Memoir Excerpt

The following is a short excerpt from my master’s thesis, a memoir titled Mapping the Interior: Memories of Africa.

In November of 1994, three months after I left Africa for the last time, the Great Ruaha River stopped flowing for the first time in recorded human memory. The slight trickle that had been the final lifeline for the chain of life-giving pools sank away into the white sand of the river bed. As the weeks wore on, the pools themselves dwindled and shrank until all that remained were stinking, shallow depressions of mud filled to overflowing with cantankerous hippopotami.When the rains resumed in the mountains surrounding the river basin, the Great Ruaha began to flow once again. But in each dry season since ’94, the cycle has been repeated. Each year the period between cessation and resumption of flow has stretched longer, drastically affecting the entire Ruaha ecosystem. Total rainfall amounts in the region have remained virtually unchanged through the years, so the blame seems almost certainly to lie with the massive agricultural projects upstream. These rice plantations siphon off so much water from the Usangu Catchment, the network of swamps that feed the river during the dry season, that the water tables are now too low to support year-round flow.

I made three trips to Ruaha, all before I reached my twelfth birthday. The actual amount of time I spent there couldn’t have totaled more than fifteen days. Yet when I think of Africa, it is the image of this river that is always among the first to drift into my consciousness. I see again the eddies swirling beneath the steep bank, the blue flash of a malachite kingfisher plunging into the silt-laden water and emerging with a silver fish. I feel the shade of the giant yellow fever trees that reach out over the watercourse. My gaze travels outward across the main channel of the river to a wide sandbar where the prehistoric figure of a Nile crocodile reposes. I watch the sedate progress of an elephant as it browses along the far bank. I can hear the crack of the branches it snaps off and the deep rumbling of its contentment.

I want my children to see this place.

To get to Ruaha National Park from Mvumi, you first take the familiar 25-mile washboard track into Dodoma where you top up the petrol tank and perhaps a few jerry cans as well, since there isn’t much chance you’ll find fuel along the way. You then set off southward, rattling along the main road for two or three hours toward Iringa, a pleasant little town with a few shops where you hope the electricity has been on so you can find a cold soda or two. Then it’s off westward into the bush. After a few unmarked forks in the road, you begin to wonder if you are completely lost, but then, finally, you see the river below you. If you are lucky, the one-car ferry will be on your side. You ease down the bank and across the rickety planks onto the ferry, just a few boards lashed to a bunch of 55-gallon drums, really. A couple of cheerful fellows pull you across the current, their bare hands on the rough steel cable, their muscles long and beautiful. And then you spin and scramble your way up the far bank and you are there. Ruaha opens out before you. It is the size of a small European country, and you are its only inhabitants.

The days at the park seemed to stretch on and on. The slow drives in search of lion or leopard or sable antelope seemed to be the true purpose of life, and finding them its greatest reward.

The kudu bull stands in the center of the track, frozen momentarily by the sudden appearance of our Land Rover over the rise. I see the muscles of its shoulders bunch as the massive antelope wheels and takes flight toward a thicket of ebony trees just to the south of the road. That such a heavy creature can move with such grace seems beyond the realm of the possible. He is so close that I can see his eyes, wide with alarm, roll back to keep the vehicle in sight. The bull’s dusty flanks are traced with thin white stripes, and he runs with his head angled upward, his great spiraled horns laid back along his flanks. I can hear his hooves clatter on the stony ground as he kicks up pebbles and tiny streamers of red dust, and then he is into the trees, a gray ghost disappearing into the mottled shadows.

I am perched on the spare tire that is chained to the roofrack; my hands are sore from hanging on to the bucking Land Rover. Ruaha stretches out to the horizon and beyond in every direction. And at the moment we startle the kudu bull, even my companions in the Land Rover beneath me disappear. I am alone, floating above the rocky terrain like one of the fish eagles over the Great Ruaha River, making minute adjustments to my position as the air rushes by, surveying the only kingdom I will ever desire.

~ pk