Of Things Beautiful and Hated
There is a mountain called Njesuthi that sits above all the other mountains in the region of Lesotho in South Africa. I know this mountain well, for when I was a young boy my family would travel from our home in Durban to the Lesotho countryside for summer holidays.
I loved Njesuthi for its grandeur. My mother loved it because she said it was “the most beautiful mountain the world.” And my father—a broad-shouldered, large man with a prickly mustache and piercing blue eyes—loved Njesuthi because he loved to hunt.
My father loved hunting all creatures. He was not a cruel man, nor was he particularly loving. He was as an army captain should be—often cold and calculating, sometimes generous and friendly. But he was not loving.
He often told me that “hunting will make you into a man.” And so, with the best of fatherly intentions, he would convince me to trek down the deep valleys falling toward Njesuthi and then hike up the steep, rocky paths that led to the great mountain’s peak.
I was too young to hate anything vividly then. Hate is something that grows, and young boys do not hate easily. But even then, at that young age, I recognized the discomfort of hunting.
My father particularly enjoyed hunting for wildebeest, the wild cattle that roam South Africa’s plains. Even in Lesotho, in the heights…
