THE LEOPARD, THE TORTOISE, AND THE GAZELLE (AN ORIGINAL AFRICAN FABLE)

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Africa, Animals, Fable

In Africa a long long time ago there were places where people had yet to come and animals ruled supreme. In one such place the chief of all the animals, the mokonsi, was the leopard. Some other animals were bigger and stronger like the elephants and hippos and crocodiles, but the animals considered the leopard the most dangerous and didn’t want to get on his bad side. No one feared the peaceful elephants, and the hippos and crocodiles were only dangerous in or near rivers and lakes. The leopard could climb trees, and see at night better than most of the other animals, moving quickly and quietly through the trees, and he was strong with long teeth and flashing claws. So the leopard ruled the deep forest.

Now the leopard was not content just to be the mokonsi of the deep forest. He claimed to rule the vast grassy plains on the borders of the forest as well. Most of the animals there, the antelopes, warthogs, jackals, and even the big strong buffalos feared the leopard and accepted him as the mokonsi. All but the gazelle and his wife. The gazelles were so fast and nimble that the leopard could never catch them, although he often tried to sneak up on them in the night. The female gazelle grew tired of being stalked by the leopard, so she decided to ask her old friend the tortoise for help.

This was no ordinary tortoise. She was called the mother of all tortoises because she was the eldest of all the tortoises living in the entire world. She was hundreds and hundreds of years old and her shell was as big as a very large house and even had bushes and grassses growing on top of it. Animals often walked right by her thinking she was just another hill. All the animals respected her for her wisdom, and some even claimed that she had secret magical powers. In fact she possessed no magic, if by that you mean something supernatural, but her shell did contain wonders, wonders called books and scrolls. Long ago the tortoises had learned to chew and pound reeds to make paper, and they’d learned to read and wright in tortoise fashion. Now their loosely bound books made with crude paper weren’t as fancy as our modern books, but it is what is written inside a book that counts. In fact the inside of her shell was really an enormous library containing all the tortoise wisdom of the ages, which was a lot because they live so long, are very observent, and do a lot of thinking in their quiet shells. It was considered an honor, almost a holy pilgrimage, for elderly tortoises to make the long slow journey to give her the book they had assembled over the course of their lives.

All that aside, to the lady gazelle the tortoise was just an old and treasured friend who lived nearby, and a very wise one. She told the tortoise about their problem and asked for her advice. Her friend replied that she would think about it and to come back in a week. During that week the tortoise read a lot and thought about the problem, paying special attention to the section of her library labeled psychology. When she had a plan that she thought would work, she told the gazelle what to do.

A few days later the leopard came slinking around and asked the lady gazelle where her husband was. While staying out of leaping range, she told him the tortoise was using her magic to send her husband up to the gods to ask them to kill the leopard. The leopard was furious and took off at a run to find the tortoise. As soon as he left the male gazelle came out of hiding and they both raced off and got there well before the leopard. When the leopard arrived he saw the head of the male gazelle on the ground covered in blood and the tortoise holding a bloody axe in her mouth.

“Is he dead?” The leopard asked.

“No,” she replied after setting down the axe. “This is how I use my magic to send someone to the gods to appeal for help. He wants to replace you as mokonsi.  I’ve done this countless times through the years. He will be fully restored shortly.”

The leopard padded around huffing and puffing. “Then you must do the same for me so that they can hear my side.”

The tortoise obliged. The lady gazelle came out of hiding and dug her husband out of the dirt and washed off the red berry juice. They thanked the tortoise. And for awhile peace reigned over the forest and the grassy plains. But sooner or later another mokonsi always comes along.

Moral: While the distant gods are often deaf to our appeals, the axes here on earth are rather sharp.

THE DOGS BARK BUT THE CARAVAN MOVES ON (INTERESTING CHARACTERS I’VE KNOWN — USAID BOSSES)

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Africa, Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, David Wilson, Humor, John Lundgren, Mali, Nonfiction, Peace Corps, Togo, USAID

I first came into contact with John Lundgren when I was a PCV well driller. Our project was funded by and required a good bit of contact with USAID. In addition living in N’Djamena there was a great deal of interaction in general between PCVs and embassy/USAID personnel, far more than most places I’ve lived and worked. It was the mid-seventies and things were decidedly less uptight than now. Characters abounded, people were allowed to be a touch eccentric. And John, the USAID Director, was a five star character. Everybody knew he was a nudist. Usually he drove to work without a shirt on and put it on in his parking space. Once in later years when I knew him better, I asked him what he thought about going to his new post as AID Affairs Officer in Djibouti. He replied, “Maybe I can find a beach where I can walk around naked.” Also in later years a female consultant friend told me she had stayed at John’s house once for a few days. She’d known about his nudist proclivities, but it hadn’t bothered her. He wasn’t going to walk around naked in front of her. John had class. But one night she went down for some water and surprised John as he was getting something out of the frig. The refrigerator door was between them. They chatted a few minutes until she realized he was getting cold.

John had a pronounced theatrical streak. He never seemed to be off stage, but he was a likable guy. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body and he was loyal to his people. Somehow he was contacted by a guy named Pruitt from the University of Tennessee (I think). I don’t remember if he was a professor, PhD student or what. Anyway, from his ivory tower in Knoxville this guy had developed an elaborate and unbelievable project proposal to stop the spread of the Sahara. He wanted to build dykes along three to four hundred kilometers of the Logone river to keep it from its annual flooding, thus greatly increasing the water flow into Lake Chad and doubling its size. He postulated that that would greatly increase humidity and rainfall in a large area of the Sahel — a dubious assumption, there are desert islands. Also that annual flooding that he wanted to stop allowed for extensive rice cultivation. The funniest part was that he estimated the labor costs using the labor production and cost stats of the Chinese coolies who had worked on the transcontinental railroads in the nineteenth century. Everybody laughed at the project except John. Of course he knew it was total pie in the sky, but the grand scale of it appealed to him. Twice this poor fellow flew out to Chad convinced that John was pushing to get his project approved. If anybody mentioned the project in the USAID Office when John wasn’t around, a chorus of “Pruitt…Screw it!” was sure to follow.

John was the AID Affairs Officer for Togo and Benin, two small narrow adjacent countries, when I worked in Cotonou, Benin with a colleague, Sarah, on a potable water project. I worked on the technical side and she handled the health side. John’s office was in Lome, Togo which was a only a few hours drive from Cotonou. About a year into the project relations between the US and Benin deteriorated and the project was suspended. Benin’s UN Ambassador shouting “Vive Peurto Rico Libre!” in front of the General Assembly didn’t help matters. When a drunk American diplomat drove into and became “lost” inside a large military camp (at least that was the embassy line), things went south fast. Sceptics at heart, the Benin Government was in no hurry to release him. The resulting standoff threatened to become a major diplomatic incident, so the embassy ordered Sarah and me, the only non Peace Corps Americans without diplomatic passports, to leave for Lome immediately to avoid potential complications like house arrest. Since officially the project was suspended and not canceled, John kept us on the payroll for months until we could land other jobs. He caught considerable grief from USAID Washington, but refused to budge. I was and am grateful to him for that. However it made for a very crowded little USAID Office in Lome. John had a spacious office, but everybody else was crowded into small spaces. When John went on vacation, and without his approval, his deputy immediately called in a crew and created another office. Upon his return John wasn’t happy. They’d sawn his stage in half.

In order to relieve some of the crowding, I proposed to John that I take my project’s little 404 Peugeot pickup and make technical visits (cough cough) to some other wells projects in West Africa. John approved it with no qualms. I don’t believe any other professional bureaucrat in the world would have, but John danced to a different tune. Given the turmoil in Africa today, the idea of  an American driving by himself across three countries more or less on a lark seems incredible, but in 1982 I never gave a thought to my safety. I mean the road was paved the whole way, albeit a bit rough in spots. To someone used  to driving on sand tracks up and over dunes, that seemed like a piece of cake. I drove north all the way through Togo to Ougadougou, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) where I thought I could get a visa for neighboring Mali. I couldn’t. Relations between the two countries weren’t good. I did purchase a couple of nice Ougadougou bronzes.

I planned to meet my buddy Mark in Bamako where he was coming through on business. The USAID Director there, David Wilson and his wonderful wife Tatsie, old friends, had invited us anytime. Tatsie was a serious vegetarian. I once asked her if she ate fish. She replied, “I don’t eat any of my friends.” Dave had replaced John in Chad and had been the USAID Director during the civil disturbances when I was working on a USAID contract. He personally asked me to come back to Chad during an interim of nearly a year when things had calmed down some, before renewed fighting closed everything down for years. It’s an odd thing, but even intelligent people can become accustomed to abnormal conditions and totally lose perspective. During that false hope interim period in Chad we desperately tried to get the foreign assistance train back on track, convincing ourselves, all evidence to the contrary, that conditions had improved sufficiently.

At one point we went so far as to invite a UN and World Bank delegation to Chad to see about starting back up a multi-donor road building project. There were only a few of us at USAID Chad at that time, a skeleton crew, so I was unofficially handling the project management side of that and several other dormant projects, unheard of for a contract employee and against USAID regs — hence unofficial. They  arrived and we went to the USAID conference room and sat around the big table. As we were making our presentation, a few distance shots could be heard, a common occurrence. Then the shots got louder and nearer. I noticed some flinching. Finally an AK47 went into rapid fire just outside the building. I looked down the long empty table to Dave and shrugged. Our distinguished visitors were all under it.

FAP – Force Armee Populare FAN – Force Armee du Nord

It so happened that a couple, old Chad PCV friends, were living close to the Mali border, working on a water/health project. So I continued west across Upper Volta until I reached Scotty and Charlotte’s place. I asked around about the border and was told that there was only a little offset border station a few kilometers inside Mali where you were supposed to present credentials, but it was all pretty sleepy. The USAID logo on the side of a vehicle had proven useful to me in the past, so I decided to chance it. I blew right past the border station, no problem. I had some time to kill so I stayed in Mopti a few days and visited the Dogon country. The cliff houses were fascinating. On the way down to Bamako I took the ferry over the great Niger and visited the ancient city of Djenne with its truely stunning architecture.

I had a fun time in Bamako. One of the highlights of the trip was a party at the Ambassador’s Residence to which Dave and Tatsie insisted we accompany them. The US Ambassador was new, unusually young (maybe early forties), single, liked to dance, and not bad looking either. Unsurprisingly there were quite a few attractive women there. On more than one occasion Mark had stated that his greatest fantasy was to be in bed with a French woman and have her say “Ooh la la!” That night he spent some time chatting with an attractive French lady. He had a big smile on his face the next day. That round trip was some 1,600 miles across the heart of North Africa.

Recently I learned that John is an actor now, usually playing odd old men in music videos and strange cult movies, but lately branching out to more mainstream parts. He looks great for his age.