To this New York City resident, South Africa came on like a temporal portal, a core sample of humanity’s past, as much when as where, and far more distant than 8,000 miles.
I visited some weeks ago as photographer and parent, shooting images for a travel-mag feature my wife was reporting and keeping the kid from wrecking a few UNESCO World Heritage sites. When I wasn’t fighting the confounding array of focal settings on a loaner SLR, I kept getting spooked by the sheer mass of human history in the region, and how lifespan lays over it like a gossamer film.
The closest analogy I can think of is Rome, the so-called Eternal City with antiquity visible on every block. But this history felt heavier, more elemental. Humanity’s past begins somewhere in Maropeng’s archeological Mecca, the Cradle of Humankind, and spreads outward through space and time to Johannesburg’s police stations, Soweto’s shanties, the gold-mine mansions in Sandhurst. It’s audible in the voices of every waiter, artist, cab driver, gallerist, shop owner, or conductor you meet.
I realize I’m starting to sound like the wobbly-voiced narration of a 1960s grade-school filmstrip (behold…the Fertile Crescent!), but this experience was anything but academic. More like an extended psilocybin trip, the kind where someone’s offhand comment appears in your mind typeset as play dialogue. The vectors of geography, imperialism, capitalism, and tribalism intersected so explosively in that region that everyone there seems aware of it, all the time. A bit like how everyone in England used to have some Shakespeare installed at birth.
In Johannesburg, “codeswitching” doesn’t mean toggling between Black and white vernacular. It means flipping from English to Xhosa to Zulu to Afrikaans in the course of a single coffee order. In a city white people call “Joburg” and Black people call “Jozi,” an urban American’s anxiety around ethnic politics gets a jolt at every turn. In a nation with living memory of apartheid, U.S. media obsessions like “polarization” and “critical race theory” seem like amateur hour. I was so unmoored that, one week in, even wildlife seemed to offer insights on human behavior.
These came on safari in Kruger National Park, where I spent each three-hour game drive perched on the bitch seat of a LandCruiser helmed by a twenty-something guide who goes by Mac, speaks the kind of Victorian English that turns the word “elephant” into a Kipling tale, and whose ophthalmic blue eyes and bright copper beard suggest 19th-century propaganda cartoons about the feral Irish menace.
He and spotter Siya were true lords of this place. Siya sat on a sort of crow’s nest that projected outward from the LandCruiser’s bow, a smiling cherubic presence with a fighter-pilot’s vision, he wore the reputed superiority complex of Zulus lightly, possibly because this region is dominated by Tsongas. Mac was authoritative on his subject, and a true prodigy with kids, soliciting sustained engagement from our city-raised, screen-addicted son, who somehow had an embarrassing question for each new animal we saw. (“So lions have a lot of wives—what’s that like?” “Wish I could tell you, mate.”)
My role as hack photographer imposed a degree of professional distance from the marquee animals of the Big Five (lion, leopard, elephant, giraffe, rhino), which I vainly struggled to give the Nat Geo treatment. I found myself much more open to b-listers like the gnu, warthog, impala, baboon, and the noble termite, whose strikingly massive muslin towers loomed along the trail like housing projects on the Cross Bronx Expressway. But our most memorable encounters, with canines, are the ones that haunt me today.
Right around dusk on the first day, Siya pointed out a hyena, still in the tire-rutted trail of a dry river bed. Mac pulled up to about ten yards away and killed the motor and we chatted softly, gazing at the sallow, black-eyed creature lying in the failing light. So cute. She’s so pretty. Do they really laugh? After few minutes of this, the hyena rose to stand and abruptly killed all conversation.
It’s hard to account for this. It was almost as if in a single movement the creature turned itself from something we’d taken more or less as “dog” into something truly Other. The full-body view—muppet legs, sloping back, and werewolf neck, leopard spots—all reframed the ferret ears and fruit-bat muzzle as something alien, prehistoric. Even now, I’m resisting terms like “evil,” “sinister,” and “demonic” to describe the vibe shift we all felt; let’s go with “undomesticated.” And as this rough beast took some slouching steps, the kid broke our trance with an urgent whisper, “Let’s go!” Mac chuckled as he threw the clutch, the spotlight wheeled across blackened dirt riverbed walls, and we executed a brisk 180 to head back in the direction of camp.
It turns out hyenas aren’t even related to dogs. They have their own species, Hyaenidae, share more genetic material with a mongoose than a Doberman, and offer a treasury of culture-war factoids straight out of the Barbieverse: females are bigger and more aggressive than males, run hyenas’ matriarchal society, favor female cubs over male ones, and even produce three times as much testosterone. Expectations blind you.
The next day brought the grand-slam: an arboretum of giraffes, a panzer of rhinos, a militia of baboons, and a VIP section of lions locally called the “Birmingham Pride.” This last was clearly the big-ticket item, and we had to time our visit so as not to turn their clearing into a Land Cruiser parking lot. We arrived to find the scene painted in amber winter light: cubs, moms, and MGM logos, massed atop or traipsing around the Brontosaurus ribcage of a recently snuffed giraffe. The pride included white lions and their offspring, cubs nuzzling atop their mothers or batting at siblings with their wee paws.
It was, in a sense, too perfect: somehow already televised, already Instagram-ed, what Deleuze might call “deterritorialized.” I kept having to bat my head to disrupt the David Attenborough monologue running in my head. Mac was voluble on the pride, its members and history, quietly answering questions and sharing details about the nature stars arrayed before us. He was, as always, chill, game, attentive, eager to answer any and all questions. But this man visibly lit up when the radio brought word of a pack of wild dogs.
“All right,” he said, replacing the radio handset. “This will be quite something.” He pulled out and sped down the track.
Part of his excitement was zoological. The 450 wild dogs living in the Kruger reserve comprise a significant part of the species’ global population of 6,000, making it one of the planet’s most endangered mammals. But the more obvious, primal lure was something else, and evident the second we pulled up to a massive termite mound that these wild dogs turned into the location of a smoking-hot puppy-porn shoot.
“Oh, my days,” Mac sighed, as we took it all in, the adorable yips, coos, and bleats of two dozen tiny puppies with oversized ears, jumping, playing, and nursing as the dozen-odd adults paced around or laid in the sun. For a time, we were actually speechless, other than Ohmigod and I can’t stand it. When at last the kid piped up, “This is the best thing I’ve seen on safari,” Mac softly replied, “This literally is one of the best things you’ll see in your life!”
Why, though? In the cold light of day, a wild dog looks like a German shepherd that survived a forest fire, the blackened parts of its piebald coat recalling kid’s illustrations of Smokey Bear’s backstory. With those gangly proportions and vague asymmetry, it would get laughed out of Westminster. But something in our wiring sees this animal in the wild and thinks “friend.”
Apparently, we have 33,000 years of breeding and cohabitation to thank for this. Earlier this year, I did a piece about recent studies on animal behavior focused on the so-called “puppy-dog eye effect,” one of several physiological traits dogs share with eons-long human companions. “Humans domesticated dogs with attention to the facial expressions that dogs produce, selecting for a suite of facial movements,” reads the study by professors Anne Burrows and Kailey Olmstead of Duquesne University’s Rangos School of Health Sciences. It reflects a relationship we intuitively feel without understanding.
But like the over-anthropomorphis of apes, the feeling masks some facts of nature. Mac pointed to two tiny pups playing tug of war with a scrap fabric. “You see how they’re pulling in opposite directions, there?” he said. “When they catch something, that’s literally how they kill it. It’s very, very brutal.”
A striking statement to someone who’d just seen the bloody wreckage of a 16-foot giraffe. But as Mac explained, the brutality is in the process, not the outcome. Lions suffocate their prey, either by breaking their neck or smothering them with their jaws. Leopards charge and quickly kill their prey with a bite to the neck. Cheetahs rely on speed, running up to knock an antelope over and grab its throat.
Wild dogs are pack animals and, in a sense, kill more like modern humans: mobbing a victim, collectivizing violence, operating in within the madness of crowds. They’re also really effective, killing a whopping 80 percent of what they hunt, and, fun fact, often eating it alive. We don't judge these animals for this behavior. We don’t call it sinister, demonic, or evil; we call it adaptation.
At least that’s the attitude I’m trying to preserve in a country whose public life seems so full of wild-dog attacks: large groups swarming the most vulnerable, at libraries and public schools. Mobs tearing flesh and piling on a way no individual constituent would dare alone. An election cycle beginning with visible bloodlust in half the country. I’d almost say our mental health demands we take it all in from some distant vantage point.
But in a time of fear and trembling, travel insights only go so far. People like me “travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human.” We “fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and [we] think [we’ve] seen something.”
Mental note for future trips: leave Kierkegaard at home.