Learning to Speak Baboon

Rita Miljo, to be sure, is hardly the longed-for maternal figure of my dreams. Nor is she a woman who much enjoys talking about herself. Her preferred subject is clearly the baboons, but it is during these evenings in her living room, over a glass of white wine, that I begin to learn something about her strange, courageous and remarkable life.

Rita was born as Rita Neumann in 1931, in the northeastern corner of Germany near what was then Koenigsberg, near the Russian border. A young girl from a proper middle-class German family, she was in love with animals from her earliest memories and wanted to become a veterinarian. But World War II was brewing, and Rita discovered the Hitler Jugend, or Hitler Youth, joining when she was 8 years old. A year later, she became the youngest Hitler Jugend leader in the province. These facts surprise me, and it is not without a certain sense of irony that I listen to all of this: I am, after all, the American son of German Jews who fled Nazi Germany, just in the nick of time, in the spring of 1938.

"Being a young and naive little German girl," Rita confesses, "I enjoyed the Hitler Jugend. There were lots and lots of sports and competition, so I could do things I was normally not allowed to do, being the only daughter of an overprotective mother. Only today, in hindsight, do I understand the total madness we were subjected to."

For some reason, I do not have a hard time believing her claim that she was too independent a thinker to be brainwashed by Hitler's Aryan supremacist ideology. Instead, she says, the Nazis taught her "how to fight {lcub}hellip{rcub} and to win" through relentless pursuit, a lesson she later put to use in fighting the South African government to protect the baboons.

After the war, soldiers returning to West Germany were granted preferential admission to higher education, so Rita abandoned her plans for a veterinary career and went to work at Hamburg's renowned Hagenbeck Zoo. Inspired by her love of animals, she emigrated to South Africa in 1953, where she married a young German engineer named Lothar Simon who had come to work in a gold mine. Ten years later, she bought the section of bush that is now home to C.A.R.E. But, in 1972, Lothar, along with their 17-year-old daughter, was killed in a small plane crash.

It was in 1980, during her brief second marriage to an Afrikaner named Piet Miljo, and while on a roving expedition into Angola, that Rita made the transforming acquaintance of her life: Bobby, a neglected female chacma baboon, whom -- in defiance of the requirement for permits -- she took home by way of the Gemsbok National Park. And, with that, Rita's history, and the history of South Africa's baboons, changed forever.

By the end of my second week, I'm beginning to feel a bit like a baboon myself: I've actually begun enjoying this sitting around being groomed, presented to and lip-smacked. What's more, it's not a bad life being the alpha male -- I get a lot of attention. Somebody up there on my head -- Tortilla? Sabrina? -- seems to have fallen in love with me. She madly grooms my hair, my eyes, then moves on to my chest, along with periodic yanks on my chest hairs, and methodically chews off all three buttons on my shirt. But, all in all, it's a good life here in the cage -- calming, even meditative, when I'm not breaking up a fight.

On my first day entirely alone with mediums, Dennis comes to me repeatedly for comfort, yelping his little "help!" cry until I squeeze him to my chest and stroke his head. As the days march on, Dennis, in fact, is so sure of my protectiveness that he feels confident enough to attack Sunamu, the alpha female and troop leader, who does reverse somersaults between my legs chasing him. Dennis and his sister, Maggie, with whom, arm in arm, he often does a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-like soft-shoe around the cage, groom my chest hairs, while Sabrina and Kariba groom my legs. Even Sunamu takes a turn at grooming me. Dennis and Maggie have, to their delight, discovered my right nipple, which they attempt to "groom" right off my chest, without success. Stella, much like Shakira in the smalls, thinks I am of the greatest interest as a rump scratcher.

"You can pick your friends and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose" was a popular saying when I was a kid growing up in Manhattan. Yet that certainly isn't the prevailing ethos here. Maggie, whose tail was bitten off in a fight, is -- at least judging from the ardor with which she preens and grooms me -- clearly becoming my friend. She is also not at all averse to picking my nose -- along with my ears, my eyelids, my lips and gums and virtually any other protrusion or orifice she can reach. The sense of intimacy I have achieved with these creatures astonishes and moves me.

When my stay at C.A.R.E. draws to a close, I experience a deep welling of emotion; I am actually going to have to leave Dennis, Maggie and the others. But I'm not quite ready for that yet, so I decide to rent a car and go to Phalaborwa for a few days to explore the city and prepare myself for a return to "real" life.

On the day of my scheduled departure from South Africa, I drive back to C.A.R.E. to say goodbye to Rita, Lee, Bennett and the baboons. When I walk into Rita's living room, I discover that there's been bad news during the night: Nelson from the "Nut Village," where the older baboons, most of whom were rescued from research labs and scientific experiments, live, has died of pneumonia after 11 years at C.A.R.E. When they shaved his chest to perform a chest X-ray, Rita tells me, they found a number tattooed on him by an experimental lab where he was once a subject. I can't help think: The dark resonance of Rita's Nazi past rears its head once more.

"Where will you bury him?" I ask Rita.

"Up the hill with all the others, behind the Nut Village," she replies.

"And do you put a marker up for each?"

"No," she says. "I remember where each one is ... and that's where I'm going to be buried, too."

Before leaving, there's something else I need to do. I enter the mediums' cage, where I am immediately greeted and climbed upon by Dennis and Maggie, along with Sabrina and Tortilla.

I have come, in my engagement with Dennis, Maggie and the other baboons, to develop a certain appreciation for what has often been referred to as animals' "pure being" -- a certain soulfulness and centered vigilance that comes from dwelling, out of necessities that are most probably both self-preservative and genetic, entirely in the present. In the baboon world, one comes to see this in a way that, in the human world, perhaps only the bodhisattvas and truly enlightened come to know it.

And there's something soothing, consoling, even humbling, about this.

I take a seat on one of the crates, Maggie and Dennis firmly planted on my right knee as usual, with Maggie fervently grooming me. But I don't have much time for the hairdresser today -- I've got a plane to catch back to Marseille. So I turn and look Dennis right in the eye, lip-smacking and smiling as I do so. He looks back at me, neither running nor sounding the alarm cry.

In fact, it looks to me like he's smiling, too.

Michael Blumenthal is an author, poet and a professor of creative writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. He can be reached at mcblume@attglobal.net.