In the Shadow of Ol Doinyo Lengai

By Lisa Godfrees

In northern Tanzania, almost to the border of Kenya, lies a lake shrouded in mountains and mystery. Petrified birds stand on our shores as silent witness—a warning to all who would enter.

Grass plains surround our lethal lake, a place where rivers come to die, their only escape through evaporation. With water temperatures high enough to blister tender skin, evaporation is a certainty. And in Africa’s inevitable dry season, the lake’s surface turns scarlet from cyanobacteria that flourish in the high salinity of this miniature Dead Sea.

But rivers aren’t the only things that can’t escape the lake. Low-flying birds, disoriented by its mirror surface, encounter scalding water when they breach its placid face. Any that die here are calcified by saline as alkaline as ammonia.

For many years, only the Maasai visited, but they kept a respectful distance. Then travelers came to climb Ol Doinyo Lengai, the Mountain of God, and they became curious about a body of water that even parched African wildlife avoided.

Now scientists come to study our waters. They believe that high levels of natron—a mixture of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, courtesy of the ash deposits of Mount Kilimanjaro—are to blame for the extremophile habitat of Lake Natron.

They are wrong.

Long before the Maasai tribe came to inhabit our area of Africa, a dark-haired beauty, her human belly stretched tight as a drum over the child within her, wandered through the once-forested area.

No one remembers why she came alone and so near her child’s birth. Perhaps she foraged too far from her village and became lost. Perhaps she fled from danger or from sorrow. Perhaps her presence was a test. Whatever the reason, she found herself on the shores of the crystalline lake miles from humanity.

In that age, when we creatures could still communicate with one another and Mount Kilimanjaro lay dormant, the birds of Africa found refreshment in the lake’s tranquil waters. Each day, as the birds came down to drink, the woman would ask them for help.

“Will you find my people and tell them where I am?” she asked the dove.

“Will you show me the way back to my village?” she asked the songbird.

“Will you catch me something to eat?” she asked the fish eagle.

One night, she even spoke to a passing bat. “Will you send someone to help me? My babe’s time is near.”

But they ignored her requests, seeing to their own selfish needs. The dove nestled its head beneath its wing and slept. The songbird would not stop singing. The fish eagle filled his own belly without sharing a single morsel. The bat pretended to be deaf. And the poor woman was left alone.

Then one afternoon in late summer, twisting pain twined around the woman’s middle, forcing a scream from her. The pains came sporadically at first, but by morning they increased to a steady drumbeat as if calling the unborn to come out and dance.

Trembling, a timid flamingo emerged from his hiding spot beneath a broad aloe leaf and approached the woman. He had been watching and had seen the other birds’ treatment of her.

“I don’t know where to find your people or your village,” he said. “I can’t catch anything that you would eat, but I will see if I can find someone to help you.”

The bird flew around the lake, widening his search with each pass, looking for another human all the way to Ol Doinyo Lengai. Discouraged, he glided back to the woman, homing in on her cries of pain, and dropped to the ground nearby.

“Does anyone come?” she panted.

“No.” The bird tucked one foot under his body. “But I will stay with you, so you don’t have to be alone.”

The little flamingo did as he said, and the woman struggled to bring her babe into the world. When her strength had all but left her, and the babe still had not been born, she spoke her final words. She cursed the birds that did not help her but blessed the kind flamingo.

The wind carried her final words all the way to Ol Doinyo Lengai, who had puzzled over the interactions between the woman and the birds by the little lake in his shadow. When he heard her final utterance, he bellowed her words into the heavens. The volcanoes of Africa took up the cry. They shook with plumes of smoke, debris, and fiery ash, causing the sky to tremble. The force of their furor shook the bat, the fish eagle, the songbird, and the dove out of the sky.

Volcanic ash settled around the woman’s body and did several things in rapid succession: it made the lake water undrinkable; it conferred on the flamingo the ability to survive the contaminated waters of the lake; and it dispersed the babe’s spirit into the flamingo and his descendants.

How do I know this?

Because I am that child. My spirit lives in the millions of Lesser Flamingos that come to Lake Natron each year to nest. My mother’s bitter tears turned the water alkaline to protect our flock from any predators. The red hue that scientists call cyanobacteria is really my mother’s blood reflected in the water each year to commemorate her passing. The flamingo’s scarlet plumage bears witness of the other birds’ failure to sustain life.

I am Uchungu because of my mother’s bitterness and sorrow. I am Haki because of Ol Doinyo Lengai’s call for justice. I am Kulindwa, the protected. And thanks to my mother’s blessing, I am not alone.

If you don’t believe me, just ask the bird statues.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Godfrees has never been to Africa but hopes to one day see the places she can now only write about. The first few paragraphs about Lake Natron are all true. (Google “Lake Natron” to see the petrified birds.) The rest is from the author’s imagination inspired by travel sites and online articles. “Ol Doinyo Lengai” is Maasai, and the rest of the African names are Swahili, one of the languages spoken in Tanzania.

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