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Place of the Lions - Moses Howard

Page history last edited by Henry Hamburger 10 years, 1 month ago

 

Africa is an exotic and beautiful place and because of its natural beauty the traveler is often forgetful of the imminent constant dangers.


I served in Uganda about nine of the ten years that I was there and I married and bought a shamba in Ankole on which I helped to build a three room mud house with cement floors. It was fortified with strong doors. My wife and two children lived there close by a county chief’s family. At night all kinds of creatures visited us. Lions roared, big cats ate our goats. Along with a farm worker, I once clubbed and captured a civet that was foraging in our chicken shack.


One day with the sun blaring down on our yard, my four year old son wandered outside into the yard carrying his lunch sandwich. A large hawk-like bird swooped quickly and furiously from the sky down and before my eyes took the sandwich out of the hands of my young son, Ngoma. I was frightened: the fast moving windy whisk and beating rush of the wings, the quick violent swoop, I thought had injured the boy, but he stood before me, holding his undamaged arms up, hands out into the air gazing in awe into the sky after the retreating bird. The encounter had not bruised or scratched the skin of his arms...

Over the hills a short distance from our house in Ankole long lines of villagers of all ages gathered at a borehole, pumping and filling their pots with water. I think we had all attached almost no meaning to the place name which is 'Wonchunchu' which in Runyankore means "place of the Lions" a name given the place in olden times. Apparently the lions had not forgotten for villagers often lost lambs and goats to lions and one day, not knowing the meaning of the name, I went for a walk in those murram hills and the hills were steep, speckled with caves, stunted bush and isolated mesas. Before I knew it I was no longer meeting people. I was alone; no goat boys chasing their goats or playing flutes met me. I stopped in the shadows of a clump of trees to wipe sweat from my hot face.


A soft wind blew toward me and I looked under a copse of trees in a murram half cave and saw this tawny figure reclining. At first I was not sure, but then I became aware of the rising and falling of its body… breathing, the large head and flowing mane shocked and convinced me and I stood there momentarily disoriented. Frozen for an instant, I was unable to move. Yes, it was a lion! I am surprised now that I did not panic and run away, which might have fatally drawn its attention to me, a rushing moving prey. Quietly but hurriedly I slipped away in the direction in which I had come, and soon I was panting but meeting goat herders and hiking villagers again. I shivered in fear and wonder of what would have happened had the wind from me been blowing toward the lion instead of the wind blowing from the lion toward me. It could have revealed to the lion my scent and things might have been far different in the "Place of the Lions."

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