LSUS Professors Travel to Kenya

              LSUS Professors Travel to Kenya
The Kenyans at the Samburu game
park called him "The Big One."
And when he came to eat, "You never
saw people jump back so fast," said Dr.
Anne Torrans, describing a 20-foot
crocodile whose arrival for his evening
meal at the park awed humans and
scattered other crocodiles.
"The Big One" was just one of the
exotic animals Torrans saw during her
recent trip to Kenya, where she and Dr.
Barbara Zimmerman presented a re-search
paper at the Congress on Black
Communications in Nairobi, the Kenyan
capital.
Torrans, a professor of communica-tions
at LSUS, and Zimmerman, an
associate professor in the department
of audiology and speech sciences at the
LSU Med School, were accompanied by
Dr. Madalene Barnett of Baylor Univer-sity,
who designed a test used in their
research.
Their trip included a visit to Athens
and a Greek-islands cruise to Rhodes
and Crete.
But they were more interested in
animals and plants than in Grecian
ruins. Athens was "all right," Torrans
said, but Kenya was "a gorgeous coun-try."
After the conference, they toured
game parks, spending the night at five
of them, and traveled through more
than a third of the country.
According to Torrans, Kenya is 60
percent 20th century and 40 percent
10th century. Nairobi is a clean city
compared to Athens and is a study in
contrasts, with Western influences and
technological change brushing up
against a desire to maintain the old
culture and values.
At a ranch just outside Nairobi, Masai
tribesmen live in huts of thorn bushes,
dried cow dung and clay. And they
dance twice a day for the tourists. Of
the tribes she encountered, Torrans said
the Masai seem most reluctant to West-ernize,
clinging to their traditional
nomadic culture.
An aspect of Kenyan life that seemed
especially odd to Torrans was the
absence of women from the streets of
Nairobi. And men hold jobs normally
filled by women in this country — in
Nairobi the chambermaids are cham-bermen.
And where Americans might use one
person and a machine to do a job,
Kenyans will use three or four persons,
each performing a special function. For
instance, at museums one person stands
at the door to provide information,
another sells tickets and another col-lects
them.
Seeing the animals was the main goal
of their countryside tours, and their
driver, a Kikuyu who spoke five lan-guages,
led them on lion hunts in the
bush. Torrans said she and her compa-nions
developed blisters from hanging
onto straps as they bounced over dirt
roads and fields. In the parks they
traveled with the windows rolled up, of
course, since the tall grass hid lions as
well as snakes.
At the lodges, observation decks lo-cated
near the water holes allowed
visitors to see the animals. "We saw
every animal there except a leopard,"
Torrans said.
They saw elephants in herds, giraffes
and zebras in family groups, and did-diks
in pairs — always in pairs — as
well as gnus and gazelles. And the birds,
Torrans said, the birds were dazzling in
their bright green, blue and red hues.
Even the local starlings, unlike their
drab American cousins, were red and
blue. Lizards were brightly colored, too
— she saw one with a blue head and
orange tail.
The Kenyans are trying to combat
poaching, which threatens many
African animals with extinction. Tor-rans
said the elephant herds are in-creasing
as a result of a ban on the sale
of ivory and strict law enforcement in
the game parks.
Once they counted 18 lions in the
grass near their minibus and watched
the lions drive a hyena away from a
partially eaten elephant; the hyena, lim-ping,
returned to the scene only to be
attacked again, this time fatally.
Torrans, a 1952 Byrd High School
graduate who holds a Ph.D. from Michi-gan
State, returned from Kenya im-pressed
by the people she met there.
"They struck me as a very energetic
people," she said, "who are trying to
modernize and Westernize while keep-ing
what they can of the old cultures."
The only time she was treated rudely
was at the airport on the return trip. Air
Kenya employees enforced surprisingly
strict baggage weight limitations and
extracted money unfairly. "Don't ever
fly Air Kenya," she warned.
But other than that, her Kenyan trip
was just fine.
— JOE LOFTIN