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The Endless Paradox of Africa
The big African sunrise was still a half hour away when we climbed into our Land Rovers on the last day of our safari at Lake Ndutu in Tanzania. We crept through the thick forest of acacias and fever trees with quiet engines and no stirring expectations. To be honest, we'd filled our cup with sights and sensations in our ten days in East Africa. We rode in the midst of the massive wildebeest migration, which was not as boisterous as it is on the 15th rerun on the Discovery channel but it was there in the flesh and on the ground, through the savannahs of the Serengeti and surging around the alkaline bays of Lake Ndutu. We'd witnessed quarreling male lions at 10 feet, an uneasy distance that you assumed could be quickly redeemed by an alert driver. Wary rhinos, almost extinct in this part of Africa just a few years ago, kept more distant than that in the Ngorongoro caldera, where elephants--having absolutely nothing to be shy about--plodded anywhere they chose. For days it was one absorbing scene after another. For those seeing Africa for the first time, each one stopped the show. For those who’d been there before, it was a re-enactment that was greeted with a silent and relieved thanks. What if the lions hadn’t shown up? At night we stared into the nearly-blinding infinity of the African starlight. No matter how often you see it, the African sky at night pulls your jaws apart. It’s that hypnotic. And when your eyes fix on the Southern Cross, you can’t escape an odd twinge of fulfillment. There's a truism about a clan of Minnesotans traveling below the equator. If you've grown up in the northwoods idealizing the moments when the aurora borealis burst on you in all of those dancing curtains of blue and green, seeing the Southern Cross is the ultimate transport to another world. All of this we’d seen and felt, and much more. Priscilla Murphy flew above the Serengeti in a great hot air balloon. And what did Priscilla Murphy see? "Forever," she said. "Almost forever." Pragmatists might not be satisfied with almost forever. What else? "Herds of cape buffalo," she said, "moving across the plains." The sun coming up over Africa. The endless savannahs, gazelles skittering and leaping. She could barely breathe, it was so immense. And Barbara Harris? "I will never look at the stars the same way again," she said after seeing them from the slopes of Kilimanjaro. The wildlife reserves are one Africa.Its heavens are another. Kilimanjaro is another. Kilimanjaro is a grind and a trudge; it’s a journey from the rain forest to the receding ice and snows nearly four miles above the sea, from the tropical to the sub-polar. Climbing Kilimanjaro is to walk in the chatter of monkeys and then through vast dry meadows of heath and sedge and then to the face of the moon, the bouldered wasteland of its lava slopes. Dan Anderson and Jon Sargent reached the summit ridge. Others got sick, cramps, fouled stomachs and etc. Kilimanjaro is rarely spectacular but it’s always hard. Sometimes it’s glorious, from 15 miles away. But it is a monument to Africa, and you can never look at it or climb it without respect. So on the last day of the safari, what more was there to see? The sun grazed the the silver water of Ndutu but it was too early or too scary for the flamingo. It wasn’t too early for a mother lion. We saw her lying alert and motionless in a stretch of sand between the scrub bushes near the lake. The lion was hunting. Her young were nearby, waiting to be fed. We parked 50 feet away from the mother lion. Twenty minutes before, we’d seen a lone female wildebeest. The wildbeest is ungainly and largely unloved by humans because it homely and misshapen—a kind of a buffalo head on the frame of a skinny cow—and it looks dumb. It may not be. But the struggle of a mother wildebeest to keep track of her newborn is one of the dramas of the African wilderness. If they are separated, the baby wildebeest is almost certain to die within a couple of hours. The wildebeest, we realized later, was the mother. The lion didn’t see it. But here came a baby wildebeest, scuttling along, crying, looking for its mother. It couldn’t have been more than two days old. It approached our Land Rover and rubbed against it. What did the baby wildebeest know about genetics? It was terrified and alone. The baby wildebeest wandered away. One of us tried to warn it. In fact, he yelled. "Hey, go the other way, the other way." The little wildebeest knew less about English than genetics. It scurried toward the low-lying bush and onto the sand where the mother lion lay motionless. The lion rose quietly, turned and crushed the baby wildebeest. It was one more and a rather unforgettable Africa. A few days later, before leaving Africa, we visited with an old friend, Dave Simonson, a missionary in Africa for 50 years. People who presume to make changes in Africa, with its poverty and sickness and wars and its scars of the colonial domination, are going to fail unless they go there with the unbreakable will to see it through. Simonson truly believed that Africa was his calling. That conviction sustained him through attacks of malaria, anthrax and diabetes, by-pass operations, prostate cancer and pneumonia. He’s still there in Tanzania with his wife, Eunice. He’s still crusty and a load if you argue with him, which you probably should from time to time. But after 50 years he and those who worked with him have built 2,500 classrooms, a secondary school for once-suppressed Maasai girls and a hospital that has saved thousands of lives. So Africa is better because of the Simonsons and those like the Simonsons. It has endured a horrific epidemic, civil wars, corruption and the neglect of wealthier nations who gave up on Africa as a hopeless chaos. But today’s Africa is also the Africa of Mandela and Tutu. It is the Africa of Tanzania and Uganda, where there are the beginnings of democracy. It is the Africa of the new and spreading uplift of women fostered by the microcredit movement that puts small loans—access to money for the first time—into the hands of the ambitious poor. So when you leave Africa you know there are dozens of Africa with one constant. There is no ONE Africa. It has a hundred faces and landscapes. It is elusive and cruel, beautiful and maddening, a place of murder and brutality but also a new awareness among its educated young people with management skills. It is stately women in their orange and black saris, carrying gourds of water on their heads. It is people who want you to come closer and to understand them, which shouldn’t be hard because when they sing and laugh the sound will stick in your mind until you have to hear it again. And so we will. Best wishes – Jim Klobuchar |