The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The day Simba looked into the Lion King’s eyes
This is an experience like no other. I’m standing on top of a huge rock gazing out over the African savannah. Looking down, I can see all the creatures of the bush: zebras, giraffe, a warthog, antelope, elephants, even a red-billed hornbill is skittering about cawing loudly.
And all these incredible animals are looking straight at me. A dream? Well no, not exactly. In fact, it’s an experience I’ve become pretty used to over the last few years in my role as Simba, the Lion King, playing nightly at the Lyceum Theatre in London’s West End.
But this time it feels different. Tonight, as the curtain comes down, I’m feeling ecstatic. Without doubt, it’s been the best performance of my life. The fact that, just 48 hours ago, I was the one being given an audience with the Lion King, gazing into the eyes of a huge male lion from no more than 10ft away, is surely no coincidence.
I’d travelled to South Africa with a small group of friends to Royal Madikwe Lodge in the remote North West province near the border with Botswana. It was my first experience of the African bush and I wanted to experience everything: the landscape, the animals, the people who live in the local communities.
But, above all, I wanted to look into the eyes of a lion. Not a lion in a cage in a zoo but a free, wild animal. I wanted to know first-hand and from the heart who it was I playing on stage.
When the moment came I was taken aback by how close we were able to get to this majestic creature lying quite composed under a bush. It was just our small group in the game vehicle with Adam, our guide, and the lone male just a few feet away. The lion, known as Kwandwe,
100 miles was around five years old and had left his birth pride and was already fighting the alpha male in the adjoining territory for breeding rights. The scar on his nose was a trophy from a recent scrap with his ageing rival.
Suddenly, Kwandwe’s eyes were looking straight into mine. At first it was like a moment of understanding, almost like we’d struck up a relationship. I was looking at him and he was looking at me and we were both curious. It was almost like mutual respect.
Big mistake. Suddenly he let out this terrifying growl. A lion’s roar close up is unlike anything you’ve ever heard. No amount of BBC wildlife films quite prepare you for that moment. There was something guttural about that sound that reached deep down inside of me and I’ll never forget it. When you see lions lying around on their backs after a kill, with their tummies full and with a sort of smile on their face and their tails flicking from side to side, you almost think that you could go over and give them a stroke. Not a good idea!
On another occasion we were watching a group of four lionesses under a tree when they suddenly spotted some impala nearby. In a pride it’s the lionesses that do most of the hunting and it was incredible how they suddenly changed from being like pussycats to these hyper-alert predators, crouched close to the ground taking in everything around them with all their muscles tense and ready to pounce.
In the evenings huge herds of zebra and family groups of elephants with their young calves came down to drink and wallow in the waterhole in front of the camp. Incredibly cute! Several times we also saw the two packs of wild dogs, sometimes known as painted dogs, for which the reserve is famous. There are only around 6,500 individuals left on the entire planet, so seeing one of the packs kill a reedbuck right in front of us at the lodge was incredibly unusual.
We also spotted both black and white rhinos. Here is an animal with a hide like a starship trooper and yet it is so vulnerable to the cruelty and greed of poachers. And all for what? Their horns may be worth almost twice their weight in gold, but they have as much medicinal value as my fingernails. Madness.
But it wasn’t just the animals that moved me. It was the people, too. One very special experience for me was the morning we went to visit one of the local community schools. A group of the older children sang a song from the show and they were seriously good. Their voices were so raw and pure and came from deep in their hearts. That kind of talent is something you grow up with, it’s inside you, and you can’t just be taught it. One of the girls, called Seiroma, who sang a solo, had the most beautiful voice and when she’s old enough I’d really like her to audition for the show.
When it was my turn to sing for them I felt much more nervous than when I go on stage in the West End. I sang One by One from the beginning of Act 2. Even though my parents are from the Caribbean and I was born in the UK, Saki, the viceprincipal, came up to me afterwards and told me he felt I was a true African at heart. That meant a lot to me and made a real impression.
The next day we visited a village sangoma. Outside Africa, the role of the sangoma is often trivialised as a “witch doctor”, but that gives completely the wrong idea. We have a character in the show called Rafiki who’s very wise and acts like a kind of sangoma to Simba. They are really more like medical and spiritual healers to the local community than fortune-tellers, although they believe in the power of the ancestors.
Before we went, I had preconceptions about sangomas being older and rather foreboding, but when we met her in her tiny house in her village, the sangoma was the complete opposite, young and beautiful as well as being very dedicated.
Later she did a dance for us with the village drummers and you could see from her face that she had gone to another place and was not just performing. She was channelling some powerful emotions and, at one stage, started weeping. Knowing that our presence also helps the local communities by putting money into the local economy and creates jobs at the safari lodge itself was also very important to me.
Conservation is very close to my heart so we were incredibly lucky to be given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a team darting