The Menace of Locusts

The desert locust - schistocerca gregaria - is one of the greatest natural threats to agriculture, and hence to human life, in much of Africa and Asia. It can invade nearly 11 million miles, an area that contains roughly 20% of the world's land surface, 10% of the world's population and all or parts of 65 different countries.

Locusts normally live for about four months but they can slow down their body processes and extend their life span to a year if there is a shortage of vegetation or if the climate is cold. Each female locust produces about 200 eggs in her short life. The young locusts have no wings and are known as "hoppers". They live mainly in sandy desert areas. In dry years when vegetation is sparse locusts resemble green grasshoppers. They prefer to hunt about by themselves for food and to stay away from each other. Their desire for solitude disperses them over wide areas, thus helping the species to survive. But when, at rare and irregular intervals, there are heavy rains in the desert, they begin to breed in enormous numbers. Moreover, their manner and appearance change. They crowd together, touching one another's bodies repeatedly and their colour changes from green to black, yellow and red. They become voraciously hungry and set off in enormous swarms in search of food.

The ability of the locusts to change in appearance was first detected in 1921 by Sir Boris Uvaroy, now in charge of the Anti-locust Research Centre in London, and the leading world expert in the behaviour of these insects. His discovery answered one of the oldest questions about locusts: how did they vanish in some years and reappear in others? The answer was that they didn't vanish. They simply had a diabolical way of escaping attention. They change back to the form resembling ordinary grasshoppers and were mistaken for a separate species.

Locusts also have a remarkably keen sense of smell. This guide the migrating swarms to trees, crops and pastures in their search for food. They can fly at about 10 miles per hour but prefer to be carried by winds and can travel 30000 miles within their lifetimes. Since they breed as they go, the distance that a swarm and its progeny can cover becomes enormous. During the great locust plague of 1968 one group arose from the deserts in the far south of the Arabian Peninsula near Aden, pressed north-wards through Yemen and Saudi Arabia and then crossed the Red Sea turning south again to attack the United Arab Republic and the Sudan, thus travelling approximately 2,000 miles in eight months.

Research into locust behaviour is carried out in the London centre which actually breeds 600,000 locusts a year for experimental purposes. But efforts to control and contain the locust swarms are led by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAG) with headquarters in Rome and II field stations, all equipped with radio transmitters ranging from Morocco and Mauritania in the West to Persia and Pakistan in the East.

Unfortunately Nature herself cannot offer any serious challenge to the locusts once favourable conditions for breading have occurred and the swarms begin to multiply. The locust's natural enemies such as certain beetles, flies and wasps are neither sufficiently numerous or mobile to reduce the swarms to any extent and although birds regularly attack locusts their effect is only marginal. Man is now attempting to prevent such plagues by a variety of means.

One method is to scatter poisoned bait in the breeding grounds before the locusts begin to fly. Suitable bail is bulky to transport but can be spread by hand without expensive and sophisticated equipment. The chief difficulty is that the areas where breeding occurs are m- mainly uninhabited and themselves cover a very wide area. Another method is by insecticide sprays which are released on the swarms in the air by a fleet of light aircraft. Light oil is mixed with the insecticide to prevent if from evaporating in the sun or being washed away by the rain. One hazard which the pilots face is that the engines of their planes can become clogged with flying locusts which causes them to return to land. Attack from the air has of course proved vastly more effective than spraying from the ground but the real solution is to destroy the locusts before they become air-borne at all and this requires teams of locusts scouts whose job it is to report any signs of swarms forming.

Recently even space research has contributed to the anti-locust campaign. There is a U.S. weather satellite tracking station at Asmara in Ethiopia. The satellite in space transmits the pattern of wind zones to the station on earth and, since locusts tend to ride with prevailing winds, they normally congregate in a zone and scouts can know where to look for swarms.

Nevertheless human intervention has so far only managed to contain a plague, never yet to stop it from occurring. Yet even this resulted in the saving of 15 billion dollars' worth of crops in 1968, the most recent plague year.

The Arabs in the area of the Red Sea tend to take a philosophical view of the problem. "The locusts are there to show us that life is not ours alone", they say. "It is written that when there are no more locusts there will be no more world.”

Kenneth Crosthwaite Murray

Many of the important developments which have come to be accepted as permanent assets in the newly independent countries of Africa were conceived and pioneered by individuals, who at the time were unregarded and hardly known, but it was by their enthusiasm and devotion that they succeeded in gaining support for their work and getting their ideas adopted and put into effect. Kenneth Murray was one of these pioneers.

After training in architecture and sculpture at the Birmingham Central School of Art, Kenneth went to Nigeria in 1927 to join the Education Department as an art teacher. He worked in this capacity at Queen's College, Lagos, and at the Government College at Ibadan and Umuahia, for most of the years before the war. At that time he was only an itinerant art teacher, and his pupils travelled around with him. One of these was the now famous Ben Enwonwu, and another Uthman Ibrahim, who subsequently succeeded him as art master at Government College, Ibadan.

His teaching was probably unconventional for those days, but his aim was always to discover and bring out his pupils' inherent gifts, based on their own traditional art forms, rather than to impose European ideas of artistic merit. Partly for this reason he was constantly studying local crafts and traditional art. He was captivated by the artistic skills of local craftmen with their seemingly primitive tools - the decorations on the Fanti fishemen's boats on Victoria Beach at Lagos, calabashes in domestic use but transformed into artistic treasures by their intricate designs, the skillful patterns used by Ibo women to ornament their bodies before going to their markets, carved ceremonial canoe paddles used by a chief's retinue, shapely clay pots made by women without the use of any potters' wheel, and above all the arresting masks and carved wooden figures that he found in so many different parts of Nigeria, often in remote villages. These carvings were used for seasonal festivals; traditional dances, or religious rites that were gradually being abandoned as local customs disappeared with the opening up of communications and the impact of western civilization. This was deplored by Kenneth, because it meant that the traditional crafts associated with them were dying out. It was largely for this reason that he started to make his collection of masks and carvings to save them from neglect and destruction.

When war came Kenneth joined the army. By that time he had made a splendid collection of masks and wood carvings, many of them rare antiquities. Some of these he sent to a South African museum for safe keeping, and some he carefully packed up and stored in one of the old wooded staff bungalows at Umuahia Government College. He left money while he was away to pay a night watchman. Fortunately, no art dealer could have suspected that it contained such a valuable hoard of "fetishes". In 1943 Kenneth was recalled from the army to join the Information Office, and in 1946 he was appointed the first surveyor of the newly-created Antiquities Service of Nigeria. This enabled him to give his whole time to the collection and preservation of Nigerian art treasures and antiquities, but he still had no permanent home in which to keep them. For some time he occupied the old wooded building on iron pillars formerly used as a mess when the British Cotton Grower's Association had a ginnery at Moor Plantation, Ibadan. The ground floor was packed with carvings and other wooden objects, and was also used as workshop. The bedroom drawers were filled with a large collection of ibeji and other Yoruba figures that he had rescued from destruction by members of a zealous religious sect.

The priceless bronze and terra cotta heads at Ife, many of which were only discovered in 1938, needed special care and protection. It was largely due to Kenneth's advocacy that the Federal Government enacted the Antiquities Ordinance in 1953. This made it an offence for anyone to export Nigerian antiquities. Money was also voted for the building of the museum that Kenneth and his friends, had wanted for so long.

The Nigerian Museum was built in King George V Park in Lagos, and was officially opened by the Federal Minister of Works in the presence of a distinguished audience in 1955. Kenneth's collection was at last safely housed and displayed in a worthy setting; at that time it formed the major part of the Museum's contents. He was largely responsible for the design and arrangement of the Museum that was built at Ife to house the terra cotta and bronze heads, which are probably Nigeria's greatest art treasure. At Oron Kenneth discovered a large number of neglected wooden ancestral figures which were falling into decay. He persuaded their owners to place them in a small museum that he had made out of the old waterside rest-house. Unfortunately, most of these valuable figures were looted and sold during the civil war.

Kenneth retired in August 1957 and built himself a house at Tarkwa Bay on the West side of Lagos harbour. From here he would go over in his motor boat when he l--ad work to do at the museum. Seven years later, when Bernard Fagg who had succeeded him was also due to retire, he agreed with some reluctance to return to his old post, to fill the gap until such time as a Nigerian would be available to take his place. He finally retired in March 1967, when Ekpo Eyo was appointed to succeed him. When Kenneth was not travelling on behalf of the museum he was absorbed not only the mounting and display of art objects, but in the endless task of cataloguing, preserving and storage.

After his final retirement he was still willing to give any help required at the museum and to undertake journeys on behalf of the Antiquities Department. It was when he was on his way to Benin to advise about the proposed museum for the famous bronzes that he was killed in a road accident on April 22^nd, 1972.