This is in the manual, but I thought I would post it here in the event someone else spends an hour rereading the manual a 100 times to figure out what's wrong.
I wanted a query string of
TeamSite/Templating/DCR/Type

rimary/resource
and
ast_path:africa
what I had was
q=TeamSite/Templating/DCR/Type

rimary/resource%20and%20ast_path:africa
what I needed was:
q=TeamSite/Templating/DCR/Type

rimary/resource%20AND%20ast_path:africa
Apparently the boolean operators OR AND NOT are case sensitive.