An Affair with Africa: Expeditions and Adventures Across a Continent

Natural History, July-August, 1998 by Arthur V. Evans

An Affair with Africa: Expeditions and Adventures Across a Continent, by Alzada Carlisle Kistner; Island Press (Shearwater Books); $24.95; 224 pp.; illus.

Review Beetles that habitually live in ant or termite nests (myrmecophilic and termitophilic beetles, respectively) have evolved a fascinating range of adaptations that afford varying degrees of acceptance by potentially hostile hosts. Fleet of foot and protected by heavily armored exoskeletons, they can avoid attack, and the more specialized beetles can secrete substances that trick ants and termites into feeding them at the expense of their hosts' own broods. It was this group of beetles that led David and Alzada Kistner, two graduate students in biology, to set out for Africa shortly after their marriage in 1960.

In her memoir, An Affair with Africa, Alzada Kistner presents often humorous, sometimes harrowing accounts of the couple's entomological field research spanning thirteen years in eleven African countries. At a time when women were discouraged from pursuing full professional lives, the author discovered a passion for adventure and observation, a world "endlessly beckoning, a lively bubbling cauldron of questions and intrigue." Her book gives a behind-the-scenes account of the couple's entomological research, over the course of which David Kistner became the world's leading authority on myrmecophilic and termitophilic beetles, discovering and describing more than 500 new species and 150 new genera.

In five African expeditions, the Kistners' paths crossed those of important political figures such as Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda and Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere. They even dined with Idi Amin and his entourage just months before Amin led his bloody coup against the Ugandan government.

Their first expedition began in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1960, just as Belgium granted the colony its independence. The Kistners settled into fieldwork, but within three weeks of their arrival, political conditions had deteriorated to such a degree that their fate---and that of their beetle collection--was in jeopardy. They escaped from their research station and fled to Stanleyville (now Kisangani) in a motorcade led at breakneck speed by the provincial governor and were eventually airlifted to safety in an Air Force plane sent by Vice President Richard Nixon. Not missing a beat at this setback to their research, the Kistners relocated to Kenya to continue their search for rare and unusual beetles.

In 1962, more than six months pregnant with her second daughter, the author set out on a second expedition with David to Liberia and the Ivory Coast. (Their three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Alzada, had been reluctantly left in the safety of her grandparents' care.) "Fortunately, I had my short-legged, foldable stool," Kistner writes. "I could kneel on the ground, rest my forearms on the stool, and suspend my ample middle." This probably ranks as one of the more unusual observation positions in the field. Elevated blood pressure eventually forced her to return home while David stayed behind to carry on with his research. On a later expedition to South Africa and Tanzania in 1965-66, the Kistners were joined by their oldest daughter--already a budding naturalist--while the youngest remained at home with her grandparents.

All four Kistners set off for Africa in 1970, this time to study termites in South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Kistner marveled at the termites' amazing engineering feats--concretelike mounds constructed with soil, vegetation, and saliva that keep millions of inhabitants in comfort by maintaining a remarkably constant internal environment of 90 [degrees] F and 95 percent relative humidity. But she also discovered that termites are a culinary delicacy and that nests are regularly plundered for their winged reproductive males and females, rich in fat and protein. "In the village market, termites yielded about $1 [Rhodesian dollars] per pound; some nests yielded 100 pounds each season. Thus, an acre of termites yielded more cash than an acre of cattle or sheep."

In Kistner's Africa, "there was never a night without roaring, snuffling, chomping, and bashing through camp." In one spot, on their fifth expedition to Botswana in 1973, they heard lions around them throughout the night. In the morning, when they asked their ten-year-old daughter Kymry why she looked so haggard, she said, "A lion went to sleep leaning up against me, and I didn't dare move for hours until he left. I thought he would eat me right through the tent."

Those intrigued by African natural history, adventure travel, family dynamics in the field--and especially termites, beetles, and ants--will find An Affair with Africa difficult to put down. Alzada Kistner alludes in her book to the family's other entomological expeditions in Asia, Australia, and South America. I look forward to possible sequels.

Arthur V. Evans, director of the Insect Zoo at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, lived in South Africa for three years while studying melolonthine scarabs. He is the coauthor, with Charles L. Bellamy, of An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles (Henry Holt and Company).