UP YOUR GA
Brian Jackman visits Tswalu, SA’s largest
e was an old lion past his prime with a dove-grey coat and a broken canine tooth, but he was still an impressive beast, his grizzled features framed by a lustrous black mane that fell like a rug around his shoulders.
All day we had followed the tracks he and his brother had left in the red sands of Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, each four-toed pad as wide as my outstretched hand. Now he lay in all his majesty, just a few metres in front of us, staring into the thorny thickets where his brother had just departed after an extraordinary demonstration of mutual grooming and affectionate head rubbing.
This was my reward for a masterclass in the arcane skills of bushcraft, demonstrated by Rudi Venter, my guide, and Ari Leeow, the tracker. In the Kalahari you have to work hard for your lions, but the experience is worth every spinetingling second.
For hour after hour, perched on the bonnet of our four-wheel-drive, Ari had picked out the lion’s unmistakable spoor as we drove through the bush.
“He’s following what we call the silver line,” said Venter. “That’s when a tracker can almost think his way into the mind of the animal he’s following, anticipating its every twist and turn.”
Once we’d found him, the lion began to roar. On and on he went, each deep-throated bellow reverberating among the surrounding hills and out into the deep emptiness of the Kalahari until at last his brother responded, like the echo of his own voice returning.
Everyone who comes to Tswalu wants to see the famous black-maned lions of the Kalahari, but this is not a Big Five reserve.
INTO THE BIG WIDE OPEN
True, there are Cape buffalo and rare, desertadapted black rhino hidden deep in the tangled seas of thornveld, but the real attraction is the heady sense of freedom.
Tswalu began life as a hunting preserve owned by Stephen Boler, a British entrepreneur who made his fortune selling cut-price car tyres in the ’70s. In 1995 he bought up 35 clapped-out farms in the southern Kalahari and turned them into his own vast, private fiefdom. When Boler died three years later the ownership passed to Nicky Oppenheimer, the former chairman of De Beers and a lifelong conservationist.
FIVE STARS IN THE DESERT
Within a month he had put an end to hunting and begun the colossal task of re-wilding, introducing breeding programmes for rare antelopes such as roan and sable, reversing decades of overgrazing and providing a haven for cheetahs and other predators.
Since then, more farms have been acquired and returned to the wild, sweeping away fences and buildings to enlarge what was already the biggest private wildlife reserve in South Africa