| August
of 2004 |
| To The Adventurers and
Adventuresses -- All at once it was a scene to roil your adrenaline and freeze your breath. In the middle of Tanzania’s great Serengeti Plain that reaches from horizon to horizon in East Africa, our LandRover crept into the midst of a colony of lions. They were altogether magnificent. They were also unimpressed by the intrusion. Our driver, Godwin, moved among the lions with a healthy prudence. He was threading along the skimpy dirt road in the lowest gear available, going, as a patrol sergeant might tell it, low and slow. On either side of us they hunkered in the low grass, appraising us with that look of lazy annoyance that identifies lions that have recently eaten and have no time for hospitality. There must have been 11 or 12 of them, an extended family of lions, a pride. The patriarch had a massive head and extremely large teeth. There were a couple of females and subsidiary males and three our four cubs, and none of the lions was more than 15 or 20 feet from us. And then one of our tires went flat. It did this without explanation. In the middle of the Serengeti there are no Jiffy automotive test centers. We might not have known about the flat immediately. The driver of a second LandRover flagged it for us and then, unaccountably, kept going down the road with a shrug and wave. I don’t know if there is a Swahili version of "c’est la guerre," but he might have been singing it in the billows of dust he blew up as he left. Godwin dismounted without enthusiasm and grabbed a wrench. His purpose was not to mount some Herculean defense but to change the tire. As the organizer of our suddenly silent tour, I also got out in a thin show of moral support and to hold all available nuts that Godwin loosened from the disabled tire. The six others joined us quickly to expedite the operation as Godwin jacked up the Rover to replace the tire. I need hardly explain that there are no guard rails or obvious moats between the intruders and lions in the Serengeti. The unbendable rule in all camera safaris in Africa is not to leave the vehicle in the presence or suspected presence of lethal animals. Flat tires tend to change the options. It seemed the sensible thing to station ourselves in a way that covered the major compass headings while we listened for approaching grunts in case one of the lions chose to break up the party. I cleared my throat and said, "How’s it coming, Godwin?" He said it would be another couple of minutes. He looked on his side of the tossing fields of savannah and saw three lions in the prone position, a view that spurred him to even higher zeal attaching the new tire. "Everything OK on the other side?" he asked. I saw three baby lions and the mother. The mother lion was, well, frowning, watching the scene on the road with a mixture of puzzlement and disapproval. "Maybe," I said, "we can start piling into the LandRover." Godwin thought this was a terrific idea. He was behind the wheel a minute later and we rolled away unmarked. "They had us outnumbered," I said. Godwin was philosophical "All they needed to outnumber us," he said, "was one." For the visitor who has traveled East Africa a dozen times, or once, the journey is almost always a stunning experience. Whatever the subsequent dilutions of time, it’s impossible to dislodge the scenes of its hypnotic wildlife, or of its grief, or its size, its poverty, its incredibly diverse geography--jungle, desert, mighty rivers, snow mountains---or the scent of death in its refugee centers. Nor can time or distance do much to diminish the memory of the power of its landscape or the beauty in the faces of its struggling women. The irony in it cannot dull the gay colors of the garments they wear, as though they are silently defying the condition of their lives to reveal the song in their souls. The stereotypes of Africa are horrendous. We say Africa and we think millions afflicted with HIV-AIDS, populations ruled by assault weapons, billions of dollars of intended aid siphoned off by corrupt bureaucrats. We say Africa and we think genocide, civil war and bloated babies in the last throes of starvation. None of that is very far away when you visit Africa. It is not all of Africa. You should be spared any phony apologetics. But to be honest those images should also include the millions of ambitious Africans who are lifting their lives out of oblivion and feeding and schooling their children by building tiny businesses with loans they repay at interest. Not all of the African governments are irredeemably corrupt. Not all of the economies are sinking disasters. It’s abundantly true that very few saints occupy positions of power in Africa. But the governments of Tanzania, Uganda and a few others seem to make some sense. South Africa shows something more than lip-synch gratitude to its heroic Nelson Mandela. There is something else to remember about the cash-poor states of sub-Saharan Africa. They acquired their chaotic independence in the 1960s, about three or four thousand years behind the rest of what we consider organized society. Their legacy is tribalism, barbaric rivalries and brutality, exploitation by rich and greedy industrial powers, the theft of its humanity by slavers, poverty and, except for South Africa and one or two others, practically bare shelves in the world trade markets. You might add the casual neglect of African suffering by those same powers until actual anarchy erupts—and even then the response to it has been uniformly bashful and tardy. It will be a different Africa a couple of hundred years from now. But today? You don’t have to be naïve to be thrilled by what Africa presents to the traveler in search of discovery. You can absorb that spectacle by the hour without being blind to its staggering needs in education, hospitals, technology and, perhaps above all, its need for friends. You can go to Africa a dozen times and feel the same jolt of astonishment in the sight of herds of elephants plodding toward a stream in an acacia forest. That is the child in you. Nothing reawakens it as Africa does. But then you reach the nearest village and observe the naked kids and dust and crumbling mud houses and skewed tin roofs and flies in the market, and feel the oppression of death by AIDS. And you have to remind yourself to withhold quick judgments about ignorance and squalor and tribalism. And you might also want to remember all those preachments about brotherhood and sharing that we are convinced makes us civilized and spiritual. Africa is a good place to examine the depth of those attributes. Guilt doesn’t have to be part of the equation. An attempt at understanding does. Maybe a man like Godfrey Mukasa makes it easier. It was pure luck that we met Godfrey again after a final day in western Uganda. My wife and I had traveled in separate groups in Kenya and Tanzania for two weeks. Susan escorted members of a family foundation she manages on visits with Africans whose lives had changed because of grants from the family. My group explored the wild nature of East Africa, the wildlife preserves and the safari lodges. Two in my group, Kathleen and Dave Lepp, climbed on Kilimanjaro. David reached the summit at Uhuru. Kathleen made it to 17,500 feet despite a chronic knee problem that forced to go do down 500 feet from the summit ridge. When the rest of the travelers left, Susan and I traveled Uganda for a week. Near the end of it we stood within reach of the deafening rampage and mist clouds of the Nile River where it leaps 200 feet at Murchison Falls. The day before we cruised the Nile among packs of hippos and crocodiles 15 feet long, flattened still and carnivorous along the shore. That was one Africa, startling and almost unreal. Godfrey was another, the Africa of life-or-death reality. We met him two years ago in a small hospital for AIDS patients in the Ugandan capital of Kampala. He’d been a soldier in the resistance army that defeated Milton Obote and brought Uganda back from the horror of Idi Amin. A few years ago his wife died of AIDS. So did one of his children. He was also infected. The social service director at the hospital, Beatrice Lubega, saw symptoms beyond his HIV. He had resigned himself to dying. "You can do that," she said. "Or you can take hold of yourself. You can toughen yourself. You can do exercises. You can watch what you eat. You can stop drinking. You can’t smoke. You can find some way to make money so you can put your two children into school." When we saw Godfrey two years ago at the age of 36, everything about him declared his capitulation to death, from his unfocused stare to his limp arms and the dragging monotone of his voice. A week ago we visited Beatrice and asked about Godfrey. "Is he gone?" She laughed to hear that. "I’ll get him on his cell phone." She called and ten minutes later Godfrey rolled into the hospital parking lot on his motorcycle, walked into the building, clapped his hands, grinned hugely and told his visitors. "Hello. I remember you." Tell us, we said. He moved about athletically, a man of action without enough time to meet all of his chores. He had taken a loan and built a café in his house. His grandmother ran it. Its business was growing, his kids were in school, he was raising pigs and he was counseling five AIDS patients at the hospital on how they could extend their lives into the indefinite future even if they couldn’t afford drugs. He did it building up his body, by taking care with his diet,, by reporting all small infections immediately, by holding his blood counts at a level where he could stay healthy without drugs and by one final commitment. "I tell myself every day," he said, "that life is good. That I have something to offer. Life is best when I’m doing service. Nobody should ever feel alone the way I did. My children now have a chance." The discoveries one makes in Africa are not limited to its wild nature. Cordially Jim Klobuchar |