Ants Ants Everywhere

Eight years on, it is still unsettling to walk into the kitchen and find a seething mass of (voracious) ants covering the dirty dishes. Not as unsettling, I will admit, as waking up at 4am to find ants streaming under the bed.

One could argue that leaving dirty dishes on the counter is inviting problems and that I should know that after eight years of living anywhere. As for ants going through the bedroom, there’s not a lot to prevent there; they emerge from the tiniest cracks in the cement, under the windows, down through the rafters... Interestingly, we’ve never had more than a few in the bed itself.

We seem to have built our house on a migratory route for siafu, otherwise known as driver ants of the genus Dorylus. They come through every few months; our foundation becomes a temporary encampment of sorts. Their presence is announced by a mad flurry of insect activity - spiders, cockroaches, grasshoppers, crickets and even centipedes scurrying, hopping, leaping and running madly ahead of the onslaught. It’s reminiscent of how villagers might have reacted when the marauding armies of old passed through.

Anyone who has spent any time in rural East Africa knows the telltale feeling of dread that comes with the realization that siafu are in your pants – and it usually comes about the time the first one reaches your waistline. There’s the inevitable effort to extract them from above, then from below and finally, off come the trousers in a flailing dance of panic. Their bite is painful, and it’s freaky to have a bunch of them on you, biting on all sides. But really, it’s quite easy to stay out of their way – as long as you are mobile.

Nightmare tales aside, of babies or invalids getting suffocated (and worse) by swarming ants, siafu are more beneficial than harmful. They are nature’s own environmentally friendly exterminators. In all the years we’ve lived on the outskirts of Arusha, we’ve never had to use harsh chemicals to rid our house of pests. Instead, we just wait for the next wave of siafu. We’ve successfully survived scourges of termites (I know, who uses wood to build in Africa, right?), crickets, cockroaches, other types of ants and a myriad of other dudus, all without applying a single chemical spray.

Moreover, the siafu tunnel through the vegetable garden, emerging triumphant with grubs and slugs and beetley bugs. Again, no chemicals needed.

Unfortunately, siafu don’t seem to be effective at eating the powder post beetles that are devouring the wood in my kitchen cupboards. I am still looking for a non-toxic solution to that problem. Neem oil perhaps?