Know the Animal

To live safely beside crocodiles, you first have to understand the one that counts. Across the great majority of Africa that animal is the Nile crocodile, Crocodylus niloticus. One species, mostly. Here is what it plainly is: one of the largest and most formidable predators on the continent, and the reptile that kills more people than any other on Earth. Everything else in this book, every rule about the water's edge, every warning about dawn and dusk, comes back to that one animal.

The Nile crocodile

A mature Nile crocodile typically measures between three and a half and five metres in length. Large males routinely exceed five metres and can weigh more than seven hundred and fifty kilograms, the mass of a large bull, carried on a body built entirely for the ambush. It is armoured along the back with bony plates, powered by a vast muscular tail, and equipped with a jaw that closes with one of the highest bite forces ever measured in a living animal. Those jaws are built to hold. They do not chew. A crocodile does not tear its prey apart in the water so much as seize it, drag it under, and drown it.

The Nile crocodile hunts by lying in wait. It floats low in the water, or rests submerged near a place where animals come to drink, showing nothing above the surface but the low humps of its eyes and nostrils. Often not even those. When a target comes within range, it launches with a speed that is genuinely shocking in an animal that seems, a moment before, to be a floating log. Larger prey is seized, hauled into deep water and held under to drown. The death roll comes after: the crocodile clamps its jaws and spins its whole body along its length, twisting apart a carcass it has no way to chew. When the victim is a person who is still fighting, the roll happens anyway, and it does to an arm or a leg exactly what it was built to do to a carcass. Against this, in the water, a human being has essentially no defence. This is why the entire strategy of survival is to never be in the water with it in the first place.