car back into place. “Kevin, what are you doing?”
“Um, just showing Dave the engine, sis.”
The Mini was my car of choice to steal for our after hours jolls, but if it was parked in I could also take an old 1979 Toyota Corolla which the family had inherited from my grandmother when she passed away, or dad’s 1980 baby blue Mazda 323. We hated being seen in the Mazda. I was used to driving all the other cars, but one night one of my sisters, Candice, who was studying at nursing college at the time, had left her Fiat 131 Mirafiori in the driveway then gone off to stay at her boyfriend’s place.
When Dino arrived at my place for our usual nightly departure we slipped outside and started downing our preferred cocktail of spook and diesel. We drank hard and fast, chasing feelings of relaxation, confidence, and euphoria. I pointed to the boxy red Italian car and said, “Come, let’s take this one.”
It had been raining that night and the roads were slippery, but I hadn’t driven the Fiat before and wanted to put it through its paces. As usual, we pushed the vehicle out of the driveway and down the street a bit before starting it. I was still only about eight kilometers from home, on the road to Sandringham, but I was already pushing it to its limits.
With Dino beside me egging me on I floored it. I watched the speedometer climb through seventy, eighty, ninety, and finally a hundred kilometers an hour. The gearbox was automatic, which I hated as I preferred stick shifts. However, I had the engine screaming at full revs as the transmission did its work. I cared for the car about as much as I cared for the feelings of my sister or my mom. I preyed on the innocence and goodwill of my family in those days. I’m not proud of it, but it’s the way I was.
“Faster!”
I dropped down a gear and pushed the accelerator into the firewall before ramming it up into drive again. I came to a downhill stretch and I roared with exhilaration as the needle passed the 170-kilometer mark. We were flying at more than a hundred miles an hour down this suburban road and the rainwater hissed like a cobra under the Fiat’s wafer thin little wheels.
At the bottom of the hill there was a dip. Even if I’d had time to brake I wouldn’t have. The suspension bottomed out as I hit the depression and I lost control. Because of the speed we were traveling at and the slickness of the road, the car spun through three full 360-degree turns. The streetscape was spinning past our eyes at a dizzying speed. We hit the pavement and rolled.
Luck or a guardian angel was on my side, because we missed a light pole by inches. If we’d hit it we would have been dead. The car ended up on the passenger’s side. I lay there for a moment, stunned, but Dino climbed up over my lap and out of my window. It was only a small car and he was a strong guy so while I was still inside he pushed the car back over on to its wheels. I looked up, shaking my head and he slammed the open bonnet down with a thud.
He banged on the roof of the car. “Come, let’s go, Kevin.”
“Dude, the car is stuffed,” I replied. “It’s come to an end. We’re finally going to get busted this time.”
Dino climbed in and wouldn’t take no for answer. “Let’s go!”
As an indication of how drunk we were, Dino convinced me that we could wash the damage off the car, so we found a garage and the owner let us wash the Fiat in the middle of the night. There we were, two drunk teenagers trying to wash scratches off a car. We sobered up pretty quickly.
We managed to limp the vehicle home and I summoned up the courage to tell my mother what had happened. I knocked on the door of her bedroom and opened the door.
“Ma, I’ve crashed Candice’s car.”
Still half asleep, she mumbled, “Go back to bed, Kevin, you’re dreaming.”
“No, Ma, you don’t understand. I stole the car and I crashed it.”
Mom woke up. “Kevin, I’m going to kill you!”
Even in our moment of shame Dino and I still had a plan. We’d decided in advance that when the shit hit the fan we would start crying. Mom was telling us off and I started pushing the tears out, telling her how sorry I was and how we hadn’t meant to cause any damage. My sister Corrine, whom I’ve always had a great relationship with, stood up for us, though why she did that I don’t know.
We were grounded for the rest of our lives and both had to get part-time jobs to pay for the repairs to the car. Dino got a hiding, and his old man wanted to klap me, too. God knows, I deserved a hit.
Predictably, my schoolwork took a pounding during those rebellious years. I was out three or even four nights a week on drinking binges and hungover in the mornings. I’d also put my animals to one side. By that stage most had died—because of age, not neglect—or been freed during my release stage, and with Mom struggling to make ends meet, we had scaled down to just a couple of dogs and one or two birds at any one time.
I tried to be a good boy sometimes. I bought my mother a teddy bear for her birthday one year, but I got so drunk the night before that somehow I managed to throw up on the bear. I went to the bathroom, still pissed, and tried to clean it, but needless to say it was in no fit condition to hand over as a present.
My uncle tried sitting me down and counseling me, telling me that since my brother had left for vet school I was the man of the house, and all that sort of stuff. I know that he wanted to hit me, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it as he was such a nice guy. I probably needed a beating, but he made no headway with me, and he and Mom thought I would never come right.
If I wasn’t bunking off school I was picking fights with other kids. Discipline at school was a joke, and even though we would get six of the best—smacks on our butts with a cane—or be placed on detention, we treated those punishments as a joke. I always knew what was right and wrong, and while I didn’t do particularly well at high school, I was able to study enough to scrape through.
We loved playing rugby at school and while the game itself doesn’t make people aggressive, we would hype each other up before games and tell each other how we were going to hammer our opponents. Without a father figure to keep me in line, I just continued to play up. My other friends, of course, had fathers and used to be disciplined, so thinking back on it now I was probably a bad influence on them, rather than the other way around.
The only positive outlet I had for my anger was cycling. I would take my cycle out in the afternoons and ride forty or fifty kilometers a day. I used the cycle to visit girls on the other side of the city, and at weekends my friends and I would ride in hundred-kilometer races. I loved going fast—still do. Mom used to insist that I get home by dark, and after visiting a girl who lived near the racetrack at Kyalami I was pushing it to get home by nightfall. As I was tearing along a policeman leapt out from the side of the road and waved me down.
“You were doing eighty kilometers per hour in a sixty zone,” the cop said to me. “Do you realize you were speeding?”
“No, officer, I didn’t. Anyway, I’m on a bicycle, so what are you going to do about it?”
He shrugged his shoulders and I sped off.
As my friends and I got older we were able to get away from Orange Grove every now and then, if only for the weekend. Dino’s family had a holiday place at Bronkhorstspruit Dam about fifty kilometers east of Pretoria. On one visit we found a Grey Heron which had become entangled in fishing lines. Some guys staying at the dam had gone to bed after a big night’s drinking and left their rods, baited with balls of corn meal pap, stuck in the riverbed. It was winter, and when I put my fingers in the water it was freezing cold. We could see the bird was alive—just—and I decided that Dino would be the best person to go into the water and free the bird.
“Why me?”
“I know about birds. I’m going to be the one who fixes it and I have to be ready, here on the shore, to take it off your hands when you bring it out of the water.” I was, after all, the birdman of Orange Grove.
“Okay.”
Dino swam out into the icy dam and was able to free the bird, which was near dead from being trapped in the cold water all night. Dino, teeth chattering and body shivering, was near hypothermic, and the only thing I could think of was for all three of us to go to the shower room and get under a hot shower. Inside we stripped off and crowded into the cubicle. I turned on the hot tap and Dino and I held on to the bird. I had no idea if this was the right thing to do, and just when I thought it might actually die from my extreme treatment the heron came to life.
A grey heron is a big bird that stands about a meter tall, and it looks a hell of a lot bigger when it flares its wings and starts attacking you with its very long beak. Dino and I fought each other to open the shower cubicle door and escape its stabbing pecks. The heron followed us out and chased us around the changing room, flapping its wings and squawking madly. We were trying to chase it outside and the bird was trying to kill us, which I thought was a fine show of gratitude. Eventually we cornered it and, waving and squawking ourselves, shooed it to the door. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in South Africa who tell the story of the time they were camping and saw a Grey Heron running out of a toilet block, being chased by two naked teenage boys.
That wasn’t the only time, however, that a few naked teenage boys made an impression on the wildlife of Africa. Once, the three of us went camping in the Retiefskloof of the Magaliesberg Mountains. We were dropped off one weekend and set off to cause mayhem. That sort of unchecked, unauthorized camping doesn’t happen in the national park anymore, probably because of what people like us used to get up to.
We decided to go skinny-dipping in a pristine waterhole. It was warm and sunny, and we found that we could slide on our bare bottoms down some water-slicked rocks and splash into the pool. While we were playing we saw a troop of baboons clambering across the rocks high above us.
“Wah-hoo,” cried one of the baboons, giving a warning call.
“Wah-hoo,” we all started yelling back, teasing them.
We thought this was great fun, but the baboons weren’t impressed. There was a splash in the water hole next to me.
“What was that?”
“Shit, someone’s throwing rocks at us,” one of the other guys said.
As we scrambled out of the water, looking for our clothes, there was a minor avalanche of rocks and small boulders raining down on us. As I hopped on the rock while I pulled my shorts on, I looked up again. It was the baboons. They were the ones attacking us and now they were moving down the slope. I’d heard of stories of adult male baboons ripping apart leopards in fights, so I was more than a little worried.
As the baboons closed in on us, two stopped, crouched, and defecated in their hands.
“Oh, no! Shit!” Which was exactly what started pelting at us during round two of the baboons versus the teenagers. I’d heard of primates doing this in zoos, but not in the wild. These baboons were adding insult to injury and we took off, their foul-smelling missiles shattering in the trees behind us. If their lesson to us was to be respectful of others, we forgot it a short time later when we crossed another stream and found a dozen bottles of beer that some Afrikaner campers had sunk in the water to cool. We slipped away with our liquid manna from heaven, and later laughed and drank ourselves stupid.
The car crash had been a wake-up call, but it wasn’t until I met my first real father figure that I started to apply myself to my schoolwork and, as it happened, to my animals again. His name was Stan Schmidt, and to my friends and me he was a god. He also had a very pretty daughter, named Lisa, whom I fell in love with. Stan Schmidt was a renowned South African karate champion and the founder of the South African Japan Karate Association. Every boy knew who he was and we were all in awe of him.
“You can’t possibly be going out with Stan Schmidt’s daughter,” one of my mates said when I told him who Lisa’s father was. “Dude, Stan’s going to kick your arse big time as soon as you do something wrong to his girl.”
However, Stan was so not the person people thought he was. He never threatened me. He and his wife, Judy, would sit me down sometimes and talk to me about the directions I was taking, and life in general. I’d talk for hours with Stan, and started spending more time with Lisa and her family than with my own. As a result of the Schmidts’ influence I started studying harder at school, and I even started going to church! It was one of the conditions of going out with Lisa. For some reason they trusted me and I started calming down.
It was all about respect. I don’t think I’d had respect for anyone else up until that point. I respected Stan not only for his achievements, but for who he was. When that oke talked, I listened.
Stan and Judy also rekindled my interest in animals. At the time I met Lisa I’d already found another African Grey Parrot, Rebecca, after J.R. died. I convinced the Schmidts that birds could make good pets and they bought a Macaw. Stan had to travel to karate tournaments overseas and the family would take me overseas—a first for me. As well as the karate tournaments, we would go to bird shows. I traveled all over the United States with them and back home in South Africa they took me to places I’d never been, such as Cape Town, the Kruger National Park, and Pilansberg National Park.
As with the baboon and heron incidents, my early encounters with wildlife in the bush gave no indication that I had any natural affinity whatsoever with creatures bigger than parrots and frogs. On one trip to a small game reserve with the Schmidt family, I decided to take a walk in the bush by myself. I was enjoying the solitude and the sounds and smells of the veld, which made a nice change from suburbia.
Something rustled ahead of me. I froze. I could see the silhouette of a large mammal through the bushes. I heard what sounded like a lion’s growl. I turned and ran.
Bushes whipped and scratched at my bare skin and my heart was pounding as I retraced my steps quick time, arms and legs pumping furiously. When I thought I’d covered a safe distance, I stopped and looked back, my chest heaving as I tried to calm my breathing. About a hundred meters away I saw a bull kudu—a large antelope—staring at me. He had covered about the same distance as me, in the opposite direction, after we had both scared the life out of each other.
On another solo hike I came across a dead heron in the shallows of a stream. Curious as ever, I decided I would examine the bird to find out how it had died. I pulled on a wing and it pulled back. Alarmed, I took a step backwards. It must still be alive, I thought, although once again it was lying motionless. Cautiously, I stepped forward and grabbed the wing again. It started to pull back so I tugged harder. I screamed when the crocodile’s head broke the surface of the water and it reclaimed, once and for all, the bird it had just killed.
As my own wildness calmed down, my collection of domestic animals started to grow again. A couple of years earlier I’d gone with a mate when he bought an anaconda.
At the time, Annabelle, as he named her, was less than a meter long. When I was sixteen he called me up one day and told me he was moving overseas and asked if I would take Annabelle. I hadn’t seen either of them for a while and remembered Annabelle as a small snake. When I got to the guy’s house it was a case of, “Anna-belle, my, how you’ve grown.” She was three meters long. Annabelle had a big appetite and I found myself searching for a constant supply of chickens and rats.
I regained my reputation as the bird man and a procession of people started arriving with orphaned chicks, cats, and dogs. When the twins left home, Mom and I moved to a town house in Buccleuch north of Johannesburg. Mom and I were like passing ships as I was spending a lot of time with Lisa. I was also spending less time with Dino and David, but that was a good thing for my studies. Lisa was passionate about everything she did—dancing, studying, even fighting with me—but her passion for schoolwork rubbed off on me.
In standard nine, the year before matriculation when we graduated from high school, I went for an interview at Pretoria University. Part of the criteria for acceptance to vet school was your progress up to standard nine, and the interview.
I dressed in my smartest shirt and put on a tie and drove the Mini to Pretoria. Although I still wasn’t old enough for a driving license, Mom had given up on me and had started letting me drive. It was about an hour’s drive through what was then open farming country that separated Johannesburg and South Africa’s capital city.
When I got to the university I had to wait, sitting with other nervous aspiring vets of my own age. When my name was called, I walked into the room and sat down in front of a panel of four faculty deans, three men and a woman.
“How important do you think your school results are to your suitability as a candidate for veterinary college?” one of the male deans asked me.
“I think people place too much emphasis on results,” I said. I wasn’t being cheeky; I was just saying what I believed. “I don’t think people place enough emphasis on a person’s ability to work with animals. I think a lot of vets study for five or six years and then work six months in veterinary and discover they’re not an animal person and this isn’t for them. I really believe your entrance to vet science should involve a practical component so you can see how students work with animals. Obviously study is important, but if you’re passionate about what you do you are going to study and you are going to make a good vet.”
Well, I didn’t get in. Clearly the correct answer should have been, “Yes, results are very important and I’m going to work my damnedest to get straight As.”
I also needed a B average in maths and science in my matriculation year, which I didn’t get. I wasn’t too shattered as I had enough marks to enroll in a Bachelor of Science (BSc), majoring in zoology. As the first years of zoology and veterinary science were quite similar, I knew I would be able to apply again for vet school in my second year.
I loved university life, but I didn’t enjoy some of the subjects I had to study, such as chemistry and botany. Also, I worked out pretty soon that even though I was in South Africa, land of the big five and every big, interesting mammal in the world, I wouldn’t be studying them. We spent a lot of time learning about sea molluscs and nematodes—worms—but not lions, hyenas, and elephants.
When the time came around for my second interview for Veterinary Science I found myself in front of the deans again. “So,” asked one of the deans, “how important do you think your university results are to your suitability as a candidate for veterinary school?”
I couldn’t help myself. I gave the same answer again, about the importance of being able to relate to animals. This time the panel seemed quite receptive and nodded and smiled while I was talking. I thought that I’d waxed it, that I had passed. I didn’t, and I was pissed off. I ended up dropping out of university altogether.
My brother-in-law had a good job selling real estate and he offered me a position. I thought, “Stuff university, I’m going to go out in the world, get rich, and buy my own game farm with my own animals.”
I was quite happy for a while, but Lisa’s brother-in-law, Mark, whom I got on well with, sat me down one day and said, “Kev, listen. You can sell real estate any time in life if that’s what you really want to do, but now’s your chance to finish your university degree. You’ve got the brains to do it, but you need to apply yourself.”
He was right. If money was my motivator for selling houses and land—which it was—then that wasn’t good enough. If you’re a real estate agent who loves land, and gets passionate about selling it, then you’ll be good at your job. I re-enrolled and eventually completed my BSc.
I finished two years of zoology, but by my third year I’d had enough of studying sea urchins and worms. It seemed one had to put years into this field before the lecturers would let you study an elephant or a lion or something interesting. Since I had no chance of applying for veterinary school again I decided to change my major to physiology and anatomy. Ironically, in second-year physiology I found myself working with the sorts of animals I thought I’d be studying in zoology. We studied vertebrates, everything from rats to baboons to owls, to learn about their skeletons and their musculature. It was fascinating and the lecturer was brilliant.
Mark, who had convinced me to go back to university, owned a gym in Morningside and he was developing a new concept that would suit my qualification. He had a well-founded theory that when someone knew they were going to hospital to have surgery then it would make sense to do some preconditioning on the musculature around the affected area in order to speed the process of rehabilitation after the operation, when the patient would return to the gym. It seemed like a good career choice for me. Animals would still be a part of my life, but I reasoned that as I hadn’t needed to make money from my relationships with them as a kid, then I didn’t need to make money from working with animals as an adult.
Although I had become great mates with Mark and everyone else in Lisa’s family, no one was more surprised than me when our five-and-a-half-year relationship broke up. Lisa was like me, very headstrong, and while we parted as friends, and remain so today, I think, we worked out that we couldn’t spend the rest of our lives together. I finished university and had a promising job to go to, but with my love life in tatters I decided I needed a clean break and a change of scenery. Like a lot of South Africans, I decided I would leave my homeland and go and work and live in England. I left in December 1996, figuring that if I could survive a winter in Britain then I could survive anything.