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Volunteering in the Wild
by Lisa Clifford
I never imagined that the largest inhabitant of an African game
reserve and a London taxi driver would have anything in common.
But as I watched two furious elephants pursuing a furiously
pedalling ranger called Jabulani down the rutted and dusty road
that winds through Swaziland’s Mkhaya Game Reserve, it hit me that
both pachyderms and cabbies hate cyclists.
Ears and trunks
flapping wildly, they thundered after Jabulani - who had
inadvertently sparked their wrath by cycling past on an aging bike
- all to a chorus of theatrical screams from our Land Rover.
The elephants soon gave up, however, keen to get back to the noisy
and sociable orgy of leaf, branch and bark consumption that takes
up18 hours of their day.
It took much longer for my heartbeat to return to normal, and as I
waited for the roaring in my ears to subside, I belatedly
contemplated the advice given to me when I arrived for my stint as
an ecovolunteer at Mkhaya: if you’re charged by something big
climb the nearest tree or, for the less agile, hide behind the
nearest tree.
 I’d
also been warned about ticks, scorpions and an unpleasant-sounding
snake called the Spitting Cobra, but except for a few unnaturally
large spiders snoozing in our coffee mugs we had, until the
elephants, been ignored by Africa’s wildlife.
It was pretty clear from day one, however, that my month at Mkhaya,
in southeast Swaziland’s beautiful lowveld country, wasn’t going
to be a luxury safari experience.
There would be no lazy days lounging under leafy baobabs, crisp
linen to cuddle into at night and cold beer to wash the dust from
our throats.
Instead, for around £900 (it turns out you can’t volunteer
anywhere for free), I could spend four weeks sleeping in a tent,
without electricity, hot water or any modern comforts, including
alcohol, which was strictly forbidden. The minimum stay is two
weeks and the maximum five.
It was my first
night and, after a meal of wildebeest sausage cooked in the pitch
dark over an open fire, I asked the other three volunteers - two
English women and a German - what they usually did in the
evenings. “Go to bed,” they said.
But after a few
days at Mkhaya, the routine of rising at dawn, working hard in the
hot sun then bedding down, stone cold sober, by 8 seemed perfectly
normal.
It also helped that by the end of most days I was truly shattered
- but in a good way that comes from hard physical labour, not the
sense of fatigue caused by sitting in a stuffy office.
At Mkhaya, we spent most of our time walking the reserve,
patrolling as they called it, making sure its more than 20 species
were safe and well. That meant daily encounters at close range
with hippos, giraffes, buffalo, impala, crocodiles, kudu, nyala,
zebra, wildebeest, and the reserve’s star attraction - the black
rhino.
There were fences to be checked, roads to be cleared and trees to
be planted. Almost everything seemed to involve chopping at,
walking through or picking up viciously thorny branches that
months later still scar my legs.
Once, we helped the rangers capture an injured eland - a large,
spiral-horned antelope - that needed to be taken away for medical
attention. We heaved it onto a transport truck and then piled into
the back of an open-top pick-up, bouncing across Mkhaya’s
abandoned airstrip while a huge, orange sun went down over the
reserve.
 My
journey to Swaziland - a tiny country of just 1 million almost
surrounded by South Africa - began several months earlier in north
London. I realised I hadn’t had a long break since finishing
university more than 10 years ago.
One stumbling block was my employer’s unenthusiastic reaction to
my request for a three month sabbatical, but I desperately needed
a change from financial journalism in the City of London. So, with
no regrets, I quit.
I knew I wanted big animals and Africa and was open-minded about
the rest.
Mkhaya seemed
perfect. Set up in 1979, it is a refuge for endangered species,
particularly the black rhinoceros, which you are more likely to
see in the wild at Mkhaya than almost anywhere else in the world.
These solitary ungulates are substantially different in appearance
than their more common white rhinoceros cousins. They have a
proportionately smaller head, smaller ears set more to the side,
no hump at the base of the neck and an upper lip that is
triangular in shape, very flexible and prehensile.
I loved them and Mkhaya - once I got over the enormous shock of
leaving Hackney for the middle of absolutely nowhere. I
particularly relished the absolute tranquillity that only comes in
the absence of radios, sirens and other people.
A tiny lizard making the occasional dash across my tent and a loud
crashing in the nearby bush, later identified as the footsteps of
Stimela the black rhino and her very large baby, were all that
ever disturbed my rest.
Sometimes at night we sat on watch towers underneath the brightest
stars I’ll ever see listening for the sound of poachers’ gunfire
or looking out for their torch lights.
It has been more than 10 years since a rhino was killed illegally
at Mkhaya. But a gruesome display of dozens of skulls near the
entrance to the reserve is grim evidence that Swaziland’s big game
was once hunted to near extinction.
 Between
1930 and 1960 almost all the country’s wild animals died out,
killed by the lethal combination of disease, poaching and a
general disregard for their well being. The giraffe were gone by
the early 1900s and elephants soon followed. The tsessebe
antelope, the world’s fastest, was lost in the 1930s and the last
lion shot in 1954.
Black rhinos,
which disappeared in the late 1800s, were particularly hard hit
with poachers commanding high prices for their horns which are
used in traditional Chinese medicine and for ornamental objects.
Only the
efforts of Mkhaya-founder Ted Reilly and Swaziland’s late king
Sobhuza II saved Swaziland’s wild animals from complete
annihilation.
Horrified by the devastation, Reilly was, in 1959, given
permission by the king to transform his family farm into the
Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary, Swaziland’s pioneer conservation
area. Reilly set about painstakingly reintroducing the country’s
wildlife, species by species. Hippos and elephants came from South
Africa, rhinos from Zimbabwe and smaller animals from where ever
he could find them.
Reilly founded Mkhaya - named for the thorn tree that covers the
land - to save the Nguni cattle that had lived there for more than
1,200 years from extinction.
Other animals soon followed and today are flourishing under the
care of about 15 rangers, many armed with machine guns and who are
willing to shoot to kill poachers. This, coupled with stiff
sentences of at least five years in prison plus a fine for killing
a rhino, lion or elephant, has brought the problem under control.
Volunteers, or ecos as we were called, are essential to the
conservation effort at Mkhaya as both their money and labour are
vital.
Admittedly, some are more trouble than they’re worth. One woman
signed up to hide from her abusive boyfriend while another was
trying to kick a drinking habit.
All are
welcome, even those better suited to the Betty Ford clinic, but to
really enjoy Mkhaya you have to come for the up close and personal
animal experience. Pit toilets, cold showers and no e-mail or
phone contact with the outside world are a huge culture shock.
There is also a lot of manual labour, and no modern tools to
lighten the burden, so it helps to be quite fit.
But it’s not a
hard labour camp and anyone who is too tired to work is cheerfully
given time off to recover. There are also days off the reserve,
vital when living in the bush gets a little too much.
An hour-long hike brings you to a main road of sorts where a bus
far cleaner and nicer than anything I’ve ever seen in London takes
you to Manzini, one of Swaziland’s main towns.
 There,
we went to a large craft market where, against my ‘anti-useless
souvenirs’ policy, I bought a traditional Swazi mask. A note of
caution for anyone planning to journey on from Swaziland with
their souvenirs: several weeks later on arrival in Australia, the
mask was confiscated by a Melbourne customs official who told me
it was infested with woodworm.
More successful was our outing to the Reed Dance (Umhlanga) where
Swaziland’s King Mswati III selects a new wife from a group of
thousands from across the country who gather at his palace each
year for the two-day festival.
The young women parade before Africa’s last absolute monarch
dressed in short beaded dresses and colourful sashes, hoping to
attract the attention of the 36-year-old Mswati who already has a
fiancée and 11 wives, one of whom was abducted by the king when
she was 18. His father had more than 60 wives.
In a country with one of the world’s highest HIV rates – around 40
per cent – the Reed Dance is becoming increasingly controversial.
Mswati’s plan to build new palaces for each of his wives also
rankles in a place suffering from widespread poverty and food
shortages.
But one of the benefits of being an absolute monarch is you don’t
have to listen to criticism, and after reviewing videotapes of the
dancers Mswati chose a 16-year-old beauty queen as his latest
bride-to-be.
The Reed Dance was near the end of my trip, and several days later
I sadly said goodbye to Mkhaya and returned to dodging London
taxis on my bike.
© Lisa Clifford, 2005
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