Carol’s Column

Kheto pointed to a shadow in the water ...

On Sunday afternoon as the sun dropped off the edge of the horizon, Kheto Ncube told me what he'd seen.

We were standing on the Zimbabwean side of the Zambezi and he said that the previous week he had watched a mother hippo giving birth.

“The baby was small and as pink as a flower bloom. It was in the middle of the day and the sun was high and hot,” he said.

“The mother gently nudged the calf onto her back, then slowly walked into the river.

“Then, very carefully, she went under the water almost covering the baby, then she came out. Up and down she went, up and down for hours so that her calf's skin would become wet and have protection from the burning sun.”

He smiled, a tall man, his teeth white in the softening light. “You cannot imagine,” he said, “how soft the skin of a baby hippo is.”

I was attending the launch of a new travel magazine at the Victoria Falls and we were staying in the Zambezi National Park.

We'd been taken on a late-afternoon game drive by ranger Kheto and discovered a delicate Chobe bush buck, a herd of 200 buffalo gloriously stinking and snorting, a lone elephant bull and a timid herd of kudu.

A civet had uncurled its tail and darted into the undergrowth while a flock of ungainly ground hornbills gaggled around us.

Kheto spoke of the Zambezi. “For hundreds of years it has been called Kasam bawezi by the local people. The meaning of these words is ‘only people who know the river can bathe’.

“When the settlers came,” he smiled charmingly, “they were unable to pronounce the words correctly and they called the river Zambezi, which is, of course, what it is known as today.”

How extraordinary this Africa is and how lucky we are to be here.

I have friends living exciting cosmopolitan lives in New York, London and Paris but they haven't had a honey badger jump on their bed while camping in a game reserve.

They haven't had oranges stolen by a gentle elephant who removed the fruits from a camp table and left everything else undisturbed.

They haven't had the pleasure of quietly sitting in the bush, pants around ankles, doing what is necessary, to be disturbed by a curious hyena and in shock leapt to the roof of a four-by-four.

A feat which could possibly make an Olympic high jump record.

They haven't had freshly baked bread stolen by baboons, been incarcerated for three hours in a bush toilet at Savuti by a herd of elephants browsing on the surrounding trees.

And they haven't had a deep sleep around a camp fire interrupted by the growling and screeching of a leopard killing a buffalo.

They haven't watched two lilac breasted rollers share a grub, seen a wild dog bring down an impala ram and been stuck in a traffic jam caused by a pair of enthusiastic lions mating for hours on end.

And they haven't seen a python swallow a bird whole.

They haven't glimpsed dark chocolate brown newly born baby hyenas snuffling and they haven't watched a baby giraffe drop from its mother's high vagina then wobble to its legs.

I thought about this as I stood with Kheto Ncube. Who pointed to a shadow in the water. “Look carefully,” he said. “Perhaps you'll see the mother and her baby.”

I heard a splash but the gloom hid both mother and calf.

No matter, I knew they were there and another African miracle was unfolding.

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