Tanzanian Tales V: Home & Garden Safari I

Home and Garden Safari I

I’ve been threatening to write about my on-going garden safari for ages now. The reason that I haven’t produced said document is because it is a rather more ambitious project than I first imagined. Having given up on producing it all at once, this will be the first of many chapters. I dedicate this series to the memory of my Grandma who’s constant curiosity and wonder at the world around her will always inspire me.

“Safari” is a KiSwahili word meaning “to travel.” When you are about to embark on a journey people wish you “safari njema” meaning “travel well or safely.” When you return from your journey people ask “habari safari?” which literally translates as “what is the news from your journey?” The polite answer to this is “mazuri sana, habari yako?” which means “very good, what is your news?”

When we go on a safari as it is more widely understood, we generally travel into a protected African wilderness. Upon entry into these wilderness areas, we are given or buy or find in the guidebooks that have brought us to these places, a list of the birds, animals, bugs, reptiles and even sometimes plants and rocks that the wilderness area provides homes for. As tourists we find ourselves scanning these lists and ticking off the birds and animals we see. Sometimes we mark with a star those that we enjoyed the most or got good pictures of. I find myself wondering what the African guides who first saw tourists frantically ticking away thought of our headlong antics. Of course by the time I’ve visited any of these areas, the guides (when we’ve used their services) have been well used to our ways and have consulted the lists themselves in planning and prioritizing where to take us to make sure we got to tick as many as possible – thereby maximizing their tips.

Having spent my formative years in a Northern Hemisphere climate where winter has a significant limiting effect on the lengths to which life can grow, I consider the adventure of housekeeping in the Tropics a journey in discovery and wonder at the amazing variety and size that life can take. From a North American perspective, when Africa is not about chaos and poverty, it is about the incredible environments and ecology found here. It is no coincidence that questions about the animal and plant life are those that most frequently come up when people in Canada ask me what it is like to live in the African bush.

All this is to explain the inspiration behind what will hopefully become a series of pictures and words. Since I’ve been living and working in African countries, I’ve been collecting pictures of the plants, animals, bugs and birds that populate my home and garden. That is not to say that our homes and gardens in wintery places are not also places full of wonder and discovery. However, the sheer abundance and tenacity of life inside and outside my homes in Africa has in turns excited, revolted, terrified and mostly just simply amazed me. I’ve wanted to share this wonder with people all the way along. The following is an excerpt from my journal to start us all off with a particularly tenacious creepy crawly that we see around once in a while.

Eye spitter beetles are aptly named because they can secrete and even propel a noxious smelling acidic liquid when they feel threatened. They are member of the carabidae family of insect order coleoptera and can grow to and impressive 6cm long. The one in this picture had obviously seen a few fights given the damage on its shell near the end. Its body was about 5cm long. It may or may not have been the one who met its end in the following excerpt from my journal. The picture was taken in our bathroom a couple nights before the journal entry.

Monday 14 November 2005 21:00, Mwadui

Eulogy to the eye spitter beetle that died sometime today. Last night around this time I was getting ready for bed and discovered, to my horror, a largish specimen of the so called eye spitter beetle hanging on the net over Kobus’ pillow. Given that Kobus was home, I delegated the task of this potentially messy eviction to him. Kobus turned on the naked bulb that serves as the overhead light in our bedroom and chased the monster under the bed. The light, combined with our debate over weather the job was done briefly woke Simon. Reckoning the bug “lost” Kobus adjourned back to the couch while I managed to send Simon quickly back to sleep with some gentle words and a soothing touch.

Having already turned off the offending light I then applied my red maglite torch to the problem. I found the intruder at the foot of the bed still under the net. I asked Kobus to return and remove the beast while I shone the light on it. In his pique at being roused from the couch for the second time in ten minutes, he decided to kill it and selected one of his hunting boots for the task. The net came between the bug and the boot when he thwacked it and its defensive liquid plus whatever other interior innards made an ugly brown stain half the size of my palm on the net plus another stain half the size of the first one. The carcass was allowed to lie where it was thwacked. In the morning I decided that such an awful mess deserved some forensic photography. (Gentle readers: you’ve been spared these shots because none of the pictures represented the situation adequately in my opinion.) As I went about my photographic project, I moved the bug so that I could get shots of the body with the stains in the frame. I was again horrified when I discovered that the poor beast was still alive. I had to call Kobus at work to inform him of my discovery. He said: “well good luck to it.” That being said, I didn’t give it much thought again until I discovered the carcass lying just outside the back door where the maid must have left it when she swept the dirt out of the house this morning. It was completely dead by then and the ubiquitous ants were busily carrying it away tiny piece by ant-bite piece. Somehow such a tenacious beast deserved a couple paragraphs of my time.