This is only a story by Nadine Gordimer, but it is so true to life, so well told, and so important that I summarise it here. The Kruger Park in South Africa is advertised as the Ultimate Safari, the highest experience in the wild-life tourism of our days. Here is another experience through the Park to open our eyes to the “ultimate problem” of our times.

That night our mother went to the shop and she didn’t come back. Ever. What happened? I don’t know. My father also had gone away one day and never came back; but he was fighting in the war. We didn’t know where to go. Then the people of the war, those the government calls bandits although here they say they are not that, came to our village. We heard people screaming and running. We were afraid even to run, without our mother to tell us where. I am the middle one, the girl, and my little brother clung against my stomach with his arms round my neck and his legs round my waist like a baby monkey to its mother. All night my first-born brother kept in his hand a broken piece of wood from one of our burnt house-poles. It was to save himself if the bandits found him.

The next day when the sun was going down, our grandmother and grandfather came. Someone from our village had told them we children were alone, our mother had not come back. They took us to their place. Our mother never came. While we were there our grandmother had no food for us, no food for our grandfather and herself. Our grandmother took us to look for wild spinach but everyone else in her village did the same and there wasn’t a leaf left. So they decided we would go away. We wanted to go where there were no bandits and there was food. We were glad to think there must be such a place; away. 

To get there we had to go through the Kruger Park. We knew about the Kruger Park. A kind of whole country of animals – elephants, lions, jackals, hyenas, hippos, crocodiles, all kinds of animals – where white people go to look at the animals. We went in a group and a man was leading us, but we were tired. He told us we had to take a long way to get round the fence, which he explained would kill you, roast off your skin the moment you touched it, like the wires high up on poles that give electric light in our towns. But in one place we had to cross the wires. He got us through and no one was hurt. We found a dead monkey and wanted to cook and eat it, but the man told us we were already inside the park and could not make a fire because the wardens would come and send us back. He said we must move like animals among the animals, away from the roads, away from the white people’s camps.

We saw the elephants curling their trunks round the red leaves of the Mopane trees and stuffing them into their mouths, with babies leaning against their mothers. They passed very slowly because elephants are too big to need to run from anyone. When it was very hot during the day we would find lions lying asleep. They were the colour of the dry grass and we didn’t see them at first but the man did, and he led us back a long way round. I wanted to lie down like the lions. My little brother was getting thin but he was very heavy on my back.

We walked at night as well as by day. We could see the fires where the white people were cooking in the camps and we could smell the smoke and the meat. The wind brought voices in our own language from the compounds where the people who work in the camps live. A woman among us wanted to go to them at night and ask them to help us. The man who led us had told us that we must keep out of the way of our people who worked at the Kruger Park; if they helped us they would lose their work. If they saw us, all they could do was pretend we were not there; they had seen only animals.

We stopped to sleep for a little while in the nights. We were tired, so tired. My first-born brother and the man had to lift our grandfather from stone to stone where we found places to cross the rivers. Our grandmother is strong but her feet were bleeding. We ate some wild fruit and our stomachs ran. Our grandfather went off into the elephant grass to be on his own. He was not coming back, and the man told us to hurry up. We had to keep up, the man who led us kept telling us, we must catch up, but we asked him to wait for our grandfather. So everybody waited for our grandfather to catch up. We went to look for him in the elephant grass, but he was so small and the grass so high, and we didn’t see him. We called him softly and stayed in the long grass all night and continued looking for him the next day. I saw those ugly birds with hooked beaks and plucked necks flying round and round above us. My grandmother was seeing them too. In the afternoon the man told us we must move on, or all would die.

Our grandmother said nothing. We watched the other people getting up to leave. Tears came out of my eyes onto my hands. My grandmother got up, she took my little brother and swung him onto her back, tied him in her cloth and said, Come. So we left the place with the long grass. Left behind. We went with the others and the man who led us. We started to go away, again.

*

There’s a very big tent, bigger than a church or a school, tied down to the ground. I didn’t understand that was what it would be, when we got there, away. I saw a thing like that the time our mother took us to the town because she heard some of our people were there and she wanted to ask them if they knew where our father was. In that tent, people were praying and singing. This one is blue and white like that one but it’s not for praying and singing, we live in it with other people who’ve come from our country. Sister from the clinic says we’re two hundred without counting the babies, and we have new babies, some were born on the way through the Kruger Park.

Inside, even when the sun is bright it’s dark and there’s a kind of whole village in there. Instead of houses each family has a little place closed off with sacks or cardboard from boxes. When it rains the small kids play in the mud. My little brother doesn’t play. Our grandmother takes him to the clinic when the doctor comes on Mondays. Sister says there’s something wrong with his head, she thinks it’s because we didn’t have enough food at home. Because of the war. Because our father wasn’t there. And then because he was so hungry in the Kruger Park. He likes just to lie about on our grandmother all day, on her lap or against her somewhere, and he looks at us and looks at us. He wants to ask something but you can see he can’t. If I tickle him he may just smiles.

When we arrived we were like him – my first-born brother and I. I can hardly remember. The people took us here where you have to sign when you’ve come through the Kruger Park. We sat on the grass and everything was muddled. One Sister came and brought us a special powder. She said we must mix it with water and drink it slowly. We tore the packets open with our teeth and licked it all up, it stuck round my mouth and I sucked it from my lips and fingers. Some children vomited. Another Sister took us by the arm and then stuck a needle in it. Every time my eyes dropped closed I thought I was walking, the grass was long, I saw the elephants, I didn’t know we were away.

Now that we’ve been in the tent so long – I have turned eleven and my little brother is nearly three although he is so small, only his head is big, he’s not come right in it yet. Some people have dug up the bare ground around the tent and planted beans and mealies and cabbage. No one is allowed to look for work in the towns but some of the women have found work in the village and can buy things. Our grandmother is still strong and carries bricks for people who build houses.

Some white people came to take photographs of our people living in the tent – they said they were making a film, I’ve never seen what that is though I know about it. A white woman squeezed into our space and asked our grandmother questions which were told to us in our language by someone who understands the white woman’s.
How long have you been living like this?
In this tent, two years and one month.
And what do you hope for the future?
Nothing. I’m here.
Do you hope to go back to Mozambique – to your own country?
I will not go back.
But when the war is over – don’t you want to go home?

Our grandmother looked away and spoke: There is nothing; no home.

Why does our grandmother say that? Why? I’ll go back through the Kruger Park. After the war, when there are no bandits any more, our mother will be waiting for us. And maybe when we left our grandfather, he was only left behind, he found his way somehow, slowly, through the Kruger Park, and he’ll be there waiting for us.

Nadine Gordimer, The Ultimate Safari, Telling Tales by Nadine Gordimer, Bloomsbury, London 2004, p. 269 (abridged).

(My eyes are wet.)