If you remember, some years back, there was deafening noise about the Curugsewu villagers of Indonesia who claimed to have caught a python that would make it to the Guinness Book of World Records. It was said that the python, caught by a hunter in a Sumatra forest, weighed in at 447 kilogrammes and measured a whooping 15 metres long! I shuddered when I thought of the food this monster would require for its monthly dinners. Now, consider another python. Samantha, who lived in the Bronx Zoo in New York, USA, was a 30-year-old python who was not particularly heavy by the time she died at the end of 2002. She weighed 125 kilogrammes and was 8 metres long. Mealtime was once a month and her menu consisted of a freshly slaughtered 16 kilogrammes pig which she swallowed in 15 minutes. When she was still strong enough to wrestle with her food, she preferred it live. 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 goats, hens, bread, frogs and water. My quarrel with these slithering menaces is that they bring back bitter memories of some 40 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 at their dinner table. If it was not the hippopotamus, the lion, the leopard, et al, to oversee the hastened demise of your exiled life, it was the tsetse fly, the mosquito or simply the thorn of a tree. But all these faded in comparison with the danger that a snake posed. For instance, you think you have seen all the species of snakes, right? Wrong! Visit the grasslands of Ankole 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. Rurongo Stream was some six kilometres away. Since the stream was in the opposite direction of the school, it meant covering 19 kilometres before the start of lessons at eight in the morning! In your hurry to finish all morning tasks, 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, 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 it will be too late to duck from its deadly venom. 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! For instance, you are up in a tree, looking for dry branches as firewood. Then you hear something whiz past your ear. The initiated will climb down the tree and say a thanksgiving prayer, because what whistled past your ear was insana, a rattlesnake! This species of snake has so much venom that the whole tree will soon wither away and die. 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. 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! And so it goes on… Contact: ingina2@yahoo.co.uk
