In 1995, I took a three-month sabbatical with an unusual objective: I wanted to discover how people in sub-Saharan Africa used insects and other arthropods in their everyday lives.
I was interested not only in insects as food or medicine, but also in their place in religion and witchcraft, art and music, dance, children’s games, stories, and proverbs. Together with a second sabbatical in 2000, this journey eventually led me to interview 304 people from 121 ethnic groups in 27 African countries.
Insects in African culture
You will find on this page examples from published work
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- A number of examples from the studies dealing with termites, caterpillars, beetles, wasps and bees and grasshopper and locusts
- Seven refereed publications (open access)
You can access the examples/publications here
Here several stories during the interviews
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- The grasshoppers that changed my career
- The Secret Behind Cameroon’s Football Success
- When Spiders Make Music
- Magic, Spiders, and the Most Expensive Interview in Togo
- Sudan: Where Bee Stings Became Medicine
You can acccess the stories here
