The Ultimate Safari

The Ultimate Safari Summary | Detailed Summary

The Ultimate Safari is the story of a family from Mozambique that sets off on a long journey by foot in search of refuge from war. The narrator is a young girl who, like the other characters in the story, remains nameless. The girl has an older brother and a baby brother. The story begins on the night that their mother ventures out of the house in search of cooking oil. She never returns home.

The children's father disappeared some time ago. He is a solider fighting the war against "bandits" who have destroyed the country. The narrator worries that her mother might have come across some of the bandits. When the bandits cross the paths of civilians, they always kill the civilians. The young girl explains that the first two times the bandits came to their village, they stole everything. The third time they came, there was nothing left to steal so they set the houses on fire. The narrator's mother found pieces of discarded tin that she used to cover the damaged parts of the house exterior. The children are scared to leave the house. They can see people in the village running about and hear their screams. Without their mother, the children do not know where to go. The narrator's eldest brother keeps a piece of broken wood in his hand all night for protection.

The children wait for their mother all of the next day. They don't know what day it is since the village church and school are no longer open. When the sun goes down, the children's grandparents arrive. Someone in the village had told them that the children were left alone. Their grandmother is big and strong, while their grandfather is small and quite old. The grandmother takes the children back to her house.

The remainder of the family waits for another month, but the children's mother does not come back. The family is starving. A woman from the village breast-feeds the infant boy to keep him alive. The grandmother searches for wild spinach to feed the rest of them but soon there is no spinach left. Some of the women bring food, and it is gone after two days. The grandfather and some younger men go out to look for the children's mother but they do not find her. Women visit the grandmother. They sing hymns together. The grandfather had three sheep, a cow and a vegetable garden; the bandits took it all. When planting season comes around, he has no seeds to plant.

The children's grandmother decides that the family should leave the village. They want to be away from the bandits and the place where their mother never returned. The narrator is happy to think of such a place as "away." The grandmother exchanges her church clothes for dried "mealies" to take with them. They can cook them with river water. The family doesn't find a river and they are forced to turn back. They do not go all the way home but they find to a nearby village that has a water pump. Here the grandmother sells her shoes in exchange for a plastic container to carry water. At the village, the family meets other people who are also leaving. The family follows this group, because they seem to have a better idea of where they are going.

They travel through Kruger Park, an enormous reserve of animals. Some of the animals in the park used to be in the family's country before the war. The bandits and soldiers killed many to sell or eat. The narrator recalls that a crocodile had once bitten a man from her village. She comments that their country is a country of people, not animals. As the group journeys toward the park, women who carry children on their backs grow tired. The park is surrounded by an electric fence. It will be a long trip to get around the fence. The first hour that the group walks through the park, the narrator sees no animals. When they see animals, a little later on, there are only monkeys, birds and tortoises.

The narrator's brother catches a tortoise for the family to eat. The man who leads the groups explains that they can't make a fire because the smoke would signal the police that they are there. If the group is found they will be sent back to where they came from. They must move like animals among the animals and keep away from roads and white people's camps. A loud noise frightens the children. The narrator thinks it's the police, but it is just a herd of elephants. The leader tells them to stand still and stay quiet until the elephants pass. The elephants are too big to be frightened of anything - smaller animals run from them. The group follows the animals to their waterholes.

The group does not run out of water, but they do run out of food. They must eat what the baboons eats, dried figs that are filled with ants. The narrator comments that it is hard to be like the animals. During the day, when the sun is hot, the group sees sleeping lions. The lion blend into the color of the grass - the leader spots them and leads the group the long way around them.

They are all getting tired. The narrator's older brother is difficult to wake once he falls asleep. Flies crawl on the grandmothers face and she doesn't even swat them off. The granddaughter is frightened. They walk day and night. At night they see the fire of white people and can smell meat cooking. They watch hyenas follow the meat smell. In the dark, the eyes of the travelers and the hyenas meet. The groups can hear voices in their own language coming from one of the camps. One of the women wants to ask the campers for help or ask them for food. She cries out, and the grandmother has to cover the woman's mouth to block out the noise. The leader says they must keep out of the way of the park workers. If the park workers were to help them, they will lose their jobs. All the workers can do is pretend they didn't see them.

Sometimes, the group stops to sleep at night. They sleep close together. One night they hear lions approaching, and group gets closer together. The ones who are sleeping on the edges want to be closer to the middle. The narrator prays for the lions to leave. The leader shakes a tree branch and shouts out to scare the lions away. They lions leave, but the group can hear them growling from far away. The grandfather is tired. The leader and oldest grandson have to carry him from stone to stone when the group crosses rivers. The grandmother is still strong, but her feet are bleeding. She can't carry her basket on her head anymore so she has to leave their belongings behind. They can carry nothing except the youngest brother.

The group eats some strange fruit that makes them sick. The grandfather wanders off to be by himself when he is sick. The rest stay near each other in the long elephant grass. The leader tells them they have to move on, but the family asks the others to wait for the grandfather to catch up. The grandfather doesn't come back. The hum of insects makes it impossible to hear the grandfather moving in the grass, and he is too small to see over the tall grass. They believe that he mustn't have gone far since he is so weak and slow. They call to him softly and wait for him all night, but he doesn't return.

They look for the grandfather the next day by splitting up in groups. No one can find him. The narrator and the grandmother spot a vulture soaring overhead. The leader tells them they must move on. He says that if the children don't eat soon, they will die. The grandmother doesn't respond to the leader. He tells her he will bring her and the children water before the others leave. The narrator is worried that the police will find them. She cries, but the grandmother doesn't notice. The grandmother gets up and tells the children they must follow the others. The narrator repeats, "We started to go away again," in reference to the earlier comments about going "away."

The group comes to a big tent that the narrator describes as being much bigger than a church or school. This is a refugee camp. A woman helper from the clinic says there are two hundred people - not counting babies. Some of the babies had been born in Kruger Park to women who had traveled just as the family had. The tent is like a village. People made blocked off living areas inside the tent with cardboard to mark their space. Some used ground rocks to draw designs on sacks. The narrator says it is living inside a mountain because rainwater comes in the sides of the tent and runs down the little streets between the different family's living areas. The spaces between are small. Only one person at a time can move through them.

Small children play in the mud but not the narrator's youngest brother. The grandmother takes the young boy to the clinic on the day the doctor comes to the camp. The doctor thinks there is something wrong with the boy's head, since he didn't get enough food at home during the war and at Kruger Park. He has not developed properly. The youngest brother lies around all day. He seems like he wants to say something but can't. Sometime he smiles, but he doesn't laugh. The narrator and the older brother were like the youngest when they arrived too. The people from the nearby village took them to the clinic. Here they had to sign a paper that stated they had come "away" through Kruger Park. The children were given something to drink and shots to keep them from getting sick. The children are asked to stand in a line at the clinic, but are too weak to stand.

The grandmother is still strong. She signs the children in and gets them a place in the tent near one of the sides. A woman shows her how o make sleeping mats from grass. She gets a card punched and gets "mealies" for the family to eat.

Once a month the church leaves old clothes for the refugees. The grandmother gets another card punched for the children to pick out some clothes. The people in the village next to the tent let the children join their school. They speak the same language. Before there was an electric fence around Kruger Park, the park was the only thing that separated the countries. Both countries had the same king.

The family has now been in the tent a long time. The narrator is five and her youngest brother is now almost three. The youngest boy still has not developed properly. Some of the refugees plant crops beside the tent. They fence off their gardens with tree branches. No on is allowed to look for work in the towns, but some of the women have found work in the village.

Because the grandmother is still strong, she works where people build houses. The houses in the village are made of brick and cement, not mud like in the village where the family came from. The grandmother carries bricks and fetches baskets of stones that she carries on her head. She buys tea, sugar, milk, and soap with the money she earns. The store gives her a calendar that she hangs in the tent. The narrator does well in school. The narrator and her older brother have to do their homework in the afternoon before dark because candles are too expensive. There is no room in the tent - - people have to lie down close together, as they had in Kruger Park.

The grandmother still hasn't been able to buy herself any shoes but she bought her two eldest grandchildren shoes for school. The children clean them every morning and the grandmother inspects their cleaning job. No other children in the tent have real shoes. The narrator says some days in the tent it feels like home before the war, like they had never gone away. White people come to take photos of people in the tents. They say they are making a film but the narrator doesn't know what this is. A white woman asks the grandmother questions that are translated by someone into their own language. She asks how long they have been there.

The grandmother says they have been there for two years and one month. The woman asks what her hopes are for the future. When the grandmother says she has no future hopes, the woman asks what her hopes are for the children. The grandmother hopes they will get an education, get good jobs and have money. The woman asks if the grandmother wants to return to Mozambique. She says that when the war is over, they will not be allowed to stay here. The grandmother says she will not go back; there is no home; there is nothing.

As the narrator listens to her grandmother's statements, she wonders why she won't go back. The narrator wants to go home. She would take the long voyage back through Kruger Park after the war is over and the bandits are gone. She wants to see her mother again and assumes that she will be waiting there. She expects that her grandfather will be there too, that somehow he made his way back slowly. She says, "They'll be home and I will remember them."