Predators I Have Known by Foster Alan Dean

Author:Foster, Alan Dean [Foster, Alan Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Science, Adventure Travel, Biography, Novelists; American, Predatory Animals
ISBN: 9781453210420
Amazon: 1453210423
Goodreads: 10821411
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

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Tanzania, August 1984

AS TANZANIA’S FIRST PRESIDENT, JULIUS Nyerere was admired by many, both inside Africa and out. Opinions regarding the rest of his government and many of his policies tended to be considerably less complimentary. Under the communist-socialist system he imposed, the usual inescapable afflictions of state-run commerce affected every aspect of Tanzanian society. Shortages of basics became even more commonplace than elsewhere in East Africa, industry stumbled along deprived of raw materials, and traditional African subsistence agriculture found itself subsumed into the familiar dreary people’s communes where no one is inspired to work one iota harder than they absolutely must to avoid the approbation of their fellows.

For years, a reader of mine named Bill Smythe had been imploring my wife and me to visit him and his wife, Sally, in Tanzania. Bill was a rodent control expert who had worked for various international aid programs everywhere from Fiji to Pakistan to Somalia and was, at that time, posted to Morogoro, a medium-size city about three hours’ drive inland from Tanzania’s capital of Dar es Salaam.

“Come on over,” he kept writing. “I’ll save up our gas ration coupons, and we’ll take a couple of drives around the country.”

This invitation finally being too tempting to ignore, JoAnn and I eventually found ourselves on a British Airways flight from London to Dar, with brief layovers in Cairo and Khartoum. As a harbinger of interesting developments to come, even these two brief stops proved themselves of interest.

Assigned to the forward section of the plane, we turned in our seats as in Cairo group after group of white-clad men and women boarded the aircraft. A number of the men sported ritual scars on their cheeks. Noting our curious stares, one of the crew proceeded to enlighten us.

“They all live in Khartoum. This is their shopping flight. There’s nothing to buy in Khartoum, so they take this middle portion of the flight back and forth to do their shopping in Cairo.”

Sure enough, when we arrived in Khartoum and parked on the tarmac, every one of the passengers who had boarded in Cairo promptly got off. As the last of them deplaned and the aircraft sat, I was able to steal a look out the door. No terminal was visible. In the warm desert night, the lights of the capitol of Sudan glistened in the distance. Driven by a steady breeze, swirls and whorls of sand danced across the runway while a pair of guards armed with AK-47s stood guard on either side of the rolling stairway. At any moment, I expected Sydney Greenstreet to arrive in a jeep and make a mad dash for the plane with an agitated Peter Lorre in tow.

Bathed in sunshine and carpeted with flowers, Morogoro sits at the foot of the imposing Uluguru Mountains. For days, we enjoyed Bill and Sally’s hospitality (Sally’s chicken-fried warthog is to die for . . . perhaps I should rephrase that: It’s wonderfully good), traveling to little-visited spots like Ruaha National Park.

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