Africa Notes: Reflections of an Ecotourist

By John Janovy, Jr

Africa Notes addresses the following question: How are exceptional travel experiences, especially ones taken to realize life-long dreams, not only integrated into your memories, but also informed by your past experiences, your knowledge, and your values? In this sense, the book’s theme is transferable to other aspects of human lives as well as to experiences that are not necessarily chosen but nevertheless have a major impact on our personal futures. There is plenty of biology in Africa Notes, but that biology is quite different from what you would find in the rest of the tourism or African natural history literature; this difference is enough to qualify Africa Notes as literary non-fiction. Chapter subjects range from the author’s wife’s first encounter with a lion, to the view of elephant-wrecked trees as sculptures, to the back-home behavior that can be attributed directly to precious time spent in sub-Saharan Africa.

The author brings to these ecotourism adventures the background, interests, and observational skills acquired during a career as a professional biologist, writer, and artist. Thus Africa Notes is a sort of travel writing, but heavily laced with a kind of natural history not really found in the travel literature. Field observations for Africa Notes were derived from two safaris, one to the Okavango Delta in Botswana and one to the Serengeti in Tanzania. In that sense, the thousands of digital images and pages of notes are not much different from those brought home by the other thirty million tourists who visit the continent annually. A significant fraction of those images, however, were taken from the perspective of a professional biologist planning his non-scientific writing, a good example being hundreds of photographs of elephant-sculpted trees, taken from distances of a few yards to a few centimeters. While in Africa, the author was constantly thinking about what a person with his background could, and should, be saying to the rest of the world through his writing. This kind of thinking has shaped the narrative; the author’s goal to let a reader see the experience in a unique way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Janovy, Jr
• Release date: Jul 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780986388736

John Janovy, Jr

About the author:John Janovy, Jr. (PhD, University of Oklahoma, 1965) is the author of seventeen books and over ninety scientific papers and book chapters. These books range from textbooks to science fiction to essays on athletics. He is now retired, but when an active faculty member held the Paula and D. B. Varner Distinguished Professorship in Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interest is parasitology. He has been Director of UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station, Interim Director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, Assistant Dean of Arts and Sciences, and secretary-treasurer of the American Society of Parasitologists.His teaching experiences include large-enrollment freshman biology courses, Field Parasitology at the Cedar Point Biological Station, Invertebrate Zoology, Parasitology, Organismic Biology, and numerous honors seminars. He has supervised thirty-two graduate students, and approximately 50 undergraduate researchers, including ten Howard Hughes scholars.His honors include the University of Nebraska Distinguished Teaching Award, University Honors Program Master Lecturer, American Health Magazine book award (for Fields of Friendly Strife), State of Nebraska Pioneer Award, University of Nebraska Outstanding Research and Creativity Award, The Nature Conservancy Hero recognition, Nebraska Library Association Mari Sandoz Award, UNL Library Friend’s Hartley Burr Alexander Award, and the American Society of Parasitologists Clark P. Read Mentorship Award.

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AFRICA NOTES

Reflections of an Ecotourist

John Janovy, Jr.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Center for Great Plains Studies, 2018

Except for brief quotes used in reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright holder. NOTE: This e-book is being published exclusively by John Janovy, Jr., with written permission and endorsement from the copyright holder, the University of Nebraska Center for Great Plains Studies. The Center is a non-profit organization that promotes teaching, research, and outreach on subjects pertaining to the North American Great Plains, a region of enormous economic and social importance to the United States and Canada. Tax-deductible donations can be sent to the Center at 306 Hewitt Place, 1155 Q Street, Lincoln, NE 68588-0214

Paperback copies of Africa Notes may be ordered from Nebraska Marketplace for $20 plus shipping and handling; the web site is https://marketplace.unl.edu/liedcenter/africa-notes-reflections-of-an-acotourist-mp-124.html

Cover design by Alexa Horn.

ISBN: 978-0-9863887-3-6

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CONTENTS

An Introduction

1. Fourth-Grade Dreams

2. John’s Trip

3. Homework

4. Logistics

5. Wetlands

6. Savannah

7. Hammerhead

8. Ornithology

9. Big Five

10. Sculpture Garden

11. Botany

12. The Village

13. The Notebook

14. A Warning

Acknowledgments and Sources

About the Author

Books by John Janovy, Jr.

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AN INTRODUCTION

We all have travel experiences, many of which are, in my view, challenging. Nevertheless, we save up money, buy tickets to far-off lands, and walk, fully aware of what we are doing, into metal tubes in which we will be sealed then taken six or seven miles into the air, through hurricane-force winds, to an enormous building where we’ll have to run a mile or two while carrying thirty pounds of stuff if we don’t want to spend the night watching sparrows come down out of the I-beam rafters to pick up popcorn dropped by fellow adventurers. Furthermore, we routinely exhibit this behavior for what some might think are the most flimsy of reasons, for example, going to Africa after dreaming about it from the time we were in the fourth grade.

For decades prior to our Botswana and Tanzania adventures, I was told by professional colleagues to see Africa before it’s gone. When my wife, Karen, and I finally made those trips, we were simply stunned by the incredible beauty of everything— animals, plants, habitats, and people. I took thousands of digital photographs; none of those images can even begin to convey what an impala herd looks like in the bush. My kudu pictures are great, but they can’t come close to telling you what a kudu does to your mind the first time you see one in the wild. My wildebeest photographs are amazing; their main function is to bring back the memory of taking them. With my background as a biologist, half a century of doing research on animal parasites, and teaching zoology courses to thousands, this travel taught me how ignorant I really was of all those species I’d seen only in zoos.

Karen printed her hundreds of photographs, labeled them, and put them into two large albums. Watching her face as she goes through those albums makes me realize that she also has that lingering, nagging desire to go back. Our encounters with Africa, even knowing how managed they were, and how stereotypical in many ways, produced changes in us that we simply cannot describe. I honestly believe those changes now strongly affect our views of the natural world, of human diversity, of geological and evolutionary history, of language, of politics, and of culture in general. This book is my attempt to explain those changes, how they came about, and especially how they are now integrated into our memories, past experiences, and perceptions of current events.

Of course, there exists a staggering amount of literature on the African continent, from which anyone with access to a library or the internet could easily become partially educated prior to visiting the Serengeti. But one of our drivers described the perceptions of many tourists, especially Americans, by commenting that most people think of Africa as a single country. He made this observation as we were traveling through tribal lands listening to a radio conversation in Swahili, a Bantu language adopted across much of the continent to alleviate the problem of communicating between cultures and human lineages dating back half a million years and speaking up to three thousand different languages and dialects. The driver’s conversation, of which I understood nothing except his comment about average Americans’ perceptions of a continent, evidently concerned a sleeping leopard. Once he clicked off, returning the handset to its place on his nicely decorated dashboard, he pushed the pedal to the metal. I immediately had two unspoken questions: How quickly do sleeping leopards wake up? And, had he ever thought about entering his Toyota Land Cruiser in the Baja 1000?

Among the real surprises awaiting one on a typical tourist safari is the number of tourists. That number is enormous, but not as large as local vendors, lodge staff, and market hagglers would like to see arrive in places like Arusha, Tanzania, with a Visa card and a backpack full of crisp, post-2009 currency. The other surprise that awaits a person taking advantage of packages offered by companies such as Classic Escapes, the outfit that put together our trips, is the sophistication of staff and facilities in various game reserves and national parks. Karen and I were in ten different facilities in Botswana and Tanzania, some featuring tents that redefine the term. As a Boy Scout, none of my World War II vintage pup tents ever had full bathrooms with hot showers. As a traveler making my way down the Baja California peninsula in 1989 and 1990, my tent was quite a bit more elaborate than the one I had as a Boy Scout, but still featured no indoor plumbing. Nor was I ever greeted with a song and a hot washcloth at any scout camp in Oklahoma or public campground in Mexico, although in places like El Rosario the scabby dogs did show up, sniffing around our backpacks, a welcoming committee of sorts.

Of all my tourist impressions, the sheer audacity of constructing then maintaining resorts deep in the bush has to be one of the most powerful. At Duma Tau, in Botswana, we were given a tour of the facilities, including vehicle maintenance shop, water purification plant, electrical power plant, bakery, and laundry. Power was all solar, backed up by battery. The only thing I remember about the water is that in all of our Botswana camps, there was pure, safe water to drink, supplied by the plant, with the only plastic bottles being souvenirs given to us. We were able to charge cell phones and cameras. Our local host, finishing the tour, reminded us that our venues were originally hunting camps, but now that they had been converted to tourist lodging and dining; they were ultra-sophisticated green operations that could indeed be disassembled, totally, and removed. The implication was that a vacated site would be reclaimed by mopane trees and elephants, and that within a very few years nobody would be able to recognize the place for what it had been.

Only the laundry was sobering. Women washed linens and guest clothing by hand in large metal sinks, scrubbing in a manner reminiscent of pre-World War II rural Oklahoma households where washboards were actually used, regularly, and not as musical instruments in some folk band. That mental image of those women in Botswana standing beside the sinks and scrubbing surfaced in Tanzania two years later when I sent a pair of pants— North Face Paramount Peak II, quintessential tourist gear—to be washed. I’d worn them for several days; they had paint spots from when I’d worn them a year earlier while remodeling a piece of rental property. Those paint spots had not come out during half a dozen machine washes at home. The spots were gone, however, when those same pants returned from a laundry in the African bush. Disappearance of paint spots under such circumstances makes an impression on you and forces you to rethink the power of people versus the power of machines.

A month or so before our second trip to Africa, I offered to share my education in the form of comments about what to look for with the rest of our travel group, and was told by a couple of folks whose advice I respected to keep my mouth shut. The implication was that whatever I might say to the others would somehow diminish their sense of adventure and discovery. From having been told since childhood to quit talking so much, and in later years described as professorly by relatives—that is, launching into textbook-chapter answers to simple questions requiring only a yes or no—I didn’t take offense at being told to keep quiet. After thinking about such a constraint, however, I decided to write this book. Education is too easy to acquire nowadays, but also too essential for a civilized world to be avoided entirely, especially during a period in American history when national-level politicians constantly spout stuff so absurd, so illogical, that it challenges even a fiction writer’s imagination.

Professionals have something to say about shared experiences, regardless of their disciplines. Stuck in an airport departure area, benumbed by CNN mumbling on about the latest suicide bombing, a novelist in the crowd will tell you how and why folks around you can end up in her work in progress, a paranormal romance. Sitting beside the novelist, your architect friend can elaborate on modern terminal construction and the idea that large international airports have replaced Gothic cathedrals as nations’ symbols of faith, although in this case the faith is in commerce. Returning from Starbucks with her coffee and giant cookie, a coach will smile at kids wearing athletic gear and contribute a discourse on the role of play in all the diverse cultures represented by those three hundred or so people who are ready to board that Airbus 330 with you for an eight-hour flight to Amsterdam.

Your friends the novelist, architect, and soccer coach have learned plenty just by doing their daily work, and you are the beneficiary of that learning if you ask, if you value what they have to say about our world, and if you are ready to listen. Thus, everyone we encountered in Botswana and Tanzania provided just such an education, mainly by talking not only about plants and animals but also about their lives and how they got into their present situations. Even now I can hear their voices as I look at digital images taken during those ecotourism trips. Their words may be telling me about basket patterns, roof thatching, and hyena behavior, but behind those words are the tones of voices, the inflections, and the facial expressions to accompany the conversation. These men and women can talk to me in my language, but I cannot talk to them in theirs. That realization, demonstrated instead of read about in a magazine, might be the biggest take-home lesson of all.

Speaking of listening, the first general rule of polite dining is to never invite a parasitologist to dinner. I am a parasitologist, and I’ve been one officially since the summer of 1962, when I attended my first meeting of the American Society of Parasitologists and took my first course in the subject, taught by Dr. J. Teague Self at the University of Oklahoma Biological Station. Two years earlier, in the spring of 1960, I had returned from Fort Benning, Georgia, after a short stint in the US Army, with the intent of becoming an ornithologist. That intent was based on a chance encounter with another teacher, Dr. George Miksch Sutton, Research Professor of Zoology at OU. At the suggestion of a friend, I’d enrolled in his basic ornithology course in my last semester of college, not realizing what I’d gotten myself into. By the time that semester was over, I was determined to be a prof just like Sutton.

He would not accept me as a grad student in ornithology until I got a master’s degree, but by the time I received my MS, I was hooked on parasitology as a discipline. Nevertheless, Sutton ended up on my doctoral supervisory committee because I was studying parasites of birds for my dissertation, so I took all the advanced courses I could from this remarkable gentleman. In one of those courses, Birds of the World, my classmates and I were required to make a notebook with pages of information gleaned from the scientific literature about every family of birds known to humankind. I refer to Sutton and this notebook numerous times in the pages that follow, mainly because it was my primary source of information about what I expected to see, and wanted to see, in Africa. That notebook is also the focus of chapter 13, where it’s used as a narrative device to explain the integration of knowledge and experience into my reaction to Africa, and by implication, anyone’s experience into trips of a lifetime, whether those trips be real or metaphorical. So the frequent reference to Sutton is evidence for the kind of impact a teacher can have on a student, but it’s also a reflection of the major role that birds have played in my own education about the distribution and diversity of Earth’s fauna.

For half a century I have been associated with a large American university, first as a young prof, later as an endowed senior prof, and finally as a retired emeritus prof struggling to reconcile his ideals with the way American education, traditionally a prime source of my nation’s strength and longevity, is evolving. There was a time we handled real, live animals, dissecting some of them, including frogs and earthworms. Today, the thought of dealing with animal care and use regulations makes even an old timer say, To hell with it; give ’em a computer exercise, or better yet, let ’em look it up with their smart phones. But even as often as I’d been in the field doing research, it took these ecotourism safaris to bring those thoughts about the value of encountering real stuff back up in my mind to the point of deciding I needed to write a book about that topic.

Economic pressures are also changing the fundamental nature of our libraries, a traditional source of wonder and adventure. As a college prof, one of my most satisfying assignments was to ask students to choose as their semester’s text a series of scientific papers on one subject from the primary scientific literature. One of these papers needed to be from the past three years, another from the year they were born, one from the year their parents were born, and finally, one from the year their grandparents were born. All those papers had to come from the same journal. We used those papers for everything from the history of technology to the careers of scientists involved. We also used those scientific papers as an excuse to interview parents and grandparents about what the world was like when they were young adults, thus as a tool for analyzing the social, economic, and cultural context in which research was done. In this library there were many journal titles represented by full runs of the past century, a treasure trove that you could get lost in just looking at papers.

Like a fertile wetland filled in, plowed, and planted with corn, however, those kinds of library resources are gone. We shipped massive numbers of books, especially science books and journals, off to storage or other libraries to save money. We assumed that Google Scholar and other search engines can give us what we need and want more cheaply and quickly than a shelf of real books and bound journals. Trust me; that assumption is wrong, and if you were one of the students who wrote those papers, you had an educational experience that simply cannot be repeated at our university. Today, if you go to the exact place where those journals were shelved, what you’re seeing will be the new department administrative offices. Staff members have a great view of the football stadium. Once you’ve finished the book you’re holding, I hope you’ll understand why I now look back at those African trips the same way I look back on being able to walk into a library and find a hundred-year run of some scientific journal, knowing it will be there when I want to send a student on some exotic mission.

The library, with its bound journals, was a form of real stuff, and in that sense, the equivalent of a live frog, along with the live worms inside that frog’s lungs and bladder, i.e., the parasites, metaphors for engaging mysteries hidden inside a familiar body. In other words, that library was a sort of wilderness to be explored, and you had to learn how to explore it regardless of how many others had touched those same volumes. In addition, this exploration brought you face-to-face with papers that were not necessarily what you were looking for, but nevertheless found interesting. That is the fundamental property of any rich supply of real stuff. Just by doing what you intended to do—find that literature needed to write your paper—you encountered a lot of other papers, some of which captured your attention, and maybe caused you to linger on them because you wanted to, not because you’d been told to. In this sense that library experience is similar to taking a tourist safari to Botswana in order to see a lion, but coming back home with more giraffe stories and more stork pictures than lion stories and photographs.

When your post-trip conversation turns to the diversity of experiences, what you’ve learned by having them, and how those wildlife encounters are integrated into your personal history, you’ve become an ecotourist. I picked the library example because in the minds of many people, including some politicians, old books can easily be replaced by the internet. Such treasure troves are often, if not regularly, endangered in a manner quite analogous to many species and environments. With our current societal attitudes, we believe they are not valuable enough to be preserved. This book is my attempt to convince you otherwise.

In a few places, especially chapters 8 and 9, you’ll encounter scientific names. My hope is that you are not frightened by these words. After all, kids learn scientific names of dinosaurs, and given the global conflicts reported in our daily news, we routinely encounter strange combinations of letters, denoting strange places and people behaving in diverse ways. So my only suggestion is to treat these names like you would the name of an immigrant neighbor: they mean something, sometimes something important and intriguing. But in case you’ve forgotten your middle school biology, remember that a genus includes a group of related species. Your pet dog is in the same genus—Canis—as coyotes and wolves; your pet cat is in the same genus—Felis—as a bunch of other cat species, some of which are so wild and secretive you’re never likely to see one alive, even if you take a safari to where they are supposed to live.

The chapters in Africa Notes are arranged in a loosely narrative sequence, beginning with the reasons we went to Botswana then two years later jumped on the chance to visit Tanzania. Homework and logistical considerations follow, as they would for anyone making such trips. The depth of our experiences forms the basis for the rest of the chapters, with a special focus on the way those experiences are now fully integrated into our memories, and how the memories influenced what we found of value in those foreign environments. A few of the digressions are longer than an impatient reader might want, but that length is simply a demonstration of how deeply our ecotourism experiences affected us. The lasting impact of this travel, at least for me, ends with a warning chapter. Again, that warning may seem a little raw for some of you, with parts of it seeming rather out of place in this book, but it is a completely honest warning, again, resulting from travel to a distant continent. Thanks for sticking with me!

John Janovy, Jr., 2017

Lincoln, Nebraska

Return to Table of Contents

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1. FOURTH-GRADE DREAMS

People who do not observe their cats, but only rely on received wisdom, miss out.

—Doris Lessing, About Cats, from Time Bites: Views & Reviews

Some friends were coming over to see our pictures from the Okavango tourist safari two weeks after our return. Twenty years ago, this visit would not have been much of a problem, nor would I have been sitting in front of my computer at three o’clock in the morning with tears running down my face. Back then, I’d have bought some decent wine, sorted through a few hundred two-inch-by-two-inch Ektachrome slides, filled up a carousel, made sure I had an extra projector bulb and knew how to change it, and set up a screen in our downstairs living space where we usually went to relax after inhaling a Valentino’s pizza. During the show, there would be conversation about each picture, but some of this conversation would be one-sided:

Can you speed things up? Karen would say. Tom is going to sleep.

I never considered going to sleep during someone else’s slide show to be much of a sin; I’d done it fairly regularly myself, although I did manage to stay awake when subjected to one