Moonlight rippled off the back of the hippopotamus as it walked out of the narrow river. It was bright white, a slow-moving shard of lightning cutting across the darkness. Themba watched from the bank, listening to the grunts of the hippo as it swished through the wet grass. He closed his eyes to breathe in deeply, imagining the wet skin of the hippo, the heavy footprints it made in the mud. He recalled the first hippo encounter he had had when he came to Skukuza camp five years earlier. It took quite some time for their grunts to stop scaring him. Now, he enjoyed taking his breaks by the river in the evenings, waiting for the grunts, hoping to catch a glimpse of the enormous beasts. 

When Themba was three years old, his grandfather taught him to climb to the highest and most improbable branches of the mango tree which stood in the dusty yard in front of their home. The old man’s tips on how to angle his toes just the right way helped Themba move quickly from limb to limb, like a baby vervet monkey, until he was in the upper parts of the tree. His reward that first time was five perfectly ripe mangoes, sweet and sticky on the tongue. The South African heat mixed with January rains had made the skin of the mangoes perfectly pliable, ready to give way to the sickly sweetness of yellow-orange flesh beneath. They would sit beneath the tree and share the mangoes, passing the knife back and forth, wiping their hands on their pants. It was a ritual that Themba and his grandfather carried on every afternoon, with the exception of Sundays when the dusty funnels of wind around their compound would lie still, at pause for church. He used to tell Themba stories from his childhood, always beginning with the same line, “You should always have something in your pocket that surprises others.” Many of the stories featured hippos, but Themba had never seen one. They were always powerful and terrifying, but beautiful. 

The young Themba would turn his pockets inside out, trying to find the surprise his grandfather talked about. “Mama,” he’d ask, “did you take out the surprise Umkhulu left in my pocket?” She would shake her head smilingly. 

On the day his grandfather died, ten-year-old Themba stayed amongst the branches of the mango tree for many hours, turning a single ripe mango over and over in his hands, until his mother came searching for him with a stick, the fury in her eyes shielding the disconsolate grief beneath. Themba wondered what surprise his grandfather had sprung upon them other than disappearing forever, and if he would ever discover the surprise in his pockets. 

Thirty years later, Themba became one of the few from his neighborhood to get a job at the busiest camp in the Kruger National Park. A busier camp meant more tourists, more forced smiles, more cheap labor, and on occasion, more tips. Having secured a position as head waiter in the camp’s sought-after restaurant, Themba managed to get his sister, his brother, and two cousins employed by the camp as well. Most of their days were spent smiling cheery hello, how are yous at white-skinned guests in awkward safari wear: menacing hiking boots, seas of beige and pale gray waterproof pants, olive-green shirts, and Indiana Jones hats. After the camp closed for the evening, on the ride back to their quarters, they would recount and laugh at the bizarre things the tourists did that day. 

“This one — an old man! — thought the branch in the water was a hippo! Yoh! He called the whole family over to come see the hippo!” 

The rest would erupt in laughter. Tourists often thought they saw hippos in the river that wound around the camp, when they were rarely there. Themba knew when to look for them, and when to sit and wait. He never shared this secret with the tourists because that was his break time, to listen for the grunts, feel the darkness ensconce him, and have silence to recall the path that led him there. 

As a teenager, Themba dreamt of going to America, much like the rest of his classmates at school. When he met Alain, they were both new to Khanyisani Secondary School, Themba having come from a primary school farther away, unlike the majority of his classmates. Alain was the wonder-boy of the year: he and his family had moved from a place called Toronto, Canada, which nobody had heard of before. Being outsiders, Themba and Alain struck up an immediate friendship. 

“Why do you have an i in your name if you don’t pronounce it?” Themba asked. 

Not missing a beat, Alain replied, “Why do you have an h in your name if you don’t pronounce it?” 

Themba learned from Alain about the magical Western world that he had only seen in movies: traffic lights worked (and were obeyed), people stood in queues, credit cards didn’t require PINs, and load-shedding was a foreign concept. Themba couldn’t understand why Alain’s family would want to leave such a world, and was even more puzzled that Alain didn’t seem to mind the change. 

“Yeah, I guess I miss my friends and life back home,” Alain mused in his American-sounding accent. “But it’s no big deal, really. It’s an adventure being here.”

The underlying confidence Alain had in being able to go back home wasn’t lost on Themba, to whom it seemed nonsensical to have left Toronto for the dusty valleys of Mpumalanga. From the main road that wound up, down, and around the towns, he would look below at dots of sun glinting off tin roofs, waves of white cars and trucks meandering the dirt roads, and wonder if he would ever want to return to this home when he went to America. In his mind, he would go to America, not Canada, because America was where you found the movie stars, the rappers, and the beautiful women. Black people had mansions and sports cars in America; they were just as famous and respected as white people — sometimes even more so — something that was still contentious in South Africa. 

Alain’s parents were writers, which was yet another puzzle in Themba’s mind. That parents were able to relocate to another continent to simply write, and “explore,” and survive happily doing so, was a real mystery to him. He couldn’t imagine his father hanging up his blue worker's uniform to take up paper and pen. It was equally impossible that his mother could survive by putting words to paper instead of yelling at customers at her makeshift corner store. There must be an advantage to having only one child, he thought. 

Their town lay by the side of a meandering stretch of highway which was part of the vascular network of roads leading from Johannesburg to Mpumalanga. His mother’s “store” —  more a three-walled room with a tin roof — sold everything from cigarettes, condoms, notebooks and pens to various kinds of potato chips. One of many narrow dirt roads leading out from the main road ran alongside her store, where she could always be found sitting on a plastic crate, fanning herself with a magazine while staring out over dust clouds. The houses along the road were mostly one-story brick structures, some standing partially completed and gaping whereas others had lacy curtains at the windows and intricate wrought-iron gates housing several cars. Most of the activity happened in the mornings before and after school time, leaving empty stretches of day when the sunshine reflecting off cable dishes on rooftops were all that seemed to exist. As with the rest of South Africa, jobs were scarce, a fact that was at odds with the backdrop of MTN and Vodacom specials advertised across brick walls on every street. 

Alain and his parents moved back home, as Themba knew they would, within a couple of years. Themba often wondered if Alain’s parents published the books they had come to Africa to write, and how they would describe what had been their home. Numerous pages describing the lions, leopards, and elephants in the Kruger National Park, undoubtedly. Themba had never been inside the Kruger except vicariously through Alain. He spoke of the herds of elephants bathing in pools, trumpeting and frolicking like children. He described the giraffe that stood in the middle of the road, chewing slowly while giving them a dead, indifferent stare. He talked about the leopard’s butt he saw in the crook of a tree, the floreted animal panting in the suffocating heat, tired and full from a day’s kill of an antelope it had dragged up onto the tree. Themba listened intently, picturing all the shapes and sizes of the animals, the colors Alain described, the behaviors he saw. Alain clearly had the same natural talent for description — and embellishment — as his writer parents. What fascinated Themba most was the hippopotamus: a creature so large and dangerous that rangers and visitors alike stayed as far away as possible, even in their vehicles. He described hippos to be larger than elephants, their yawning jaws wider than whales. The only time Alain saw a hippo out of the water was one early morning from the lodge; the animal was a fast-moving shape far in the distance, too low to be a buffalo, too large to be a wildebeest. There were times the family had heard grunts close by, but they had never seen any out of the water. Despite being surrounded by predators that could easily tear into human flesh, hippos were unfazed, truly the most dangerous animal in Africa. It fascinated and terrified Themba. 

He listened to Alain talk about the trees, the birds, the jackals running about with their bushy tails. He tried to imagine he was a Western writer, trying to see what Alain and his parents had seen. “It’s good to see that the country’s painful past is being dealt with,” Alain’s mother said once. They were describing the private game reserves which surround the national park, allowing the animals to move across borders freely. “Regardless of who’s from where, they all work together to keep these reserves running efficiently,” she said.

But Themba knew that most of the private reserves were run by white South Africans, that the workers were struggling black South Africans, or Zimbabweans. The game rangers were still mostly white, whereas the trackers were black. The country was still working on reparations for apartheid, and positions of privilege still belonged to the minority white. What Alain’s parents saw as advancement and hope, seemed incomplete to Themba. 

When their school life ended, Alain moved away, and Themba was left behind with his wispy dreams of animals and America. He took up work as a repairman with his father, relishing the moments he happened to drive by the Kruger’s border fence, slowing down and scanning for movement. He would pause and watch wildebeest, impala, or elephants making their way lazily and deliberately beyond the fence. Eventually, Themba found an opportunity to work at Skukuza camp. As he was driven into the gates of the park, he expected to see animals around every bend, every tree. He assumed the animals he had seen from the road would be a small fraction of what would be teeming within the border fences. Unexpectedly, he had to scour the horizon for some time before spotting a few zebras and dozens of impala. 

Themba was on the path along the Sabie river when he first saw the hippopotamus. He had heard the grunts but assumed they were toads. A massive jaw appeared from beneath the water, a pink cave of teeth slowly swerving in his direction. He froze, uncertain what to do. The grunting got closer as the hippo raised its body. Rivulets of water flowed off its back as it took a step onto land. Its beady eyes were almost hidden in the giant head, the tiny rounded ears twitching, its mouth opening and closing. Themba turned and ran, despite being well behind the protective rails. His colleagues laughed at his ashen face when he returned to the building. But Themba kept returning to the same spot at different times of day to find the hippos again. He learned to wait and watch, reading the sounds in the air, until he saw the tell-tale ripples in the water. He appreciated the unknown element to hippos: fearsome and mysterious, their beauty recognized by few.

At the camp, Themba’s interactions with guests would stir his latent dreams of going to America and see the city lights of New York or the beaches of California. He impressed the foreigners with his mimicry of their accents, with his knowledge of America and Canada. He observed them intently, taken in by their behaviors and language. But over time, something turned sour at the edges. His answer to the perpetual question “What’s it like to live here?” began to assume a damper tone. He realized the question was less often about living in the Kruger as it was about South Africa. It was less about being surrounded by animals than it was about inadequacies and detached pity. He found himself replying more frequently with a brittle, “It’s the same as everywhere.” He began to notice a palpable disquiet in the guests when they would hold their purses closer to their bodies as the waiters walked by. As it was common knowledge throughout the country that safety was the biggest concern for tourists, this behavior did not surprise Themba. However, when he observed a direct correlation between the level of worry of these guests and the level of darkness of skin color in the waiters, Themba was taken aback. But when he reflected on the many guests who treated him with kindness and respect he concluded that he must have misinterpreted the diners' seemingly offensive behavior. With each apparent micro transgression he witnessed, he reassured himself that he had misconstrued their looks; these weren’t South Africans, they were Americans. Americans were different. They didn’t equate danger with the color of someone’s skin. 

One evening while cleaning one of the tables, Themba overheard three men talking loudly. 

“But it’s ridiculous, you know,” boomed one of the men, “There’s zero safety in this Godforsaken country. Sure, it’s beautiful. But what’re you gonna do with so much beauty if you’re constantly fearing for your life?” 

“Is it really that bad?” asked his friend, a middling man with glasses. 

The third, a younger man in a Yankees baseball cap, piped up, “I don’t know if it’s quite that bad. There are some areas where it’s pretty safe, you know.” 

“Like here?” the first one asked with a bellowing laughter. The other two murmured their agreement. 

“Actually,” he continued, “I hit the nail on the head. This is probably the one place it’s safe enough to leave my phone on the table while having dinner. I can’t do that in Johannesburg. I can’t do that in Cape Town. Hell, I can’t even take my phone out of my pocket in the middle of the street in any of those places! It’s a travesty, really. This is what happens when you’ve got a country full of dirty-minded people.” 

He didn’t lower his voice, nor did he look around as he spoke. They were intent on their glasses of Pinotage before them, looking out over the serene water, sizing up Africa. Three Americans exploring Africa. 

“Not only is this place crime-free, but it’s also the only place we get WiFi within, like, 50 miles!” laughed the younger one. 

Themba’s mind remained immutably on the phrase dirty-minded people.

The first man continued, “I’m telling you. Lack of law and order and a complete disregard for other human beings. Just dirty.”

At a sideways glance Themba observed the man. He was portly, his khaki-clad belly drooping over the sides of his brown belt. He had sparse salt-and-pepper hair peeping out from beneath a fishing cap advertising a St.-something island Themba couldn’t make out in the dark. Flickering candlelight bounced off the middle man’s glasses. Their fourth round of drinks came, and all three put down their phones to sip and compare, then began to look through the photos of the day on their DSLR cameras. Themba carried on with his duties in stony-faced silence, overcome by a barrage of thoughts he never acknowledged he had. 

When next Themba walked by the table, he found the chairs emptied of the men, but there on the table lay a leather wallet. Swiftly, Themba picked it up, pocketed it, and walked away to the river for his regular break. He stood by the riverbank, waiting for the hippos to announce their arrival, for the grunts to ease his disorderly mind. Some time passed before he took out the wallet and inspected it: several hundred Rands, two twenty-dollar bills, credit cards, and a photo of two children with blue eyes and dark blonde hair. A beautiful woman with curly black hair accompanied the children, her dark skin belying roots in Africa. Themba felt a bubbling in the depths of his stomach, anger unfurling slowly and stormily, and resisted the urge to throw the wallet into the river. 

A sudden commotion in the distance interrupted his anger; shouts and words intermingled, came closer. He noticed his fingernails had made dents in the leather from his tight grasp. 

“Themba!” shouted his manager. “Come to the office!” 

“I’m coming just now,” Themba replied, his tone faraway and unfamiliar to himself. 

It would be much later that Themba wondered which of his colleagues had seen and given him away to the manager, or how red the face of the American man must have been when he accused his waiter of stealing his wallet. He dimly perceived his manager’s words of exasperation, then anger, then disbelief at Themba’s refusal to offer an explanation or apology. He calmly and distantly admitted to his action. That which had been feared and anticipated had come to pass, and Themba felt no remorse. 

Themba walked to the riverbank one last time after he was told he was not to return to work the next day. He stood quietly, listening to the heavy thuds and grunts, water sloshing around the hippo’s feet as he imagined them. The hippo must be so much larger and more frightening up close, he marveled to himself. Finally, he turned and walked away, the moonlight reflecting off his skin, his footsteps leaving heavy prints in the mud and along the wet grass. 

//Rabab Ahmed is a Bangladeshi-American writer and teacher with an MA in English Literature and a dream of a PhD. She currently teaches ESL at EC English Language Center and Pace University in New York City.