Confronting the Chiropterans of Mid-October
Thursday, 21 October. Through some combination of luck, grace, and electronic weirdness, this morning we were able to read an email from Young Doctor Davis. Gently chiding me for my failure to send any Africa news, GR said he understood about time-pressures and the demands of entertaining multiple guests. Well, time has indeed been a bit short of late, but our visitors have been self-entertaining, and the real cause of my electronic silence has been the inaccessibility of the Internet. Between Sunday and today, I was able to “get on” only once, and I used that brief contact to send quick notes towards Deno and Wendy. Anyhow, I’m sorry that I’ve been out of touch. I don’t really expect commo to get easier before we leave Zimbabwe, but we’ll see. Meanwhile, overall, things here have been very good. I’ll start this letter with a long, impersonal meditation on African ecology, and then I’ll relate the local news.
Saturday, 16 October. Somehow last Thursday I further injured my pesky left foot, so I minimized standing activities on Friday, and on Saturday, when Jeff, Paul, and Chrissy went in to town, I remained mostly abed, griping about my sorry state to any house-geckos that would listen. During this time of enforced leisure I also read through a College of Charleston library book entitled African Savannas. This weighty tome included chapters by maybe a dozen authors hailing mostly from Africa and the USA. Their contributions were diverse, but two important threads were interwoven throughout the book.
One theme was ecological. Educated amid temperate-zone woodlands, many twentieth century biologists & range-management specialists approached the study of savannas from a viewpoint of equilibrium theory. They thought in terms of climax floras, and they wanted to diagnose the causes of any landscape’s deviation from its natural, climax-state. For these scientists fire, drought, deforestation, etc., were pathological departures from “normal,” and they destabilized the homeostasis of Africa’s natural ecosystems. In recent years the emphasis of ecology has changed substantially, and today most savanna biologists are disequilibrium-theorists, for whom there are no normal years, and for whom climax-states make no sense apart from very specific contexts. I believe that the scientific assumptions of ecologists from both schools influence the way these folks view African society and even African morality. Scientists who hold the “ecological homeostasis” viewpoint are likely to list African cultural practices as the Number One destabilizing factor that prevents savanna ecosystems from achieving their normal, appropriate climax-state. On the other hand, scientists who subscribe to disequilibrium ecological theory tend to interpret African cultural practices as adaptations co-evolved with other biota within ecosystems that are inherently instable. Thus, for the former school, annual burning and high pastoral stocking densities are counter-adaptive practices that conservationists should preach against. For the latter school, fire is seen as an adaptive tool, and high stocking density is survival-insurance against essentially unpredictable droughts. Being wishy-washy, I flip-flop between the two theoretical outlooks. I would note, however, that many thoughtful Africans remember equilibrium-ecology as the orthodoxy of colonial conservation-services, preached as Truth to the ignorant, sinful natives and enforced from the muzzle of white folks’ rifles.
The other theme of African Savannas is especially relevant to Americans who would like to understand the manner in which our country perceives African needs. Most of …Savannas’ authors contend that, generally, Western charities respond to “crisis narratives” that are framed largely by Westerners (or by westernized Africans). Thus, if we’re generous enough to give money, we do so because, otherwise, “elephants will be extinct by the end of the twentieth century” or because, otherwise, “the current [1970’s] generation of Ethiopia’s children will disappear.” Now friends, I most certainly favor affirmative responses to humanitarian crises. (Uh, um, in my darker moments I am a bit disturbed by an eerie similarity between charities’ crisis-narratives and Eisenhower’s directive that the CIA should assassinate Congo’s Patrice Lumumba because, otherwise, “Africa will go Communist under our watch.”) However, if, as generous, giving people, we relate to Africa only through crisis-narratives, then we may lose important opportunities for a deeper understanding. More important, we may lose opportunities to love.
In this context I think back to the Christian missionaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Overall, this missionary enterprise was certainly a morally ambiguous undertaking; today we recognize the connections between mission-ism and colonialism, so the missionaries don’t get a whole lot of good press. We decry their ethnocentrism; we condemn their cultural insensitivity; we are appalled by their spiritual arrogance. Shoot—even when we are most charitable towards these people, we ridicule their obsessive concern about bare boobs and unfamiliar food. But in this letter I’d like to make three points in the missionaries’ defense. (1) Although their record of accomplishment was very mixed, for sure they did some things that were really, really good. If you don’t believe me, do something un-American: ask Africans. (2) Many of the missionaries were able to laugh at themselves, and that capacity is rare amongst present-day “development theorists.” (3) And here’s the point that is related to what I’ve written above. The early missionaries did not approach Africa in a crisis-narrative mode. To them the continent was not a Problem that had to be solved immediately by the rapid application of Western resources and (superior) intellect. Rather, Africa was an Opportunity for love and giving that could (and often did) last for a lifetime. Heck, friends and colleagues, I think I have something important to say, and I’m not saying it worth a flip. I reckon I should just get on with narrating the events of an eventful week.
Sunday, 17 October. The noble Randy Babb arrived today, after a journey greatly protracted by his flight-connections out of Arizona. Of course we had no mercy upon him & dragged the boy immediately afield, across the Mutare River, and way up the far ridge. At the mine where Chris and I have seen porcupines, Randy caught a long-tailed rock mouse and a red toad. At the next mine he and Jeff captured slit-faced bats (a species to which I refer only by scientific name when I’m talking rapidly in public) and horseshoe bats. Meanwhile Paul and I dismantled a cairn of stones to find a lovely little house-snake. Then we waded back across the Mutare to invade one last mine, where we bagged a larger sort of horseshoe bat. Back at the house Randy set up his photography equipment while the rest of us improvised a flight-direction chamber for the bats.
If I could send pictures and diagrams, I could easily explain the employment of this flight-direction chamber. But, given our Internet resources, that’s impossible, so (somewhat against my better judgment) I’ll attempt the task verbally. Those of you who are uninterested in photography (or who dislike bad technical writing) should skip the next few hundred pages. Anyhow, Randy’s objective was to photograph bats in flight and to freeze the movement of their wings. To accomplish this, one must employ a burst-flash of no more than about 1/300,000 of a second. This extreme brevity is a problem because your photo needs depth of field, so you must shoot at F20, and that requires a whole lot of light. Thus, to hammer your bat with sufficient photons, you need no fewer than four flash-guns, which must fire simultaneously. This light must, of course, hit the bat at the moment when she or he flies through the pre-established plane at which your cameras are focused. So, anyhow, Randy erects a pair of vertical “goalposts” to which he attaches his four flash-guns. He emplaces two big-ass Nikon SLRs on tripods, focused at an imaginary point between the goalposts. He also points an infrared trip-beam between the goalposts. This beam serves as trigger for a coordination-box that causes all four flashes to fire simultaneously. Then Randy makes the whole flight-room absolutely dark. (In our case the flight-room was our kitchen, and because of electrical-power failures, darkening the room was not a challenge.) Finally, Randy opens the shutters of his cameras and kindly requests the subject-bat to fly precisely through the middle of the goalposts. At this point the subject-bat kindly requests that Randy perform an obscene act of self-abuse.
Actually, that’s where the flight-direction chamber comes into play. We fixed a black cloth to the inside of a box constructed by means of duct tape from the cardboard that had protected our new stove. The box was lined with black cloth because the cameras were pointed into its open end, and, ideally, a photograph would show only the flying bat against a black background; this minimizes the post-photography use of PhotoShop to remove miscellaneous junk from an otherwise artsy picture. Anyhow, we pointed the open end of this box toward Randy’s goalposts. We cut a small opening into the top of the box. When we began photographing, Jeff would feed a subject-bat through the opening, and the bat would have no choice except to fly out of the box and through the goalposts.
At least the bat would have no other choice in theory; in practice the bats made all sorts of non-theoretical choices, so we would have to recapture the animals and fly them again and again until the poor varmints would simply lie on the bottom of the flight-direction box and pant for breath. (Fortunately, Africa University has no animal-use committee.) We repeated this process with bat after bat for a good part of the night. When we finally quit, Randy, who had not slept for two days, deleted about 90% of the photographs. But he kept some good ones, which you may eventually see.
Monday, 18 October. The bats were permitted to rest throughout the daylight hours, but Randy was forced to help with one of my classes, while Jeff organized equipment and Paul & Chrissy went into Mutare to purchase last-minute supplies. On Monday night Chris’ and my Natural Resources students came over to the house for the day’s lab. Randy and Jeff were able to involve students in the rites of bat-photography, three students at a time. Meanwhile Chrissy & I fed the uninvolved students disgusting pseudo-cheese snacks and attempted to engage them in fascinating conversations. Paul, always the missionary-type, seized the opportunity to preach against the ophidiphobia that is so widespread among African students. Little Ms. Memory, who has always done everything suggested by her teachers, finally held the house-snake, but she kept her eyes closed all the time she did so. Prisca said something in Shona; I think she was quoting the bats, and in any case she would not touch the house-snake at all. After some disastrous attempts at mouse-photography (incidentally, AU students will definitely chase escaping mice) we called an end to the day, and the exhausted bats were allowed to fly home. The students left too.
Tuesday, 19 October. I survived Wildlife class; I might have survived biometry/statistics class too though the verdict on that is still out. I announced a test for this coming Tuesday, and then I went on to complete my discussion of Chi-Square analysis. One highly impolite Angolan student (whom I know to speak perfectly good English and Portuguese) shouted something in an African language, and a few other Angolan students laughed loudly. Then she stared at me and said, “In high school, when our instructors tried to teach us something so difficult, we shot catapults at them.” I replied, “That is a fascinating custom.” Meanwhile, the Zimbabwean students (at least those who had not been bored into slumber) rolled their eyes at the ceiling.
Tuesday night Jeff, Paul, and Randy set a bat-net in the lower forest while Chrissy and I met the students and guided them to the netting site. The netting was not spectacularly successful, but we did lay hands on a lovely yellow house-bat. My next task was to help Randy photograph bush-babies while Jeff monitored his net and Chrissy & Paul led the students back out of the wilderness. Young Doctor Babb and I were attempting to have our photographic way with a particularly appealing bush-baby when from the middle distance we heard some student shouts, and Paul started calling for us. Randy was loath to leave Bushy’s company, but I began to jog towards the shouting. As I neared the noisy throng, I saw a line of folks with their lights pointed towards a reasonably large python (maybe 11 feet long, maybe 12). I held my flashlight in my mouth and a snakebag in my hands while Paul and Chrissy caught the lovely serpent. Meanwhile Randy arrived (with great bush-baby photos) to admire the tail-end of the python-capture enterprise. With python and students, Paul left the woods; Chris, Randy, and I stayed to help Jeff dismantle his net, and then we all walked home.
Wednesday, 20 October. Chrissy and I went to chapel, where the program focused on a call for solidarity with women who are suffering from sexual violence in the DRC. A High Noon Paul, Randy, and Jeff presented their widely acclaimed PowerPoint on bats at the Ag Faculty’s public lecture. Then we ate lunch, after which we prepared for the afternoon, when Randy conducted a two-hour sketching/scientific drawing/art class with our Natural Resources students. Randy was creative, demanding, funny, and patient. The students did much, much better than I could have, but there are no Dao Van Hoangs (or even Michael Angelos) in the class.
After the school-day was over, we all walked back into the lower forest to photograph the python. We found a location with decent background, and the late afternoon’s light was perfect. But when we dumped Mr. Python out of the bag, he made a quick feint at Paul’s glutei maximi (which were in full retreat) and then tore across the ground at admirable speed to the base of an Acacia tree, which he immediately ascended with the vertical velocity of a Polaris missile. Mumbling some biologist’s comment about how primates can out-climb reptiles, Randy hit the tree in hot pursuit. In the upper boughs of the Acacia, Doctor Babb and Doctor Python enjoyed a half-hour of quality interaction, with the former ineffectively snapping photos at the latter and the latter ineffectively snapping long teeth at the former. Jeff was cheering for Randy while Paul & I cheered for the snake and Chrissy cheered for good photos. Eventually Randy called a truce, so we left the python in the tree and went to supper with the Kies, a missionary family that I have repeatedly mentioned in other communications. Unfortunately, Chris’ hopes for spectacular python photos were in vain.