If I ended last year on a sour note, it was because of a conspiracy of ugly factors. I wouldn’t want to harm your innocent ears with an inventory of these offending factors, so let me only say that three of them were: 1. serumu, 2. the German geezer who offered himself for a meal and, especially, 3. the hullabaloo about the biggest python in the world. If you remember, there was deafening noise on radios, television and in newspapers about these Curugsewu villagers of Indonesia who claimed to have caught a python that would make it to the Guinness Book of World Records, for its size. I shudder when I think of the food this monster will require for its monthly dinners.
It was said that the python, caught by a hunter in a Sumatra forest, weighed in at 447 kg. and measured a whooping 15 metres long! Now, consider another python: Samantha, ‘who’ lived in the Bronx Zoo in New York, was a 30-year-old python who was not particularly of heavy weight by the time she died at the end of 2002. At the grand old age of 30, she weighed 125 kg. and was 8 m. long. Her mealtime had always been only once a month and her menu consisted of a freshly slaughtered 16-kg. pig which she swallowed in 15 minutes. She preferred it live when she was still strong enough to wrestle with her food, but at 30 she had become frail! There are nearer examples like Omweri, the 16-foot-long python in the Nyakach District of Kisumu in Kenya. Her menu consists of a miserly assortment of bread, frogs, hens and water.
My quarrel with these reptiles is that they bring back bitter memories of some forty years ago. In the early 1960s, in the refugee camps of Nshungerezi, south-western Uganda, we did running battles with all forms of creatures every minute of the day and night, creatures which were competing to put us at their dinner table. If it was not the hippopotamus to oversee the hastened demise of your exiled life, it was the snake, the tsetse fly, the mosquito or simply the thorn. Yes, those acacia trees had thorns long and hard enough to pierce the skin of a hippo, skin which is so thick that even Rukara-rwa-Bishingwe’s famed spear cannot so easily traverse it!
For instance, we had to contend with the perils of walking in the evenings. Your old man is a he-man since he is not a born-again Protestant. Which means nothing more than that he cannot sit by the fire in the evening and watch over the progress of the cooking sorghum, with rats playing hide-and-seek around his legs. Which sorghum, American fattened grains, you will have received yesterday, at the Red Cross offices, as the ration of your family. So, after work in the fields, your old man has to join other men so that they can exchange ideas on not only how to take care of their families, but also on how to liberate their country. Those are very heavy responsibilities, and so you do not discuss them on a dry throat.
Unfortunately, when you are deliberating on serious issues over the banana brew the hours tend to go too quickly! It is thus that your old man found himself ambling home after dusk. With senses a little dulled by tontomera, meaning ‘don’t knock me down’ (as the local banana brew is known in Ankole!), the old man cannot hear the heavy breathing or the noisy grazing of the hippo at a distance. The hippo will hear him first and then it will stop grazing and even breathing, so that it blends in with the bushes.
But the old man knows the hippos from the Akagera River are out on the prowl, and so he will be extra careful and count the bushes, since he knows their number. He knows the distance between each bush and the next, also, and so he will count the steps. You cannot be more careful! Unfortunately, the old bozo will not notice that the last bush is thicker than usual, and that will be his undoing.
He will thus be surprised to see the bush splitting in two, and one half coming for him! The hippo is swift despite its bulky size, and how fast can you run when you pulled at one straw too many, on the tonto from the calabash? The next thing we heard was a shriek from the old man, and when we ran to his rescue it was too late. The animal had split him in two and one half was there. We knew that we would have to go across River Akagera, in Tanzania, to look for the other half, the following morning.
It was not only the nocturnal ambler to experience these fatal mishaps. They were constant companions to us all! For instance, you think you have seen all the species of snakes, right? Wrong! Visit the grasslands of Ankole and you will realise how naïve you are. There, you will see a catalogue of snakes with a variety of colours that will put a rainbow to shame! As for their cunning, Bakame the hare could cry with humiliation! For example, take your daily chores. Very early in the morning, before running the seven kilometres to Kajaho Primary School, you needed to fetch water for domestic use. Rurongo Stream, where you fetched the water from, was not very near, maybe some six kilometres away.
Since the stream was in the opposite direction of the school, it meant covering nineteen kilometres before the start of the lessons at eight in the morning! Waking up at four in the morning was therefore not rare, an ungodly hour when beasts of all forms are out and hunting. In your hurry to finish all tasks of the morning, however, you could not be too careful. And so it came to pass that after filling your blackened safuria, saucepan covered with soot, with water, you heard ruffling of the grass behind you. You thought it was one of your friends and turned to check. But that was the gravest mistake you could ever make: it could cost your eyesight at the lightest, your life at the worst.
Spitting cobras, incira, are cunning reptiles. The creeping thing does not trust its forked tongue as a weapon, but knows its spitting powers can compete with those of any dragon worth its tongue of fire. It knows, too, that its venom is most effective when it hits your eyes. When you turned, therefore, it meant you had answered its prayers. You will realise this when you see its erect neck, all puffed up and ready to send its missiles of spittle, but then it will be too late to duck from its deadly venom. Your eyes and face will be covered with the deadly poison, and it will require all the powers of the best witch doctor or herbalist to restore your life. As for your sight, it is an extremely thin chance.
Do not walk at night, do not look back, you may be saying. That, however, is because you have not met the rattlesnake. Which, in any case, you cannot meet! Because, for instance, you are up in a tree, looking for dry branches as firewood. Then you hear something whiz past your ear, and if you are not initiated you do not thank your stars. The initiated will climb down the tree, kneel down on the ground, and say a thanksgiving prayer. What whistled past your ear was insana, a rattlesnake! And you can see that it is lodged in the branch next to you. This species of snake has so much venom that the whole tree will soon wither away and die. We were not always that lucky, very often we were on the receiving end of that life-withering venom!
The viper, impiri, is so fat that it hardly ever moves. You only get into trouble with it when you accidentally step on it. Which is inevitable when you are travelling barefoot, in tall grass. It is very strong and so does not have to rely on its venom alone, but can also grip your foot as if with a vice. If you have a panga, long cutting knife, with you, the best course to take is to chop off your foot and leave it in its mouth. Then you can approach your witch doctor and see if she can salvage your stump of a leg.
However, as I said, the king of all snakes is the python, uruziramire. It is so peaceful that it usually fell into more trouble than it caused! Like this time we penetrated deep inside a thick forest, when everywhere else was devoid of firewood. The leader of our group was, as usual, Karoli Irivuzumwami, renown for his diminutive size, extreme agility and speed. As he was in front of us, he thrust his head into a thicket only to find it inside the mouth of a python! It immediately swallowed him whole and we had no time to even pull at his toes. Next thing we knew, however, the giant snake seemed to be gasping for air. From a safe distance, we watched in disbelief as the fellow emerged from its side, all covered in blood! He had entered the python bowels with his panga, luckily for the fellow, and so he simply cut his way out. It was not rare to be caught without a knife!
Perhaps you know the beauty of rain at night: would you spoil it with thinking of weapons of python destruction? You would rather sit near a fire, in the kitchen, roasting fresh maize. In the refugee camps, every household had to have a separate kitchen and toilet, as a rule. (Surely an easy thing for our health workers to enforce, in this country!) The kitchen is a small outer-house with, unfortunately, an extravagant supply of holes in the walls, and without light. There is not a single snake, to my knowledge, that is averse to the aroma of roast maize. The fact that the walls were riddled with sizeable holes meant that nothing could stop these reptiles from inviting themselves to sample this appetizing aroma.
As long as their attention was drawn to the aroma of the maize, all the snakes could slither harmlessly over any part of your body. You only needed to sit still and not move a muscle. A python, however, is not impressed by what tickles its nose alone: in addition it wants something solid and none-too-small, to swallow. Whenever we heard the cry of “Ruramize!” we always knew the python had attacked and we all scampered in all directions to retrieve our weapons: spear, umupanga, sickle, club, ubuhiri, etc. always being careful not to harm the victim. If you were lucky, we would be able to sever its lower part and pull you out of its bowels, head or legs first – looking as wet and slimy as a fresh, bouncing baby-calf out of the womb of mother-cow!
Pythons, yuck!
