Letter from Cuavanale
Thalefang Charles | Friday March 4, 2016 13:07
Could the hallucinations be caused by the sounds and calls of frogs and insects crinkling out there creating unending lullabies throughout the nights? But I really suspect it is these pills. These anti-malaria tablets. The mefloquine.
The Health Brief from National Geographic mentioned hallucinations as part of the side effects of taking Mefloquine. But I do not have a choice. I cannot stop taking these tablets because the mosquitoes here do not mess around. The swarms of deadly disease-carrying mozzies are out to get us here. Last week, they took down the expedition leader, Christopher Boyes and floored him with malaria. He had to be airlifted to the hospital with his body heating up to boiling temperatures. But he is fine now and in fact, led us again to a new river – the Cuanavale River source lake.
So the hallucinations have followed me from the Cuito to the Cuavanale. It has been two weeks of me following scientists – some of them engaged in fields I have never really heard before such as entomology, ichthyology and herpetology.
I cannot even pronounce those. I have never been around grown up men and women who marvel at catching frogs, insects, lizards, rats and snakes.
These men (some of them over 60 years old) and two women wake up everyday from their damp tents to go out and check their traps and excitedly return with little creatures that my mother would beat me up for if she ever found out that I had interest in them.
They then photograph them before they are killed and stored in special containers. That is the crude version. In respectful scientific terms, they are field-gathering scientific specimens for conservation research at the headwaters of the Okavango Delta.
So maybe it is the actions of the biodiversity scientists that are giving me hallucinations. It must be their little colourful lizards, rats, frogs and various insects. The ones they call cut, just before they kill them. But despite the hallucinations, these Angolan highlands are so beautiful.
The lush Miombo rainforest and flowing rivers that transport the water to our Okavango Delta, are a sight to behold.
This week we are camped out at the source of the Cuanavale River. The Cuanavale River is one of the tributaries of the Cuito River, where we were stationed last week.
The drive here was, however, labourous.
The roads are pretty bad on these highlands. The former roads built by the Portuguese colonisers were blown up during the war, leaving us to the mercy of one of the toughest roads in southern Africa.
We have heard from some of the people living on these highlands that even government officials do not travel these roads. Some of these people, at the villages of Majimbi and Sacumuna, say the last time an official visited them after the war, was more than five years ago.
The people on the highlands have learnt to live without central government.
They have learnt to be self sufficient from outsiders. They live by hunting and gathering from these highlands.
Some of these hunters visited us the other day and shared with us their skills. Our visit to the village also revealed that the people stuck on these remote highlands cut off from Luanda, have a love-hate relationship with animals. According to them, all snakes must die; hyenas, wild dogs and the whole wild cats family must die too. To them these animals are bad because they have never seen the benefit of wildlife to humans.
And that is the real reason we are doing this expedition – to assist in educating local communities how to benefit from the wildlife using Botswana’s Okavango Delta as a benchmark.
And if the people from the headwaters of the Okavango can understand the value of wildlife it could be possible to protect the entire Okavango River basin and create the largest true wilderness area in the world.
And so, I believe these hallucinations are for a good cause.