Françoise Malby-Anthony encounters a herd of elephants after her husband’s death, Thula Thula Private Game Reserve, Zululand, South Africa.
In the middle of this chaos, at seven o’clock on Friday morning, 2 March 2012, I received a call telling me that my indestructible husband had died of a heart attack during the night. I didn’t believe it. Lawrence had survived war-torn Baghdad and savage Congolese violence, and now I wouldn’t be fetching him from Durban International Airport and bringing him home. I sank onto the bed, numb with shock.
The game reserve fell silent in disbelief.
‘It was as if somebody switched off the plugs of life,’ said Mabona, our lodge manageress.
Like a robot, I kept going. The storm was still raging and the Kwazulu-Natal emergency services had warned us that it was heading our way. I made sure the guests were safe and instructed the rangers to secure the tented camp with extra ropes and wire. Then Mother Nature gave us an incredible reprieve and Cyclone Irene veered offshore. The crisis was over. We let out a collective groan of relief and prepared to stare grief in the face.
How was I going to survive without Lawrence at Thula Thula? It felt impossible, for me and for our staff. Many thought I would take refuge in my native France. He and I had run the game reserve as a rock-solid team. Lawrence, or Lolo, as I called him, took on everything to do with the animals and their safety, and I handled hospitality, marketing and finance. We learned on the hop, adapted to things we knew nothing about and simply tackled each out-of-the-blue challenge that flew our way. Like adopting a herd of emotionally deranged elephants. What were we thinking?
But we managed, more than manged, with courage and craziness and plenty of laughter. We loved each other and we loved the oasis we had built in the African bush. Protecting animals, especially elephant and rhinos, was the focus of our life together.
And now, from one day to the next, my partner in everything was gone. It was unthinkable, and because he’d been away when it happened, his death didn’t feel real. Word spread like bush fire, and emails, calls and messages poured in from around the world. It wasn’t just my grief; it was everyone’s grief. Still, it didn’t sink in. I kept expecting a call from him.
‘Frankie, I’m at the airport! Where are you?’
I stumbled through that first weekend in a daze. Very early on Sunday morning, I received a call informing me that the herd had surfaced and were on the move.
‘They’re heading south,’ crackled the radio. ‘Direction main house.’
That was a surprise. The last sighting of them had been during the worst of the storm alerts, when they had been a good twelve hours’ walk from us – and remember, that’s twelve hours powered by mammoth muscles. Now they were a mere fifteen minutes away. But to be honest, I really didn’t give it any more thought. Life was a blur and I could hardly breathe for the things I had to do. Our guests didn’t know what had happened and somehow I had to keep the lodge running for them.
Promise, a good-looking game ranger as skilled at rustling up a cocktail as tracking an elusive animal, was the first to see the herd and almost drove into them. They were right at the gate to the main house and reception compound, making it impossible for him to drive through. He immediately noticed something odd.
‘Even the bulls are here,’ he reported.
Bachelor elephants tend to stay away from the others, or, if they are close by, they stay out of sight. But that morning, all twenty-one members of the herd jostled about at the gate, clearly agitated. This was highly unusual because their visits were normally so serene.
Sometimes, if Lawrence had returned from being away, they would pop by, mill about and graze patiently while they waited for him to come out and say hello. Or if there was a baby to introduce, they would stand along the fence, radiating peace, and gently nudge the new arrival forward to meet him.
The Sunday after he died was completely different. They were restless and pacing. They walked in a disorganized jumble to the front of the house, stayed there for a few minutes then shouldered their way to the back of the house again, ever grazing, always moving.
‘They were disturbed but I had no idea why. I thought maybe they had had a run-in with poachers. When I got closer, I saw the telltale streaks of stress on the sides of their faces, even the babies’,’ Promise said afterwards, rubbing his own cheek in amazement.
An elephant’s temporal gland sits between its eye and ear, and secretes liquid when the animal is stressed, which can create the mistaken impression that it is crying. The elephants at our entrance weren’t crying, but the dark moist lines running down their massive cheeks showed that something had deeply affected them. After about forty minutes, they lined up at the fence separating our home from the bush and their gentle communication started.
Solemn rumbles rolled through the air, the same low-frequency language they always used with Lawrence. Mabula, the herd’s dominant bull, paced up and down with the others; just Nana stood by silently, as if waiting for Lawrence to appear but knowing he wasn’t going to.
We hadn’t seen them in months. Why now? Why this exact weekend? And why were they so anxious? No science book can explain why our herd came to the house that weekend. But to me, it makes perfect sense. When my husband’s heart stopped, something stirred in theirs, and they crossed the miles and miles of wilderness to mourn with us, to pay their respects, just as they do when one of their own has died.
This is an excerpt from An Elephant in My Kitchen: What the herd taught me about love, courage and survival by Françoise Malby-Anthony with Katja Willemsen (Pan Macmillan, 2018).
Françoise Malby-Anthony was born in the south of France, brought up in Paris, and has lived in South Africa since 1987. She founded the Thula Thula game reserve in 1998 with her late husband, the renowned conservationist and bestselling author Lawrence Anthony. When Lawrence died in 2012, Françoise took over the running of the reserve and is equally passionate about conservation. She was the driving force behind setting up a wildlife rehabilitation centre at the reserve to care for orphaned animals. Her first book, An Elephant in My Kitchen, was an international bestseller.
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