One hot, sweaty morning, I was breaking the grounds in my small home, clothed in three-quarter shorts and a singlet. I was preparing a small plot ahead of the rains when I hope to plant some vegetables. At a spot I stumbled on a colony of small, black ants whose bites are very painful. They were angry because I had disturbed their peace. I dropped my small hoe in panic and backed off. Within seconds I saw a column of lizards descend on the colony and began devouring my enemy ants. In a short time, the colony had been wiped out and my lizard friends, thoroughly satiated, were bobbing their heads up-down, up-down.
Rescued’ by the lizards, I resumed my digging, very relieved. Not that I like lizards, particularly the one with a blazing red head and scaly tail. My dislike for lizards began when I was small, 4, 5 years or so. I was having a bad cough that wouldn’t go away. One day one of my aunties showed up. One whooping coughing from me told her what to do. She fetched a dry twig and went behind the kitchen and returned moments later, a dead fat lizard dangling from her fingers. She looked at me and smiled. She roasted the ugly looking thing, cooked it with only salt added. When it was done, my auntie turned the entire thing into a container, blew into it for it to cool. “Come over here,” she told me. I inched forward. “Come,” she repeated. First, I was asked to drink the dank warm soup, then I ate the head, followed by the flesh. I winced in horror as I forced the “medicine” down my throat. Three, four days later, my cough was gone. Do you blame me? A week later, my stick raised, I pursued a redneck lizard. As it ran up a mud wall I hit it hard on the back and it fell to the ground, twitching. I gave it another smack and it lay still. I thought it was dead and made to pick it. Imagine my horror! The damn thing gave a twitch and freed itself my shaky fingers. I fetched a stone and broke its head, blood spluttering in all directions. But I was too shaken by fright to attempt to pick it up. Ever since I lived with this eerie feeling that a lizard never dies. Lizards not for me again, ever.
So, that day that a horde of furtive lizards ‘saved’ me from mad ants, did they become friends with me then? Over 60 years after my initial experience with one? No, never will be. Oddly, today lizards are swarming all over my place. Turn right or left, look front or back, two or three or more are sprinting away from you and some more are stretched out atop the security fence nodding their bald heads as though daring you to come catch them. They are fast runners. Running from you, they take off in a burst of speed and can change direction 270 degrees. But they tire quickly. Safe from you, they believe, they dash into the holes they have burrowed all along the walled fence. They have a fantastically excellent sight. They can spot a small ant five meters away and come running to snap it up. Voracious eater, they are just as destructive. Last year, they ate up all the flowers on the watermelons I planted. You know without the flowers the melon creeper can’t fruit. Same thing they did to my groundnut seedlings. You dare not leave your doors and windows open. Daring as they are, they cowardly shrink from the heat of the sun. Open doors are a gratuitous invitation to take cover in the coolness of your sitting room, dining room and kitchen. And they leave their mess on everything to announce their presence.
These predator lizards lack a sense of community, unlike ants. Between them there is violent competition for everything, food mostly. The strong chase away the weak and parents deny their little ones the tiniest morsel of 🍞. Copulation is just as mad. Ants, on the other hand, demonstrate a uniquely strong sense of community. Not for them the lizard’s cutthroat competitiveness. They live together and own everything together. The strong help the weak and they don’t prey on each other as the lizards do. If one isn’t strong enough to carry a load, another quickly steps up to lend a hand. No ant colony takes from another.
Two takes from my ant- lizard experience. One, the permanence of the food chain and two, the political underpinning of activities of all living systems. The food chain starts with producers, progresses to consumers and ends with links that convert wastes back to new sources of energy in the chain. Ants and lizards don’t produce their own foods. They are predators albeit of different kinds. Ants consume crumbs from our dining tables or the dry remains of dead organisms. Lizards, like ants, don’t produce their own foods but prey on other organisms like the ants. This producer-consumer web has been there since Creation and will be there still for as long as there is life on this earth. The other thing is the principle under which all living systems, including the human system, operate. One promotes the community spirit such as we observe among ants and the other a keenly independent, selfish and murderously competitive one that lifts the survival of the fittest over and above communalism. In this latter we find the lizard and, of course, we humans.
