"Don't Call Me Stupid!"

Do you remember the John Cleese movie “A Fish Called Wanda”? ?I thought it was one of the funniest movies of all time. Kevin Kline plays Otto, a complete idiot who fiercely protests anyone stating what's so obvious about him: “Don’t call me stupid!”

The Otto of the African wild has to be the wildebeest. One apocryphal joke told around the campfire on our Tasimba safari is that, when God had made all the beautiful animals of the wild, He was left with some spare parts, notably a big ugly head and four spindly legs - but sadly no brain cells. He put them all together and voila! He created the wildebeest.

Wildebeest don’t just look strange. They are strange. Long before the breeding season starts, you’ll see them standing out all alone on the savannah about 100 yards apart from each other. They will occasionally set off running at top speed for a few seconds before stopping as if to ask themselves: “I forget… why did I run just then?”

These “Lonesome George” wildebeest standing vigil, are males.? What they are doing is staking out their patch, so that when the females come to graze, each one hopes that his will be the face that the prettiest wildebeest girls will come to love.?You can't blame him for hoping.

If you’re a male wildebeest maybe that’s the only page in his playbook. What doesn’t seem to occur to wildebeest is that, when prey animals like them are all alone, particularly at night, they are quite likely to become dinner for a pride of hungry lions.

There’s a lesson here somewhere…

Just as we can learn something from all nature’s species, so too we can learn from the wildebeest.

• They show us how to stand up for what we believe in, even if it means standing alone and facing life-threatening odds;
• They show great resilience, optimism and boundless patience;
• Like every living creature, wildebeest have their own unique purpose to fulfill in the vast panoply of nature; and
• Theirs is a stoic determination that, as the old proverb says, “Everything comes to he who waits.”? And waits!

Given what we can learn from wildebeest, perhaps we should grant them the right to say “Don’t call me stupid!”

Otto would be so proud.