Mama Africa

Published April 15, 2008
One Comment (at bottom of article)

By Colin Lucas

My sanity is being eroded daily by vivid, hallucinogenic flashbacks of Africa that hit me at my most unsuspecting moments.

Recently, I was driving along one of Vermont’s icy mountain backroads when the snowy pines that lined my path morphed into flat-topped acacia trees. A troop of toothy baboons occupied one such tree, using it as their jungle gym while expressing senseless, carnal infuriations with low-pitched, echoing belly shrieks that resonated through the caverns of my imagination, striking a chord in the instruments of my memory. Literally speaking, I was still seeing snow and birches and blue winter skies; yet, in the past weeks, my inner eye has fallen prey to graphic reminiscences of Africa’s mystique. My mind has become inhabited with ceaselessly shifting primates.

In class, I have lately been opting for inconspicuous desks in the back corner, because I know that in short order my concentration will be savagely whipped away from politics, and I’ll once again be sitting shotgun in a Land Rover, breathing through a bandana that catches the choking dust of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans, my arm outstretched with a ten-million candle strength spotlight as we track brown hyaenas through the crisp Botswana night, damning the hidden aardvark holes we hope we can dodge.

Hitting one would mean losing the hyaena and having to step into the boundless dark to jack up the vehicle and change a flat, not the most inviting midnight proposition in lion country.

These hallucinations aren’t drug induced. No, wait, I take that back; it’s Africa that’s the drug and it’s under my skin like a dormant parasite that recurrently emerges with the candid and ghostly invocation of my senses. Africa has been known for its notorious magnetic pull, its intoxicating effect on wide-eyed itinerants. Many are the casual tourists who catch a two-way ticket to the Dark Continent and, after dirtying their clothes with a week’s worth of savannah dirt, take a permanent rain check on their return flight. I admit, that did occur to me; but I had a promise to keep.

My uncle got me a summer job as a camp hand and what I will call a safari guide’s “apprentice” in the Okavango Delta of Northern Botswana, working for Capricorn Safaris. “You can take the job,” he told me, “on one condition: you will return in September to continue with school.” Not too heavy an ultimatum, I thought to myself. It shouldn’t be any trouble.

In retrospect, though, I underestimated the psychological effect that all those weeks in the bush imprinted on me. I caught my return flight, but I somehow know it would have been just as easy to pull a 180 in the terminal and cruise back out to the safari post without a single thought of college, my apartment lease, my GPA or all the petty restrictions of modern America. And now, back in the mighty, civilized West, there is a primitive howl in my throat that I must suppress every time I remember my first day driving a Land Cruiser through the bush.

From camp, our group had traveled an hour to a river-tour drop-point where the clients and one of the guides floated off down a reedy causeway infested with crocodiles. That left Stanley, a reserved Zimbabwean schoolteacher who took up guiding safaris when his country went to Mugabe’s dogs, and me. Well, I’ll be goddamned if Stanley’s calm and gentle demeanor didn’t vaporize the second he sat down in the driver’s seat and pointed to the remaining vehicle, which he clearly intended for me to drive back to camp. I sauntered over to it, stepped in, and before even turning the key, Stanley was gone, and in a hell of a hurry. He ripped off down a double-rut track and disappeared into the trees.

I’ve been driving trucks since before I had my permit, so I can hold my own when it comes
to off-roading. But Africa’s colonial roots threw in a confounding kink that I was still trying to work out: shifting with my left hand and sitting on the right. I was quick to find, though, that ambidexterity comes more easily than one might expect when elevated to a matter of absolute necessity. With my CB radio broken, I was not about to be left behind. For twenty minutes I kept on Stanley’s tail without actually catching a glimpse of him. I was drifting through switchbacks and following his trail of dust past forks in the road that would have pointed me on a lost solo mission into the heart of the darkness, had I miscalculated the direction of his dust trail.

That possibility summoned up a scene I had witnessed only days before, of a stranded zebra foal, separated from its herd and lost in the forest, crying out in desperate whinnies. I watched as it sprinted a quarter mile this way, then doubled back in confused terror in search of its mother. Its pleas for help were no doubt alerting all nearby predators that the Saturday-evening special on the menu of run-fast-or-die was black and white and ready to be served. My situation was not quite as dire, admittedly, but Africa ignited in me a constant flame of romanticized fantasies of man versus beast; it reconnected my long-neglected primitive instincts that played out in embellished imaginations of face-to-face encounters with big cats and aimless frontier-like wanderings.

When I caught up to Stanley, my heart nearly exploded with excitement. The dust cloud cleared to reveal that we were caught between a breeding-herd of elephants, at least forty strong and feeling a bit threatened by our presence. The matriarch and a few angry mothers extended their trunks at us in a blaring racket of trumpeting and mock charged our Toyotas, flapping their ears in a two-step advance and retreat, advance and retreat. We both downshifted fast and weaved our way out of the herd before I could exhale and, when I did, I let out a ripping yell to say GODDAMMMNNN!!!

This is Mama Africa! Yee-HAWW! I’m in it and I ain’t just looking, I’m living the Hemingway dream!

Keeping up the momentum we had used to get out of the herd, we emerged from the trees onto open grassland. Turning a quick, sandy corner on the edge of the woods, we nearly collided with a giraffe in the middle of the track, chewing leaves with a dumb look on its face and spectacularly well-camouflaged. It kept on dumbly chewing and I kept on dumbly exalting my situation with a pulse of 185 and a hundred breaths per minute. I looked out onto the savannah toward the setting sun, big as a basketball held at arm’s length, which would soon set the grasses alight with the red and orange blood of each day that dies into the night.

Home in body, I now understand that I have never, will never, leave Africa in mind. I feel the tug of the Kalahari Desert pulling me back to dance shirtless around a bonfire with the few remaining San Bushmen in southern Africa. A shaman sinks into a healing trance and his eyes roll back as I follow his slapping footsteps. His chanting deepens and he ceases to be fully human, His altered consciousness lifts him into a spirit world where he is half-animal and transcends the bounds of human flesh and mind. Drumbeats shake the ground, moonlight battles the stars, beads around the shaman’s bony ankles shake with the rhythm of the flames. His shadow casts off into the night and parts the earth where it touches down. The drumming slows and he collapses on the ground, shaking, hyperventilating, released from his otherworldly elevation.

My time in Africa seems like a prolonged trance dance, the burning heat of fire infiltrating my bones and lifting my soul into a metaphysical abstract that reengages my primeval yearnings. The trance is over now and I am down crouching on the dirt, fighting to retain the wild and free, fighting to catch my breath.

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