South Africa's Hope

by Ginny Mikita

With downcast eyes and showing no interest, the armed South African National Park officer, his skin the color of charcoal, rich and glistening from the heat, reviewed our camp reservations and waved us through Malelane Gate, the southernmost entrance point to Krueger National Park, a five million acre wildlife refuge.

And for the first time since setting foot in South Africa, I felt safe.

Safe from random acts of violence—carjackings, muggings and other brutal responses to years of oppression. Safe from the painful reality of AIDS‚ ravishment of an entire continent, leaving orphans too numerous to comprehend. Safe from the sights of township shanties, their roofs secured by discarded car tires, crammed together on muddy slopes without running water or electricity—“housing” for black South African families. Safe from the awareness of the color of my skin, tinted with Apartheid shame.

Now I needed only contend with several thousand wild carnivorous creatures.

I had to come to Africa for two reasons. First, to visit one of my dearest and most courageous girlfriends, Betsy, who had left her “successful” life in Minneapolis behind in search of meaning and was teaching in a Zulu orphanage. Second, to fulfill a life-long dream of seeing God’s foremost gallery of creation—the non-human inhabitants of the sub-Saharan plains.

Upon landing first in Johannesburg and, ultimately, Durban, it was clear to me my proposed experience was far removed from what Spirit had in store for me in the coming days. For what I experienced during the next ten days was a country and its people ravaged by years of oppression, violence and disease—and with it an enveloping atmosphere of danger I had never experienced.

The contrast in Krueger was profound and, like a rainbow, a reminder of God’s promise of unceasing love and beauty.

Each morning of our stay, Betsy and I set out early from camp in her old, quick-to-overheat Mercedes, “Madge,” dressed in our PJs and winter hats (South African mornings are cold), coffee and binoculars in hand. Without fail, God filled the sky, using the deepest, richest colors from His palette, providing a perfect backdrop for the sun’s entrance on the horizon, an entrance the sun has been making since the Ancient of Days.

Herds of perfectly-striped zebras joyfully thundered across the plains. Statuesque brown on buff patterned giraffes browsed from tree to tree, with tiny birds, yellow and red-billed oxpeckers, grooming their sparse manes. Elephant mothers and babies, “nursery herds,” lumbered slowly along, allowing us time to appreciate their absolute, almost prehistoric beauty.

Warthogs, with their long curved tusks protruding from their huge, flattened heads, contentedly rooted around in the dirt. Despite being the poster children for “Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder,” they were not rushing to the nearest plastic surgeons to correct any of nature’s “mistakes”—they were simply being who they were created to be, warts and all.

The second night, we hired an armed guide to lead us into the darkness. As night fell, under silver glitter-filled skies marked by the Southern Cross, made famous by Crosby, Stills and Nash, an unseen animal and insect choir, as if on signal, began its clamorous chorus.

As we drove, we spotted a river hippopotamus, weighing in at a sprite 3,000 pounds, “hiding” from our view. Taking cue from Winnie the Pooh, he forced his huge head into a bush, mooning us with his very large, and still, behind.

Then, in what amounted to be one of the highlights of our bush experience, we had the rare opportunity to observe cheetahs mating within five yards of our open-air jeep. When our thirty-something, native to the bush, guide realized what we were witnessing, he could not stop exclaiming, “Oh, my God!”

Cheetahs communicate with loud, bird-like chirping sounds to one another. We sat in the darkness for about 30 minutes, listening and occasionally turning on a low-intensity flashlight to follow the movements of the male as he searched for his soon-to-be mate. When the two found one another, they gently wrestled, purring all the while. The male eventually mounted her, as she lay in the brush on her stomach, and, in just moments, the two went their separate ways.

I had arrived in South Africa just days after the ten-year anniversary of the country’s first democratic election marking the end of Apartheid. Bishop Desmond Tutu writes about his service on the first-ever tribunal charged with hearing full confessions from those who had committed unspeakable atrocities. In the end, he queries, “God does have a sense of humor. Who in their right minds could ever have imagined South Africa to be an example of anything but the most ghastly awfulness? We South Africans were the unlikeliest lot and that is precisely why God has chosen us.”

Perhaps it is also true God chose South Africa to be the site of one of His finest creation displays. For in the midst of such historical and continuing tragedy, life abounds in all its glory.

Ginny K. Mikita is an attorney in Rockford, MI, and practices with her husband and law partner, Bob Kruse. A graduate of Notre Dame Law School, she was honored in 1998 as Lawyer of the Year by Michigan Lawyers Weekly for her animal protection work. She is the mother of two. Contact her at ginnymikita@hotmail.com or 616.866.1218.