Shaken, Not Stirred

I come from the branch of Methodists who believe that Jesus turned water into Welch’s Grape Juice for the marriage at Cana. Our ignorance about spirituous liquors is profound, and on Jeopardy, even the rednecks amongst us select the “Opera” category ahead of “Potent Potables.” Nevertheless, we do watch movies, and we are all aware that James Bond prefers his martinis to be “shaken, not stirred.” Now, dearly belovéd, I want to offer two over-generalizations about Americans in Africa. (1) The typical visitor to this Continent is a self-styled Eco-Tourist, who has come to see charismatic megavertebrates [= elephants and lions, oh my!]. (2) On a more local scale, the typical visitor to Africa University is an Evango-Tourist, who has come to talk (and talk…) about Jesus and to have her or his heart gently stirred by the warmth of multi-cultural godliness. In my own conceits I defy both stereotypes: I have come to chase frogs. And in Africa, inevitably, my heart is shaken, not stirred. Of this I offer an example.

Miracle in Nyanga. Daniel Nzengy’a, my closest colleague in the Faculty of Agriculture, had arranged for the two of us to visit Nyanga National Park last Thursday. This was kind of a last minute deal, but some weekend transport had become available, so Daniel and I went to preview a Saturday fieldtrip for our Natural Resources students. For reasons that should become obvious, the Saturday fieldtrip could not take place. Still, the Thursday venture was, shall I say, interesting.

I was excited from the moment we hit the road—not because Nyanga is my favorite Park (too high and too cold) but because the Chief Warden and Park Ecologist was one of my Year 2000 wildlife students. Nyanga is only about 100km north of A.U., and our journey was entirely routine until we crossed the Park boundary—to discover that everything had been burned from the border-fence to the horizon. At the entrance gate we inquired about Chief Ranger Zara (my former student) and were told by a less than communicative guard that he was not in his office. Undeterred, we thanked the sullen gate-guard and drove to the Zaras’ residence. A Park employee, red-eyed from smoke and lack of sleep, explained that the Chief Warden had been injured and should not be disturbed. Daniel and I apologized and were about to leave when Mr. Zara, assisted by his wife, made his way to the kitchen door and slumped into a chair that his daughter had brought for him. His legs were newly scarred, his head was bandaged in bloody gauze, and his eyes had the “thousand-yard stare” of man who had seen too much in recent days.

I guess the story should have been predictable. The previous week, on the night when I’d watched the flames at Old Mutare, men from Nyanga Village had set fire to the Park. The reasons for this destructive act are unclear: perhaps the perpetrators were striking at the nearest symbol of Government, or maybe they were simply overloaded by the Disaster that their lives had become. Whatever their motives, the arsonists were clever enough to select a secluded area with an enormous fuel load, so by the time the fire was discovered, it had become a monster. (Those of you who have fought serious wildfires will understand this at a visceral level.)

On Wednesday, Chief Ranger Zara and his crew had chain-sawed and backfired a sector of pines, and by Wednesday night they were trying to defend a line extending eastward from Old Circular Drive. The crisis came around midnight: it seemed that the line might hold, so Zara took the big lorry [= truck] and went after his last reinforcements back at Park HQ. He was driving at breakneck speed when the steering-linkage failed. (That’s what happens when you try too hard for too long with too few repair-parts.) The crash was in a low defile, so Zara’s radio had no reach, and he lay in the wreckage for hours. Finally discovered, he was rushed to the nearest emergency room, Nyanga Station, where he was examined and received about three dozen stitches before he was bandaged up and discharged. I did not need to ask why Zara was sent home so quickly; in these days of shortages, you may be treated at a hospital or clinic, but if you recover, it will be at home, where someone might have time to care for you.

I looked at Zara’s face. Clearly he was hurting: sweat had beaded on the exposed line of his forehead, though the day was cool. “Pain,” I asked, “what did they give you for pain?” Zara touched a bandage on his face and examined his fingers for blood. “Fortunately,” he said, “the doctor was a competent radiologist. He determined that I had no internal injuries, so I could have painkillers both before and after the stitches.” Because almost-doctor Elizabeth Norman has trained me to ask specific questions, I pressed on. “What exactly did they give you for pain?” Zara sighed at the white-boy question. “They gave me the only thing they had,” he said. “They gave me aspirin.”

At this juncture Daniel suggested that we should leave, but Zara would not hear of it. “I have to tell Prof [= Ab] about the error that he made. Do you remember lecturing to us about ungulates that should not be released in Parks like this one?”

I admitted that I remembered. Back in 2000, I had expressed to Zara and his classmates my American-wildlifer’s prejudice against introducing non-native species into protected areas. And Daniel had already informed me that the Park had been stocked with zebra and wildebeest, two species not definitively known to have occurred naturally in the Nyanga area.

“Well,” Zara said, “an ecosystem may be like a broken lorry. If we cannot acquire the correct parts, maybe we repair with what we can get. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it does not.” Zara touched his bandages again, perhaps for emphasis. Then he continued. “In this case, your unwanted beasts have worked a miracle at Nyanga. What is the biggest, ecologically most significant mammal that has been absent from this region for more than a hundred years?”

I shook my head. Elephants had never lived as high as Nyanga, and people were not absent, had not been absent for five hundred years. Therefore, the question could have only one answer. But that answer, though it would shake my heart with joy, made no sense; it had been rendered impossible by a century of wanton killing and by the destruction of the highlands ecosystem.

“Yes, Prof—” Zara smiled, though clearly the gesture caused pain “—they came in the night, perhaps from Moçambique, and now we have four groups of them, each with a male and females.”

So this is the miracle in Nyanga. Ecologist Zara, unable to reconstruct the ecosystem with original parts, had rebuilt the critical trophic level with the best available substitutes. And then, to a degree, Africa had healed herself. Lions—freaking lions, by the grace of God—had returned to the Nyanga Highlands.