Sabou & the Sacred Crocodiles

The last few weeks are the most intense part of our training, practice school. We teach for a few hours each day at a summer school. I have been teaching math and biology. Friday was our last day of practice school! Woohoo! Normally, we have 4 hours of language class on Saturdays, but yesterday, they decided to take us on a little field trip to celebrate our hard work and the end of practice school. They announced that we were going to feed crocodiles…

I really didn’t know what to expect from this. I’ve been to the zoo and paid a quarter to feed the ducks or an occasional camel, but crocodiles were on a whole different level. We arrive at the crocodile place, which was basically a huge lake surrounded by some marshy wetlands and trees. There was a place to eat lunch, and naturally, the touristy shops. The first thing I noticed when stepping off of the bus was that all the workers there had some type of deformity or handicap in their feet. Of course, the first thing I think is that they were attacked by the crocs. This makes me a little nervous, but I follow the group down to the lake.

Now, if this were America (if only I had a dime for every time I said that phrase), there would be a clear separation between us and the crocs, but we walked right up to the edge of the water. I’m looking into this lake when all of a sudden, about 10 feet away from me, I see a croc peak it’s head and eyes up out of the water. It was like something you would see on a movie… a horror movie haha. Now, I’m still a little wary of these crocs, so I step back… behind the rest of the trainees ha. Next thing I know, the man in charge of the crocs heads out into the middle of the lake with a dead chicken died to a string. He starts swinging it around in the water until a croc gets close enough that he can grab it. Yes, I said grab it. A wild croc. With his bare hands. He gets a hold of the tail and starts dragging it out of the water towards us. He puts the croc down in front of us, and announces that we can go touch it now. It started with our brave trainers, and then slowly progressed to some of the trainees. For most of the time, the crocodile would just sit there while all us took our turn touching it. The man in charge of the croc would swing the chicken near its face, presumably to distract it from the thought of eating us haha. Everyone few minutes, the croc would get angry and snap towards someone, or try to head back into the water.

After the novelty and this croc wore off, one of the kids in my group asked jokingly if he could sit on top of a crocodile and ride it. We all laughed, when to our surprise, the man in charge says yes, he can arrange that. He’ll go catch “le vieux” aka “the old one”. We were all shocked as we watched him put the first croc back into the water, then head back into the crocodile infested lake, with the chicken in hand, to catch the old crocodile. A few minutes later, sure enough, he’s dragging out a much larger, older crocodile. He plops it down in front of us, and says we can sit on it. Once again, I’m thinking hell no. All I can picture is me trying to sit on the croc, and that’s the end of my right hand.

After about an hour of so of poking and sitting on the poor crocs, we’re finished and we head up to eat lunch. At this point, the man in charge of the crocodiles tells us their story. First, let me start off my saying that there’s a common joke among Burkinabe that, “50% of them are Muslim, 50% are Christian, but 100% are Animists.” Obviously, the numbers are a little off, but the point is that most people here are animists. Ok, so the croc story. So along time ago, the crocodiles lived about 5 kilometers away from their current town. One day, the founder of the town where the crocodiles currently live, Sabou, caught on fire. Luckily, the crocodiles were around and they saved his life by putting out the fire. After that, the crocs were moved to Sabou, and have lived in the same lake for over 100 years. He said there is a relationship between the crocodiles and the humans. The crocodiles saved the founder’s life, so now the people of the town care for the crocodiles. Every year, they make a sacrifice to the crocodiles to keep them happy. He didn’t say what the sacrifice was, but I would think that it would be a chicken, or other small animal. He said it’s ok to go swimming in the crocodile lake because the crocodiles and humans are friends. (There are 100+ crocs in the lake… this is not a theory I would want to test out!). He also said that during the dry season, the crocodiles will leave the lake and venture out into the town. If you happen to find a crocodile in your house, which apparently is common, you feed it a chicken and it’s good luck for the family.

Later that night, when I return home to my host family, I ask them about the sacred crocodiles. They assured me that the crocodiles and humans in Sabou live peacefully together. But they also said that the crocodiles know the difference between “good people” and “bad people”, and they only eat the bad people. This led me to believe, that at some point, the crocodiles have in fact attacked a human… or two.