Tom Cain: Dictator

On the Stratten Reserve in southern Malemba, hard by the South African border, a black rhino cow was standing placidly in a grove of acacia trees, close to the pool on the banks of a slow-flowing river where she liked to drink. The game wardens who had followed her progress like doting godparents since her birth fifteen years ago called her Sinikwe, just as they named all the key animals – the rhinos, elephants and big cats – on the reserve.

She looked up as she heard a squeal from Fairchild, her calf, who was discovering to his cost that while acacia leaves were tender and delicious, they grew on branches protected by vicious thorns. The youngster had suffered no serious damage, however, and his hunger soon overcame his pain. He returned to the acacia, but a little more cautiously this time, a lesson learned. Two other calves were feeding nearby, Sinikwe’s two-year-old daughter Lisa-Marie, and her cousin, Kanja, whose mother Petal had wandered to the pool to slake her thirst.

A dirt road ran by the grove, near enough to enable tourists to sit in their open-sided trucks and photograph the rhino and other species that clustered there. The animals had become accustomed to humans and no longer fled at the first sound of an engine, unless they were actually on the road when a truck appeared. In that case the safari-goers got to enjoy the sight of a fully grown rhino’s massive backside heading away from them at thirty miles an hour in a rolling, waddling, fat-man gait – a sight as comic as that of a rhino charging towards them would be terrifying.

But the eight men crammed into the battered old Toyota Hilux pick-up – two in the cab, six packed tight in the back – were not tourists. Dressed in a motley jumble of jeans, army fatigues, football tops and sleeveless T-shirts, and aged from eighteen to forty, their only common denominator was the AK-47 assault rifle each of them carried.

Sinikwe looked up again as the truck drove by the grove. Her ears gave an edgy twitch. But the truck kept moving and its noise faded away, so she returned to browsing for food.

The truck came to a halt downwind from the grove, so she did not smell the men as they dismounted and walked back towards her. The feeble eyesight with which rhinos are cursed meant that she did not see them either as they crept up to the acacia grove and raised their weapons to fire.

A rhino has no natural predators. The biggest danger they face is each other: roughly one-third to a half of all rhinos die from injuries sustained as a result of fighting other rhinos. Thick hide and a sharp horn will deter any other natural threat. But they are powerless against a brutal volley of automatic weapons fire like the one that ripped through the acacia grove that day, tearing skin and flesh, cracking bones and shredding leaves and branches.

Sinikwe was the first target. She died with a high-pitched scream of terror that could be heard over the brutal chatter of the guns before she and they fell silent, leaving her punctured body, garlanded with the crimson rosettes of its wounds, lying on the blood-spattered earth.

All but one of the other rhinos fled, suffering no more than minor injuries. But Fairchild, frozen by terror, overwhelmed by the sound and smell of the guns and baffled by his mother’s sudden stillness, remained by the bush where he had been feeding. Then he slowly crept towards Sinikwe’s body, mewling and squeaking in a plaintive attempt to rouse his parent.

A single sharp order was barked by one of the men. Two of the others slammed fresh magazines into their AK-47s. There was another, much briefer burst of firing. Then Fairchild, too, lay dead.

The men got to work with machetes. One group hacked the full-grown horns off Sinikwe and the much shorter, immature growths off Fairchild. The others, some wielding axes, attacked the rhinos’ feet until their work was cut short by another order.

The men stepped away from the mutilated corpses, keeping Sinikwe’s longer front horn, their most valuable trophy, but leaving the rest for the carrion feeders who would soon be drawn to the slaughter. They made their way back to the Hilux. And silence fell again upon the grove.

Zalika Stratten kept hoping that her father would rescue her. Later, she knew, he would ruffle her hair with his strong brown fingers, their skin as rough as bark, and tell her, ‘Don’t you worry too much about what Mummy says. She means well. She just worries about you, that’s all.’ But Zalika didn’t want ‘later’. She wanted him to stand up now and say, ‘Stop it, Jacqui. That’s enough.’

Dick Stratten ruled his own vast personal kingdom – not just the reserve, but farms and ranches all over the country, filled with people who depended on him for their work, their homes, even the food in their bellies. Why couldn’t he rule his own wife? Why did he have to sit there, chewing on his lamb chop and very deliberately looking out at the view from the terrace while he ignored the argument going on right next to him at the table?

And why wouldn’t her mother leave her alone?

‘Honestly, darling,’ Jacqui Stratten was saying, ‘it really wouldn’t hurt, just once in a while, to put on a pretty dress. If you just took off those ghastly trainers and put on some heels, or paid a tiny little bit of attention to your make-up, it would make such a difference. You have such lovely blue eyes, they’re much your best feature, but no one will notice unless you make some effort to show them off. As for your hair, Rene keeps asking me when I’m going to bring you along to the salon. He’s longing to give you some proper highlights. He says it would absolutely transform you.’

‘I don’t want highlights,’ Zalika snapped back. ‘Sitting for hours with my hair wrapped up in tinfoil, getting bored out of my mind while that horrible old man fusses about with his fake French accent – that’s my idea of total hell.’

‘Well you’re never going to get a boyfriend if you carry on with those attitudes, that’s for sure,’ her mother replied.

‘I don’t want a boyfriend.’

‘Oh don’t be silly. You’re a seventeen-year-old girl, of course you want a boyfriend. When your brother was your age, he was absolutely surrounded by girls. But then, Andrew’s never had any trouble making the best of himself.’

Zalika rolled her eyes. ‘Here we go again with my oh-so-perfect brother…’

‘Well, have you seen how many letters he’s had since he got back from New York, all obviously written by girls? All my friends there could talk about was the impression he was making. Every pretty little thing in Manhattan wanted to know him.’

‘God, Mummy, don’t you have any idea what Andy’s like? He’ll be giving all these silly Americans his big stories about going on safari, pretending that he rides on elephants and fights lions single-handed, and they’ll all be dreaming that he’ll take them away to Africa and planning what they’re going to pack. Then as soon as he’s got inside their pants, he’s off telling the exact same stories to some other girl. That’s what he does. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.’

‘Honestly, Zalika, you really do talk utter nonsense sometimes. And you shouldn’t be so mean about your brother. After all, he’s the one who worked hard enough to get a place at Columbia Business School. To judge by last term’s reports, you’ll be lucky to pass a single A level. And I’m sure you’re not stupid, really. You’d have a good mind if only-’

‘The plane!’ shrieked Zalika, ignoring her mother and switching straight from furious indignation to utter delight with the speed only a teenager can muster. She leapt to her feet and ran away, dashing from the shade of the thatched veranda and down the steps, her long, slender, butterscotch legs racing out on to the rich-green lawn while Jacqui Stratten called after her, ‘Zalika, Zalika! Don’t leave the table!’