Ants

Ants are everywhere in Africa. Growing up there, they were part of the everyday, part of the landscape, part of life. At times we saw them as useful, so we would exploit their capacity to eat flesh when we buried a seashell which still had its snail inside: the ants would clean it out in days. At other times we would be cruel. A penny banger stuffed into the ants' hole would attract thousands of angry soldiers, at which point we lit the fuse.

Gradually I grew to like them, to be fascinated by them, so I would happily squat beside an ant hole and watch then go about their business. One learned to distinguish between the guards at the entrance and the workers to-ing and fro-ing, but mostly bringing in food, doing their essential job of cleaning up the countryside. Without them, the place would fester in the heat. With them, carrion is quickly and efficiently picked clean to the bone.

Most ant colonies live underground, excavating what must be vast and complex dwellings deep beneath the soil. The spoil they bring up, grain by grain, is often piled in neat volcanic mounds - on a well-tended lawn the African equivalent of the English mole.

Ants also come indoors, which they do to help keep your house clean. Unfortunately, they'll also get into the larder so, in the old colonial days, the legs of the mesh-screen cupboard in which fresh food was kept - albeit briefly in the heat - were stood in tins of water or kerosene to deter the ants.

In general ants are pretty harmless and can be ignored but....

....these ants, pictured in Tanzania, are the nasty tribe of the ant world. They're safari ants, a whole colony perpetually on the move, hundreds of thousands of them seething in a long line across the countryside looking for a meal. If this tribe moves in to your house they'll pick it clean: there are horror stories of infants left untended in their cots when the siafu ants arrived.