Before Paula’s thought provoking guest blog on her life in Africa, I had started to do a guest post about my tourist view during a ‘Safari Lite’ of four different countries in Southern Africa. Paula’s experiences made me feel so inadequate I shelved the project. People like Paula and Sheila make me feel quite humble by the amount of energy they put into helping others in need while I spend great chunks of my life travelling for my own pleasure. And then I thought back to the key themes about which I had planned to write – education and opportunity.
During our travels in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, we encountered many people who looked after us in hotels, Safari Lodges, or in the various shops where we bought colourful and beautifully crafted souvenirs. Almost without exception they were all delightful, friendly and talkative people, keen to ask about our life and also to tell us of their hopes and aspirations. They admitted that they were desperately trying to improve their English as that was a requirement for just about all the better paying jobs. I found it really heartening how anxious people were to get on, at the same time, especially in Zimbabwe where unemployment is 80%. I was saddened by the thought that ‘getting on’ would mean most of them leaving their homes and families.
Our safari guides, drivers and trackers were especially enthusiastic about the opportunities ‘Safari Tourism’ has given them. Just as Exodus Travels train their porters and guides for the Kilimanjaro climb, good safari companies or reserves also train their people. One of our guides told us how outwith the Safari season, he is sent to school where he learns about nature conservancy and how to protect the animals on his patch. His ambition was to go to work in a special reserve for rhinoceros – an animal rapidly heading for extinction in Southern Africa. The breed has been hunted more of less to extinction in Asia, where there is still the ridiculous idea that rhino horn restores potency. Our guide laughed when he said that the Asian men would be as well collecting their nail clippings. Ugh!
Another senior guide was busy studying for exams that would let him become a wildlife instructor and possibly lead to research projects. A driver, who was already a trained guide, was working as a driver simply to improve his English and driving skills; his ambition was to form his own safari company. He was engaged to a girl who cooked for a safari lodge, with a younger sister a housekeeper there. They, with help from their families, were building their own lodge that his wife-to-be and sister in law would run to western standards. All that was needed to make their dream a reality was another season of driving to provide enough money to buy their own Toyota “animal viewer”. I think Leslie (17 July) would be proud of their ‘dream’. There were so many more stories of hope and ambition in the Safari industry, that I ended the holiday feeling not too bad about being a well off tourist in a poor country.
There was however, another side to this desire to get an education and get on. In Namibia, we were lucky enough to visit a small, traditional village of about eighty people, where nearly everybody was related to each other; sensibly, the young men were sent to other villages to bring back wives. The age profile was noticeable. There were quite a few elderly women (possibly about fifty but that is old given the toughness of their lives). The ‘Village Elder’ was in his early forties and there were no elderly men to be seen as most had died, and most of the younger men were away from the village – either working the land or if very lucky working for one of the Safari Companies, the most sought after work. The younger women about the village had young families – the unmarried ones being away working in shops and hotels. Everybody lived in traditional mud huts, increasingly with corrugated iron roofs, as the elephants – carefully conserved on the reserves – had destroyed the reed beds that traditionally gave them the insulating thatching for the mud huts. So that was one downside of animal conservation. Our Head Man showed us around and told us about village life. Children from the age of six go to school in the nearest village about four miles away, where they ‘board’ with friends or relations during the week, and then some move to the towns or cities for secondary education. Our Elder was very proud that his two daughters (but not his sons) were in the town. His greatest wish was that his daughters should go to University. I thought, “What an amazingly liberated, and far-sighted man, pushing his daughters to an education”. I just about exploded with laughter when he said that if his daughters got degrees, he would get twice as many cows when a suitor came a-courting!
Come to think about it, we never had a female guide, tracker or driver. Maybe Sheila and Jae will help inspire a generation of females round Kilimanjaro.