It’s a Jungle out there.

It is, quite literally, when you get a few miles outside almost any Tanzanian town, a hot, humid, seething mass of greenery. Now I love this, it’s the main reason for me personally, to come and work in Africa. But there seems to be some instinct, or at least tradition, of fearing it. I hope it won’t seem too pretentious if I waffle on a bit about it. I’m not claiming to be any kind of authority on any kind of literature, just trying to link some stuff together in my mind.

Joseph Conrad talks frequently about the menace of the forest, both in Heart of Darkness (in which even the title suggests a foreboding danger) and in earlier less famous works. Even when speaking through the voice of Marlow, who is clearly critical of many aspects of the Euro-centricism and imperialism he witnesses, he describes the forest as frightening and “so dark as to be almost black”.
Shakespeare talks in a similar way about British forest. A few hundred years before Conrad (obviously, as Britain’s forests didn’t really last into much of the 20th century), the dark forests are frightening and avoided places in, for instance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now I believe this metaphor has gynaephobic overtones as well, but ultimately it is the forest that we are supposed to fear.
And we’re not out of the woods yet, culturally. Around the time of WWI (in setting at least), Henri Charriere’s “Papillon” tells of his hero’s attempts to escape, not just from a French prison colony, but from L’Enfer Vert. The French overseas dependency of Guyane, almost entirely covered by rainforest, is still known by this nickname. Sections of the film Papillon are actually shot there on location, although Steve McQueen never even attempts a trace of a French accent.

Although I didn’t even take a journey by aeroplane until I was 23, I have since then had the privilege of visiting all these locations. I love walking around the few remaining tracts of Shakespeare’s British wilderness, and the much better preserved examples in Central or Eastern Europe. Suze and I’s honeymoon was in the “Green Hell” of French Guyana. And although it is never specifically stated in Heart of Darkness whether Marlow’s boat travels towards the Congo from East or West Africa – much more likely the latter – we have now travelled, and in Suze’s case worked, in both.
The horror! What horror? What do we actually have to fear in the woods these days, except that bears undeniably shit in them? Bears don’t attack humans (or anything even close to man-sized) unless they feel threatened, and likewise there is not a single documented instance of unprovoked attack on people by wolves. Lions, tigers, and pumas take the occasional human victim, but far fewer than are killed in towns by domestic/feral dogs. Mosquitoes are an annoyance, but providing you cover bare skin and take your Mefloquine or Doxycycline, not much more than that. Reptiles are widely feared, and snake bite does kill quite a lot of people in the developing world. The actual numbers are hard to pin down owing to lack of access to care, record-keeping etc, but 20,000 deaths per year worldwide is a credible estimate. That number could be reduced dramatically if we could raise the standard of living in Africa and South Asia sufficiently that everyone could afford a pair of shoes. Which doesn’t sound like that much to ask, really? Conversely, in a single country (the USA, obviously) about 30,000 people per year are killed by firearms and more than 3 times that number are injured.
So trust me, I do have a degree in zoology after all. If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in sturdy boots and a long sleeved top, and as long as you do you are in one of the safest and most beautiful places on earth. There is one thing above all others that’s really worth being frightened of in this world, and it mainly lives in cities. L’Enfer, should you believe in such a place, may be firey red or sulphurous yellow, but would surely be unlikely to be green. To paraphrase the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s ideas regarding it: “We have no need for fire and brimstone, hell is other people.”