We’re in a car, driving with poachers. Money is tall and skinny, rake-like. He drives. Rabbit is thick set and short. He sits in the passenger seat. They’re in masks. We see only eyes, only the side of a cheek, a scratchy beard.
A wintery landscape slides by – bony trees and blue sky. We’re up in the northern area of South Africa. Lowveld. It’s where the rhinos are. We’re driving alongside a farm.
“Our boss is dangerous. This needs to be between us,” Rabbit says. “If my boss found out I was doing this, selling information, my life would be over.”
“Bosses are too much dangerous,” Money adds. “If you go wrong, they kill you. A lot have been killed by their bosses. They have eyes everywhere.”
The car continues onwards. A haze of grey in the distance approaches. “Kruger National Park.” Money points.
“Once you pass the fence, they can shoot you,” Rabbit says. “In Kruger National Park those rangers kill you fast: black people kill black people. Because they give them R20,000 if they shoot you. People are scared now to go back inside.”
The landscape changes and is suddenly bright green. “We use the farm to enter,” Money says. “Mangoes. It is easy to go across the fence into Kruger, cut it, then come back here. And we can hide for a few days.”
Cut it. Poacher’s slang for cutting the horn off the rhino.
“If we go inside with tourists, they won’t be suspicious. We must look like we’re tourists,” Rabbit says.
“We’re dressed like you and then they drop us,” Money says. “The rangers are working with us. They leave our equipment inside. 458 and a Rambo to cut it. Big knife that one. Long handle. Two or three of us. One shoots, one cuts it, one puts it in the bag. It’s not dangerous if the rangers are with us.”
Across nearly 20,000 square kilometres of ancient land, Kruger National Park reveals itself not as a destination, but as a living, breathing presence. In this extraordinary book, the park speaks through a chorus of voices: rangers, scientists, workers, travellers and the wildlife and landscape itself.
From the slow rhythm of a dawn drive to the magnetic silence of a riverbank, each page invites you deeper into a world where elephants shape landscapes, antelope sustain entire ecosystems and birds carry echoes of deep time. Through intimate interviews and vivid storytelling, the hidden life of the park emerges: the dedication of those who protect it, the complexity of conservation, the rough lives of the poachers who plunder it and the ever-present tension between sanctuary and survival.
Accompanied by striking photography, Kruger Speaks captures both the grandeur and the subtlety of one of Earth’s last great wild places.
