An Elephant in My Kitchen
Reader's Digest India|October 2020
Following my husband’s death, I found myself in charge of the African nature reserve we created together. I didn’t know where to begin
Francoise Malby-Anthony
An Elephant in My Kitchen

I grew up a city girl, a Parisian through and through, who could tell the quickest way to Saint-Germain-des-Prés but who knew nothing about animals. Our family never even kept pets. Living and working in the city, even a beautiful one like Paris, leaves no time to notice nature. It’s métro, boulot, dodo, as they say in France, when life is a relentless treadmill of commute, work, sleep. Yet, even as I pounded the Parisian treadmill, somewhere deep inside of me I always felt that I would end up in a foreign country. But living in the sticks in Africa? Not that foreign. And yet, here I was, in the sticks, all by myself.

It was my husband Lawrence Anthony, a South African, who brought out the wanderlust in me. I’d met him in London in 1987, and a year later I gave up my job and my chic Montparnasse apartment and moved to South Africa. I started a fashion business in Durban, but we were drawn to the bush, and eventually we bought a game reserve—a beautiful mix of river, savannah and forest sprawled over 1,500 hectares of the rolling hills of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal. There was an abundance of Cape buffaloes, hyenas, giraffes, zebras, wildebeest and antelopes, as well as birds, crocodiles and snakes of every kind.

This story is from the October 2020 edition of Reader's Digest India.

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This story is from the October 2020 edition of Reader's Digest India.

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