Marriage versus Death by Buffalo

A Healthcare Travelogue of Africa: Part 3 of 3

“The Buffalo Story.” Jigsaw puzzle made by my wife’s colleague, Brenda Thornton, sometime between 2000 and 2007 in honor of this story.

NOTE: I’m posting excerpts from my not-yet-published book, “Fifty-Million-Dollar Baby: Economics, Ethics, and Health”—the goal being to edit the manuscript in plain view, informed by your comments, corrections, suggestions, and criticisms.

This is Part 3 of a 3-part series. #1 Fun and Death in Lagos, #2 Checkpoint, Toothbrush, Wind of Change, and #3 Marriage versus Death by Buffalo.

I dedicate this three-part chapter to countless people in eight African countries who welcomed me to their continent long ago. My nostalgia for them and for their lands has never receded.

When I taught at various universities, my classes began a question to the students: What is the single most interesting fact about you—maybe something you’ve done, somewhere you’ve been, someone you’ve met? The answers were often fascinating. One student’s childhood babysitter was Janis Joplin. Another said her ancestor had immigrated from Ireland and become one of the first governors of Montana. I left her speechless by asking, “And before he came to this country, was he tried in Great Britain for treason and sentenced to hang by the neck until dead?” She gave a stunned “yes” and asked how I knew. I answered that it’s because professors know everything. In fact, years before, I had read the story on a paper place-mat in an Irish pub and had saved it in my files; I brought it to class a few days later to show her. The most stunning answer I ever received was from a cheerful-looking young woman who said, “I was stillborn.” The class—me included—fell into a stunned silence. I asked her to elaborate, and she explained that she was delivered lifeless and unmoving. After doctors and nurses in the delivery room gave up trying to revive her, one doctor began filling out the certificate of stillbirth. However, another doctor, apparently crying in despair, went to the table and pounded relentlessly on her silent body until he shocked her into life. I looked around and said, “I very much doubt that any of you are going to top that one.” In many years of teaching afterward, no one ever did. I’ll readily admit that 20 years later, just typing her story causes tears to stream down my face.

The students, of course, would ask me to tell them the single most interesting thing about me. I typically offered one of four stories:

Dustin Hoffman image by Diana Kremer, from Wikimedia Commons. Robert Graboyes photo from high school yearbook. Doppelganger? You decide.

1. At a lavish political banquet, a tipsy socialite walked up and told me she was one of my biggest fans, and asked whether I would sign her program. In those days, people constantly suggested that I was a doppelganger for Dustin Hoffman, so I knew what she was thinking. I told her I would be delighted to sign her program and wrote, “To one of my biggest fans. —Bob.” Then I closed it, handed it back, and watched her stuff it into her purse. She said her friends wouldn’t believe whom she had met when she showed them the autograph the next day. I suspect that assessment proved correct.

2. My wife and I once spent an afternoon with Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon in their apartment—a story I told in “Sunday Name-Dropping.”

3. There is a slight probability that I personally accelerated the demise of apartheid in South Africa, which I explained in Part 2 of this three-part series, “Checkpoint, Toothbrush, Wind of Change.”

4. I once had to choose between getting married and being trampled to death by a buffalo in East Africa. That story is the subject of the paragraphs that follow. (SPOILER ALERT: I chose marriage.)

The Buffalo Story occurred during my second trip to Africa, in 1984. For a few years, I had been dating the most wonderful woman ever placed on this blue marble of earth. Anyone would have been a fool to let her slip away, but, at the tender age of 30, I was still hesitant, not about her, but about marriage itself. Just prior to my trip, I finally mustered the sense to say yes to marriage and told her I would spend the next seven weeks in Europe and Africa adjusting to the idea.

Masai Mara, Kenya. Photos by Robert F. Graboyes © 1984.

After concluding my business in Nairobi, I hopped on a DC-3 and flew west to the Masai Mara National Reserve for a photo safari. I could write a long essay on the trip (and probably will sometime). But suffice it here to say that I spent several days close to and surrounded by vast numbers of elephants, lions, giraffes, baboons, warthogs, wildebeesten, rhinos, hippos, crocodiles, jackals, leopards, zebras everywhere. We stayed in tents—luxury tents, but tents nonetheless. Just canvas and mesh between visitors and wildlife. Over and over, the guides warned us to stay far away from the massive African buffalo—widely regarded as the most dangerous animal on the continent. Lions will generally not bother you unless you have given them good reason to do so. Not so with the buffalo, which will storm you and trample you to death simply for the entertainment value of doing so.

The first night, I looked upward to the sky and have never seen anything like it. We were far from any cities, with crystalline air. It seemed as if we were 100 miles from the nearest incandescent bulb. The stars practically blotted out the black of the night sky. (I’ve been in deserts many times since but have still never seen a sky that devoid of light pollution.) I’m an astronomy freak and know my way around the sky. For the first time in my life, I was thrilled to see the Southern Cross and the Magellanic Clouds. Then, the sky slapped me across the face when I spied Orion. There the Great Hunter was, just like at home, except that he was upside-down—his sword was sticking straight up, rather than hanging downward. I had to think long and hard about the geometry of earth and sky before that configuration made sense. It was my life’s ultimate Toto-I've-a-feeling-we're-not-in-Kansas-anymore moment. (Later on, I flushed toilets in Southern Africa to see whether they really spun in reverse, thanks to the Coriolis Effect, but that experiment failed.)

In the evening, our guide assembled the dozen or two of us visitors around a campfire. At some point, a buffalo thundered by, just a few feet from us, in the dark. One young woman asked, nervously, “Why do they come up here so close to us?” The guide, a charming, very worldly Kenyan, laughed, and said, “Miss, you don’t understand. This is their home. They live here. Right now, he’s out there somewhere asking his friends, “Why do those people come up here so close to us?” (Additional trivial detail: the young woman who asked the question was a sister-in-law of one of the fellows who invented Trivial Pursuit.)

Late that night, we were escorted through the darkness to our tents. I was alone in mine, which happened to be the farthest from the guide’s cabin. They sternly told us not to step out by ourselves at night—that it was extremely dangerous. If we had a problem, they said, find the gas lantern in our tent, light it with a match, and then hang it on the front of the tent. One of his Maasai assistants, armed with a spear, would come and take us wherever we needed to go. Exhausted, I fell asleep as soon as I got into the tent.

Somewhere around 2:00 a.m., I awoke with a start and sat straight up. Not to be indelicate, but for the first of only two times in my travels to around 22 countries outside the U.S., my intestines were raging turbulently and demanding that I attend to them with extreme speed. I remembered the guide’s advice and frantically stumbled about over cots, luggage and equipment, searching for my lantern, but wondered, “How am I going to find it in this huge tent, amid all this stuff, in pitch-blackness?” Then I wondered, “If I find it, where will I find matches?” Then I wondered, “If I find the lantern and the matches, how am I supposed to light the thing?”

There was a restroom tent maybe 10-20 feet behind my tent, and I decided to throw caution to the wind and make a mad dash of it. As I reached for the zipper I heard a thundering snort and the sound of pounding hooves circling my tent. A buffalo. How timely. I decided to test the sheer power of human willpower and sat back on the bed. In time, I fell back into slumber and had a fine sleep till morning. When I awoke, the need I had felt in the night had simply gone away. (Perhaps some M.D. can explain how that can happen.) I had breakfast in front of my tent, and an elephant wandered up fairly close, looked at me, let out a deafening trumpet, and went on his way.

When I next spoke to Alanna, I told her that it was now definite that I would be marrying her—that during the night, I had a really convenient way to get out of my promise to marry her but declined to do so. “I needed only to step outside the tent, and I would have been trampled to death—which would have been much more pleasant than returning to New York and telling you that I had changed my mind.” Then, I told her, “Had I done so, you could have put my photo on your mantelpiece. For the rest of your life, people would have asked, ‘Who’s that guy?’ And you would have answered, “Oh, he was my fiancé, but he was trampled to death by a buffalo in East Africa.” And your guests would have thought, “How sad. But cool story, anyway.”

Obviously, I did not really consider the buffalo option, but in all honesty, not once after that night did I ever have a single second-thought about marriage. It is now 39 regret-free years later. The only loser in the whole story was the buffalo, who had to tell his friends, “You should have seen the one I almost got.”

[ADDENDUM 2/3/23: A loyal reader writes to say that the buffalo’s actual comment to his friend was: “I almost trampled Dustin Hoffman to death!”]

Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.