We arrived in Dodoma with a busload of eager gap-year students, all carrying their own carefully imagined Africa. They had seen it in nature documentaries, coffee-table books, and glossy magazines: endless golden plains, elephants against crimson sunsets, and lions that roared on cue. They were about to discover that the real Africa was far stranger, infinitely older, and entirely indifferent to their expectations.

Our first night’s lodging was comfortable enough, though only in the most generous sense of the word. The hostel was half complete. Corridors simply ended where builders had abandoned them, their unfinished edges marked only by frayed lengths of warning tape fluttering in the evening breeze. Beyond them waited a two-storey drop onto the red earth below, where foundations baked beneath the Tanzanian sun. It seemed an apt introduction to the continent—a place where certainty could end with a single careless step.

The following morning we climbed aboard an ageing Toyota bus and headed south towards the Livingstone Mountains. Hundreds of miles of unsurfaced road lay ahead. We drove through a world of red dust that swallowed everything. Ancient transport lorries, patched together with ingenuity and hope, lumbered through the haze carrying the trade goods of the twenty-first century into landscapes that seemed untouched by it.

Their wheels churned the soil into clouds that rolled across the bush like battlefield smoke, staining every face and every piece of clothing the colour of dried blood. It was easy to imagine that the earth itself remembered the centuries of conflict that had soaked into it.

By dusk we reached our camp. Our hosts were Askari from an anti-poaching militia. They wore faded olive fatigues bleached by countless seasons beneath the African sun, while battered Chinese-made AK-47s rested as casually upon their shoulders as walking sticks. Despite their formidable appearance, they welcomed us with broad smiles and easy laughter. Fires were soon crackling beneath blackened cooking pots, and before long wives, girlfriends, and camp followers emerged from the darkness carrying heavy billies filled with stews whose rich aromas drifted through the trees.

The students gathered around their own fire to prepare familiar English food. I found myself drawn instead to the Askari. Most belonged to the Ha Ha people, whose homeland stretched across this rugged corner of Tanzania. They spoke proudly of their ancestors, of wars fought long before Europeans arrived, and of battles that still echoed in local memory.

They told stories of serving alongside British forces during the First World War against the German colonial army, recounting how a valley earned the grim name “Valley of Skulls.” Whether every detail was embroidered by time mattered little. History and legend sit comfortably beside one another around an African campfire. Before long they were laughing as they insisted their forefathers had once humbled even the mighty Maasai in battle.

I shared their meal, listening more than speaking. They were men shaped by hard country, their humour as dry as the dust that coated our boots.

When darkness settled completely, I returned to my own camp. I gathered the students for a final briefing.

“The toilets are some distance away,” I warned. “Nobody goes alone. Ever. Three together, every time.”

They nodded with the confident expressions of young people who believe warnings exist for somebody else.

The reason was simple. Hyenas.

We had heard them calling beyond the trees as twilight faded. More than once we had caught pale shapes slipping between the acacias, circling our wooded glade with patient curiosity. Across the clearing, one Askari sat watch beside his fire, his rifle resting across his knees as moonlight caught the worn steel of the receiver.

I retired to my tent but slept lightly. Responsibility has a curious way of sharpening the senses.

Sometime after two in the morning, I heard the unmistakable rasp of a tent zip. I knew immediately what it meant. Someone was going to the toilet alone.

Slipping silently from my sleeping bag, I stepped into a night washed silver by the full moon. There she was—a lone young woman picking her way towards the distant latrine, carrying a torch so feeble that its beam barely reached her feet. The roots beneath the acacias twisted across the ground like sleeping snakes, and she stumbled more than once, completely unaware of the danger that watched from beyond the light.

Then I heard it. The soft, deliberate footfall of a predator. Not behind me. To my right. Hyena. Perhaps two. They had waited all evening with the endless patience that makes predators so effective, watching the herd for the one individual foolish enough to separate itself from the others.

She was that individual. She was my responsibility.

I moved quickly, keeping my footsteps measured so as not to frighten her into running. Before I reached her I announced myself quietly. She turned, surprised. So did the hyena.

For a heartbeat I caught its pale outline at the edge of the moonlight. It seemed almost offended that its hunt had been interrupted. Then it wheeled away with that peculiar, loping trot unique to its kind and disappeared soundlessly into the darkness. It would not be eating that night.

The young woman, blissfully unaware of how close she had come to becoming little more than another story told around an African fire, thanked me as I escorted her to the latrine and then safely back to her tent.

When she was settled inside, I paused in the clearing. The moon hung high above us, flooding the camp with an eerie silver light that transformed every tree into a ghostly sentinel. Across the glade the Askari still sat beside his fire, leaning comfortably against his rifle. He had drifted into sleep.

As I walked back towards my tent, he stirred, blinked awake, and raised a lazy hand in greeting, never knowing the small drama that had unfolded while he dreamed. I returned the gesture before crawling back into my shelter.

The night remained oppressively hot, and I lay on top of my sleeping bag rather than inside it. Sleep came only in fragments. Beyond the canvas walls the African darkness breathed with unseen life. Hyenas laughed somewhere beyond the trees. Insects droned. Leaves whispered in a wind too faint to feel.

Africa never truly sleeps. That night, neither did I.

To be continued…