A Juggler's Perspective

 

African Safari In Search Of A Total Eclipse

By Eric Roberts, Cambridge, MA

 

Sunday, February 10, 1980 - thirty-thousand feet above the equator as it passes near Mt. Kenya some seventy miles to the east. In about an hour, we are due to land at Kilimanjaro Airport in northern Tanzan­ia, the first stop on a two-week adventure to several game preserves, Olduvai Gorge (where our ancestors busied about some several million years back), a rare sight of a total solar eclipse and a little juggling on the side.

 

John Robinson, my co-chairman from the 1979 IJA Convention in Amherst, MA, is sitting a few rows back with IJA'er Ragnhild Fredriksen, wondering just what the customs officials are going to make of the seven clubs and vast collection of juggling balls crammed into every nook and cranny of our luggage. It turns out to be idle speculation; they express no interest in that part of our cargo at all.

 

We spent our first day sleeping off jet lag in the town of Arush, the principal center of ommerce for the northern section of Tanzania. Our hotel was located near a small river which was popular with the younger generation of townsfolk. Walking down that way, I gave an impromptu demonstration of my five ball pattern to an audience of four relatively excited 8-12-year-01d children. Switching to a three ball routine, I did the standard participatory juggling routine, throwing them balls to catch and getting them to throw them back into my pattern.

 

I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that catching a ball seems to come much more naturally to Africans than it does to their stateside counterparts. There was none of the reaching with both hands and having it fall through the gap between the arms which seems to be the standard American 8-year­old response. These kids watched the ball in flight, reached out with one hand, and caught it every time. Later on, I met two or three older kids who, after watching me juggle only a short while, got five or six throws with a two-in-one-hand pattern without any additional coaching. My guess is that there is something different in the nature of childhood play between the two cultures that encourages catching and coordination in the African children, but I have no idea what it is.

 

Juggling for baboons

 

From Arusha, we drove west on northern Tanzania's major highway. (You can tell because-with the exception of many potholes-the one-lane road is mostly paved.) On the way to the Ngorongoro Crater game preserve, we stopped for lunch near Lake Manyara, where several baboons joined us. I again tried out my five-ball pattern, but only got a disinter­ested yawn. Appreciation of juggling is clearly an important step in primate evolution which baboons, unfortunately, have not yet achieved.

 

The Ngorongoro Crater, the world's largest, was formed many thousands of years ago by the collapse of a volcanic mountain. The crater is about 15 miles across and 1,500 feet deep. All of the area's rainfall collects in a small lake on the crater floor, making the land there more fertile than the surrounding territory. It supports a large population of African game ­ herds of zebra, wildebeest and antelope which are preyed upon by lions, cheetahs, jackal and hyena.

 

The crater is also home for larger animals such as elephants and rhinoceri, and an estimated one-fourth of the world's flamingo population - which appears from any distance as a solid beach of pink sand surrounding the lake.

We were scheduled to take the special landrover tour of the crater the following morning at 8 a.m. It was more like 2 p.m. before the vehicle actually arrived, so John and I took the free morning to teach juggling to interested members of the expeditionary party and crew, plus a few Africans working around our lodge. It's wonderful to be able to teach something without sharing a common language. The Africons watched us for a while as we half-juggled a bit, then they'd try it on their own, usually with remarkable success.

 

To market, to juggle

 

On the way back from the crater, we stopped at a small marketplace near Lake Manyara to bargain with local merchants for various souveniers. After the trading session, I gave a short show for a whole crowd of people and got a very good response. If I had been at all clever, I would have started with this. It would've been worth at least a 50-percent discount!

 

As before, I soon involved the audience in the juggling, throwing a ball to one of the kids and indicating as best I could that I would like it thrown back into my pattern. This worked well the first couple of times but one kid ran off down the road with his newly acquired magical toy. I got it back with the help of the adults around, but ended up losing a couple of other balls over the course of the trip. I hope that their new owners learn how to make the magic work on their own.

 

The rest of the week was spent at Tarangire Park preparing for the eclipse on Saturday, February 16. We arose early that morning to a partly cloudy sky and drove to our previously selected site in the mid­dle of the park. We set up cameras, telescopes and other implements of destruction, and hoped that the clouds would cooperate in this endeavor.