Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Twenty dollars?'
Boston knelt at the skin to study it. By turns, he was shaking his head in what appeared
disgust and grinning at the monstrosity of the beast.
The man in front of me produced an old mobile phone from his shorts and told me, with
increasing pride, how just yesterday one of the villagers' goats had disappeared. Fearing
the worst, they had tracked its last movements - and there, lying before them, was this
enormous python, gorged and swollen with the goat inside.
'So we killed it. Watch . . .'
The cracked screen of the mobile phone came to life and I realised, with grim fascin-
ation, that he was about to show me the snake's final moments. In the picture the man
appeared to be pulling on its tail as the swollen beast thrashed around. Then, from out of
shot, a machete appeared. The final act was half-obscured, but at last the python was still.
When the image turned black, the man was nodding in appreciation.
'Did you eat it?' I asked, for want of anything better to say.
He looked at me with disbelief. 'Of course not!' he exclaimed, as if to say that the very
idea was absurd. 'Snake meat is bad. It will become a drum.'
As we left them to their work, Boston sidled up to me and shook his head sadly. 'Sav-
ages,' he muttered.
It was the most ecologically minded thing I had ever heard Boston say. 'It's a predator,'
I said. 'Perhaps they had to do it, to protect their goats.'
'I did not mean that, Lev!' Boston balked as we resumed our trek. 'I mean - why kill
such a beautiful creature, just for a drum skin? They could have made so much more
money if only they had sold it to a zoo . . . These Bugandans, Lev, they're too stupid to
even think.'
Over the next days the shore alternated between dense swamp and pristine beaches where
more landing sites like Kasansero had grown up. At times the mangrove forests were so
alive with fire ants and spiders that we were forced to wade out into the lake and skip
around the swamp instead.
The closer we got to his adopted home, the brighter Boston seemed to become. Passing
from landing site to landing site, with the lake always glittering on the right - and, some-
where in it, the Kagera transforming to the true White Nile - he constantly chipped away.
This, he told me, was a civilised country. I was humbled to admit he might have had a
point. From the moment we set foot in Uganda the local attitude towards us seemed to
change. Matthias's news story must have helped, but the villages we passed through were
not as immediately suspicious as were in Tanzania, and the police didn't seem as eager to
apprehend us for being English spies or the CIA. Uganda is a country that emerged from
British rule in 1962 and it felt as if, unlike in some other corners of Africa, the colonial
