An Urban's Rural View

Encounters with African agriculture weren't touted in the glossy tourist literature when my wife and I signed up for 11 days in Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Views of lions, hippos and elephants, sure. The brochures even held out hope for grey crowned, wattled and blue cranes. (The trip was organized by the International Crane Foundation, which works in Africa and around the world to preserve threatened and endangered cranes. Disclosure: I'm an ICF director.)

Nowhere did the promotional material mention the possibility of a cattle stampede.

Our entourage of 13 was camping in mid-August next to the Kafue Flats wetland in southwest Zambia, unaware that we'd pitched our tents across a path used to herd cattle upland for the coming wet season. A din in the distance -- drumbeats and shouts -- were our first hint something was up. Had one of our guides not intercepted them we'd have been overrun. As it was, they passed within 100 yards of us.

Red dust rose and fell as hundreds of animals tromped by, two and three and four abreast. The herders jogged alongside, swinging long sticks, urging the cattle on with a rapid patter of beats on a hand drum and clanks on a bell. They whooped the kind of whoops the Indians whooped in the old cowboy movies. They blew and blew and blew on police whistles. They whistled, they shouted, they chanted.

It's a shame they weren't stopping to give interviews because I was overflowing with questions. Were they raising the cattle to eat or to sell in the market? If the latter, how does the market work? Who owned the cattle? The tribe? The village? The herders? Had they always raised cattle or is it a recent innovation? Did they make a decent living from the cattle? What were their problems and how did they solve them?

Four or five minutes and it was over: a magic moment in a magic trip. Later that morning we had another magic moment. As we searched for cranes we stumbled across a makeshift village on an open plain with no roads, inhabited by nomadic fishermen and their families. Their living conditions were an exotic mixture of primitive and modern.

Music blared from a boom box and television antennas popped out of some of the tiny thatched dwellings. Solar panels propped against the sides of huts provided the juice. The children swarmed over us, posing for photographs and delighting in seeing themselves in our cameras' digital monitors.

More questions: Did our cattlemen live like this? Were these the exceptional lucky ones in African agriculture or in their own way as vulnerable as the continent's struggling subsistence crop farmers?

The trip lived up and then some to the promises of mammals and birds. The cattle stampede and the fishing village were the kinds of experiences no one can promise but that will rank with the lions and the cranes in our memories.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

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