Before Idi Amin’s coup in 1971, Rwenzori National Park has 4,000 elephants. Nine years later, only 150 will remain. The buffalo population drops from 18,000 to 8,000. Lions, leopards, hartebeest, giraffes are decimated. Animals that survive the soldiers flee into Zaire. It will be nearly two decades before they return, but the park will not be the same. There will never be as many elephants or hippopotamuses or lions.

My family moved to Uganda in the mid-seventies, when even the animals were leaving. My father was an idealistic Seventh-day Adventist missionary. My mother, the daughter of an Adventist pastor, was more pragmatic, less certain about Uganda. My older sister Sonja and I were fluid children who learned to climb trees and eat sour grass and hunt for chameleons. Our family lived on the edge of a college campus, and at first, much of the violence seemed to swirl beyond us. Our house was on the top of a hill, and we thrilled at the animals, so bright and exotic. Monkeys sat on tree branches and picked fleas off each others’ coats. Birds dipped into the clearing, their wings flashing iridescent purples and greens, their plumes as fancy as a lady’s hat. My father was particularly taken with Uganda’s national bird. Crested cranes live right on campus and we see them often, he wrote his mother. The mating dance is very interesting, but I never have a camera ready.

Sonja and Sari sitting on an elephant skull
at Queen Elizabeth National Park, 1977.
© Gary Fordham

My parents were anxious to go on safari and see Africa’s famed wildlife. They were united in this desire. The relative nearness of lions and wildebeest left them dizzy with anticipation. When my father went to Kenya to buy oil, flour, margarine, oats, toilet paper, and dish soap, he also purchased a slender paperback titled Animals of East Africa. It was written and illustrated by C.T. Astley Maberly. The book had no photographs inside, and in the introductory note, the author warned: “In order to be able to devote adequate space to the more popularly interesting animals, it has been necessary to omit mention of the numerous smaller rodents, bats, etc., which swarm in abundance throughout the areas concerned, and which are equally interesting to the keen naturalists.”

My parents were apparently not keen naturalists. My mother especially had seen enough of the rodents and bats. The etc, she suspected, were snakes. They certainly swarmed in abundance. She did not mind their omission. She flipped through the book backwards, looking at the drawings: baboons, hyenas, lions, warthogs, hippopotamuses, giraffes, gerenuks, oryxes, zebras, mongoose. They were improbable animals. Who could dream up something with that coat or those eyes? “God,” my mother liked to say, “has a sense of humor.”

My mother read Animals of East Africa as if it were a novel. She sneaked passages while the beans were boiling, and when she smelled something burning, she set the book facedown on the couch. She grew fond of Maberly and his arch prose and couldn’t quite decide whether or not he was trying to be humorous. She chose to believe that he was not and imagined him in the field, wearing khakis and a pith helmet, sitting on the dry grass, his head bent over a pad of paper as he drew his subjects.

When my father came home from teaching, my mother was ready. He always returned with a story waiting in his throat: You’ll never guess what my students said when I told them about the test coming up. Or Guess who’s finally coming to Bugema? You’ll never guess. He would begin his stories at the door, while he was taking off his shoes. My mother was eager to hear something of life beyond the hill, but she was also annoyed at her isolation, at having nothing of her own to contribute, beyond the domestic: Sonja said this. Sari did that. My father even carried up the mail. Each day, she gazed hungrily at his hands. My mother had begun to measure her happiness by the number of letters we received each week. The slips of paper were evidence that there was a world beyond beans and rice, beyond Idi Amin’s voice on the radio, beyond mosquitoes and malaria, beyond chloroquine. “We sure have a lot of cockroaches,” my mother dryly informed my father when he got home one night. She had been so stricken with malaria that she had spent the afternoon crawling with the bugs.

All day, my mother had been aching to share what she was reading. Trivia, like good news, improves when spoken aloud. She waited now, first devouring the letters that my father brought: one from his mother, one from her sister. And then she waited further, first for supper, then worship, then until Sonja and I were settled into bed. Only when the last story was read, the last glass of water drunk, the mosquito net tucked in, the lights turned out, did my mother pick up Animals of East Africa.