The Moosual Suspects

Here's a startling display of insensitivity from today's Daily Voice that had me clutching my sides:

A Cape Flats community is living in fear of a gang of killer cows that roams the streets.

The hamburgers-on-hooves have already killed an old man.

And the community says the cops need to MOOve in before another person dies.

The Daily Voice has HERD that authorities find themselves on the horns of a dilemma.

But they say they know who is behind the COWardly attack so no STEAKouts are necessary.

The attack on Kebone Lahala, 59, happened as he was returning from the shops on Saturday.

But little did he know that he was being watched by cows with MOOder on their minds.

The cows stood motionless, waiting for Kebone to get closer.

As he tried to pass the grazing herd, they turned their attention to their pray. There was nowhere for him to HIDE.

The ringleader, a huge bull, rushed in and gored the old man in the leg.

Terrified neighbours watched in horror as the cows attacked in a rare, BEEFY display of violence.

Neighbours say they battled for at least 10 minutes to get the four beastly bovines off the man's trampled body.

But the cows refused to MOOve.

By the time the cows were calmed down, Kebone was dead.

His daughter Thabisa Kosana, 23, says a neighbour called her with the news and told her to get home CHOP, CHOP.

The young woman thought the neighbour had made a miSTEAK when they told her that her father had been the victim of an UDDERLY senseless drive-by hoofing.

"I thought they were saying a boy had hurt my father," she says.

"Only later I understood that it had something to do with cows.

"I told my mother we had to get home right away."

The mourge van arrived hours later and took Kebone's body away.

The bloodsoaked spot where he was trampled is now covered with sand.

When the Daily Voice visited the area yesterday, the killer cows were still at the scene of the crime -- brazenly grazing as if nothing had happened.

In a BULLISH move, they smelled the spot and tried to get to their victim's blood by pushing the sand away.

The bull then peed and kakked on the spot as the widow Nosake looked on in UDDER disgust.

Neighbours in the Malawi informal settlement say the cows are a menace.

"They move through the shacks and last week they charged a boy," says one woman.

The owner of the cows does not live at the camp.

The family have not tried MILKING the owner for money for the funeral but he has offered a contribution.

Pastor Tommy Klein, the chairperson of the Police Forum, says cows should not be allowed that close to people's homes.

"There are bylaws about these things," he says.

Klein says the cows need to go BEEFore they hurt anyone else.

For closeups on these pages and for my collection of more Daily Voice stories, click here.

A Thanksgiving Braai

Happy Thanksgiving!

Katie's parents, sister and her friend Myra have been in town for the last several days, and we got to cook them a traditional South African Thanksgiving feast tonight. We did not let the fact that they do not actually celebrate Thanksgiving in South Africa stand in our way of having a feast.

We combined the best of Thanksgiving cuisine--too much stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and turkey--with the best of South African cuisine--the braai. That meant we grilled a turkey breast to accompany some boerwors (that's sausage, only better) and lamb cutlets and lamb ribs on a traditional South African Weber grill.

We let our neighbors, Marcus and Laura, in on this new tradition too. They left looking both bloated and shocked at the amount of food the rest of us ate.

This was what the traditional feast looked like on the grill:



There's a small photo album from today on the web here.

N2 Adventure

There are supposedly few places more dangerous in Cape Town than the N2 highway at night.

If you believe what you hear, breaking down on that highway is akin to a death sentence. Armed bands of robbers roam the road, looking for hapless drivers stranded on the shoulder. Then they beat them up, take their stuff, and leave them for dead.

That's the conventional wisdom, anyway. The conventional wisdom tends to be a little exaggerated here, but there's no escaping the fact that a lot of people believe it... and their belief has to be based on some bedrock of truth.

Even if the truth is buried very deep beneath the bluster.

So when our beloved Swamp Thing ran out of gas on the N2 a few weeks ago after I had picked my brother up from the airport one evening, I did a quick calculation. One of us was going to have to go for gas. The other was going to have to stay with the car. And since I knew where the closest gas station was, and my brother didn't, it was pretty obvious who would be doing what.

Even as the car was coughing and sputtering to a stop on the shoulder, I was debating the merits of sharing the conventional wisdom with my brother.

Dave had been in the country for a week by then, and had just returned from Joburg, and was starting to gather that some people here are a little nervous about crime.

But did he need to know that he would be standing watch over a car on a much-maligned stretch of road? Did he need to know that some people here would advise that we just abandon the car, expect to never see it again, and file an insurance claim the next day?

I made the unilateral decision that he did not.

And then I left him there.

If anyone has seen a blonde guy who's about my height, or a white VW rabbit, in the vicinity of Mitchell's Plain, could you shoot me an e-mail?

Just kidding.

What actually happened was, I made the decision to leave him there, and through the teamwork of a large group of strangers and a critical contribution from a good friend, we managed to get gas, get back to the car, and get home in one piece.

First, a woman stopped for me the instant I started to walk away from the car to the next offramp--which happened to be our usual exit. (We broke down less than a mile from home.)

She was VERY kind, and gave me a lift almost all the way to our flat. She was perfectly willing to drive me all the way to the front door, but I made her drop me where she could turn around easily.

Then I got our neighbor, Marcus, to drive me to a gas station so I could get a gallon or two of petrol. The gas station was useless: they didn't sell canisters to hold the gas and didn't know where to get any, but Marcus had anticipated this, and he had grabbed his green watering can from the kitchen for us to fill up with gasoline.

Then we drove back to Dave, with me holding the watering can on my knees.

Dave was still there! And there was a man standing with him! And the car was there too!

Marcus and I drove up from the opposite direction, so we had to park and cross the not-so-busy highway on foot. When we get there, Dave tells us that four cars had stopped in the 20 minutes I had been gone. None had been packed with armed-to-the-teeth robbers who were looking to do him harm. Instead, all of them were nice people who wanted to make sure he was getting his petrol problems sorted out.

Let's be clear: this did not surprise me in the least. But I think it would surprise a few of the more crime-conscious people in this country.

The man who stayed was an off-duty cop, who filled Dave's head with his own interpretation of the current status of South Africa's race relations. And though Dave might have been inclined, in a different forum, to quiz him on his beliefs a little more thoroughly, the cop was nonetheless a very good sport, a very dedicated police officer, and a man who clearly had a very strong streak of altruism running through him.

He stayed until we emptied our watering can into the car and got it started again, and then he wished us a good night. There were handshakes all around.

Then we went home and drank some much-deserved wine. Dave, our dedicated car guard who endured the whole thing without uttering a peep of complaint, got the first glass.

There's one postscript to this story: Dave and I were driving around in downtown Cape Town the next day, and it wasn't until we were practically past them that the two people strolling on the side of the road registered on my brain. They were walking with thumbs outstretched, looking forlorn. And they were carrying an empty green watering can.

I didn't stop.

Passion of the Anti Christ

I haven't put up a cover from the Daily Voice lately... but this one was too good to pass up. Enjoy.

(If you are a regular reader of this blog but aren't sure why I haven't been putting up Voice stories lately, e-mail me and I'll fill you in.)

Sneak Peak

The newspapers here can be pretty cutthroat.

This past week, word surfaced that South Africa's former deputy president was under investiagtion for allegedly raping an acquaintance, and as the story came out in dribs and drabs, each paper seemed to have a different take on the news.

By today, it was time for the weekend newspaper that had the scoop to crow about their victory... and get snarky with the rival paper that hadn't fought fair.

From today's Sunday Times:

After sneaking a peek at copies of the Sunday Times running off the presses we share with them in Sauer Street, Johannesburg, (something they're not really supposed to do), the Sunday Independent's editor rushed upstairs to change his front-page story. His newspaper ran a report denying "reports" that, technically, had still to be published.

The Sunday Independent's reporter even quoted "an ex-journalist" to call our report "rubbish". However, he failed to remind readers that this ex-journalist, one Ranjeni Munusamy, "who is assisting the Zuma camp", left us under a cloud two years ago.

Strangest of all: although the Sunday Times did not identify the woman who complained to the police about a rape, the Sunday Independent named someone who said she had not been raped.

The article is available in it's entirely here.

Safari Stories III: Invasion of the Pachyderms

For the start of our safari adventure, click here. The second installment is here. Links to all our pictures are here.

There were no fences around the private lodge where we stayed during our little adventure to the bush. Urban-dwelling South Africans seem to have a love affair with fences, but the rural ones... not so much.

This had a few unexpected repercusions. When we went to our fancy little personal lodge/hotel room at night, we sometimes got an escort from a ranger.

A ranger who walked jauntily alongside us with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Just in case.

And the lack of fences meant there were always little monkeys around in the trees, and warthogs strolling through the grounds, and antelope-y creatures eating the grass.

And it meant that when we got up one morning, they told us that a leopard had been spotted on the lawn in front of the reservations hut.

And elephants came by and munched on the trees one afternoon.

The elephants were a bit of a nuisance that day, actually. They snacked for a long while on what must have been a particularly yummy tree right outside the door to my brother's room. He was trapped inside for an hour or so while the rest of us sat on the deck chairs by the pool, ordered beers from Henri the omnipresent bartender, and snapped away with our cameras.

Have you ever gotten to the point where you were tired of looking at massive mammals in the wild? I didn't think such a point existed. But after staring at these guys for an hour or so, we eventually grew somewhat complacent to the fact that they were so close. And that was when Henri strolled down the hill and clapped and waved at them a bit so they would run off into the bush.

Henri wasn't a really big or intimidating guy. I don't know why the elephants listened to him. The last picture in this series is of him during the big showdown.

The manager and head ranger, John, actually spoke about the elephants as if they were a bit of an annoyance sometimes, the way people on Fire Island talk about the deer. The last morning, as we were leaving for our final game drive, we made a stop right outside the lodge grounds so that Richard, our tracker, could chase off another elephant that was exasperating John. This one was a gigantic bull elephant.

Poor Richard. Read this post for another tale involving Richard getting closer to an elephant than is strictly advised. Both stories of Richard being out there on the line for our sake bring back a great quote from an underappreciated Ivan Reitman movie called Evolution. The quote, uttered by Orlando Jones, was: "I've seen this movie. The black dude dies first."

Anyway, Richard dutifully hopped out and did a sort of circuitous approach toward the elephant, while John backed us all up in the safari truck to a safe(r) distance. Richard starts clapping, and the elephant backs away a little bit from the tree he'd been eating. But he doesn't want to give up his breakfast foliage just yet. So Richard picks up a fist-sized rock and bowls it toward him. The elephant doesn't like this. Richard does it again. The elephant hops back a bit--as much as an elephant can hop--while the rock skips toward him, and when it stops right near him, he takes an authoritative step forward and picks up the rock with his trunk. Then he sort of lobs it part of the way back to Richard.

They actually played this game a couple more times--once the elephant threw it to the side instead--while we sat in the truck and watched. My brother called it "bowling for elephant" and we tried to imagine a scoring system that might involve bonus points for rolling it between his legs. But then the elephant made a sort of false charge toward Richard. This set him running for a moment. But that was the last of it. When Richard clapped at him one more time, he turned and left his prized tree behind.

Safari Stories II: Katie's Snake Adventure

For the start of our safari adventure, click here. Links to all our pictures are here.

The summary of Katie's Great Snake Adventure doesn't sound too dramatic. It would go something like this: "Then there was the time that Katie nearly tripped over a snake on the way to our room."

But to understand the gravity of Katie's Great Snake Adventure, perhaps I should begin by saying that Katie is an admitted snake-o-phobic. She suffers from what I believe to be clinically diagnosable leglessslitheryreptilephobia.

In Brooklyn, there was a pet food store where the owner had a couple little footlong garden snakes as pets a couple blocks from where we lived on Seventh Avenue. Sometimes he would sit in front of his shop with his snake curled up around his neck or in his hand.

Needless to say, upon making this startling discovery, Katie never went into that pet food store again. There was another pet store slightly further away, and she went there instead. But her phobia demanded more of her than that. If Katie ever saw the owner of these dreaded snakes sitting out in front of his shop as we walked down the block, she would cross the street before ever getting close enough to know if he had his snake with him.

Katie suffers from this phobia so acutely that, before we left for our safari, she studied up on the snakes of southern Africa in a field guide we had in the apartment. Katie maintains this was just prudent preparation for our trip to the bush. She looked at the pictures of the snakes intently, and read about the habitats and habits of each of the deadly ones. By the time we left for our trip, she knew that the African Rock Python can eat a small antelope, that the Puff Adder travels in a straight line instead of a slither, and that the largest and deadliest of Africa's poisonous snakes, the Black Mamba, can do an eight-minute mile.

So when the moment came, and we were walking back from the lodge's office during our mid-day break, and we cut across the lawn in our flip-flops to our room, and Katie spotted the literal snake in the literal grass as it was beating a hasty retreat from us... well, she had a bit of credibility on her side when she uttered the startled words:

"Oh my God! That was a Black Mamba!"

I never saw it. It was too fast. But I saw the closest bush to us, about three feet away, as it shook when the snake went into hiding there. Katie says she and her unprotected ankles got within 18 inches or so.

To Katie's credit, she didn't freak out too much. She did immediately move so that I was between her and the bush, and then decide, conveniently, that she should be the one to alert the lodge's staff while I stood there and made sure our new friend didn't go anywhere. But she didn't freak out too much.

Later, though, Katie realized several things:

1. Pretty much the worst thing that could possibly happen--besides actually being bitten by Africa's deadliest snake--had happened;
2. She had survived;
3. She had acted rather well, given the circumstances;
4. That maybe her fear of snakes diminished just a bit as a result of the whole thing;

...and...

5. Despite number 4, she was not going to be wearing her flip-flops around the lodge for the remaineder of our visit.

Meanwhile, as she was coming to these conclusions while locked safely in our room, the rangers were literally beating the literal bushes. My dad was watching and came back mid-way through the process to give us an update.

"Yep," he said. "The rangers said it was a Black Mamba."

We got the full story from them that night. The fact that it turns out that their--and Katie's--initial impression about what type of snake it was turned out to be somewhat incorrect, and the fact that it was instead a harmless species called a variegated wolf snake, and the fact that this meant we were never in any danger, doesn't change the fact that Katie's fear of snakes really is slightly abated by the entire experience.

It was abated enough that she managed to get pretty close to our next reptilian visitor.



That one was classified by the rangers as a young African Rock Python.

Katie, with her extensive knowledge of the entire snake family, corroborated this identification.

Safari Stories

Imagine this: a herd of mother elephants and their clumsy kids is picking their way through the scrub, munching and playing and munching some more, and you're there parked right in the middle of them...



...You're sitting in an open-top four-wheel drive Range Rover. There are nine or ten other people there, including the ranger and the tracker.

The elephants just go on about their business, munching and strolling and munching, until they are literally eating a bush that is within inches of where you are sitting. And the elephant--a wild animal, not some semi-tame creature at the circus or the zoo--is just flat out ignoring you while you alternate between staring in awe and snapping away furiously with your camera.

It was repeated experiences just like those that led me to the conclusion that the people who run the game lodges around South Africa's Kruger National Park have to be using some sort of ancient dark magic.

I mean, there's no other explanation for how they are able to get so close to the wildest of the creatures in the animal kingdom so often, and have then look straight through you without ever seeming to notice.

Nearly all the animals--the lions, the buffalo, the zebras, the giraffes, the antelope--pretty much ignored us entirely, or treated us as a mild annoyance. Apparently, the animals see the vehicle as one big entity, without picking out the people inside. They're used to the Range Rover and know it poses no threat, so as we sat on the benches of this thing without doors or windows, we were at times just a few feet away from lions on the hunt, leopards devouring their dinner and elephants wrestling in a water hole.

The very first day that my parents, my brother, Katie and I got there, we were out on a game drive within an hour of arriving at our lodge. Katie and I pretty much dropped our bags, washed our faces and slapped on our herbal insect repellent we'd gotten from a South African doctor, and hopped in the Ranger Rover. Almost immediately, we saw a male and female lion napping on an open savannah. We looked at them for awhile while our guide told us about the male, who was trying to lay claim to the female's pride while already being the dominant male of another pride in another part of the game park. Then we drove off to see some other stuff, and when we came back to look at them again right after sunset, they were still napping away. Our ranger said something like: "They look like they're out cold, but just the slightest thing can snap them awake in a second."

And on cue, the male lion sits straight up and starts blinking. We've got a spotlight on him, but he acts like he can't even see us, which is a very fortunate thing, because we were probably 10 yards away. He looks around, and suddenly lets out a deafening roar at nothing in particular. It was so loud, the sound of it rattled in our chests. We could feel it reverberating even as he let out another roar, and then another, and then another....

And then he quiets down, blinks some more, and yawns. Without any further pretense, this massive animal gets up and strolls off into the night right past the Range Rover--close enough that we can see his muscles on his haunches--without ever glancing our way. We were left there with our hearts thumping, watching his tail as it swished back and forth just before he disappeared.

This was our first game drive. We had five more after that.

There were just a few times when the animals seemed to realize that we were of interest. The one that made me hold my breath happened the next morning.

We had all slapped on the mosquito spray again and piled into the Range Rover at 5:30 am and set off in a different direction from the night before. This time, we found a herd of elephants eating their way through the scrub. One young-ish elephant, who was about 10 feet tall, strolled right in front of the truck.

Then he stopped, and seemed to look at us again.

This was bad news for the tracker, who is a staff member from the game lodge who accompanied us on ever game drive. In addition to a ranger, each truck has one of these trackers who sits on a seat that's bolted to the hood of the car, right at the front. He literally rides above the front bumper and looks for evidence of where to find our next sighting.

So this young elephant turned, and looked at him. This was no longer the case of an elephant giving a casual glance to a big four-by-four. Now he was looking at the khaki-clad guy sitting in the bumper. The poor guy--Richard was his name--sat with his elbow propped on his knee, and his fist holding up his chin, while the elephant stood and studied him from no more than two feet away.

And all of us, of course, are sitting no more than a few feet further away than Richard is. We'd already seen enough demolished trees to know that this elephant, if he wanted, could lift any of us out of the Range Rover with his trunk. And we are entirely in the hands of our ranger, John, who is behind the wheel of the Ranger Rover and seems to fancy himself as some sort of elephant whisperer, and our tracker, Richard, who is rather compromised at the moment.

It got tenser. The elephant lifted up his trunk to within inches of where Richard was sitting.

It seemed like he was sniffing around, trying to figure out if this big metal lump he'd probably seen every day of his life was actually worth a closer look.

Richard, to his credit, seemed entirely unperturbed by this turn of events. He continued to sit there, with his chin on his fist, as the elephant held the end of his trunk right near his face.

The rest of us were somewhat less sanguine about this development. We all gasped, and then held our collective breath.

But then the moment was past, and he put his trunk down, sauntered off a bit, and began eating a little tree right next to us.

The ranger and the tracker said they'd never seen anything like that before. The ranger, John, said that the elephant might have smelled something new.

Katie and I blamed our herbal insect repellent, or "hippie bug spray," as we called it.

For every game drive after that, we slapped on twice as much.

See the post directly below this one for links to our photo albums. I'll have more stories from our later game drives in the coming days--and the tale of how Katie faced down a speeding snake--so be sure to check back. After that, we'll get back to our regularly scheduled programming, including some stories from the Daily Voice and a harrowing epic involving my brother and the dreaded N2 highway.

Safari Pictures Clearinghouse

We've spent the last several days compiling our safari pictures. You can view the highlights here, or the entire album here. You can see all our lion pictures in one place here, the giraffes here, the elephants here, and the leopards here. Also, the rhino and the mean-tempered, nasty looking Cape buffalo.

A handful of these were taken by my brother. More of his will be added in the days to come, and captions will be improved later as well.

Back from the Bush

We survived!

My parents took Katie and I on a wondeful safari for four days at a private game lodge outside of South Africa's Kruger national park. We got back last night, and we have about 300 pictures to prove we were there. The entire experience was incredible.

We saw lions, giraffes, elephants, zebras, warthogs, leopards, monkeys, eagles and much, much more, including about 4,391 types of antelope--the snack food of the bushveld. Sometimes we saw more than one species at the same time, and in those instances, one was usually stalking, attacking or eating the other.

We're going to have links to our photo albums from the trip up on this site in a couple of days, but I figured I could throw up a few of our best ones right now as a preview.

But check back on Tuesday or Wednesday for the full story--including the amazing tale of how Katie overcame her phobia of snakes--and for all of our pictures. It'll be hard to put into words the experience of sitting in an open vehicle in the dark and seeing a lioness on the hunt appear out of nowhere and stalk by within three feet of you... but we'll try.

For now, here are a few of our favorites to tide you over.

The Hedge

Katie and I insisted on a slight detour to one corner of the Kirstenbosch grounds the other day to examine a rather plain looking hedge. We insisted on this because, well, we're both history nerds. This particular hedge was planted on that spot in 1660 on the orders of Jan Van Riebeeck, and it represented the first border between the Cape Colony and the local population, who were called the Khoikhoi.

Van Riebeeck, the first leader of the Dutch settlers who established an outpost at Cape Town, had been ordered not to interact with the Khoikhoi, except to barter for meat. So he told them there would never be any problems as long as they stayed on their side of the hedge.

The Khoikhoi are all dead now.

I suppose this hedge at the top of a hill in Kirstenbosch can be interpreted as a whimsical first attempt at brokering some kind of impasse with the people who had an earlier claim on the land.

Or, if you're me, you could view it with a mixture of deep despair and dark amusement, given the brutality and broken promises that came later.

No matter how you look at it, the appearance of this innocuous almond hedge amid the fantastic flowers and amazing plants at the botanical gardens is a pretty funny contrast.