Dr. Livingston, I Presume?

I can only imagine Africa as Dr. Livingston saw it, 150 years ago. After seeing Victoria Falls and going on my first Safari this weekend, I can hardly imagine a continent as wild as the one he explored.

It was something driving through tall grass fields, around large bushes, not knowing what to expect on the other side - a group of grazing impalas, a heard of elephants, or a clan of baboons playing in the trees. We camped overnight in the park, inviting a second thought when getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night given the megafauna witnessed during the day.

Hippos, crocs, elephants, giraffes, leopards, impalas - we saw them all - and LOTS of them. An elephant or water buffalo just a few feet from the car would make a sudden move, inviting nervous screams from the girls in the open sided safari truck, drawing a friendly laugh from the guide - "Do not worry, no problem." I wonder what the driver of the car said to his guests later that day when a leopard jumped onto an empty seat in the vehicle, stared eye to eye with one of the tourists, and promptly jumped out the other side. I wonder what was going through the tourist's head. I wonder what was going through the leopard's head! Dinner?


The change in lifestyle from Livingston's day until now has been an interesting progression. Signs of progress and the lack thereof abound. There was a fascinating exhibit at the Livingston Museum about the transition from modern village life to modern city life. Unabashedly, the plaques read:

"With the passage of time the people of our village have found themselves alienated from their natural environment. Now they have to obtain a license to hunt for food, cut poles for their huts, cut trees for their canoes. Day by day they helplessly watch their environment being depleted of its natural resources by outsiders, people from afar, authorized from somewhere else without any recourse to them and at no benefit to them, in desperation, all they can do is offer manual labour, for a pittance."

"Transplanted from 'Our Village' and out of touch with ourselves, our living heritage, the alienated individual walks the world at the crossroads of cultures. Struggling to retain an identity, the only place he gets flashes of his culture is the museum though only as an abstraction."

If those are the 'politically correct' words to be found in a museum, I wonder how the people really feel...