Seeing God in Kenya’s wild

At a dinner party recently, talk turned to what sort of experience could make an atheist believe in God. It brought to mind a trip my wife and I made to East Africa a few years ago, and the number of times we recognised the greatness of God in what we saw.

For thousands of years, a million and a half wildebeest and zebra have been making a hazardous journey across the Serengeti plains of Tanzania to the northern reaches of Kenya’s Masai Mara. This spectacular natural phenomenon is best known as “The Migration”, but it has also been called The Greatest Show on Earth. And what a show it is! But it’s not really a migration; rather, an endless year-round trek from south to north and back again in search of fresh grass and water.

It all starts round about April when the hundreds and thousands of bearded wildebeest interspersed with groups of ever vigilant zebra gather together on the southern Serengeti plains. By early July the long, straggling columns start moving northwards.

The young and infirm get left behind as prey for vast numbers of the most well-fed carnivores on earth. Others die as they try to cross swollen rivers and break limbs trying to escape the hordes of lion and hyena.

Round about the end of August they reach the fresh new grass of the Masai Mara, and by late September they’re already starting to reform for the journey back to the Serengeti, where they arrive three months later and begin calving.

The sight of a continuous column of wildebeest stretching from one horizon to the next is a spectacle. Watching a couple of hundred-thousand wildebeest on the move is a bush experience that leaves anything else you’ve ever seen out there stone cold. It is, I think, guaranteed to turn atheists into believers. And it’s been going on the same way since the dawn of mankind.

We set off from Arusha in Tanzania  —  the exact halfway mark between the Cape and Cairo  —  to the Ngorongoro crater, one of the world’s most spectacular natural phenomena.

The first hundred kilometres was on reasonable tar, but getting to Ngorongoro, I knew, meant tackling a couple of hundred kilometres of the worst roads imaginable. It was therefore with relief, if not awe, that we arrived on the rim of the Ngorongoro crater after having passed through villages that were brown with centimetres of dust and waiting for spring rains to give them back their true colours.

Ngorongoro is spectacular! A huge volcanic crater, almost perfectly round and 20km across. Its floor is a vast, flat grassland dominated by a salt pan covered with a carpet of pink flamingoes. As a spoilt brat it takes a lot to impress me, but Ngorongoro knocked my socks off.

It has wildlife in abundance, and is breathtaking. What makes the Serengeti and Kenya’s Masai Mara differ from what we have in South Africa is that there are no tarred roads, no signposts, no electricity pylons and railways lines, no convenient camps all over the place  —  just tracks through the veld and miles and miles of grassland that hasn’t changed in a million years.

From Ngorongoro across the vast Serengeti to Migration Camp in the northern Serengeti, a wonderful, tented camp where apparently you can lie awake at night listening to the thunder of hooves as thousands of wildebeest pass a few metres from your door on their way north.

Next morning we headed north, determined to catch up with the migration. We rounded a corner, and there, on a vast, treeless plain, was what we had come to see: From horizon to horizon, stretching at least 40km, a long, unbroken line of wildebeest and zebra.

Sometimes the line was 20 deep, sometimes only a couple of animals wide; sometimes standing still, sometimes plodding along like refugees from a war zone; sometimes startled by predators, and charging away with a thunder of hooves.

And all around us, birds of prey; lappet-faced vultures as common as mossies, auger buzzards and dozens more. Lion lying sated in the grass and hyena loping around with the smug satisfaction of knowing they would never have far to look for a meal.

The Serengeti and its northern neighbour, the Masai Mara, are spectacular wonders of nature. The sheer size and numbers involved boggle the mind. It is one of God’s masterpieces that I believe could not fail to bring the most ardent of atheists to their knees.