Hunting Black Mambas

It was 6:30 Monday afternoon. The afternoon before the first day of class. As I have mentioned before, my village does not have water. I only had one 25 liter jerry can left and for the past 5 days I had been using water only for cooking and drinking. As school was starting tomorrow I needed to bathe but I wanted to get more water before I did so. I called my counterpart Mr. Mukuve and asked him to take me to the clinic where I could fill up my five jerry cans. We got in his car and on the way out my host dad, Mr. Mandevu comes up to us. He speaks no English so Mr. Mukuve translated the conversation. Mr. Mandevu said that there was a black mamba in one of his huts and that we needed to go get a gun, come back, and shoot it. So we turn around and drive to a nearby homestead. We stop, Mr. Mukuve calls out to a lady sitting by her hut. She goes inside and comes back out with an old beaten up shotgun. She hands it to me through the window and we drive back towards my host family’s homestead.

Soccer practice had ended at my school and a lot of my students were walking home. So there I was in the front seat of the pickup truck, looking smug with a shotgun on my lap with the barrel extending out of the window. All the learners looked at me with this expression of awe and surprise. I wasn’t too worried about classroom discipline after that drive. But anyway, we get to my host family’s house and there is a group of around 25 people milling about, mostly children. I step out of the car with the shotgun in tow and my principal calls out in a joking manner, ‘Andre you must shoot, you must shoot!’. Instead I give the gun to Mr. Mandevu, but before I take the mandatory camera phone picture. We then walk over to one of the corner huts where the mamba is located. Mambas are able to climb and commonly lodge themselves in the top corners of mud huts. We throw in a small burning piece of tire into the hut so the smoke will draw the mamba out. That did not work, so my host mom being an absolute badass darts inside the hut and starts throwing things outside with the idea of gaining more visibility and finding the mamba. At this point my host father had his gun aimed at the hut while my counterpart and I stood behind him with long spears in our hands ready for whatever was going to happen. The principal stood a bit to the side with his gigantic flashlight pointing inside the hut. Call us the village SWAT team.  My host mom darts back outside and the principle flashes a light in but we can’t find the mamba. She starts poking around the hut with a long stick trying to force the mamba outside where we could shoot it. The entire time my host dad was cracking jokes, making the adults laugh and scaring the little kids. I had no idea what he was saying but the laughing was quite boisterous and the kids were quickly backing away. He was treating it like this was completely normal and didn’t show any concern at all although his eyes were always trained on the door of the hut. Eventually it started to get dark and finding a mamba in a hut without any lights started to seem like a pretty bad idea. So our party broke up, we headed out to get water, my host parents kept the gun and said that in the morning they would open holes in the hut so they could get a clearer view of the snake. I wasn’t there the next morning but I was told that they went back to the hut but the mamba had disappeared into the tall grass so they let him go.