Her music, the roar of beasts with whom she has shared her heart, her home, her bed. Her chandelier has long been the starry sky of the African plains. Kruger has always preferred to live happily oblivious to the concrete jungles of civilization. Husband Kobus (his name is a masculinized version of hers) was also born on a bushveld farm but they didn’t meet until both were students at the University of Pretoria where she was specializing in African tribal languages.įor their first date, Kobus took her to see the 1966 movie Born Free. She was born in the Northern Province on a farm where her father, the late Jamie Uys, was the director of the internationally acclaimed film The Gods Must Be Crazy. No relation to the founder of the park that was her home for 17 years beginning in 1980, Kruger is most comfortable roughing it in the bush. Kruger’s naivete (she giggles a lot and speaks in whispers) is touching for a woman who is 52, more so because genuine. I usually don’t know what any of these things mean.” “Oooooh,” she squeals, awestruck by such dishes as warm hazelnut crusted goat cheese with roasted peppers and balsamic glazed figs and Mediterranean tuna tartar on crisp olive bread.
When she sits down to dinner a few minutes later the wonderment continues.
“I’m not used to staying in hotels,” confesses Kruger, wide-eyed as a child regarding her first Christmas tree, who walks gingerly over the plush oriental carpeting at Toronto’s King Edward Hotel. The civilized life, and it has her spooked. In her trek across the continent on a promotional tour that has had her in 10 cities in as many days, Kruger has been eating in candlelit restaurants, staying in five-star hotels, and signing copies of The Wilderness Family in high-end bookstores with Mozart wafting overhead from discreetly positioned speakers. Instead of the earth-shattering growls of the king of beasts, a close companion during her years in the wild, Kruger hears the whirr of cash registers racking up sales for her gripping book - a kind of Born Free of the new millennium. The bushes come alive with snorts and grunts and snarls that can scare a human half to death.īut lately life sounds different in the ears of Kobie Kruger, author of the The Wilderness Family, a best-seller in her native South Africa and released for the first time in North America last week.
Twilight is brief and darkness falls fast on the largest wild animal reserve in South Africa, whose vastness would fill Wales. A leopard nightly patrols the neighbourhood populated by elephants and hippos, baboons and lions and, in a modest buttercup-yellow house, a popular memoirs writer, her game warden husband and their three blonde daughters. In a remote ranger station in a faraway corner of South Africa’s Kruger National Park that slithers along the border of Mozambique, bushbucks and monkeys are regular visitors.
0 kommentar(er)
