Local author Mario Cesare has been the General Manager / Warden of Olifants River Game Reserve since 1993 and is a well-known face around Hoedspruit.
Before his journey at Olifants River Game Reserve, Cesare had spent nine years in the Timbavati and prior to that, he had worked for commercial lodges in Thornybush, Mala Mala and in Botswana.
One of his first jobs was to dismantle cheetah bomas in what is now the Hoedspruit CBD, behind the old Fort Copeiba. The bomas and their inhabitants were moved to Thornybush, where Cesare had recently taken a job. Can you just imagine there being a boma of cheetahs in the middle of what is now a busy town? Hoedspruit certainly has changed.
Mario reminisces about days gone by in Hoedspruit, such as in the mid 1970s, “There was no game around then. It was all commercial farming. Game brought tremendous value to the area. The Big Five has done to Hoedspruit what trout have done to Dullstroom.”
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This wasn’t the only fly-fishing reference that Cesare made during our relaxed chat over a cup of coffee and our focus was easily shifted as we digressed to the beauty of one of South Africa’s fly-fishing hotspots, Rhodes, in the Eastern Cape and we shared our stories of enchantment over this little hidden slice of heaven.
The content of Mario Cesare’s first book was inspired by the regular newsletters that he would send out to shareholders in order to keep them up to date with the goings-on on the reserve.
The newsletters offered the shareholders a portal into the bush whilst they sat in their homes and offices. They couldn’t wait for the next edition and compliments about the creative content came flooding in, with many people suggesting that a book is made from them.
The positive feedback spurred Mario on to keep producing the letters and soon he realised that publishing a book wasn’t such a bad idea. All 800 editions of the book, titled ‘Olifants’ and published in 2009 were pre-sold and the book was hugely popular.
The content of the book is largely extrapolated from the newsletters and is in no particular order. It is designed, according to its introduction “to be picked up and opened at any page at any time to strike a chord or re-ignite a memory.”
Mario was then approached by Jonathan Ball Publishers and the book went worldwide, however the title of the book was changed to ‘Man-eaters, Mambas and Marula Madness’ – a title most people are perhaps more familiar with.
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The book proved to be so popular that Mario went on to write two more titles; The Man with the Black Dog published in 2011 and Heart of a Game Ranger: Stories from a Wild Life in 2017.
After the release of his third book, Mario decided to contact his English teacher who taught him when he was 15 years old. Mario had received an E grade for English in matric and he wanted to let her know that, “her strivings weren’t for naught!” The retired teacher, now residing in Massachusetts in the USA was reduced to tears when she heard about the huge success of his prose and memoirs.
When asked about the nature of his writing, Mario says, “You have to craft it. I like to be descriptive, to describe something as if it is completely alien so that you can almost touch and feel it.”
If you haven’t read Mario’s books, you are certainly missing out. If you are a bush novice, the stories will leave you in awe and Mario’s passion for the local fauna and flora will certainly be contagious. If you are a bush veteran, you will undoubtedly draw parallels from Mario’s tales to your own bush adventures.
