Swimming with Sharks

Battle on Big Chico Creek

Public Art:
Dumbed-Down and Decorative

Countdown in Reno

How does our Garden Grow?

Termites, Travel, and Turmoil

Step back in time to join Alzada and David Kistner as they and their small children explore Africa during the dangerous political turmoil of the 60s. [The] critically acclaimed An Affair with Africa is at once an engrossing adventure travelogue, a fascinating natural history text, and an extraordinary love story. Alternately funny, touching, exciting, and informative, this book is always engaging. —M. Bernbaum, author of Bugs in the System

Alzada Carlisle met David Kistner, now a biology professor emeritus at CSU, Chico, while both were graduate students at the University of Chicago. Alzada said, "Two children and forty years of collecting beetles and safari logistics followed." An Affair with Africa is the account of five expeditions in seven countries of Africa between 1960 and 1973. Alzada organized the expeditions, acted as nurse and medical adviser, directed protocol for her family, assisted David's research, and was a first-class myrmecophile spotter and collector.

David, who now, according to Alzada, works only six days a week instead of seven in his Holt Hall lab, is the world's leading authority on myrmecophiles and termitophiles, beetles that live with ants and termites, respectively. Over the course of his career, he has written over 200 papers and named over 500 species of these cohabitating bugs. Myrmecophiles and termitophiles have made a variety of evolutionary adaptations that allow them to survive in an otherwise deadly environment. The adaptations include secretions, body contortions, and camouflaged shapes that not only protect them from attack but trick ants into feeding them.

The Kistners' two daughters, Alzada and Kymry, accompanied them on several expeditions. Traveling with children added to the adventure, and the girls were eager explorers, adaptable travelers, and cooperative team members. However, Alzada is straightforward about the conflict she felt when weighing the benefits against the dangers to her family. The exposure to wildlife, the unmatched education, the excitement of living always won out. She writes, after a rhino charge:

That night, I couldn't sleep. To think that a day or so before,
we couldn't wait to see rhinos. Horrible thoughts kept going through my mind. What if the rhinos had charged from the front? There would have been no way to back up quickly on that twisted track, and the car's glass windows would have shattered in an instant. Help was fifteen miles away through a rhino-infested forest.

As she lay awake at one in the morning thinking about the rhinos, she gazed out the window:

I suddenly noticed duikers and reedbucks grazing on the lawn. In the bright moonlight, they played and danced. Reedbucks with beautiful quotation-mark-shaped horns came within thirty feet of our hut. Then they whistled shrilly and vanished. For a brief time, the grounds had become a fairyland, with dark rhino shadows in the corners.

Much of the expedition was mundane-literally on all fours, eyes to the ground, aspirators (a device for sucking insects into a holding tube) ready, watching hour after hour for myrmecophiles in long columns of ants. On the first expedition, before they had become experts at their research, the Kistners spent several unsuccessful days looking for beetles and trying various ways of looking through ant nests with their hosts and guides. They finally came across two streams of army ants in a botanical garden. Alzada writes:

Excited, we settled down to watch. Dave yelped when he spotted a beetle walking among the ants-our first specimen. Thank God!
Perhaps we had been unnecessarily hard on ourselves. We were, after all, up against incredible odds: for each myrmecophile, there are about 10,000 ants; in addition, many of the beetles look remarkably like their hosts. But whereas army ants are blind, their beetle guests can see and thus would dodge away from us.

The work often meant ant bites, cramped muscles, flies and mosquitoes, hours sweating in the hot sun, long days with few breaks, and, on one expedition with Alzada seven months pregnant, a too close encounter with a venomous black mamba snake.

The satisfaction from the work was great, however. Alzada describes their days after finding their first beetles:

Having tasted victory, we worked until we couldn't see, couldn't unwind our painfully cramped legs, and couldn't bear the heat... For the next two weeks, we worked ten to eleven hours per day. Each evening, I lowered myself creakily into a hot bath. Excitement over the day's findings tempered my aching bones.

Alzada describes her partnership with David: "Bottom line, he is always there for me, as I have been there for him." She illustrates this with a description of the frightening evacuation of Belgians during their first Congo trip in 1960:

At half past one, the women, some carrying crying babies while older children clutched their mothers' skirts, were loaded into the buses. The men pressed up along the sides of the buses, struggling to reach their wives' outstretched hands.... I was filming the scene with my pistol-grip 16-mm movie camera... suddenly, a drunken soldier noticed me, reached over, and grabbed my camera. Unthinking, I whirled and snatched it back. "Don't you do that!" I snapped. Within seconds, all guns were trained on me. Everyone standing nearby bolted. There was a stunned silence. I was alone.

David casually walked over and stood close beside me. "Honey," he said, "I think they are going to shoot you."

"The list of people who would do that," said Alzada, "is understandably short."

An Affair with Africa took six years from start to published copy: two years to write, two years to sell, and two years to edit and publish with Island Press, one of the foremost publishers of accounts of naturalists (publisher of E.O. Wilson and Paul Erlich). As well as being praised in The Christian Science Monitor, it has been reviewed in New Scientist, Natural Selections, and The Explorer's Newsletter.

Kathleen McPartland, University Publications (Adapted from an article in Inside Chico State, September
10, 1998.)