Impenetrable jungles and shifting sanddunes. Lions, snakes and crocodiles. Decaying infrastructures and shops stocked only with bananas and sardines. Africa has so many secrets the West has lost. Despite what we would call poverty, there is among most ordinary African people a perennial sunniness.
Today is for laughing.
Even at the depths of apartheid, black people who had got up from small poor homes at ungodly hours to commute in from Soweto, the black ghetto, to Johannesburg, were still flashing white smiles around the bleak chasms of that mini New York. Singing in road gangs in time to their shovels. Though animal life and death parade themselves across the plains of Serengeti or the Kruger Park, you are safe enough. Coming on land at night, hippos don't like to find people wandering in the dark between them and the water. You are certain to be in your lodge or camp at night, safe and happy.