African Silences (16 page)

“There will be a large gap in our understanding of the forest elephant until we understand the forest better,” Western’s letter said. “That is one of the purposes of this survey. The truth is, we know very little about forest ecology. Only in recent years, with the realization of how rapidly the rain forests, with their great abundance and variety of life, are disappearing, especially in South America and southeast Asia, have we come to realize that the forest is a very important biome that cannot be ignored by anyone committed to conservation and the future of the earth. Because of its inaccessibility and low human population, the Congo Basin is still largely intact, but there is no reason for confidence that it will stay that way.”

As for me, I am interested in both the forest and the forest elephant, and I enjoy the company of biologists, who teach me a great deal that I wish to know about the origins and structure and relationships of the natural world, which have filled me with awe and fascination all my life. Throughout our journey we shall be working with ecologists already in the field, and an elephant biologist will meet us in Central Africa and accompany us throughout the first part of the journey. Later we shall accompany okapi biologists and Mbuti Pygmy hunters into the Ituri Forest of Zaire.

Since our main destinations will be wilderness regions of the Central African Republic, Gabon, and Zaire, we will travel nearly seven thousand miles, from Nairobi, in Kenya, to Libreville, on Gabon’s Atlantic coast, and back again. So far as Dr. Western knows, this transcontinental forest journey has never before been made in a light plane, but the feat interests us much less than the discoveries we might make along the way. With luck, for example, we shall learn more about the mysterious “pygmy elephant” in C.A.R. and Gabon, widely reported for almost a hundred years. With the exception of the mokele mbembe, an elusive dinosaurlike denizen of the vast swamps of the Congo Basin, the pygmy elephant,
Loxodonta pumilio
, is regarded as the last large “unknown” animal in Africa. In a forest of such size and inaccessibility, it would be unwise to dismiss the pygmy elephant out of hand; the gorilla was reported for nearly a century before its existence was scientifically accepted, and the okapi, a large forest relative of the giraffe, eluded detection entirely until 1908.

Dr. Western and his wife, Dr. Shirley Strum, the distinguished social anthropologist and student of the baboon, have a new baby and a new house that faces across the Mbagathi River, which forms the boundary between the Nairobi National Park and the Kapiti Plain, in Masai Land. Driving out the Langata Road, passing the demolished car of a New Year’s celebrant, Jonah assured me that early in the morning I might see black rhino from his guest-room window.

Calls of the ring-neck and red-eyed doves reminded me as I awoke that I was once again in Africa. Now it is sunrise, and I see no rhino, but there are eland, impala, and giraffe, and a small herd of buffalo on the thorn landscape, still green and fresh after December’s short rains.

The bureaucracy in the new Kenya is under stern instruction
from President Daniel arap Moi to serve the people rather than abuse them, as has been the popular custom on this continent, and preparations for our air safari go quite smoothly. But this morning the Directorate of Civil Aviation was down to a single airport clearance form, though six were needed, and all the copiers in the ministry were out of service, and by the time we filled out the long form and took it downtown to be copied, and completed the strict airport preparations and procedures, and passed through customs, it was already two in the afternoon, with a long flight across Kenya and Uganda into northern Zaire to be made by nightfall.

The New York Zoological Society’s aircraft is a single-engine Cessna 206, which normally can go six hours without refueling. It has been specially fitted with a cargo pod and extra gas drums to give us a range of fourteen hours, very critical in the vast reaches of Central Africa where sources of fuel are few and undependable. This heavy-duty blue-and-silver plane is the sole survivor of a group of three that were formerly attached to the European Economic Community’s Jonglei Canal Project, designed to bypass the Great Sudd of the south Sudan and carry Nile water more efficiently to the Muslim north. The southern tribesmen—Nilotic pastoralists of the Nuer and Dinka tribes—dispute what they see as continuing Muslim aggression at their expense. In recent years, the spear-carrying “rebels” have been supplied with modern arms by Ethiopia, and not long ago they blew up two of the Jonglei planes. The remaining one was sold to the NYZS. Its former pilot, a Kenyan citizen named Gwynn Morsen, was held hostage by the rebels for more than a year. “Spent most of my time thinking up ways to strike back,” he told us this morning at Wilson airport, “and I think I’ve settled on a plague of rinderpest. Can’t infect them with cholera or human plagues because they have all that already, so I’ll hit them where it
really
hurts—their cattle!” Two years ago, when Jonah and I first discussed
this journey, we planned to look at the great herds of kob antelope on Sudan’s Boma Plateau, and the beautiful small park on the White Nile at Nimule where I first saw white rhino in 1961; but now one cannot land safely there, nor in Uganda, so pervasive are the civil wars on this sad continent.

“You’re leaving too late,” Shirley remarks when she comes to see us off, and we both know this, but by now we are frustrated, anxious to get going. Jonah, an experienced bush pilot of thirteen years’ experience, reckons that we will still reach the airstrip in Zaire’s Garamba Park before dark. There we will refuel the aircraft from our spare fuel drums and spend a day with Kes and Fraser Smith, who are studying the last northern white rhinos. The following day we will head west to our first destination in the Central African Republic.

Leaving Nairobi, the plane turns northwest across Kikuyu Land and the Rift escarpment, heading up the great Rift Valley between the Mau Range and the Aberdares. As it crosses Lake Naivasha, I peer down upon the bright white heads of fish eagles and a shimmering white string of pelicans; off the white soda shores of Lake Nakuru is a large pink crescent made by thousands upon thousands of flamingos. Then we are crossing the equator, droning northwestward over the Kakamega Forest, the easternmost outpost of the equatorial rain forests that extend all the way into West Africa. Off to the north rises Mount Elgon, on the Uganda border, as a great migratory flight of European storks passes south beneath the plane, on their way, perhaps, to winter range in the Serengeti.

The high winds of the new monsoon, blowing out of Chad and the Sudan, have shrouded the rich farmlands of Uganda in a haze of dust. The sun looms, disappears again, behind bruised clouds that are thickened by the smoke of fires in this burning land. The rebel forces of Yoweri Museveni might bring peace and stability to this bloodied
country—in early January of 1986 still under the control of the violent soldiery of the beleaguered Milton Obote, who is now known to have presided over the tribal slaughter of even more thousands of his countrymen than did his predecessor, Idi Amin. (Even among African countries, Uganda seems unusually beset by bloody-minded tyrants, who were already ruling when the first explorers came up the Nile; in the days of Henry Morton Stanley, the despotic ruler was a man named Mwanga, for whom Idi Amin named his son.) The long red roads are strangely empty of all vehicles, for the countryside below, so green and peaceful in appearance, is in a state of utter anarchy and fear, with all communications broken down and the hated, vengeful army of the latest tyrant in retreat across the land, looting and killing.

The broad morass of lakes and swamps called Lake Kyoga, with its primitive island villages, is utterly roadless and indeterminate in configuration, like some labyrinthine swamp of ancient myth, there are no landmarks for calculating a precise heading, and the monsoon wind carries us just far enough off course so that we pass east of the Victoria Nile, which we had intended to follow down as far as Murchison Falls. By the time we correct our course, we must backtrack across the Albert Nile to the Victoria, following whitewater rapids to the extraordinary chute where the torrent hurtles through a narrow chasm and plunges into the broad hippo pool below. Twenty-five years ago, when I first came here, hitchhiking south from the Sudan into East Africa, this park (renamed Kabalega but now Murchison again) was famous all over the world for its legions of great-tusked elephants and other animals. Today most of the animals are gone, cut down by the automatic guns of marauding armies, including the Tanzanian forces that helped to depose Idi Amin. In February of 1961, this pool was fairly awash with hippopotami; now there is not a single hippo to be seen. The park’s twelve thousand elephants are now three hundred. We see none. The only animals in view
are a few kob antelope that scatter wildly at the coming of the plane. The booming white falls of the Victoria Nile, descending from Lake Kyoga, thunder undiminished in an empty and silent land.

From Murchison Falls, we take our final bearing for Garamba. The day is late, the skies in all directions dark with haze and smoke, as we set out across northeastern Zaire. Air charts of Zaire are out of date, therefore misleading, and Jonah, frustrated, must resort to my small relief map for his navigation. On this large-scale map, in the poor light, we confuse the town of Arua, on the Uganda side, with Aru in Zaire, so that none of the scarce roads and landmarks seem to fit, and the light fails nearly an hour earlier than expected as the sun sinks behind a dark shroud of smoke and desert haze off to the west. We are now disoriented, with only a very rough idea of our location. Small clusters of huts below, in the old fields and broken forest of rough hill country, are already dimming in the shadow of the night, and suddenly we know without discussion that we will not arrive this evening at Garamba, that even a forced landing in rough country is much better than finding ourselves in the pitch dark with no place to come down. (Not all pilots, as he told me later, feel confident about landing in the bush, and some tend to hesitate until the light is so far gone that
any
landing becomes very dangerous.)

The dirt roads are narrow and deeply rutted, and we must choose quickly among rough shrubby fields. Jonah banks for a quick approach, and slows the plane to stalling speed. Because coarse high grass hides the ground, and the field is small, he is forced to touch down quickly. Nose high, we settle into the stiff grass. The plane strikes the bricklike laterite with a hard bounce and hurtles through bushes with a fearful whacking of stiff branches against metal. Missing the hidden termite hills and ditches, it suffers no worse than a few dents in the tail planes.

To make such a wild landing without mishap is exhilarating, and I congratulate Jonah on his skill, grateful to be wherever the hell we are still in one piece. All we have to do, I say to cheer him, is refuel the wing tanks, lay out our bedrolls, and be off again at dawn. But this is the first time in thirteen years as a bush pilot that Jonah has been lost at nightfall and forced down, and though he is calm, with scarcely a blond hair out of place, he is not happy. As a man who neither drinks nor smokes and is before all orderly and neat, he takes pride in his preparations and efficiency, and he has not yet figured out where things went wrong. “Getting off again, Peter, may be quite another matter,” he says stiffly, descending from the plane and staring about him, hands on hips.

From every direction, Africans come streaming across the country; we had seen some running toward the scene even before the airplane touched down. Within minutes, they surround the plane in a wide circle, and a few come forward, offering long, limp, cool, callused hands. They touch the wings, then turn to look at us again, eyes shining. Everyone is scared and friendly—the children run away each time we move, women smile and curtsy. “It is like an apparition to them,” one young man tells me gently, in poor French, there by separating himself discreetly from these hill peasants who have never seen an airplane before.

Many of these Bantu folk of the northeastern region known as Haut-Zaïre (Upper Zaire) have some French or Swahili, and so we are able to converse freely, and a good thing, too. The first group of several dozen shy onlookers has swelled quickly to a noisy crowd of hundreds—at least seven or eight hundred, by the end—all of them growing more and more excited in that volatile African way that can lead very quickly to irredeemable gestures, and sometimes violence. Politely but firmly, our well-wishers warn us to move away into the dark, to let the people calm themselves a little. We are told that we have landed near the village of
Dibwa, and soon the village headman, who is drunk, asserts his authority by demanding to see identification. An ad hoc committee, heads together, draws our passport numbers on a scrap of paper amidst random officious shouts and cries of suspicion and bewilderment.

In 1903, when the first Baptist missionaries penetrated this huge region west of the Nile—said to have been the last region without whites in the whole Dark Continent—it was known to other Africans as “the Land of the Flesh-Eaters,” due to the rampant cannibalism of its inhabitants, and the reputation of these local Azande people (of northeast Zaire, southwest Sudan, and southeast Chad) has not improved much since that time. After the Belgian Congo achieved independence (became Zaire in 1960), there began a six-year struggle for power, and Haut-Zaïre was pillaged by waves of undisciplined soldiery, guerrilla bands—the Simba rebels—and South African and Rhodesian mercenaries. Because of this recent memory of bloodshed and famine, and because Zaire is surrounded by unstable, often hostile African states, the Zairois are highly suspicious of unidentified white foreigners. But as in most Africans, their excitability is offset by a great courtesy and gentleness, and we were treated well by almost everyone in this remote community.