A Sad Lesson

We’re still in Siavonga on Lake Kariba in Zambia. It’s a beautiful place – imagine something like the Thousand Islands with hippos, crocs, tropical vegetation and a big dose of African weather and chaos.

Yesterday morning, as we were getting up we heard a huge commotion around the corner from our camp, in the creek about 150m away. It’s impossible to see or get around there from where we are so we ignored it. Then we heard a lot of singing – and wailing. A little later the boys were told by one of the camp staff that a small boy, 5 years old, had been killed by a crocodile while his mother was doing laundry in the creek. The boy was playing at the edge of the water with his mother only a few feet away, the crocodile grabbed the boy and dragged him deep into the water. The mother was paralysed by fear and shock – and couldn’t react quickly enough. Eventually men from the village pulled the boy from the crocodile but it was too late. He had drowned.

The entire village adjoining the camp, home to most of the camp staff, has gone into mourning for the little boy. The police arrived by boat in the early afternoon armed with AK-47s to see if they could find the crocodile, exact some justice for the villagers and take the boy away. Since then the villagers and camp staff have been singing and mourning all around… really, really sad.

Needless to say everyone has been giving the lake a wide berth since. The consensus is, just as Capetonians head back to the beaches a few days after a fatal great white shark attack, that everyone’ll be back on the shore doing their laundry again in a few days – suggesting that we might not be the brightest species on the planet after all.

Last night as we went to sleep the village was still mourning and singing – that amazing, soulful, outrageously harmonied African singing that sends a shiver down your spine and puts a big lump in your throat. At about 1 a.m., a lone man came to the lake shore a few meters from our tents and sang his heart and soul out by himself. We suspect it was Matthew, the bartender at the camp bar, who had stoically served us drinks all day and hadn’t been able to join the mourning at the village.

A tragic reminder that we aren’t entirely at the top of the food chain… poor little guy…

(Yup, we continue to be careful.)