Maybe you remember the story of these Curugsewu villagers of Indonesia who claimed to have caught a python that would make it into the Guinness Book of World Records, for its size. I shudder when I think of the food this monster will require for its monthly dinners. It was said that the python, caught by a hunter in a Sumatra forest, weighed in at 447 kg and measured a whooping 15 m long! Now, consider another python. Samantha, ‘who’ lived in the Bronx Zoo in New York, USA, was a 30-year-old python lady who was not particularly of heavy weight. At the grand old age of 30, she weighed 125kg and was 8m long. Mealtime was once a month and her menu consisted of a freshly slaughtered 16kg pig, which she swallowed in 15 minutes. She preferred it live when she was still strong enough to wrestle with her food, but at 30 she had become frail! There are nearer examples, of course. Like Omweri, the 16-foot-long python in the Nyakach District of Kisumu in Kenya. Her menu consists of a miserly assortment of bread, frogs, hens and water. My quarrel with these reptiles is that they bring back bitter memories of some forty years ago. In the early 1960s, in the refugee camps of Nshungerezi, south-western Uganda, we did running battles with all forms of creatures every minute of the day and night, creatures which were competing to put us on their dinner table. If it was not the hippopotamus to oversee the hastened demise of your exiled life, it was the snake, the tsetse fly, the mosquito or simply the thorn of a tree. But all these dangers faded into insignificance in comparison with the danger posed by a snake. For instance, you think you have seen all species of snakes, right? Wrong! Visit the grasslands of Ankore in Uganda and you will realise how naïve you are. There, you will see a catalogue of snakes with a variety of colours that will put a rainbow to shame. Take your daily chores. Very early in the morning, before running the seven kilometres to Kajaho Primary School, you needed to fetch water for domestic use. Since the stream was thirteen kilometres in the opposite direction, it meant covering nineteen kilometres before the start of lessons at 8 a.m. In your hurry to finish all tasks of the morning, you could not be too careful. And so it came to pass that after filling your blackened safuria (saucepan covered with soot) with water, you heard rustling in the grass behind you. Thinking it was one of your friends, you turned to check. But that was the gravest mistake you could ever make: it could cost your eyesight at best, your life at worst. Spitting cobras, incira, are cunning reptiles. The creeping thing does not trust its forked tongue as a weapon, but knows its spitting powers can compete with those of any dragon worth its tongue of fire. It knows, too, that its venom is most effective when it hits your eyes. When you turned, therefore, it meant you had answered its prayers. You will realise this when you see its erect neck, all puffed up and ready to send its missiles of spittle, but then it will be too late to duck from its deadly venom. Your eyes and face will be covered with the deadly poison, and it will require all the powers of the best witch doctor or herbalist to restore your life. As for your sight, it is an extremely thin chance. Do not walk at night, do not look back, you may be saying. That, however, is because you have not met the rattlesnake. Which, in any case, you cannot meet! You are up in a tree, looking for dry branches as firewood. Then you hear something whiz past your ear, and if you are not initiated you do not thank your stars. The initiated will climb down the tree, kneel down on the ground, and say a thanksgiving prayer. What whistled past your ear was insana, a rattlesnake! And you can see that it is lodged in the branch next to you. This species of snake has so much venom that the whole tree will soon wither away and die. We were not always lucky, very often we were on the receiving end of that life-withering venom. The viper, impiri, is so fat that it hardly ever moves. You only get into trouble with it when you accidentally step on it. Which is inevitable when you are travelling barefoot, in tall grass. It is very strong and so does not have to rely on its venom alone, but can also grip your foot as if with a vice. If you have a panga (long cutting knife) with you, the best course to take is to chop off your foot and leave it in its mouth. Then you can approach your witch doctor and see if he/she can salvage your stump of a leg. However, as I said, the king of all snakes is the python, uruziramire. It is so peaceful that it usually fell into more trouble than it caused! Like this time we penetrated deep inside a thick forest, when everywhere else was devoid of firewood. The leader of our group was, as usual, Karoli Irivuzumwami, renown for his diminutive size, extreme agility and speed. As he was in front of us, he thrust his head into a thicket only to find it inside the mouth of a python! It immediately swallowed him whole and we had no time to even pull at his toes. He survived, but that is another story…. ingina2@yahoo.co.uk
