A buffalo, some ants, and very little dignity.

I had an encounter with a buffalo on the slopes of Mount Kenya that quickened the pulse. I was fly fishing for trout on a small forest stream, casting from an outcrop of rock about fifteen feet above the river. I was alone. I hadn’t noticed that I had been standing on a nest of safari ants. They bite fiercely. In an uncanny way they seem to coordinate. They crawl up stealthily inside and outside your clothing and then it seems as though a leader somehow gives a signal and they all bite at the same moment.

Suddenly, I felt the stinging bites all over my body. I flung my rod on the ground, ripped off my trousers, and opened my shirt. I was leaping around trying to pick the ants off when I spotted a buffalo glaring at me about thirty yards away, in a clearing.

Since my escape route was blocked on three sides by rocks, dense bushes and a cutaway river bank, to get away meant initially moving towards the buffalo before turning away onto the track upstream. Grabbing my fishing rod and my ant-covered trousers, and wearing only my unbuttoned shirt and underpants, I cautiously walked towards it and then crabbed sideways, keeping my eyes on it all the way.

It lowered its head at one point and snorted. I paused for a minute and murmured something soothing like, “Piss off, mate.” Then I sidled around, watching it the entire time as I retreated up the track. It watched warily but did not come after me.

Safely back on the dirt road at my car, it took me half an hour to pick the ants out. They were latched deep in my beard, inside my underpants and under my shirt. While I was performing this delicate operation, a local farmer came walking past with his jembe, his hoe, on his shoulder. I thought he would find the sight of a mzungu (a white man) leaping around on the road in nothing but his underpants amusing. But he politely greeted me with a jambo as though he witnessed such scenes every day.

This was the wonderful African politeness for you. But perhaps he doubled up with laughter when he got around the bend out of sight! No doubt it became a story back at the village that night.