The Waters of Africa

No one needs to memorise the geography that follows. Its purpose is simpler than that: to give you a feel for the shape of the danger across the continent, so that the abstract warning (assume crocodiles in still water) acquires the texture of real places. Danger is not evenly spread. It clumps. It concentrates wherever three things meet: large and permanent water, healthy crocodile populations, and dense human communities that must use that water every day without a safer alternative. Where those three overlap, the toll is highest, and across sub-Saharan Africa they overlap along a great many rivers and lakes. What follows is a tour of the worst of them, meant to orient you rather than to frighten you.

The Nile, and the deserts beyond

The river that gave the species its name runs for thousands of kilometres, and along its middle reaches, through Sudan and up into the Ethiopian highlands where the Blue Nile rises, it has been crocodile country since the age of the pharaohs. Still is. In the far north, in Egypt, the great dams have broken the river into managed pools and pushed the wild crocodile largely above the Aswan barrier into Lake Nasser, so that the lower Nile of the cities is no longer the crocodile river it once was. But this is the exception that proves how much the danger tracks human engineering: where the water has been controlled and separated from daily life, the conflict falls away; where people still meet the wild river at its edge, the animal is waiting as it always has.