An Elephant in My Kitchen

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

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.