Sand Rivers Read online

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  interesting lore about African creatures, fron around the camp to the huge African megafaur it) that have survived the Ice Age. Not long £ wasp that had injected just enough toxin into dazed creature to be led by its antennae to a he laid its eggs, sealed in the prey as food for its two small sticks to block the entrance.

  Although a very private person who himself, Hugo answered dutifully enough wl life. With friends in Holland, at sixteen, he h; one day this club took a trip to a national park, pre-set camera in order to photograph the w small as well as quiet, he could sneak up bet this was something I was good at, and decic camera," Hugo said, with a characteristic look been sneaking up on animals ever since. Afte Dutch film company, he went to Africa in 1 Belgian animal photographers Armand and JV to photograph wild animals on safari. Instead work photographing their captive animals outs period that he trained himself in the study ai which at least were wild - and the next year h own. Meanwhile, he had become friendly w Leakey, who introduced him to their eminei Louis and Mary Leakey invited this young, bi and live with them. He had not been with the when the National Geographic magazine rang were doing a film on the Leakeys' work at Ok know if Dr. Leakey could recommend a suggested the young man who happened to be Geographic liked the film and shortly assigned on Jane Goodall, a young British protegee studying chimpanzees at Gombe Stream. Hug' 1964, and he worked with her closely on her C

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  for the chance to come here. Only a well-planned safari like thij could expect to penetrate the Selous to the depth that would justif effort, and such a safari was the ambition of almost everyone we ] who was concerned with wildlife m East Africa. Very few had ma and we took the opportunity without hesitation when it came.

  Maria, who was raised in Tanzania, Karen Ross, completing studies as an ecologist, and Robin Pope, a wildlife guide in Zan' Luangwa Valley, were all very eager to come too, and the Nich( family was happy to return. As for Rick Bonham, he had perse^ despite the warnings of people in Nairobi that his caravan would i get across the Tanzanian border and despite the refusal of the insui companies to underwrite him; like Hugo and me, he refused to mis: chance. Even my publishers in London had informed me that the> this project not as a commercial venture but as something that "ou^ be done". The only one with a cynical vie^ of all this enthusiasrr Brian Nicholson, who could not bear to be thought soft-heart( sentimental.

  Wild dogs visited the pool, first two, then the whole pack. The sti bat-eared creatures circled around behind the car with curiosity, emi that odd grunt-bark of alarm that contrasts so strangely with birdlike twitterings of greetings and contentment. These were all i looking animals, with shining black masks and brindle on the nap( shoulders, glossy black and yellow-silver bodies, irregularly sploti and alert clean white-tipped tails. All the carnivores we had see far in the Selous - the hyena, lion, and wild dog - were big he animals with fine coats, entirely lacking the scuffed and tat character they acquire elsewhere. This may be because the abundar water and good pasture reduces the need for seasonal "migration their prey and the resultant stress of leaving their own territories."^

  In the late afternoon the hippo calves began to surface, the 5 heads appearing right beside their mothers. The calves are born suckled in the water, and can lie so low with onlv their no

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  anticipation of the rains. The sky darkened, and yellow cassia blossoms brightened in the dusk.

  That morning, Brian had asked me if I wanted to take a rifle, knowing that 1 had planned to walk around at Namakambari; at the evening camp fire, he casually warned me again. "Even professional hunters sometimes think the hippo is too fat and slow and peaceful to be dangerous - it isn't so." On one safari, he remembered, he had had to shoot three of them, though on only two of these occasions was it the hippo's fault. The third time, on the Luwegu River, which flows down into the great Kilombero to form the Ulanga, his porters had been amusing themselves throwing stones at a hippo that had got cut off in shallow water. After trying unsuccessfully to retreat, the beleaguered beast finally came for its tormentors, who in their panic led it right to Brian. He was sitting on the ground, his rifle beside him, taking tea on his "chop box" - the tin box in which his safari utensils were carried - and when the hippo noticed him and charged, he had to shoot it; it collapsed, he said, with its great head facing him across the box.

  On another occasion, Brian told us, he had sat perched on a termite hill "splitting my sides with laughter" as a hippopotamus pursued "the acting chief game warden, Mr. D. Keith Thomas, who was on an official tour of my area" round and round it. Although this story was superficially comic, since hippos lend themselves to slapstick, Nicholson knew better than we did that a hippo can bite a man in two, and I found it difficult to believe that even lonides could split his sides when actually faced with the possibility of such an outcome - the thundering beast and screeching human being about to be bloodily destroyed before one's eyes. Not knowing quite what to make of his story (not to mention his attitude, in case the incident were true), I peered across the firelight searching for some sign of mischief in his face. ("I had a rifle," Brian explained later, "and was in a position to control the situation if it started getting out of hand.")

  Andrew Geddes of London, who made an airplane visit to the Selous with Nicholson and Arnold a few years ago, has testified to Nicholson's expertise in what the Warden himself refers to caustically as "eyeball-to-eyeball" encounters with dangerous animals; Geddes has described to me how Brian deflected a charging elephant with a rifle shot that struck it below the eye. "He stepped between us and that elephant; I'll never forget it. He saved our lives." In short, Brian's credentials were beyond dispute, yet I found myself resisting certain details of his accounts. This instinct was borne out by Melva Nicholson, who spoke with loving pride even of those headstrong qualities in her husband that from time to time must have caused her distress, but who was wonderfully frank and outspoken in all matters, whether talking about her own relentless snoring or

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  racking her memory over certain details of his stories. "I thought there was just one hon," she might say, and when her husband would say evenly, "Always two lion, Melva,"she would not dispute him, merely nod her head.

  In any case, with these hippo stories an uncomfortable silence had fallen on the company, which was relieved only when Hugo told two hippo stories of a different nature. On one occasion, an Egyptian goose was perching on a hippo's back and when her goslings, skittering and peeping at the hippo's side, tried to climb up, the animal, no doubt irritated by the patter of tiny feet, had turned and taken a tremendous bite at them. One gosling vanished into that enormous maw, only to come sailing out again unharmed as the closing jaws expelled a wave of water.

  Another day, a male hippo had chased a rival out of a pool and pursued it out of sight over a rise. Soon the earth shook again as the conqueror returned, still traveling at high speed, and hurled himself with a huge triumphal splosh - ha-wiium-pha! - into the water. Perhaps twenty minutes later, the vanquished hippopotamus turned up, moving slowly and discreetly, taking a full minute to ease his bulk into a corner of the pool with scarcely a ripple.

  As the days went on, Brian and I got on better than either of us (I suspect) anticipated; all the same, we were still feeling each other out on the sensitive matters of race and politics. One night, over a tot of rum (my tot: he scarcely drinks), I put forth the widely held idea that man's brain capacity had not improved for the last 40,000 years. Until 10,000 years ago, I suggested, all men were hairy hunter-gatherers, perhaps nocturnal, in which case the chances were that they all had blackish skins. Hugo pointed out that chimpanzees had white skin under their hair, which seemed to suggest that white skin was no evidence of evolution of primates. We wrangled a little, rather uselessly, on old questions such as the true definition of "civilization" and the obstacles to "progress" in a tropical environment. Emboldened by drink, I concluded spiritedly th
at the white man judged Africans by the material standards of his own reckless civilization, by the "progress" that was ruining the human habitat, and threatening the future of the earth . . . ! But Brian, of course, also deplored such "progress", and I lost track of my argument. Abruptly we changed the subject, and peaceably, partly because both of us were talking half-baked nonsense, and partly because we wanted to get along - indeed we would have to get along, as it now seemed certain that we would make an extended foot safari into the wild region between the Luwegu and Mbarangandu rivers with no company but the Africans and each other.

  Brian was quiet for a time, considering me in a certain way he has, lower lip curled, head cocked a little sideways, eyes lidded and cold.

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  Subsequently he related an incident at Moshi in 1951, when he was temporarily attached to Game Department headquarters near Arusha, due to the excessive zeal of Nonga Take-Your-Heart. "A herd of elephant got into that banana belt between the plains under Kilimanjaro and the mountain forest, and the Chagga couldn't get them out. These elephant found themselves surrounded by a million Chagga throwing rocks and sticks at them. Then one who was a little smarter than the rest set dogs on them, those frightful little shenzi yappers, and those elephants really got angry; they went tearing after the damned dogs, and the dogs ran back into the village with the elephants close behind, you see, and they all went round and round among all those new pride-of-the-nation houses with tin roofs, and when the elephants got fed up trying to catch the little dogs, they tore into the Chagga houses, ripped those new tin roofs right off, tore them apart. And after that, they shot off down the mountain and kept going, went all the way across the border into Kenya."

  It was a funny story and he told it well, and I had to laugh about the elephants and little dogS; but watching Brian watch me laugh, I wasn't sure that we found the story amusing in quite the same way, and hoped that the differences would not cause trouble on our foot safari.

  Author with Brian Nicholson.

  IV

  After a few days we were to move our base camp south and west about seventy miles to the Madaba region, near Nandanga Mountain, where C. J. P. lonides is buried; David Paterson would meet us there with the supply plane. Meanwhile, in hope of photographing sable antelope and greater kudu, Hugo, Brian, and I made a "fly camp" safari to the Tundu Hills, perhaps twenty miles from Kingupira, setting off through the wild-dog woods where five of these apocalyptic creatures, half-hidden, watched us pass. At a side track beyond the Kilunda Pool, we turned south to a dry sand river called Chimbulili, then southwest once more toward the open woodland ridge called Nakilala. The half shaft on Brian's Land Rover was broken, depriving it of four-wheel drive, and in the wet shallow grassy valleys that occur so unexpectedly in these parched woods, his machine had to be hauled out twice by Hugo's winch, with the aid of thrust from Bwana Peter, old Saidi, the Chagga boy Renatus, Hugo's mechanic and assistant, and Mwakupalu, the assistant cook, who would tend to the sahibs on this brief safari. For Brian, the broken shaft was a minor frustration compared to the scarcity of animals in one of his old haunts in the Selous. "Always elephant and buffalo in this valley, always!" he said. "Usually sable or kudu, too, and often both." But all we saw along the way were two solitary buffalo, two small bands of Lichtenstein's hartebeest, or kongoni, a common duiker, and a band of zebra, very wild, fleeing like striped spirits through the trees. (This is a slightly smaller race of Burchell's zebra of northern Tanzania, with narrower stripes that look black rather than dark brown.)

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  Here in the Kingupira region, which is relatively open and accessible, we saw most species only once and in small numbers, and most were exceptionally flighty - so flighty, in fact, that Nicholson, who had yet to see an elephant on this trip to the Selous, was already speculating that someone had been shooting at the animals. But, as he said, the situation in the Selous was quite different from that in the famous national parks of northern Tanzania, where wildlife could be readily observed not only because that highland country was more open but because many of the animals were hardened to the hideous sounds and outlandish sights and smells associated with the vehicles that turn up stuffed with human masks and glittering lenses all day long. "The parks are all very well in their place, but they are parks," he said. "The Selous IS the real Africa. This is what most of Africa really looks like."

  In the Selous, the spoor on the tracks and in the stream beds testifies to the abundance and variety of animals, but because of the wildness of the place, one must hunt them out and count each sighting as an event. This suited me entirely. (Rick Bonham agreed. "To me, this is the heart of Africa," he had said. "This is how it used to be. The place is stacked with game, even if you can't see it - signs everywhere, even back in the miombo. And what you do see, you have all to yourself. In the parks, there's always a minibus parked next to it." This was especially true of the "Southern Circuit" parks near the Kenya-Tanzania border, especially Manyara, Ngorongoro, the Mara Game Reserve, and Amboseli. In recent years the more remote parks, such as Ruaha which Maria visited in mid-August, have been lacking in visitors as well as funds and staff, and buildings, roads, and basic maintenance were breaking down.)

  For a photographer the situation was very difficult. Hugo was having trouble getting close to animals, and had to shoot through screens of foliage when he succeeded. Before he came, he had been warned by Alan Rodgers that the Selous animals were wild and hidden, but he had counted on their numbers to give him the opportunities he needed; even the Serengeti, he had heard, could not compare with the Selous in its large mammal populations, if one excepted the wildebeest and the gazelles. But whether this was true or not - and we were no longer confident - things wouldn't be easy. Not that Hugo complained; he was too professional for that. But he missed the conditions of the Serengeti, and I could not blame him. The animals further away from Kingupira might be less nervous, and those in the remote south the most trusting of all, but Hugo could not count on this, and as the days passed I could see that he was worried.

  At Nakilala, where we arrived just before nightfall, Mwakupalu made quick tea while Brian paced around, disgusted; he was now convinced that someone had been out "hammering animals" for food, and perhaps for money. This region had recently been burned, and there was no regrowth to attract animals; instead, the black floor of the woods,

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  with its cinder dust and gloom, seemed to emphasize the silence and the emptiness. It was plain to see that there was no systematic burning any more, Brian said, far less the foot patrols that were absolutely necessary if new game scouts were to learn their area. Effective patrols could not be made in vehicles, and anyway, all but the main tracks had been allowed to grow over and deteriorate to such a degree that the majority were now impassable. Without patrols, the bloody poachers could come in here as they pleased, the whole place would be shot to pieces, and meanwhile the bureaucrats, the townspeople who had been assigned by the socialist government to training in wildlife management^ whether they cared about wildlife or not, had taken over the Game Department from the good people Brian himself had trained. His people were less educated, no doubt, but at least they were interested and committed, with a sense of pride and accomplishment in their work, and in some cases - he pointed at old Saidi - with a whole family tradition behind them. "These lazy people they have now do nothing but sit around down here trying to figure out how they can get themselves sent somewhere else. We were proud of this place, and these people despise it! For them, it is banishment and punishment. And even while they are ruining the place, they are telling their superiors in government how well everything is going - a whole tissue of fabrications!" Brian snorted. So far as Brian was concerned, the Workers' Committees that made it so difficult to fire incompetent people had been fatal to morale in the whole Game Department. "Like so many of these socialist ideas, the theory is all very well, but it just doesn't work." The matter was complicated by the cumbe
rsome bureaucratic structure of the Tanzanian government in which scarcely anyone dared to take responsibility, far less risks, lest he be set upon by his ambitious peers, particularly where the decision involved a white man. As Rick Bonham said, speaking from the hard experience of trying to arrange the logistics of this safari, Tanzanians seemed more "brainwashed" than Kenyans in regard to the perils of cooperating with whites, whom they were apt to obstruct as a matter of course rather than be accused of collaborating with "Europeans". Had it not been for the interest and cooperation of Fred Lwezaula, head of the Game Department, and especially of Costy Mlay, one of President Nyerere's aides who had once been on Nicholson's staff in the Selous, this safari could never have taken place. (When Brian and I called on Mr. Mlay in Dar-es-Salaam in September, I found his intelligent concern for wildlife and the Selous extremely heartening; he understood perhaps better than we did how crucial it was that the Selous be saved, not only for economic reasons and for Tanzania's future but as a counterweight to headlong "progress", to help keep man in balance and harmony with the other creatures on the earth.)

  A few months after Brian left the Game Department in 1973, the government issued a ban against all big-game hunting throughout the

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  country, even though the strictly administered hunting safaris in the Selous had supported Tanzania's entire Game Department operation and had earned crucial foreign reserves as well. "They couldn't afford to lose the revenues from those safaris. The Selous can support a hell of a lot of hunting, so long as lov^ quotas are determined and strictly enforced, as they were in my day. With no funds to maintain the place, look what has happened: the airstrips are overgrown, the tracks are going, the game posts mostly abandoned, and poachers - not local meat-hunters any more but organized gangs with precision weapons - are said to be coming in from the roads and settlements to the north." It was even rumored that those gangs might be led by the ferocious Somali, who had looted the Tsavo region of ivory, rhino horn, and leopard pelts, but Brian doubted this. "Bad lot, those Somali, don't let anything get in their way: they detest the Bantu, you see, absolutely detest them. But here they'd have a problem with supplies. They won't sit out there eating rhino meat like the local poachers; they have to have their rice."