With time, the British introduced a system of forced labor: the tribal chief had to supply a given number of people to work for free. They were placed in camps. Large concentrations of these gulags indicated places where colonialism had settled for good. Before this occurred, however, other quick alternatives had to be found. One of them was to import to eastern Africa cheap labor from another British colony: India. In this way Dr. Patel’s grandfather found himself first in Kenya, and then in Uganda, where he later settled permanently.
During one of his visits, the doctor told me how in the course of the railroad’s construction, when the tracks began to draw away from the shores of the Indian Ocean and enter the vast territories covered with dense bush, terror began spreading among the Hindu workers: lions had started to attack them.
A lion in his prime does not like to hunt humans. He has his own predatory customs, his favorite tastes and gustatory preferences. He loves the meat of antelope and zebra. He also likes giraffe, although they are difficult to hunt, being so tall and large. And he doesn’t turn his nose up at beef, which is why at night shepherds gather their herds within enclosures built in the bush out of thorny branches. But even such a fence is not always an effective barrier, for the lion is a superb jumper and can soar over the goma, as they call it, or just as adroitly crawl under it.
Lions hunt at night, usually in a pride, organizing approaches and ambushes. Immediately before a hunt, a division of roles takes place. There are those who are in charge of driving the prey, directing it toward the jaws of the executioners. The lionesses are the most active, and it is they who attack most frequently. The males are the first to feast: they slurp the freshest blood, swallow the most tender morsels, lick up the fatty marrow.
The daytime hours are spent digesting and sleeping. The lions lie drowsily in the shade of the acacias. If one doesn’t irritate them, they will not attack. Even if one approaches them, they will get up and walk farther away. This is a risky maneuver, however, for a predator like this can execute a leap in a split second. Once, on the drive across the Serengeti, we got a flat tire. Instinctively I jumped out of the car to change it, and suddenly realized that around us in the tall grass, next to the bloody shreds of an antelope, lay several lionesses. They watched us but didn’t move. Leo and I sat shut in the car, waiting, wondering what they would do. After a quarter of an hour they rose and, tawny, shapely, beautiful, calmly ambled off into the bush.
Lions going forth to hunt announce this with a mighty roar that carries over the entire savannah. The sound frightens, panics the other animals. Only elephants are oblivious to these battle horns: elephants are not afraid of anyone. The others scatter wherever they can, or else stand, paralyzed with terror, waiting until the predator emerges from the darkness and delivers the mortal blow.
The lion is an efficient and formidable hunter for about twenty years. After that he begins to show his age. His muscles weaken, his speed diminishes, his leaps grow shorter. It is difficult for him to chase down a skittish antelope, a swift and vigilant zebra. He walks around hungry, a burden to the pride. It is a dangerous moment for him — the pride does not tolerate the weak and the ill, and he can fall prey to it himself. More and more frequently, he fears that the younger ones will bite him to death. He gradually detaches himself from the pride, lags behind, and finally is alone. He is tormented by hunger, but can no longer chase game. He has only one recourse: to hunt humans. Such a lion is commonly referred to here as a man-eater, and he terrorizes the local population. He lurks near streams where women go to do the wash, near paths along which children walk to school (being hungry, he now hunts by day as well). People are afraid to walk out of their huts, but he attacks them there, too. He is fearless, merciless, and still relatively strong.
It was lions like these, Dr. Patel continued, that started to attack the Indians building the railway line to Kampala. The men slept in cotton tents, which the predators easily slashed to pieces as they pulled out a steady supply of victims. No one protected these people, and they didn’t have their own guns. In any event, to battle a lion in the African darkness is a losing proposition. The doctor’s grandfather and his companions heard at night the screams of men being torn apart, for the lions feasted fearlessly, in close proximity to the tents, and then, sated, vanished into the gloom.
The doctor always found time for me and conversed willingly, for which I was grateful since even several days after an attack I would still be unable to read, the print blurring, the letters swimming about, as if lifted up and rocked on invisible waves.
“Have you seen a lot of elephants already?” he asked me once.
“Oh, hundreds,” I answered.
“And do you know,” he said, “that long ago, when the Portuguese first arrived here and started buying up ivory, they were struck by the fact that Africans didn’t have a great deal of it. Why, they wondered? After all, the tusks are very rugged and long-lasting, and if it is difficult for them to hunt down a live elephant for its ivory — they usually did this by chasing the animal into a hole they had dug earlier — then why don’t they collect the tusks from elephants that have already died, and whose corpses are doubtless lying somewhere? They suggested this idea to their African middlemen, but heard something astonishing by way of reply: there are no dead elephants, there are no elephant cemeteries. The Portuguese were intrigued. How do elephants die? Where are their remains? At issue were the tusks, the ivory, and the large sums of money they commanded.
“The manner in which elephants die was a secret Africans long guarded from the white man. The elephant is sacred, and so is his death. Everything sacred is surrounded by an impenetrable mystery. What caused the elephant to be so admired was that he had no enemies in the animal world. No other beast could conquer him. He could die (in the past) only a natural death. It occurred usually at dusk, when the elephants came to the water. They would stand at the edge of a lake or river, reach out far with their trunks, and drink. But the day would come when a tired old elephant could no longer raise his trunk, and to drink clear water he would have to walk farther and farther out into the lake. His legs would sink into the muck, deeper and deeper. The lake pulled him into its cavernous interior. He fought for a time, thrashed about, attempted to extricate himself from the bog and get back to the shore, but his own weight was so great, and the pull of the lake’s bottom so paralyzing, that finally the animal would lose its balance, fall, and vanish under the water forever.
“There,” Dr. Patel finished, “on the bottoms of our lakes, are the age-old elephant cemeteries.”
Dr. Doyle
My apartment in Dar es Salaam consists of two rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, on the first floor of a house that stands amid coconut palms and luxuriant, feathery banana trees not far from Ocean Road. In one room I have a table and chairs, in the other a bed draped with mosquito netting; its festive presence — it resembles a white, trailing wedding train — is meant more to reassure the tenant than to deter mosquitoes: a mosquito will always manage to slip through. It almost seems that these small but insistent aggressors establish each evening a battle plan meant to exhaust their victims, because if there are ten of them, say, they do not attack all together — which would allow you to deal with them all at once and have peace for the rest of the night — but one by one. The first to take off is, as it were, the scout, whose reconnaissance mission the rest closely observe. Well rested after a good day’s sleep, he torments you with his demonic buzzing, until finally, sleepy and furious, you organize a hunt, kill him; you are just lying down again, confident of returning to sleep, just turning off the light, when the next one begins his loops, spirals, and corkscrews.