Out of Africa

( This is the first entry in the” American Refugees” Substack of Roger Simon and Sheryl Longin that begins Aug. 8, 2024.)

It was somewhere around 12: 35 a. m. on July 21 that my wife Sheryl Longin, co-author of our company novel Substack, awakened me after I had hardly fallen asleep in our motel room in Arusha, Tanzania. &nbsp,

” Biden’s withdrawn”, she was saying. ” He’s endorsed Kamala”.

I had difficulty understanding her thoughts in my sleep, halfway around the world, and with my reading aids off, but she was right to wake me up for this. If she had n’t, I would have been enraged. &nbsp,

Although Biden’s withdrawal was predictable, we had been hoping he would n’t endorse his V. P. to add more chaos to the Democratic side. No such luck.

Everything seemed so close but far apart. &nbsp, Or was it the change?

We had only just arrived hours earlier from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on a somewhat unpleasant flight from Nashville, Tennessee, to Arusha’s Kilimanjaro Airport.

As readers may understand, a CloudStrike computer glitch on July 19 temporarily halted all flights in the United States and temporarily suspended all branches of banking. That included us, whose 6 a. m. United airfare to Chicago, where we were to table African Carriers for Addis, ultimately took off around nine, three days later. Since planes were being canceled all over, we assumed we would still be able to travel. They did wait.

No thus. The only two flights that left O’Hare that day, it turns out, were Eritrean and Turkey Air. We also skipped a moment in Arusha because we had planned to spend an extra day in a hotel at the Chicago airport and then flew to Africa the following day. &nbsp,

Making matters worse, after little sleeping, we had to get up before 5 a. m. to find a tree planes to Mahale National Park.

For our thirtyth celebration, we had been planning a vacation that we had been planning for the better portion of a year. &nbsp,

I did n’t sleep much that first night, wondering if this was really the time to leave America, but on the bush plane flying low over the Tanzanian countryside, I realized that it was. Nothing about this was novel. Not only American history, but also the entire human experience was a convulsive problems or war. Simply request Victor Hanson. I had no intention of letting the most recent some prevent me from seeing a region of the world again.

As a writer who frequently traveled when I was younger, I had been ignoring the adventure-seeking side that had led me to Communist China in the 1970s, where everyone was still wearing Mao suits, mountain biking in the Himalayas, and even to Siberia in February ( it was surprisingly beautiful, the Gulag notwithstanding ). COVID had n’t helped.

When you’re on a shrub plane—puddle jumpers that really stop for gas or to get people up, much like a bus—flying small over Africa, the mind normally turns to that man who made that journey much before, when it was greatly riskier, Ernest Hemingway, speaking of Kilimanjaro and the snows there. Nearly one hundred years ago, in 1934, is the copyright date for” The Green Hills of Africa,” one of his few books that I have n’t read but which is currently catching up on my Kindle. The propeller-driven puddle jumper he flew on did n’t have a computer guidance system, as ours did, but other than that, it could n’t have been all that different. ( I did n’t realize the author had crashed twice when I got home until I found out.) A lot of what Hemingway wrote was only slightly disguised autobiography. )

About a hundred people were traveling on the pond jumper, some of whom were staying at the dazzling traditional Greystoke Mahale camp owned by the Nomad safari outfit, at the time. But before we could leave, we needed to spend some more time on a boat. &nbsp,

Our fellow travelers may have made a nice Agatha Christie cast, based on a work of hers from the past. It was a group of the idiosyncratic and the not-so-eccentric, some of the former being of the unpleasant proto- or not-so-neo Communist forms that live most of our university seats. &nbsp, &nbsp,

At this moment, while writing this piece, I am staring out at Lake Tanganyika, the country’s second-biggest lake, evidently as big as an ocean. It is surrounded by several countries, principally Tanzania and Congo, two adjoining nations that could n’t be more different. &nbsp,

One of the staff members at our tour tent, the CFO of a foundation that helps the national parks of the Congo, has personally witnessed the intense corruption that simply emerges from the open lithium mines for EV batteries, which scare the countryside. While overlords in mansions with floating pools and private militias gaze upon them, their staff is made up of underprivileged child laborers who are paid a fraction. He claimed that no one was intervening in the national parks because some of the mine had illegally entered them. Congo, in fact, had no real government, simply selfish officers and bureaucrats who collected “rents” and did everything while armed gangs roamed the area.

Tanzania was more successful ( and safer ), with its anti-colonialist president from the sixties, Julius Nyerere, having brought his people together and urged them all to learn Swahili to communicate. He wanted to make it a Pan-African speech. Tanzania has 126 tribal languages, and we were told of situations where members of the same family could n’t understand each other today. Unfortunately, many of the appurtenances of modern living are these, including traffic jams in their places, some high-speed railways, and the computer. &nbsp,

Distant Mahale National Park, nevertheless, is generally “off the generator”. I had no access to the internet for the first time in a long time, allowing me to access the information from my home country or perhaps send images to friends and family. All that may delay, perhaps the vote that, like so many before, is said to be the most powerful of our days. ( Maybe it is. ) &nbsp,

It was incredibly liberating to be offline, if only for a brief moment, for this man who co-founded the online internet business Pajama Media when it was Pajamas Media, spent seven years as its CEO professor, next spent five years as a journalist and editor-at-large of The Epoch Times, and almost lived on the internet for years. I should do it more often. I was forced to give into an addiction, and the better for it.

The purpose of being in Mahale, however, was not anything like that, but to view chimpanzees in the wild and, to some extent, “hang with” our closest species relatives, who share 98 percent of our DNA, in their natural habitat. Other than Jane Goodall’s Gombe, this was reputedly the best place on the planet to do that.

We were under the guidance of a Maasai named Butati ( like” Bugatti”, he reminded us non-Swahili speakers ), known as the” Chimp Whisperer”, as far as I could tell, an accurate moniker. &nbsp,

Our first morning, a mother with her baby, was accompanied by him and other guides as we hiked steep ( no switchbacks ) mountain trails through dense jungle in search of chimpanzees. The hike was arduous, at least for me with my aging legs, despite three days a week of tennis. We were instructed to wear masks when approaching chimpanzees because human germs do n’t work well with chimpanzees and have even led to fatalities.

We were n’t terrifically lucky in our chimp exploration. The rascally primates had vanished into a valley on our second day hike in search of their most recent pastime, a newly discovered fig variety, and were beyond our reach.

Our next stop, Kigelia camp in the desert-like Ruaha National Park, was the opposite. &nbsp,

We came across an extraordinary abundance of wildlife here, riding in safari cars or on walking safaris that are required to be single-file, accompanied by a park ranger in back and a Nomad lookout in front…

… elephants ( by the dozens ), giraffes ( ditto, usually in groups ), lions, an elusive leopard ( photo at top ), uncountable numbers of impala, gazelles, miniature antelopes called dik-diks, dozens of zebra, hyenas, mongoose, greater kudu ( males with the most amazing horns ), lesser kudu, eland, baboons galore, hippos ( dangerous when riled ), crocodiles, civets, monkeys and birds of all description, including various African eagles, plus this pair of African buffalo who eyed us suspiciously but then walked off. &nbsp,

Our excellent guide Raphael ( Swahili name too complicated ) had only seen this species once before himself, and we had a brief glimpse of the wild African cat, the progenitor of our house cat.

He explains to us how other animals use elephant dung, which is so common that elephants elude treatment in just five hours.

Here, we were told, a giraffe patriarch is teaching his son how to fight to defend himself against predators who are not, as they are, vegetarian.

And here are some of the numerous impala in Ruaha sheltered from the noonday sun. &nbsp,

It’s difficult to describe how impactful this abundance of wild animal life is on you, but it’s close enough for me to describe how. &nbsp,

It is seeing the natural world as it was intended to be and has been since the beginning of time, whenever it was intended to be (uppercase deliberate ). From the animal world to the stars, his/her creation is magnificent, allowing night vision clearly.

Paradoxically, the internet connection was better in Kigelia, and we had news from home. The discussion over JD Vance’s remarks about childless women ( he might have added childless men ) was particularly interesting. The media discussed it with more than its share of the usual snide banality, despite the fact that it was pretended to be using it to make their tedious political points while on safari and watching so many patriarchal and patriarchal animal kingdom families. Why are we here, Vance, whether unintentionally or purposefully, was raising a question that is much more important than one might think. &nbsp,

It was difficult for them to comprehend why having children would even be a problem during some brief discussions about this with some of the wonderful and kind Tanzanians who worked for Nomad, including our guide Raphael. It is a natural order for them, just as it is for many Westerners who practice religion. &nbsp,

As the Substack progresses, I’ll have more to say about this, but as I’m getting ready to board the long trip home from Dar es Salaam, I have more optimism for Africa than I would have anticipated and sadly less for the United States and the West, unless we wake up. &nbsp, &nbsp,

The hotel dining room was replete with apparently well-heeled Chinese business types, many of whom were wearing suits and ties in the hot climate, on our last day of travel to Tanzania, arriving at around 7:30 local time. Through their belt-and-road initiative, which has received much criticism in our press as a covert attempt to buy the world, the Chinese are deeply embedded in Africa. ( The Chinese obtain sizable loans for public works before acquiring the projects when the loans are n’t paid off. ) &nbsp,

Tanzanians I talked to, interestingly, were well aware of this strategy but basically shrugged. The Chinese, after all, helped them build needed roads and bridges. They did something concrete. In the end, no matter who owned it, they would find value in it. Just foreign aid that consistently appeared to go to the maw of corrupt politicians was provided by the Americans and Europe. Worth thinking about.

I delved deeper into” The Green Hills of Africa” on the way home on Ethiopian Air. As the author himself might put it,” It was good”.

This outstanding author of American prose had a lot of fascinating things to say about hunting and Africa. When he and his team started their campaign to kill rhinos and kudu, they were acutely aware of the negative aspects of their actions, constantly weighing whether or not it was fair to proceed. Despite this, they continued to advance in an almost atavistic manner. They claim that the animal’s intention is to be shot so cleanly that it is relatively painless. The author and his team struggle to accomplish that by adding moral complexity to the book more than once. &nbsp, &nbsp,

But what makes” The Green Hills of Africa” truly worth reading, besides the immaculate prose style, are Hemingway’s discussions throughout of the writers he is reading while on safari—Tolstoy, Turgenev, and others—that are more insightful ( and practical for writers ) than any academic critics I have encountered. This is hardly surprising.

Hemingway’s sad ending is well known to all of us. I do n’t want to be the x-number person who speculates about why, nor do I want to have any particularly original ideas. But he was a great adventurer, a model for his time for those who wanted to experience God’s world. Exactly that, a safari. For most of us lucky enough to go on one—have the time, energy, and wherewithal—they are usually a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be treasured always. Just as we had made the decision to launch this Substack, Sheryl and I took one. And so it has provided our initial offering.

You are warmly urged to come visit American Refugees. &nbsp,

Source credit