BUNCH OF ANIMALS

The sergeant who appeared to live in the small prefabricated box at the gate was actually a staff sergeant, the rank they gave you in the Permanent Force of the SADF when you had been there long enough to prove you were useless at absolutely everything. He was lanky and clumsy and grizzled by too much sun. His face was a Martian surface of craters and broken veins.

He hated soutpiele, moffies and kaffirs, but not always in that order. Since he wasn’t technically allowed to shoot any of them, he shot everything else, gemsbokke, blesbokke, springbokke, impala, eland, warthogs, baboons, leopards, kudus, klipspringers, dassies, ratels, bushbabies, fish-eagles, cormorants, leguans, mongooses, jackals, hyenas, vultures, crocodiles and caracals.

If you want to know why there was so much game around Greefswald in 1971 you only have to open Google Earth and go to 22 degrees 12’55 South and 29 degrees 21’35 East. The thing that looks like a black mamba is the Limpopo River, running from west to east. That whitish scar coming down from the north is the Shashi River that separates Botswana from Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia in those days. Greefswald is on the southern side of the Limpopo exactly below the point of confluence.

Most of the year the Limpopo is more of a beach than a river. And the Shashi, as you can see, is just a very wide beach with a thin trickle down the middle. Farms are evident on the South African side, but they weren’t there in 1971. A new dam has been built about ten miles to the east.

But look at the vast uncultivated tracts of bush and scrub north of the Limpopo, on both sides of the Shashi. This was paradise for all those animals that hadn’t been corralled into the game parks in the east and the west, and maybe it still is. And for water they would come down to the banks of the Limpopo, less than a rifle shot from Greefswald.

Every now and then, during the course of that year, the big brass would come from Pretoria in jeeps and black Mercedes Benz limousines. They would shoot buck with machine guns and party around a massive braai until the early hours of the morning. We could smell the charcoal and burning kudu steaks from the top of Greefswald koppie. A few days later, after they had gone, we had to go down to the river and clean up everything that hadn’t been eaten by the vultures.

I’ve look very hard at the image on Google Earth but I can’t make out any signs of the camp. The resolution is desperately poor, like my memory.

Who will help me describe it?