I first crossed swords with Satani in March 1962. He was raiding village crops in the Tjolotjo teak forest of Western Matabeleland, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). March was getting on towards the end of the rainy season, and that was when the village crops ripened. That was also when the elephant bulls of Hwange National Park vacated the game reserve and moved into the teak forest in large numbers. They did not move en masse, but infiltrated in ones and twos and in threes and fours to take advantage of the ripening crops that surrounded the many villages that were springing up everywhere throughout the forest. And the elephants stayed until the crops had been reaped. That was the busiest time of the year for me because it was one of my annual duties to hunt down and shoot crop-raiding elephants and buffaloes.
The elephants did not stay in one place. They wandered everywhere, moving from one sinanga thicket to another. And when I say those sinangas were thick, I mean they were thick!
Game warden Bruce Austen, the officer in charge of Hwange National Park in those days, received a telephone call (headman) of the Gwabazibwuya village line during the night. Apparently, he had gone out onto his farmlands unarmed to drive off a single marauder and got himself killed. Bruce tasked me with the job of responding to the district commissioner’s request for assistance.
