Part 85
Harry worked on the gold mines in South Africa all his life. He had three children and a loving wife; they lived in the unfashionable suburb of Rosettenville in Johannesburg. Despite his modest income, he somehow managed to send his two sons to St. John’s College, one of the top five private schools in South Africa modelled on the English public school system. I have made films about both sons. They are so completely different in every way that I didn’t make the connection until now. Weird!
I’ll start with the older brother, Dr. Ian Player, born on March 15, 1927, and who died on November 20, 2014. As far as I can remember, he was an above-average sportsman at school. Straight after graduating at 17, he served in the South African 6th Armored division attached to the American 5th Army in Italy for the last two years of World War Two.
In 1952, he was finally able to follow his ambition to improve conditions for wildlife and ecology of the planet. He joined the Natal Parks Board, rapidly rising through the ranks to become the warden of the Umfolozi Game reserve, arguably the second most important reserve in South Africa after the Kruger National Park.
As a junior game ranger, he had started his career at Ndumo Game Reserve close to the Mozambique border. In the early 1950s, there was a huge conflict between the Reserve and local cattle farmers. These farmers were all ex-servicemen who, after World War Two, had been granted tracts of land in gratitude for their service to the nation. The land they had been given was in many ways ideal for cattle ranching. However, the proximity of the wildlife gave them two problems.
Firstly, they had to cope with leopards and other predators that would break through the fences of the reserve and kill some cattle. This was contained up to a point by the game rangers. But the bigger problem they could nothing about: the profusion of wildlife in the reserve attracted the tsetse fly. These are nasty insects that carry a disease known as sleeping sickness, which can be fatal for humans. Cattle are also particularly susceptible to it as well. This led the farmers to appeal to the government to abolish the game reserves and exterminate the larger animals such as the elephants and rhinos.
For a short time, the National and Natal Parks Boards were obliged to start killing off the big game. In the process, the rare white rhino came close to extinction. It was estimated that only 300 of these creatures had survived.
When Ian was appointed warden of the Umfolosi Reserve, he embarked on a program known as “Operation Rhino,” as well obtaining “Protected Status” for Umfolozi and the neighboring St. Lucia Wilderness areas. These areas were later declared World Heritage Sites – the first such sites on the continent of Africa. “Operation Rhino” and Ian’s techniques for capturing and relocating rhinos undoubtedly saved the white rhino from extinction. By the way, the word white in this case is a misnomer. It is believed that hunters in the nineteenth century in Africa called them “wide rhinos” because their jaws were wider than those of their sister species, the black rhino. In fact, neither are either black or white. They are both grey!
Ironically, today the black rhino is in terrible danger from poachers who have an insatiable market for rhino horns in Asia. The horns are not ivory but are comprised of thick compacted hairs. In Asia, the myth has it that the horns, when ground into powder, form an effective aphrodisiac. It’s actually nonsense, but fortunes have been made by poachers cutting off the horns – often killing the rhino in the process – and smuggling them into Asia by a variety of means. That was long after Ian Player had become world-famous for saving and protecting the white rhino.
When Hollywood Producer/Director Howard Hawks made the movie “Hatari” in Kenya starring John Wayne, he obtained a copy of a documentary entitled “Operation Rhino” featuring Ian and his rhino-capturing methods. He based much of the movie’s game- capturing sequences on Ian’s methods.
Coincidently, Nick Carter (an Englishman who had during the same period developed a method of anesthetic darting large animals in order to either relocate them or give them medical attention) became a technical advisor on the movie “Hatari.” From this movie emerged both the darting of rhinos as well as a game-catching technique evolved by a South African, Jan Oelofse, which improved Ian’s original method. Jan had found that wild animals confronted by plastic sheeting had no idea that they could break through it. They thought it was solid. Ian’s method had involved using rope netting that trapped animals and enabled them to be driven into trucks for relocation to safer areas. The netting worked – at a price. Smaller animals in particular as well as rhinos often became entangled in the netting. Antelope often broke their legs in the netting whilst trying to escape. With the use of plastic sheeting, the animals were safely steered into their transport. A combination of darting and plastic sheeting took Ian’s original ideas to another level. I later filmed with both Nick Carter (see my earlier blog on trying to film one of the Knysna elephants) and Jan Oelofse (a later sequence for another documentary).
Coming back to Ian’s early years in Ndumo reserve, a young colleague made a near fatal rookie mistake in his enthusiasm to contribute something meaningful to the reserve. For some reason, there were no lions in Ndumo. The youngster had a “bright” idea. He secretly went out, bought an old circus lion, smuggled it into the reserve and let it loose. Of course, the poor creature had little or no survival skills. A fully domesticated wild animal never learns how to hunt in the wild, so the lion was quite incapable of catching anything. In the circus she was given her food on a daily basis; so just imagine how the lioness must have been both starving and terrified by her unfamiliar surroundings.
Two weeks after the young ranger had let the lion loose, one of the experienced rangers came home after a long day in the reserve, anticipating a fine dinner prepared for him by his wife. He was also looking forward to playing with his eighteen-month-old daughter before she went to sleep. As he entered the house and started to walk down the hallway towards the kitchen where he expected his wife would be finishing off cooking their meal, he heard the distinctive low growl of a lion and then to his horror he saw the big cat at the far end of the hallway. He was shocked, not only because of the lion being in the house, but also because he knew that there were no lions on the reserve.
Whenever he entered his house, he would put his rifle up on a rack in the hallway, safely well out of reach of his child. As the lioness growled again and made to move towards him, the ranger slowly stepped backwards, taking care not to make any fast movements that would provoke the creature to attack him. He silently prayed that his wife would remain in the kitchen. As he reached out for his rifle and quickly cocked it, the lioness finally charged towards him. He reluctantly fired. No ranger will ever fire at a wild animal unless his life or the life of others is threatened. In this case, he was fully justified in firing. The lion took a few more steps, slowed and collapsed at the ranger’s feet. His wife, hearing the commotion, came out of the kitchen and screamed as she saw the body of the thin and emaciated lioness.
The young ranger was severely reprimanded and was lucky to keep his job. Ndumo reserve continued without any lions and Ian was motivated to speak to a friend, Sven Persson, a film producer, about a possible story set in the reserve. I was roped in to write the screenplay, eventually ending up as production manager as well; and the movie “Rogue Lion” was made and then successfully released in the United States as well as South Africa.
I’ve described the making of the movie in another blog so will end this one by honoring Ian as becoming recognized as one of the world’s leading conservationists and a personal friend of Prince Bernard of the Netherlands, founder and first president of the World Wildlife Fund in 1961. In later years Ian founded the Leadership School which organizes wilderness trails for young potential leaders. He also founded the Mayqubu Ntombela Foundation honoring his lifelong Zulu friend who shared many of Ian’s adventures and who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of African flora and fauna, as well as great Zulu traditions such as the concept of Ubuntu – respect for all of humankind. “I am as we are.”
Ian was awarded honorary doctorates in philosophy and law as well as being inducted as a “Knight of the Order of the Golden Ark,” an award given by Prince Bernhard. He was also awarded the “Decoration for Meritorious Services,” South Africa’s highest civilian award.
Ian’s younger brother will be described in my next blog, who also became world famous in another field entirely. In the same way as we, the ExoBrain team, will undoubtedly have the satisfaction of seeing Peter Warren, the Founder and creator of ExoTech join these two greats, in becoming a household name, in his field of endeavour, that of taking computing to a new level of excellence!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.