The Oldest Relationship

Africa is where it began. Every people on Earth who live beside crocodiles carry the same hard knowledge, and this is the continent where the first of them learned it: the place where our own kind stood at the water's edge hundreds of thousands of years before there was a Nile to name, or a word for the animal waiting in it. The crocodile was already there, submerged and patient, watching the first people come down to drink exactly as it had watched everything that came before them. It is still there. No bond between human beings and a large predator is older than this one, and none has been carried on so long, so closely, or at such cost.

So it is no accident that the crocodile sits deeper in the African imagination than almost anywhere else on Earth. Long before there was a science to name it, there were gods and ancestors and taboos for it. It was worshipped on the Nile, feared on the Zambezi, honoured at desert pools in the heart of the Sahara. All of it earned. To understand the crocodile in Africa, start with that long relationship rather than with its anatomy, and with what happens to people when the relationship is forgotten.