Safari sounds like an exotic word, but it simply means journey or trip in Swahili. Yet even in 2011 it is a return to a lost world. Book research was the excuse to visit the Serengeti region of Tanzania, but curiosity about the cradle of mankind was the motivation for a just-completed two-week tent safari. I wasn’t disappointed.
East Africa casts a spell of golden grasses, dramatic skies, rearing volcanoes, a precipitous Great Rift, and the hope that comes from healthy wildlife. In Tanzania’s national parks, the humans are the ones in cages – their bouncing Land Rovers and Land Cruisers – and the animals roam free.
The result is astonishing; the roadside spectacle tops what I’ve seen in places like Yellowstone or Denali. We saw a leopard kill, lions mate, baboons play, giraffes neck-duel, zebras roll in the dust, crocodiles snooze, hippos grunt, warthogs graze, and ostriches flirt with a frustrated male. An aged, near-blind elephant as wrinkled as wet newspaper shuffled a few yards away, snuffing warily. A lioness sunbathed with paws elevated in the air, the breeze caressing the fur of her stomach. A black rhino trotted like a tank, lay down, and then snoozed for three hours while we waited vainly for it to do something more interesting than impersonate a boulder.
Nature, it seems, keeps its own schedule.Because it was the dry season, every stream and waterhole was as crowded as an airport. Like a scene of Eden in a children’s bible, a dozen species would mingle in a peaceable kingdom a few hundred yards wide, prey edging warily away from crouched predators that seemed undecided whether to expend the energy for a chase.
Wildebeest formed majestic lines like a cavalry patrol, or crammed together in a huddle of a hundred animals under a single tree in noontime heat. Cheetahs stood sentry on termite mounds. Vultures hovered like Afghanistan’s unmanned drones, ceaselessly watching.
As intriguing as the park is a 12,000-acre former barley farm acquired about seven years ago by our safari company, the American-based Thomson. With agriculture stopped, hunting banned, and cattle herding by the local Maasai somewhat redirected, wildlife on this section of east Serengeti plateau has exploded. With the gazelles, impalas, giraffes, and wildebeest have come cheetah and leopard. Lions and elephants are probably not far behind in this regeneration of an ecosystem.
Tourists like me bring more money than barley ever did.
There are so many wild animals in northwestern Tanzania – the migrating wildebeest have increased more than 10 times to over 1 million since their 1950s nadir – that a visitor viscerally realizes how rich life was in the past, how depleted it is in settled areas now, and how spectacular it could be again. Human domination of the planet has truly impoverished the human experience of sharing the globe with wondrous species.
Equally fascinating was the Maasai cattle-herding culture. Tall, slim, and elegant, with bright red robes, steely spears, beaded jewelry, and pierced and stretched ears, the Maasai are cleanly stylish in their world of mud huts and dung-covered enclosures, or bomas. These are fenced with thorned acacia branches or stockade stakes to keep out lions.
No electricity. No running water. No convenience foods. But an assault of change.
Ecologists debate to what extent Maasai livestock are compatible with wildlife, but the natives do seem to live with predators and wild grazers in a way Western ranchers never tolerate. Except for their small corrals, the Maasai country seems to have no fencing, leaving an expansive sense of possibility, of endless wandering. They have no ovens and little furniture, but a warrior can occasionally be found with a spear in one hand and a cell phone in another. They brand and covet their livestock, but share their food. They dance as traditional warriors, and sole their sandals with tire treads. Marriages are arranged; the dead traditionally left to scavengers. But agricultural food like maize and sugar is creeping in.
Our group hiked laboriously past majestic Ol Doinyo Lengai, the “Mountain of God,” led in part by a charming 26-year-old Maasai named Lengai who invited us to observe the skilled, ceremonial slaughtering and cooking of a goat. He bridges future and past, learning English, buying cattle, and teaching visitors the traditional ways.Tanzania, with more than 40 million people and a habit of big families, has a per capita income of less than a dollar a day and severe conservation issues. Global warming shows signs of drying the country out; we tourists threaten to overwhelm what we love (there are at least 150 safari companies). A proposal to pave a miserable dirt track that represents one of the nation’s major highways has divided politicians.
For Americans, however, Africa is a revelation. For two weeks I was disconnected from phone, TV and the Internet, and thus oblivious to our habitual political dysfunction and financial instability. It was heavenly. For two weeks I got a peek at what Creation intended, and noticed that some of the poorest people in the world seemed more communal, and content, than the richest.
