flowering shrubs on the other side of a knee-high wall and, beyond that, miles of pitch-dark Africa. I heard a crunch-crunch in the decorative landscaping. Then a crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch. I turned off my room lights. It was a moonless night, but I thought I could see something moving. I got out my travel flashlight, its beam is about as wide as a finger. I shone it this way and that, and then down along the ground, and there was a pair of eyes. They were big, round, red eyes, and they seemed to be very far apart. I shone the flashlight around some more, and there was another pair of eyes. And a third. Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch. The eyes were coming in my direction. I ran into the room and pulled the screen door shut. As if that was going to help. The glass slider wouldn’t budge. I chugged a Serengeti and thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I went back out on the terrace and said, “Ahem,” and, “See here, you animals . . .” I aimed the flashlight directly into the scarlet orbs and wiggled it vigorously. The eyes kept coming. The crunching got louder. The eyes came up to within three feet of my wall. Then they seemed to turn away, and in my flashlight beam I saw the enormous head of a Cape buffalo, scarfing the bougainvillea. I switched the room lights back on. Here was the animal “considered by hunters to be the most dangerous of the big game” (said my tourist guide). In fact, here were three of them. And they were acting like well-mannered parochial-school football players in the lunchroom cafeteria line —at the expense of the hotel’s gardening staff. The Cape buffalo were unperturbed, not interested in me, and eating everything in sight. They munched their way next door. I had another beer. It goes to show how even the most wrathful of earth’s residents can be rendered dull and domestic—if the chow’s good enough. How is Tanzania supposed to get rich? Well, there’s “improvements in agricultural yield,” always a favorite with development-aid types. The British Labour government tried this after World War II in what became known as “the groundnut scheme.” The Labourites decided that Tanganyika was going to become the world’s foremost producer of groundnuts—that is to say, peanuts. They selected three huge sites and cleared the land by running a chain between two tractors, pulling the chain through the bush, and destroying thousands of acres of wilderness. Thirty-six and a half million British pounds were invested, an amount nearly equal to the whole Tanganyikan government budget from 1946
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