Benny doesn’t beat around the bush

Ben Voss creates hilarious moments while conveying his environmental message

WELCOME to the wild with Benny Bushwhacker.

For just over 60 minutes Ben Voss plays a comic conservationist as well as a host of alter egos that find themselves at Paradise Project at the Mkuze Conservancy in northern Zululand.

Bushwhacker is a conservationist who dropped out of school at age 10 and since then has spent most of his life in the wild, where he’s trying to get folk to understand how to be more in tune with nature.

When the show begins, a dishevelled Benny stumbles onto stage, his socks down at his ankles, his bush shorts just a little too baggy and his shirt just a wee bit too tight.

This is not to mention the straggly hair, which he keeps pushing out of his eyes. But his head is in the right place.

At Paradise Project he’s trying to educate people about his conservation initiative. It’s proving difficult. There’s always someone in nature who’s its greatest enemy by disallowing the natural course of events in the wild to take place.

Meet Riley, the millennial technophobe who cannot live without the accoutrements of civilised life and cannot get a signal on his phone, so he resorts to scrolling through all his old photographs on his screen.

Then there’s Mr Know-it-All, who swaggers around camp shouting for his long-suffering wife to bring him his brandy, can’t bend down to the ice box but can manage to hunt and shoot game from 2km away “just like that”.

A posh lodge owner who is creating Sabie Dunes in the middle of the bush; there’s a hippie who thinks he can come up close and personal to a snake and still be a winner, and, penultimately, there’s Benny’s sidekick Mr Skinny, whose scrotum was bitten off by a vegetarian leopard. (“He ate the nuts, but left the meat.”)

There’s also his crazy grand mom whose right hand shakes uncontrollably and an ex-wife called Brenda who microchips Benny.

Voss creates some seriously hilarious moments as he gets his message across of how not to behave in the bush, which, of course, forms the bigger picture of saving Earth. It’s all done pretty simply and directly.

With both a unique sense of verbal and physical humour and a sense of typical bush logic, Benny shows how and what it takes to survive the African bush … and in turn how to ensure the survival of the African bush.

Respect nature and reap the awards. Disrespect it and soon we’ll have a disaster on our hands.

Voss told me in a previous interview that he chose 14 venues to spread the word.

Last year it opened at the National Arts Festival Makhanda, where it won two Standard Bank Ovation Awards and he has been spreading the message across the country from destinations as diverse as McGregor, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban.

He says: “I am closely involved with the Lebombo Leopard – Human

Conflict Survey in Mkuze, in northern Zululand. A big part of this project is to raise money to set cameras to monitor leopard movement in the area after two children were taken by these cats on the reserve boundary.

“My interest is not so much conserving pristine bush, as conserving the line between humans and nature. These boundaries are critical... The theme of the show is based around saving the leopard and there are donation boxes for the project at every show.

“Every single cent in those boxes goes towards the initiative. At the moment we are raising on average R1 000 a show and I have nearly 100 shows this year. So, R100 000 is my target.” runs at the Baxter until January 18. Booking can be made at Webtickets or Pick n Pay stores.