SA's own Tarzan keeps the ancient art of tracking alive

KAREL Benadie is like Tarzan of the jungle, but only much better. For one, he is a real person.

Benadie, affectionately known as Pokkie, is one of the few people in South Africa who can read spoor. It is a rare skill that enables him to preserve indigenous knowledge of the country.

It all started when his father asked him to track caracal, also known as the desert lynx, a wild cat that terrorised farmers' animals.

Benadie, who is now a master tracker, was 14 years old at the time.

Once Benadie took two tracking students on an outing, and before he could raise his head or make sense of where he was, he had rhinos charging at him. "That was the scariest moment in my life," he said.

Benadie, now 50, is a principal trainer at CyberTracker Conservation in the Samara game reserve near Graaff-Reinet. The academy, a division of the South African College for Tourism, operates under the auspices of the Peace Parks Foundation. Benadie trains trackers from disadvantaged communities.

Adrian Steirn, who created the 21 Icons project, photographed Benadie leopard-crawling as though he were tracking wildlife. The portrait is published in the R17 edition of the Sunday Times today.

"Karel is one of the few practitioners of an almost dying art, and without people like him passing on this tradition of showing others how to track, how to understand their natural environment, we will lose a part of us," Steirn said. - Thekiso Anthony Lefifi