Ian and Magqubu minding the nightly fire to protect against predators. Photo: http://ift.tt/1Ie5YmZ .
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Ian Player and colleagues viewing wildlife on a Wilderness Leadership School trail. Photo: http://ift.tt/1Ie5YmZ .
Nicola Graydon
5th December 2014
Like the Zulu warriors who cleanse themselves of the killing they had to perform in battle, I found my healing there in wild nature. Africa had awakened in my soul and set me on a new path.
When last I saw Ian Player speaking in London he brought us all to rapt attention by perfectly imitating the shrill call of the fish eagle.
Soon after that I went to interview him at his home on the outskirts of Durban in South Africa, to find two zebra standing between me and his front door - a fitting obstacle for a man who has done so much for wild nature. It was 2006 and his legacy seemed assured.
While Ian Player has achieved many victories for the environment - among them rescuing the spectacular St Lucia wetlands from a mining consortium - his name will always be synonymous for saving the critically endangered white rhino from extinction in the 1960's.
'Operation Rhino' was one of the most successful conservation operations in history: the ground-breaking capture and translocation program took a tiny and critically endangered population of just 600 white rhino from a game reserve in Kwa-Zulu Natal and expanded it throughout Africa and the rest of the world.
By the time I met him, there were over 17,000 white rhino in nine African countries and nearly 800 in zoos and safari parks around the world. "We can honestly say that as far as the Southern White Rhino is concerned it is as safe a species as it is possible to be", he told me at the time.
Then, in 2008, a new slaughter began
After a decade of quiet - with just a dozen or so rhino being taken a year - poaching suddenly started rising again. In 2008, numbers killed leapt to 83; then to 122 in 2009, finally soaring to 1,000 last year. Already this year, some 500 have been lost. And dozens of game rangers have been shot trying to protect them.
For Ian Player it's a recurring nightmare. A life's work saving a species and, just at the moment when you think you can put your feet up and die happy, the slaughter starts to happen all over again. Only this time it's happening with helicopters, sophisticated tracking devises and semi-automatic weapons.
His distress at this drastic turn of events is palpable. "The white rhino is a really decent wild animal that has suffered greatly at the hands of man", he says on the phone from South Africa. "It is such a docile, innocent creature that even in death has been instrumental in securing wild land. We have to stop the killing."
"As human beings we have a duty to protect the natural world and the white rhino is an iconic symbol. It's one of the oldest species on our earth. The world has to wake up. We're losing our heritage."
At 87, Ian Player's mind is sharp as a tack but his body is broken from his days of rhino capture. Darting them with anaesthetic was one thing. It was administering the antidote that was the dangerous part.
"You had to climb onto their head in order to grab an ear to raise a vein and get the needle in. Because it had such a rapid effect one couldn't get off in time so one was flicked off like a fly", he chuckles. "I can hardly walk now but it was an honour to have been able to serve the rhino."
Call of destiny
Back in 2008 when the poaching began again, Player was tempted to leave his crusade to younger men but one night he had a dream that a baby rhino came into his room, climbed up onto his bed and laid its head on his shoulder. "So there it was. The rhino had come to ask for my help so I am quite literally involved up to my neck."
While Player's name will always be synonymous with this one species, his mission is far broader. He is passionate about the very existence of wilderness. His concern is that once we lose the iconic creatures of the wild - the elephant, the rhino, the lion, the tiger - we will lose the wild itself.
He has lived much of his life in wild places and can perfectly imitate dozens of birdcalls and other animal sounds. The wild lives in his blood and he believes that it can be our salvation as a species; that our lives quite literally depend on it.
His relationship with the wild began when he fulfilled a promise he had made to himself as a young soldier on the eve of the final push into the Po Valley in Italy in 1944: if he survived he would canoe from Pietermaritzburg to Durban.
When he came back broken by war and without prospects, he endured the mines and other odd jobs until he remembered his pledge. And, in 1950, he embarked on this challenging 120-kilometre journey along the Msundusi and Umgeni Rivers, travelling alone, sleeping on the ground at night and experiencing nature in its most primal form. It would change his life.
"The land of the thousand hills was sparsely populated then so day after day I paddled alone in those deep gorges, sometimes caught in thunder and lightening storms that swept the rivers. I had entered a new world. Like the Zulu warriors who cleanse themselves of the killing they had to perform in battle, I found my healing there in wild nature. Africa had awakened in my soul and set me on a new path."
And so he became a game ranger for the Natal Parks Board and thereafter devoted his life to wilderness.
A spirit on the wind ...
A couple of years later, in the dark heart of an apartheid South Africa, he found his mentor, Magquebu Ntombela, a black elder ranger who captured his young mind and led him into a profound - and deeply African - relationship with the environment that also came to include an understanding of its role in the psyche of humanity.
Ntombela was his "midwife", Player is fond of saying, who birthed him into Africa after six generations of ancestral presence on the continent.
Ntombela, a descendent of the great Zulu chiefs, Shaka and Dingaan, was illiterate but understood nature in a way that it is difficult for a compartmentalized Western mind to grasp. He read nature like we read books.
He sensed the presence of animals and birds in the bush; sniffed the change of weather on the wind. Animals were his "brothers" and "sisters" and the natural world was a sacred being that demanded respect and reverence. He died in 1993 but Ian Player never fails to greet the bronze bust of his friend that sits in his hall.
Together they set up wilderness trails around South Africa taking anyone from CEO's to township kids into the veldt. And it was on Ntombela's suggestion that Player set up the first Wilderness Congress sparking a global wilderness consciousness movement.
"Everyone who comes to the wilderness is changed by it", says Player. "No one who sleeps on the ground underneath the blaze of southern stars and hears the roar of the lion, the coughing of the leopard, the howl of the hyena, the scream of the elephant and smells the smoke of wild wood burning is ever the same again."
The transformational power of nature
In some ways, Ian Player is classic 'old school' white African - all discipline and starched khaki trousers - but he also walks to a different drum. He's a longtime Jungian and listens to the messages he receives in his dreams.
And, amidst scientists and politicians, hard-bitten activists and safari elites, he's unafraid to talk about the "spirituality" inherent in the natural world; of how the human "soul" can be restored by the experience of wilderness and why Africa itself has a unique ability to heal the ills of modern humanity. He has seen too many people transformed on his wilderness trails.
"We don't do anything; the landscape does it for us. We are walking in an ancient landscape where early man walked so it is deeply imprinted on our soul. We evolved here alongside the megafauna. This is a connection with a very, very ancient, primeval part of ourselves: the interior landscape meets the exterior" - he claps his hands - " and the two click. I've watched it happen and it is a transformational experience - and a uniquely African one."
"I've had spiritual experiences in the Sierras in America or the Cairngorms or the Algonquians and the Himalaya but this is a different story. This is why people come to Africa."
Player does not mean a safari experience with fancy cutlery, although he thinks this is a good entry point. He means the wild wild where you walk, use canoes and animal transport; where you camp around fires and listen to the stories of local people and the sounds of the night:
"Just five days will take you back 50,000 years, and in those few days you can grasp the primary tenant of ecology - that everything is connected to everything else."
Sell the horn stocks to reduce the pressure and finance conservation!
The surge in poaching coincided with a crushing global recession, a rising demand for rhino horn from a burgeoning middle class in the Far East and a proliferation of splinter terror groups in Africa raising funds through the black market trade in ivory and rhino horn.
At this rate, the southern white rhino could be extinct by 2022. Its cousins, the northern white and western Black Rhino have both been declared extinct in the last decade.
Ian Player is working on various fronts to ensure their survival: he is involved in plans to establish a population in Australia which has ideal conditions for rhino and he is lobbying various groups to encourage the trade in legal rhino horn.
"We are sitting on tons of rhino horn that have been accumulated through natural mortality which could be sold in a regulated and careful way. Why would one kill or risk being killed if one could buy it quite easily?" And, he argues, the funds raised could go into much need conservation in game reserves around the country.
Scientists have also advocated farming rhino to harvest their horns - which grow about two pounds bigger per year - at minimal risk to the animals itself. But experts at WWF and CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) believe that legalizing trade will result in more killing not less.
Meanwhile, as the arguments go back and forth, the slaughter continues with two or three rhino killed every single day.