Mr. Wesley and the Color of Oxygen-Transport Molecules

Mr. Wesley and the Color of Oxygen-Transport Molecules

Since GR rightly bans my use of footnotes, I’ll write two footnote-like comments in this offset box. First I want to explain this week’s “Sunday meditations.” When Internet connections have been unusually good, I’ve been privileged to read several long, thoughtful letters from Johnny Lane. John has been studying a book by V.S. Naipaul, a Nobel Laureate who is also one of Chris’ and my favorite writers. (I especially like his tale about winning a goat in a Trinidad raffle.) John reports that in Naipaul’s most recent book this West Indian sage narrates a pilgrimage to, uh, the Dark Continent, on which he searches for traces of Pre-Colonial Africa. Because Naipaul is probably the foremost literary expositor of Colonialism, I reckon this latest tome must be a good ‘un, and Johnny Lane confirms that it is, although Naipaul reportedly discovers few remnants of ancient Africa’s cultural beauty. Perhaps in his brilliant way Naipaul is bearing witness to the extinction of Africa’s cultures, which, like the extinction of Africa’s species, is deeply distressing. An immeasurably greater tragedy, however, would be the loss of Africa’s bio-cultural heritage—and, fortunately, that bio-cultural heritage is very much alive. So, here’s my theme, which grows less from my empirical observations than from my residence within what Ronnie Robinson might call the community of faith. We should never become so sad about what is Lost that we fail to celebrate what Remains or fail to affirm what this remnant may Become. And if we cannot find the Ancient Africa that wistful imagination may desire, then we can reach out and touch the Real Africa, which is abundantly filled with wonders.
Second I want to express my gratitude for GR Davis’ labors in maintaining this website—and my appreciation for your creative patience in reading my words & building a conversation from them. Although I’ll probably write to y’all one more time, this may be the last of these weekly correspondences. With his ebullient optimism (see, I know a Bernie Dunlap word) GR has expressed some interest in continuing this website beyond Chris’ and my 2010 semester in Africa. Nothing would please me more—uh, if my own role in the enterprise could diminish greatly while people like John, Ron, Randy, Vivian, Rosemary, and the rest of you might use GR’s good offices to post pictures and poems and ecological insights and meditations about sustainability, justice, hope, and love. So, if you are indeed interested in creating an E-Zine—which I suggest we call Davisiana—then please write to GR with your suggestions and contributions.

Sunday meditations. I’ll begin these meditations by paraphrasing the Baroness von Blixen. We live on a farm in Africa. Of course our farm is cultivated by tractors designed in the USA and manufactured in Brazil. Its produce is hauled by trucks made in Japan. Its main crops are wheat (from the Near East), corn/maize (from Mexico), squash (also Meso-American), manioc (from South America), and collards. (Uh, where are collards from? I’ve always assumed South Carolina.) Our farm’s main shade-trees are mangos (from India), eucalyptus (from Australia) and Chinaberries. Its livestock includes cows (ours are European), pigs (multiple Eurasian domestications), and chickens (Southeast Asian). The technical ideas for the farm’s management were transplanted from Iowa State and U.C. Davis. At first glance, nothing could appear more international/intercultural than the farm at this Nashville-run University.

Still, I assure you, the farm where we live is a very African farm. This critical fact was made clear to me as Chris & I were returning home from work last Tuesday. At the point where the tar-road turns from AU’s academic campus onto AU’s farm, we were intercepted by Lamek, a precocious ten-year-old (+/-) who’s the most articulate of many articulate farm kids. Since Randy Babb’s visit Lamek has decided that he wants to become a Game Guard in a National Park. To train for this profession he misses no opportunity to manipulate artifacts of Babb-related technology—so he grabbed my digital camera, fired it up, and started shooting pictures of people, places, and things. As he photographed, Lamek treated us to a report on his school activities. “I take choir, PE, Shona, and English. Of course I like Environmental Studies, but my very best subject is mathematics.” After Chrissy and I expressed our approval, Lamek walked for a time in silence, and then he began, “Do you know…?” (Those were the boy’s actual words, but his tone was clearly “Are you prepared to admit that…?”) “Do you know,” Lamek asked, “that some white people have green blood?”

The moment I heard Lamek’s question, I knew that I must write about it to y’all. But I also realized that too many of my letters had expressed the “T.I.A. Syndrome.” Some of you know what I mean. Old-time Ex-Pats on this continent tended to label every difficulty and every surprise with three letters abbreviating This Is Africa. Similarly, in my notes to you I have endeavored to make Chris’ and my life in this good place sound exotic, strange, quaint, and Dark-Continent-ish. In reality, such is not the case. Basically, we’re college teachers here, as we were in the USA for a total of about 70 person-years. And nowadays, for every minute we spend chasing mambas or riding combies, we spend an hour preparing classes, designing tests, and dealing with grade-complaints. Yes, in 2010, in Old Mutare, we really did survive for more than two days without electrical power—during which time Chrissy repeatedly reminded me that in 1989, in North Charleston, she survived without electrical power for more than two weeks. Anyhow, I’ve done you wrong if I have led you to believe that Chrissy and I are living in Romantic-Movie Africa. We’re having lots more fun than that, for we are living in Real Africa, complete with American country music, Nagasaki pickup trucks, and Holstein dairy cows.

Several decades ago a very old woman in Lowcountry South Carolina told me that the Congo and the Santee became the same river whenever children cried or laughed along their green banks. Similarly, when the great reformer John Wesley was asked about the location of his church, he replied that, because people everywhere had the same needs, the world was his parish. And today, Terry Ferguson the anthropologist, or Bob Moss the geneticist, could express this notion of essential human unity in more logical, more scientific, language. They could convince you that every human thought is a Real African thought—because every thought exists in the brain of a Real African species, a marvelous Primate, evolving on this great Continent to dream its way across this great World, inventing Toyotas and planting collard greens.

Last Tuesday afternoon, as Lamek approached his house and Chris & I approached ours, the dark-skinned Afro-Zimbabwean boy asked this light-skinned Afro-Carolinian statistics teacher, “Why do you always wear a hat?” (Lamek’s observation was not entirely correct because at the time he was wearing my hat.) I nodded seriously and replied, “Because I have very little hair, so without a hat my green blood would boil.” At this, Lamek laughed loudly, stretched out his right arm, and patted the underside of his elbow. “No,” he said. “You have red blood, like me.” Geneticist Moss and Physiologist Davis could not have said it better.

Tuesday, 9 November. Today, in class, I tried to complete a series of lectures on regression analysis and to introduce the basic concepts of ANOVA. Nobody was showing any evidence of understanding, so I talked louder.

We photographed and then released a Walburg’s velvet gecko that we’d caught the night before.

Wednesday, 10 November. This afternoon my Wildlife students presented their PowerPoints. In my opinion, these presentations were vastly improved over earlier drafts, confirming my prejudice that AU should require its always-in-a-hurry students to slow down and revise something. On the other hand, the student PPTs still included slides showing entire, long paragraphs of text. I call this a sin & have preached repeatedly against the practice. However, I’m told that Americans in Africa should be slow to condemn well-established Traditions, and my students have certainly seen a whole lot of full-paragraph slides from their other teachers. I should tell y’all that every student-presenter had her or his own laptop, though some were real clunkers. Aubrey, my Malawian anglophile, wanted to show me a clip from his all-time favorite motion picture. This was—and my daddy would certainly have approved—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. “It’s Eastwood,” Aubrey said, “before he became, respectable.” The last word was pronounced as if it should rhyme with elitist.

Thursday, 11 November. Scattered across Zimbabwe are monuments to men killed in two World Wars. Some list name after name followed by the letters, KAR. And one thinks in horror about the King’s African Rifles, with only their Enfields, committed in desperation against the tanks of Ervin Rommel.

Today we were supposed to have a Public Lecture by some Government higher-up about “the Constitutional Process” in Zimbabwe. I had to do some biometry tutoring, but Chrissy went—and stayed for about an hour, during which time the speaker did not appear. Reportedly there was some transport-failure between here and Harare. We did hear that the man eventually did arrive and did present a most interesting lecture, to a greatly reduced crowd.

We had supper with the Kies. All are eagerly anticipating a tennis doubles match that will feature Dr. Deno Trakas, the Arthur Ashe of Wofford’s faculty.

Friday, 12 November. Chrissy and I recovered a trail camera. It had one decent picture of a male baboon. This species of monkey is seldom seen on AU’s campus.

Saturday, 13 November. We had email from Dao van Hoang. Through heroic efforts his wife Hue had indeed succeeded in acquiring a visa to Zimbabwe. However, her passport was stolen in South Africa. (I think that many of you also received Hoang’s email.) This distressed Chris and me enormously. As we shopped for groceries in Mutare, we kept wondering whether Hue might have liked this food or that….

The AU bus was two and a half hours late picking us up. Most students appeared to take this in stride, but some seized the delay as an excuse to hit a local, uh, establishment, and become roaring drunk.

Sunday, 14 November. Hoang and Deno arrived this afternoon, a little before 12:30. Hoang had managed to find the AU driver, even though I had emailed a description of Douglas (who wasn’t driving) and of the AU semi-uniform (which the driver wasn’t wearing). Chrissy and I fed our old friends / new guests a small mountain of pasta salad, and then we all hiked across the near-ridge to deploy my last remaining trail camera. The day was about as hot as Eastern Zimbabwe ever gets, but nobody complained about anything.

When we got back to the farmhouse everybody drank oceans of good AU water—which, thank goodness, was turned on—and we laid some tentative plans for the upcoming week. After the Chris-and-Ab traditional supper of tomato sandwiches, we talked for a while about the latest events in Spartanburg and Ho Chi Minh City. Then Deno, who was wasted from his multi-day SpartanburgàMutare trip, wisely elected for an early bedtime. Hoang, by this time in full watercolor mode, said he needed to keep working at the house, but he requested that Chris & I obtain a couple of frogs for him to use with our students in a drawing class. The hot, dry, windy evening was not anuran-friendly, but CAH & I dutifully went out to do our best. Our first stop was the old Talapia nursery, where on each of the 6 previous (better) nights we’d seen rachophorid treefrogs. Expecting very little, we began to circle the nursery building in opposite directions. When my half-circuit was almost complete, I came to a thin clump of bushes, right up against the nursery’s concrete wall—and was greeted by yet another black mamba. This snake, probably pushing 3m in length, had draped itself across the bushes and was monitoring a small hole in the ground, probably waiting for some delectable mouse or frog to emerge. The mamba turned its gaze briefly towards my light. Then, apparently deciding that I was a negligible presence in the world it ruled, the snake resumed its watchful waiting. I retreated a reasonable distance from the mamba and kept my flashlight’s beam upon it while Chris jogged back to the farmhouse and fetched Hoang. Our noble Vietnamese artist dutifully admired the beast; then he reminded us of our frogging mission and returned to his watercolors. Chrissy and I bid the mamba a respectful farewell and thereafter pretended for another half-hour to seek Red Toads on a night that had become even drier and windier. At last, suffering from absolute frog-deprivation, we went back to mamba-world and caught a velvet gecko off the Talapia-nursery wall. We did not glimpse the big snake again, but I suspect that it did see us.

Monday, 15 November. This morning we all headed in toward the academic campus just a bit late (at maybe a quarter to seven) and were accosted on the road by a farm worker who politely introduced himself to everybody—and then announced that we should hurry because “…there is a snake…” in the vehicle-repair shed. Chrissy ran back to the house to pick up our clampstick while I pursued the attack with my surgical tongs. “Is it large?” I asked, hoping it was not our friend from the previous night. “No, small; perhaps a meter.” In my American experience, “snake calls” seldom produce results, for the animals almost inevitably disappear before I arrive at the scene. This morning, however, the varmint was still where the worker had left it, lying across the top of an old packing-crate. This snake was a female boomslang, deadly enough in her own right but certainly not in the mamba category. I picked her up with my tongs (quite safely) and immediately learned that Johan Marais’ most recent field-guide is correct. This South African herpetologist, friend of Hoang’s and Paul’s, warns that, even though the boomslang is classified as a rear-fanged snake, you should not dare assume that its venom-delivery apparatus in inefficient. This particular girl (who, as advertised, is only about a meter long) opened her mouth very wide and immediately scraped all six fangs (three per side) against my stainless steel tongs. Needless to say, this act vastly amused the crowd of farm workers who had gathered to watch the fun.