At the Treaty of Vereeniging, where the English and the Boers met to negotiate an end to the South African War (formerly known as the Anglo-Boer War), the Boers had the last laugh. While some imperialists huffed and puffed about having Afrikaans banned and eliminated from the Colony, the Boers nipped in an unwritten clause which the British have had to live with: the first word in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary would be from Afrikaans.
“Aardvark” (earth pig), a long-snouted and even longer-tongued mammal, has an alarming (that is if you are an ant) appetite for such – up to 60,000 in a good night’s foraging. Which makes it an excellent first word of the dictionary: within its pages thousands of -ants are to be found.
“Sir, can’t we do something fun? It’s Friday.”
No need for him to tell me that – don’t I know it? Friday afternoon with thirteen year olds – just the way to kick-start the weekend.
“What about the ant quiz?” Blank looks.
“Wrong subject, sir, we’re your English class.”
“Let’s start with an easy one,” I say. “What’s an ant with a trunk?”
Silence…then a voice: “Elephant.” Perhaps she’s played it before, but she is sharp.
“Yes, that’s it. An ant that sells?”
A hand goes up: “Merchant.”
And so it goes… . An ant that smells? deodorant / fragrant…an ant that stores water? hydrant… an ant that’s colourful? flamboyant.
Occasionally a difficulty pops up: “An ant with a high-pitch?”
“Chant.” He thinks he’s got it.
“No, chant’s not part of the colony. It’s got to sound “-ant”. This one’s difficult… descant.”
It worked on a Friday afternoon…quite cute to imagine…an ant that bunks school… truant.
My childhood memory of ants is totally different. Brought up on a diet of anacondas, boa constrictors, leeches and piranhas, my imagination of the Amazon, where tribes of head-shrinkers inhabited dense jungles into which no white man had ever set foot, allowed for anything. Which is why the story Leiningen versus the Ants completely gripped and thrilled me. Leiningen, a colonial planter who heroically annd single-handedly delivers his plantation, his “dim-witted peons” and himself from being stripped to the bones by the sixteen kilometre long and three kilometre wide army of voracious army ants from which all flee, except, of course, Leiningen who is intent on teaching the blighters and his terrified workforce a lesson on ingenuity, bravery and bravado.
He constructs moats of water and petrol, but when the ants wickedly work out a way to ford these barriers, intent upon stripping the humans to bone within four minutes (they witness a pampas stag become a skeleton in six) he douses himself in petrol, sprints ant-encrusted through the mass, opens the sluice gates of the dam, drowns the billions of ravening ants and saves his endlessly grateful workers.
That an army of ants could devastate every living thing in its path was something I never doubted, but I was not so delusional in my colonial upbringing to imagine that the can of DOOM in my hand made me a Leiningen. Watching the ants stop, shrivel and die was neither a source of pleasure nor guilt: it was just something to be done when the pesky things were getting to the cupboards and into the jam jar. Sometimes they were worth watching: the long lines moving rapidly towards a dead insect, a single ant lifting an object many times its size or the head-to-head pause between individuals as one train passed another. But they were just ants and my interest was only piqued if they could do something spectacular, like those fierce, bigger ants some tribes used to stitch their wounds, holding their heads to a split in the flesh, squeezing the abdomen to effect a bite and then breaking the body from the jaws, a neat suture now in place. I knew those pincers worked: “Eina! Bloody ant!” and I was on my feet beating my crotch and, hopefully, the ballbiter to death. And those were only small ants.
No longer a sunbather, subject to the investigations of ants, I have also grown a little more aware of lives other than my own. When possible I avoid killing ants, especially if the line leads to some crumbs or dead matter. They interest me now: why do they congregate at our basins and not the sticky stuff left around? Smaller than those in my childhood home, too, another species probably.
Ants of Southern Africa- the Ant Book for All*. Aah, here’s the book for me, especially as the asterisk denoted a sub-title: for Bewildered Beginners, Excited Enthusiasts and even Puzzled Professionals.
Access to the ant world seems possible… .
I have not read it, unless you count about ten pages of a book a read. The author’s asterisk does not include “The Superficially Interested”, those who know ants domestically, the ants in electrical housings, beneath the bricks, between the floorboards and in the sugar. With upwards of twenty-two thousand species of ants in the world, the majority living in tropical and sub-tropical regions, Southern Africa comes in with thousands. Even the fraction within its pages seem innumerable, unending (17 different types of House Ant) and indistinguishable. I would need the determination of an ant to, first, find the creature, second, get it to stand still without killing the thing and, third, identify it. That requires a heavy-duty magnifier and time to work through pages of seemingly identical ants… where do I start when they all look alike?
I am no aardvark. Though I have a taste for them my appetite is limited: were I to nose through the two hundred odd pages of beautifully illustrated ants I would emerge more confused than when I began. Give me Solomon’s: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise.” Yes, I am a sluggard with respect to the details of our formic friends, but I shall consider their ways and why they are known as wise, a superorganism, a unit which operates with common purpose, each member fulfilling its role in sustaining the life of the colony. I shall stand, observe the nest and its workings but not enter in.
#Thanks to Salmen Begaoui for his image from Unsplash
An exuberant read! I enjoyed it, Roger.