Go Tell the Crocodiles

by Rowan Moore Gerety

  Perhaps a government that can deliver on that promise, though, will have the means to form a different relationship with the people of Mogincual altogether. To flip Vasco’s proposition on its head, you might say the population won’t understand the means of transmission until they feel they can trust the teacher.

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  Go Tell the Crocodiles

  TETE

  To some of the Egyptians, then, the crocodiles are sacred and to others not, but they treat them as if they are enemies.

  —HERODOTUS1

  Fairy tales still play a considerable part in molding the average person’s ideas about natural history.

  —RAYMOND DART2

  The King of Crocodiles

  When we met, the King of Crocodiles introduced herself as Mae Rosa, “Mother Rose.” She smiled broadly with a show of gums and folded her hands in her lap. She is frail and leathery from a lifetime of menial work under hot sun, and shy with outsiders in the same way as many women in northern Mozambique: not a matter of personality so much as a learned form of politeness. The king wore an orange bandanna over her hair and a purple polyester blouse printed with images of roses, tulips, and hibiscus flowers. I had trouble imagining that there was anything dangerous about Rosa, but the neighbors’ children gave her a wide berth.

  Since losing her husband in 2005, Rosa has lived alone with a grown daughter in a mud and thatch hut at the western end of Bawa, where she cultivates a plot of millet, maize, and cassava near the Zambezi River. The soil near Bawa is sandy and acidic; on the whole, it makes for terrible farming, but annual floods deposit a new layer of silt along the riverbanks and on the labyrinth of reed islands opposite the village, making these the only areas where the locals successfully grow food year after year. Otherwise, they tend to change fields every one or two years, returning to fields left fallow for several seasons or burning a new clearing in the surrounding woodlands to plant before the rains. Rosa has one plot on the river and another on high ground, where yields are less reliable, and she works them both with a hoe and a machete from Zambia. Capinar, “weeding,” is how she describes making a living. Rosa eats what she grows. To buy soap, oil, and salt, she occasionally sells a sack of maize or small bundles of greens.

  Mae Rosa earned her sinister nickname in 2010, in the days following the disappearance of her brother’s daughter, Amelia, who had been washing dishes on the riverbank one morning that August. Bawa is home to only a few hundred families, but the village lost nearly fifty people to crocodile attacks in a single decade, from 1999 to 2009, making it the deadliest place in Mozambique, and possibly the world over, for human-crocodile conflict. Amelia had been taken by a crocodile, and the whole village thought that Rosa was responsible. Rosa was the owner of a charm that became a magic crocodile and obeyed the whims of its master. It was Rosa, the neighbors said, who’d killed her own niece and several others before her.

  Bawa is the westernmost village in Mozambique, on a broad peninsula below the confluence of two major rivers: the Zambezi, which meanders lazily down from the highlands of Zimbabwe, and its tributary, the Luangwa, which merges with the Zambezi as it flows out of Zambia. Known to locals as zungunukei, meaning “eddies,” or “whirlpools,” in the Chifunda language, the spot has been an important trading site since at least the seventeenth century, when the Portuguese began buying ivory, gold, and slaves on excursions upriver from the Indian Ocean. The town on the Zambian side is still called Feira—the Portuguese word for market—after the ugly trade that led to its founding.

  To the south of Bawa is a flat plain that fills with elephants and Cape buffalo in the late afternoon. Fish eagles perch on scarecrow-like trunks on the bank, and reeded sandbars provide aquatic grazing for pods of hippos. Bawa is at the edge of a large wilderness that stretches deep into Zambia and Zimbabwe, home to leopards, lions, hippos, and crocodiles as well as hundreds of smaller animals. People in the region have always had to cope with the dangers of living side by side with large wildlife, but the problem has grown far more intense over the past twenty-five years.

  Since the end of the Mozambican civil war, in 1992, Bawa and scores of other villages along the Zambezi have seen a steady stream of returnees. The war sent more than a million refugees over the border into Zambia and Zimbabwe, and those who fled fighting during the 1980s are now returning from exile with grown children and grandchildren in tow.

  As the human population around Bawa swells, the custom of farming and living beside the river has brought locals into more frequent conflict with the animals around them. Farmland has eaten away at hippo and lion habitat and cut off the corridors that elephants and buffalo use to reach the river to drink. Fishing, bathing, and washing all take place in waters patrolled by large crocodiles. Lions eat livestock; hippos raid crops; elephants trample fields and houses; buffalos charge when they feel threatened. All four have killed people in Bawa. Yet no animal has aroused more anger and suspicion than the crocodile. The elephants that kill people, Bawans will tell you, are “god’s elephants”; destructive hippos are “god’s hippos.” Only crocodiles belong to other humans.

  Biologists, trophy hunters, and government wildlife officials in Mozambique all view crocodile attacks as a perilous consequence of human encroachment on the wilderness. Crocodiles face increasing interference from fishermen who cast their nets in nesting and breeding areas and habitat loss from deforestation along the riverbank as farmers struggle to grow their crops in poor soil. In this view, crocodiles attack humans simply because we are easy to prey upon: we are far less vigilant than other animals and far more given to steady routines, like bathing and fetching water in the same spot day after day. Bawans tend to take a different view: “If a crocodile knows your name,” one ferryman told me there, “then your day has come.”

  The attacks in 2010 followed a familiar pattern: fishermen went missing from their dugouts, and women at their washing never returned from the riverbank. Amelia was only the last victim in a spate of disappearances during the dry season. Distraught, villagers turned to Bawa’s headman, Merinho Gregor, for a solution. It was in front of Gregor’s house, sitting on rickety wooden chairs with Rosa and a toothless man introduced as the community policeman, that I came to learn the details of Rosa’s case.

  The day before she disappeared, Amelia was making fried dough balls on a small charcoal stove in front of her house. Rosa walked by as her niece took the first donuts, or bolinhos, out of the oil and asked to have one. “No, Aunty,” the young woman said. “I am making them to sell.” The girl was twenty years old, pretty and popular with her peers. She was dating a man who worked on a small barge, the Santa Maria, which makes erratic trips from Zumbo, across the river, to the nearest outpost of Mozambican civilization, two hundred miles downstream. On return trips, the bargeman brought his girlfriend cooking oil, soap, and sugar; Rosa, according to her neighbors, became jealous.

  After Amelia went missing, her family consulted Gregor and sent away for the services of curandeiros, or traditional healers, who could make a determination of guilt. According to Gregor, a curandeiro’s credibility in such matters depends on the distance he travels to get to Bawa, so messengers were dispatched on foot across the border to Zimbabwe and to Zambia. Curandeiros culled from villages closer to home might have a family member involved in the case, or foreknowledge of the facts or surrounding rumors. The more far-flung the judge, the more impartial the verdict. Still, rumors began to circulate even before the curandeiros reached Bawa. It was not the first time Rosa had been accused.

  In 2005, another brother of Rosa’s lost a daughter to the river. As in England and colonial America, widows are often the first to be accused of witchcraft, and suspicions fell on Rosa even without a specific motive. She was soon at the mercy of a mob: beaten, stuffed into an empty rice sack, and nearly dumped in the river before the national police came over from the county seat in Zumbo and threatened to arrest her persecutors. But the case went no further. Until Amelia disappeared in 2010, Rosa co
ntinued to live in Bawa undisturbed.

  Speaking through an interpreter in Chifunda, Rosa kept her nervous gaze on Gregor as she told the story. “When [the curandeiros] got to my home, they said, ‘This is the one with the crocodile charm. The charm was here in the house, but it ran away to the forest.’” Rosa was given a concoction brewed from foraged roots and leaves and herded to the forest at the center of a growing crowd. Arriving at a potent spot, a curandeiro instructed family members of the deceased to dig a hole, and they uncovered two cloth amulets filled with flour: sure signs of Rosa’s guilt.

  Neighbors call Liveness Mandar, who introduced herself as Mae Rosa—“Mother Rose”—the King of Crocodiles. In 2010, she was accused of casting a spell so that a crocodile would kill her niece.

  The people’s judgment delivered, it was the community policeman—now sitting next to her—who laid on blows, with the approval of the headman, Gregor, and Rosa’s own family. Hoping to avoid a repeat of her near death five years earlier, Rosa said, she quickly admitted guilt. Gregor stopped the beating, and the community police brought her across the river, where they handed her over to “community court.”3 There, before an audience of relatives and neighbors who had wanted to banish her, she was sentenced to a week of spiritual healing with a traditional doctor and ordered never to use her crocodile again.

  Miguel Wilson, a gentle gray-haired farmer in his seventies, presided. “It’s very challenging to resolve problems of magic in the justice system,” he said. The community courts are the unofficial descendants of the popular courts that Mozambique’s ruling party, Frelimo, set up in liberated zones during their war for independence from Portugal. Then, as now, the courts were intended to operate as a counterweight to the abuses of traditional authority in places beyond the reach of the justice system.

  The community courts have established a fixed price table at a national level for the most common village infractions—adultery, domestic violence, livestock theft. There are no set penalties for acts of witchcraft. In 2010, Wilson said, the court in Zumbo heard nearly a dozen cases involving magic crocodiles, not to mention sundry other accusations of witchcraft. One case, later transferred to criminal court, he said, was presented by a woman who had walked more than eighty miles carrying the dismembered leg of her grandson wrapped in a new shawl after her husband discovered it in their grain silo. There was no outpost of the Mozambican justice system closer to the woman’s home.

  “Sometimes, even without concrete proof, the court will hand out a small sentence or penalty in order to satisfy the community—it might be cleaning, or gardening at public buildings,” Wilson explained. The courts follow Mozambican law, but they are staffed by volunteers and receive no funding or specific guidelines on procedure or hours of operation. Hearings typically take place in local schools, which are often without electricity or adult-sized furniture.

  In Mae Rosa’s case, reaching a productive resolution was made more difficult by her own admission of guilt. “That woman, Rosa—she said, ‘I have a crocodile,’” Wilson recalled, disbelieving. “She told the court that she sold the victim’s meat in Zambia!” Wilson fingered a packet of cigarettes lying on the table between us. Periodically, he beckoned the waiter at the bar where we met and sent him into the kitchen to light one.

  “You can’t witness witchcraft,” Wilson said. “But almost everyone was against Rosa, because her niece’s family was enormous. It’s always the greater number that prevails in villages.” Even after Rosa’s hearing, most of Bawa was intent on banishing her, but the law forbids it, and she did not want to leave the only place where she had ever lived. So the court handed Rosa over to the police, who had her clean the station for three days and told the chief, Gregor, not to let people exact any further revenge. Rosa was forbidden from ever using her crocodile again. Incredibly, Rosa told me she has made up with her brothers and has good relationships with Gregor and the community policeman. The crocodile attacks have continued all the same.

  Crocodile attacks come without warning. Crocs swim silently at the surface of the water, their eyes protruding like tiny periscopes, or submerged, where a translucent third eyelid allows them to see beneath the surface. Even more important on the hunt are the thousands of tiny black specks dotting every scale on a crocodile’s body, where spools of nerve fibers allow them to detect tiny vibrations and disturbances in water pressure. These freckly nodes, called dermal pressure receptors, enable crocodiles to hunt effectively even in complete darkness: like an aquatic version of sonar, the receptors allow crocodiles to navigate around obstacles in murky water and pick out prey in their vicinity.

  At full size, Nile crocodiles are the largest predators in Africa. Their life span is similar to a human’s, except that crocodiles continue to grow throughout adulthood, so that males over fifty routinely reach well over a thousand pounds and twelve feet long. The largest Nile crocodile on record, shot in Tanzania in 1905, was more than twenty-one feet long and weighed 2,400 pounds, though there have been plenty of reports of larger animals still.4 A crocodile like that was probably more than eighty years old. Crocodiles’ diets vary as they grow: bugs and other invertebrates early on; fish, birds, and amphibians in middle age; and anything from mongoose to kudu, wounded hippos, and even other crocodiles when their size allows. As a rule, only crocodiles over ten feet, measured from snout to tail, are likely to attack humans.

  A child collects water inside a makeshift chain-link enclosure Bawa residents put up to protect themselves from crocodile attacks. During my visit in 2011, after a decade in which crocodiles had killed nearly fifty people in Bawa, the only working water pump was broken.

  When they are close enough to strike, crocodiles snap their jaws around their quarry with lightning speed and incomparable force: the Nile crocodile’s jaws are among the strongest on the planet, capable of producing more than three thousand pounds of pressure per square inch.5 But they must take care not to lose their teeth, which come unmoored far more easily than a mammal’s. A crocodile can clamp its mouth like a vice, but it can’t pull or tear flesh like a hyena or a lion, so it swallows its prey in large pieces with great gulps. With larger, terrestrial prey, a crocodile will attack not with its jaws, but with a violent strike of the tail, knocking the animal into the water before grabbing it in its mouth and twirling, corkscrew fashion, until its prey is drowned.

  The vast majority of crocodile attacks in Bawa take place on the river’s edge, where women and children come to fetch water, do laundry, and wash dishes.

  The Rancher

  The crocodile biologist Richard Fergusson calls the area near Rosa’s home “crocodile heaven.” Confluences, where two bodies of water come together, are often sites of particular importance for biodiversity and wildlife habitat. The flow of one river into another creates turbulence and slows the water down. Plant life, insects, and microorganisms that would normally be carried along in the current are instead caught up in eddies, where they float to the surface, sink to the bottom, or simply hang suspended in the flow. Fish and larger animals—humans and crocodiles among them—congregate nearby to gain access to what Fergusson calls the “nutrient load” a river deposits as it slows.

  At the confluence of the Luangwa and the Zambezi, this effect was enhanced with the construction of the Cahora Bassa Dam in the early 1970s. The reservoir above the dam, Lake Cahora Bassa, stretches for more than two hundred miles. At the upper end, the Zambezi slows to the speed of maple syrup, leaving a cloud of rich, food-filled sediment from both rivers in the area near the confluence.

  The dam was envisioned as a way to irrigate tens of thousands of acres in the mountains in Tete Province, the linchpin in a program to settle Mozambique with Portuguese farmers and boost the sluggish economy back home by way of the colonies. The project displaced thousands of Mozambicans, and Frelimo, then leading a guerrilla war against the Portuguese, attacked the construction site repeatedly, deriding the dam as a symbol of imperial arrogance. Today, it has walls five hundred feet high
and generates 17 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually: just over a third of what it takes to power our least energy-hungry state of Vermont, yet far more than what Mozambique used in 1975, or even today—Mozambique still sells most of Cahora Bassa’s output to South Africa.6 But the dam turned out to be the empire’s last folly in Mozambique: the colonial government fell just six months after it was completed, and the Frelimo government inherited Lake Cahora Bassa.

  Thanks to the nutrient load near the confluence, the lake’s headwaters are one of the richest fisheries in Mozambique. But Fergusson says the dam brought particular advantages to crocodiles in the area. When the lake was created, it filled in countless narrow valleys between the ridges that rose from the river, giving Cahora Bassa the intricate, fractal perimeter of a snowflake. Crocodiles thrive in the shallow bays and inlets at the lake’s edge, where they find ample vegetation for cover and suitable sandbars for basking and laying eggs. As the lake filled, what had been a stretch of river with a couple hundred miles of crocodile habitat became a vast underwater wilderness with hundreds of new appendages. Though the dam initially destroyed important nesting habitats by flooding, crocodiles have done exceptionally well ever since.

  Fergusson is a wiry white Zimbabwean in his fifties, with a piercing stare and acerbic wit. He’s a veteran of what insiders call the “reptile leather industry.” For many years, he led the Crocodile Farmers Association of Zimbabwe, and more recently, he’s devoted much of his career to nurturing a nascent croc-farming industry on the shores of Lake Cahora Bassa. Plentiful access to fresh water, cheap electricity provided by the dam, and proximity to large breeding populations of Nile crocodiles—one of the “five classic” species used for crocodile leather—all recommend the spot.7