She writes as follows:
I’m sitting with eight other tourists in an open-topped Land
Cruiser driving on dirt roads in the Sabi Sand, a group of private game
reserves on the southwest border of South Africa’s two-million-hectare Kruger
National Park. It’s a landscape of splintered trees and pale acacia thorns,
drifts of sand glittering brightly with quartz, and it is full of wildlife:
We’ve seen leopards and hyenas, muddy groups of wart hogs, innumerable birds
and antelopes. After years of watching wildlife documentaries, spotting animals
from the vehicle is a thrilling but disconcertingly familiar experience. Not
only do they exactly resemble the ones on TV, but when Jonathan Vogel, the game
ranger at the wheel, starts to talk about the animals, his expert tone makes me
think of voice-over narration. While I’ve never been on safari before, and
though I traveled here to watch animals, I’m spending a lot of time trying to
make what is happening seem real.
Safaris are built on a series of vast contradictions. Though the
Sabi Sand, for example, is considered a pristine wilderness, it is crisscrossed
with dirt roads and dotted with camps offering tourists accommodation and
twice-daily game drives. The wildlife that roams within its unfenced interior
is absolutely wild, and yet among the most watched in the world. And while
people travel here to observe animals, not hunt them, most are keen to collect
sightings of those species renowned in the 19th century as being the most
dangerous to stalk on foot: the big five of lions, leopards, buffaloes, rhinos
and elephants. Animals that hunt other animals are the biggest draw here. ‘‘If
you want to come for predators, I think the Sabi Sand is definitely the
place,’’ Vogel explains. ‘‘It’s not just that they are beautiful, but they are
entertaining and interesting. The big herbivores, they’ll just go out, eat a
little bit, play around, but the predators, I mean, they’ll stalk, they’ll
fight, they’ll mate; everything is unique.’’
We’re
in luck. As dusk falls, we pull off the dusty road and cut the engine. A
spotlight held by our tracker, Derek, plays across dust and dry grass 20 feet
away onto something that looks like a pile of dirty beige suede. Slowly it
resolves into a sleeping male lion. His eyes are closed, his mane a bright
tangle of fur and shadow. I stare at the prone form. Despite the spotlight on
his face, a host of glowing smartphones, the excited voices of my fellow
passengers and the insistent peeping of autofocus locks, the lion doesn’t wake.
He reminds me of the trophy photographs of the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer
that I saw online this summer; after killing a lion known to safarigoers in
Zimbabwe as Cecil, Palmer’s grinning face was seen behind another dead lion he
had posed for the camera. It spurred outrage and a white-hot debate over the
morality of big-game hunting. What I am doing watching this lion is nothing
like trophy hunting, I tell myself, though some part of me isn’t sure.
Trophy
photographs seem to most of us an anachronistic display of imperial masculinity
and colonial appropriation, and the outrage that followed the death of Cecil
the lion demonstrated our keen desire to distance ourselves from everything
these photographs evoke. But the way safaris work in our culture makes me
wonder about that distancing. Safaris offer close-up, once-in-a-lifetime views
of animals in the wild — but at the same time they are deeply embedded in
colonial iconography and in structural inequality. It is hard not to recall
that when Kruger and other game reserves were founded, they were cleared of
their original human inhabitants. A game ranger at another camp told me that
when you drive around his area, you can still see the old stones where
grandmothers once ground meal. Though these days some local communities do
benefit economically from safari tourism, the Kruger region has a history of
human dispossession and erasure.
Tourists
come for a luxury version of an imagined safari past — lamplight, dinners
around the fire, safari clothes, Champagne and photographs of only the most
photogenic of exotic animals. It’s possible to try to see the luxury safari as
a kind of playacting, a kind of sumptuous ‘‘Out of Africa’’ dreamscape. But are
we innocent visitors to this place? Our appropriation of the landscape through
photographic safaris is just as bound up in those old colonial structures as
trophy hunting is, even if the animals we shoot don’t die.
The
lion we are watching raises his head. His nose is dark with old scars, one pale
eye discolored. So close to a woken lion, some part of me quails. It is
unnerving. I know the lion won’t attack us, but somehow shouldn’t he —
shouldn’t we — acknowledge that he might? Vogel turns to us from the driver’s
seat. ‘‘See his eye?’’ he says. ‘‘This one, I call him Terminator.’’ Within
yards of the animal, I expect to exchange a glance with him. I expect that
there’ll be a moment, together, of accepting the fact of the other’s presence
in this place. But he looks past us; strobed with camera flash, he begins to
walk purposely away. We switch on the engine and follow.
Something
about this pursuit feels distasteful. If lions are celebrities, they have their
paparazzi too. But there are other uncomfortable analogies: the military-style
vehicles, the spotlights, the khaki safari garb. The lion known as Terminator
is lying down again, and we are even closer to him now. I can see, even without
binoculars, a pale claw wound in the fur above his left nostril and the slow
movement of his side as he breathes. I feel vaguely betrayed by his proximity.
I think I want it to be harder to see a lion.
Perhaps
I am still stuck in that old notion that dangerous wild animals are things to
test ourselves against, to be tracked and located through skilled subterfuge
and careful field craft. But on reflection I don’t think that is the root of my
ambivalence. It isn’t that he is too easy to see. It is that he doesn’t appear
to see us at all. The lions here are so utterly habituated to people that they
choose to ignore our presence entirely. ‘‘All the animals here have already
been born with the vehicles,’’ Vogel later explains. All the same, it is highly
unsettling when a wild animal fails to look back at us and acknowledge our
existence; not only do we recognize that we are not influencing his behavior,
but we also start to wonder if we are here at all. I wonder if this is what
spurs our desperate urge to take photographs. If a lion refuses to meet our
eyes and grant us the authentic personal encounter with wildness we hope for,
we can at least turn it into something we recognize and understand: a lion
on-screen.
Suddenly
I don’t want to look at this lion anymore. Instead I watch the bright staccato
of moths dipping and circling in the dusty air around the headlights and see
that amid them is a tiny, rising point of reflected light that is so bright and
slow and small it is impossible to know what kind of insect it is. I stare at
it, transfixed. It is so much more mysterious than the lion. Perhaps it is
compelling because only I can see it, and — in the words of the poet R.F.
Langley — I know that ‘‘it will never be seen by anyone who has words again.’’
It is entirely inhuman.
It
dawns on me that this is a much better way to think about the lion; as a
creature that is precious not because of its place in our human imaginations,
not because it relates to human concepts, but because it denies them. There is
a lion reality that we cannot access. We live in different worlds, and we
cannot really ever meet. It is a poignant yet oddly heartening thought. But
then the lion raises himself onto his haunches, shakes his mane, stands in the
lights with his head lowered and makes a small, deep growl. His jaws open, and
steam rising from his mouth, he lets out a vast, low and terrifying sound that
I can feel in my rib cage and sets the whole vehicle vibrating in sympathy. In
that instant, my human musings fall away; after all my ambivalence, this roar
has taken me into the lion’s world, rendered me a being without thoughts, a
being of flesh and fear, terror and simple awe.
Helen Macdonald teaches at the University of Cambridge. Her
most recent book, “H Is for Hawk,” won the 2014 Samuel Johnson prize and was
the 2014 Costa Book of the Year.
Zulu warrior image 
The Maasai live in Kraals arranged in a circular fashion. The fence around the kraal is made of acacia thorns, which prevent lions from attacking the cattle. It is a man's responsibility to fence the kraal. While women construct the houses. Traditionally, kraals are shared by an extended family. However, due to the new land management system in the Maasai region, it is not uncommon to see a kraal occupied by a single family. 
