Living Alongside the Crocodile

We began with the oldest relationship on Earth, and it is fitting to end there too. People have lived beside crocodiles in Africa for as long as there have been people in Africa. Not in a state of constant slaughter, but in a long, careful, negotiated coexistence, worked out over uncounted generations and passed down as living knowledge. Coexistence is not a hope or an experiment. Not a theory. It is the historical norm. The tragedy of the modern toll is not that living safely beside crocodiles is impossible; it is that the knowledge and the means to do so have not reached everyone who needs them.