Blending In
I spent eight days in Africa this past November. Just reading “Africa” conjures the quintessential (and clichéd) images of loden elephants, restive lions and muscled zebras, bushveld and scrub. Or war and poverty, disease, and children dying of dehydration. Clichés persist because they often hold a slice of truth. Mozambique, which runs along eastern Africa and whose monsoon rains come from the Indian Ocean, encompasses all of the above, having suffered a vicious civil war that ended a mere sixteen years ago. My assumptions about Mozambique were colored by my reading, my western white-girl do-gooder assumptions, and all those Wild Kingdom episodes I watched as a girl. With a compromised infrastructure, and reminders of the war all around (walls strafed with AK47 ammo), Mozambique also harbors the jewel of Africa, Gorongosa Park, once called the place where Noah left his ark. Ravaged during the hand-to-hand combat and air strikes that occurred there, the park has rebounded since the peace accord was signed. Blood and bones replaced by flourishing herds of antelope grazing against a backdrop of mahogany, rain, and lime-colored fever trees; riverbanks striped with Nile crocodiles; giant nocturnal Cape porcupines wandering on the dusk-lit roads. At Chitengo Safari Camp where we stayed, warthogs and baboons criss-crossed the grounds at leisure, within the safety of the lion fence and a country now at peace.
Traveling is like the oft-told story of the four blind men feeling an elephant: the man feeling the leg has a different idea of “elephant” than the man touching the elephant’s trunk. While traveling with my former teacher, war correspondent and novelist Bob Shacochis, I was taking copious notes, and reading Bill Finnegan’s excellent A Complicated War about the gruesome conflict that Mozambique endured from the 1970’s until 1994. Shacochis was interviewing former soldiers and poachers and diplomats and dignitaries for a planned museum and interpretive center at the park; hearing his anecdotes over dinner and vodka gave me chills.
In the park itself, with the wide bowl of the sky above us, the floodplain opened up, the edges of the horizon blending with a hazy sky. I expected to see my first elephant easily. Elephants don’t just blend in, they almost vaporize with the slanting afternoon sunlight, their gray bulk melting with the blues and greens of the palm forest. Our guide Simba, with one hand on the wheel, pointed in vain as I stared at clumps of elephantine vegetation. The acacias, the slanting sun, the bluish gray palm forest dissolved together. We didn’t have the ability to hear their low rumbles, and their footfalls were surprisingly silent, due to a padding of fatty tissue. It was easier to smell them, a musky urine scent that blew hard on the wind. Then suddenly their forms appeared and multiplied in the forest around us, surrounding our vehicle with their gentle movements.
It was easy to fall under their spell as they foraged. Until one charged us. Baby at her side, ears spread wide, trunk raised, she wanted us to know who ruled the bushveld, and that she sure as hell remembered the slaughter and poaching of her brothers and fathers, brought to her by the same diesel engine our vehicle used. It was a mock charge intended to scare us away, and she stopped short, the elephant grass brushing her shoulders as she stood there, swaying.
Mozambique is the proverbial elephant, formed of contradictions, full of beauty and terror. And beginning, slowly, to lose its memory of the long war.
–Chitengo Safari Camp, Gorongosa National Park, November, 2009
