African Silences (17 page)

Now it is dark, but the people do not disperse. Increasingly it becomes clear that we will not be permitted to sleep here at the plane, that we are, in fact, to be taken into custody. “After all,” my confidant explains, when I protest, “our people are very simple, they do not know why you have come here suddenly like this, or what you will do during the night.” I look over at Jonah, who is getting the same message in Swahili. Having no choice, we agree to be escorted to the nearest hut, a quarter mile away, where in a yard swept bare as a defense against night snakes, granary rodents, and mosquitoes, a fire is built and well-made chairs of wood and hide provided.

“We
have
to keep you here, we
have
to report you!” the headman explains, somewhat mollified now that we have decided to come peaceably. We sit surrounded by admirers, who wish to hear our story over and over. Soon we are shown inside the hut, where cane mats have been spread for us on the earth floor. “This is not what you are used to,” one man suggests shyly, not quite sure of this, and eager to inquire about our customs. Two men ask to borrow my flashlight and have yet to bring it back when, still in good spirits, I close my eyes.

Toward midnight we were woken up and led outside. Someone had run across the country to fetch some sort of district secretary, and we gathered once more at the fire. Once again we produced our passports and told our story, which was duly recorded. The secretary had walked here from six miles away to gather this information. “I have done it for the security and welfare of my people,” he informed us.

Another herald had been sent by bicycle to the town of Aru, almost twenty miles away, to notify the district commissioner, who arrived in a van with his aides and soldiery about one-thirty in the morning. This time a gendarme in green uniform banged into the hut, shouting abusively, shoving Jonah, and loosening his belt, as if in eagerness to whip us along faster, Outside, the calm, cold-faced commissioner had already been seated, and the foreigners were led to two chairs placed directly in front of him. Once again we showed our passports and accounted for ourselves, but this time the passports were not given back. Though we said we wished to stay nearby, to watch the plane, the commissioner informed us that a soldier would be assigned to guard it, and that we were to be taken back to Aru.

Under armed escort, we were marched across the fields toward the road. Without my flashlight, I could not see the
hard-baked ground; I made a fatal misstep at the edge of a ditch, and tore my ankle. I fell to the hard earth with a mighty curse, aware that at the very outset of this trip, which would involve a lot of forest walking, I had resprained an ankle already injured in cross-country skiing. The pain was so violent that I did not notice the safari ants that everyone else was slapping: I simply hobbled ahead while I still could, gasping in anger and shock. Not until I was inside the van, seated opposite a sullen African with a machine pistol and another with two carbines, did I feel the
siafu
attacking me under my pants. I dealt with them all the way down the rough road to Aru.

Beside me, Jonah seemed as stunned as I, and we did not speak. Jolting along in the dead of night, with no idea what was coming next, there was little to say. With each new development, our predicament seemed to be worsening. We had no clearance for landing in this region, only at Kinshasa, where we were scheduled to arrive a few weeks later, and Zaire, with its reputation for violence and corruption (it is sometimes referred to as a “kleptocracy”), was no place to have one’s papers not in order. Also, an investigation might identify me as the author of an article about a previous visit, a few years before, in which I was sharply critical of Zaire’s puppet dictator—reason enough in this feverish climate to be arrested as an enemy of the state, if not a suspected mercenary or spy.

Twenty-five years ago to the very month, scarcely a hundred miles east of this place, on the Sudan border, I had also been in custody, under much worse circumstances (the murder of Zaire’s prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in January of 1961, had inflamed Africa, turning Sudanese friends into fierce enemies), and I had no wish to repeat any such experience.

In Aru, to our great astonishment we were not locked up—we could go nowhere, after all, without passports or airplane—but were dropped off almost casually at the quarters
of a British pilot for the United Nations’ High Commission for Refugees, which is kept very busy in this part of the world. Our host, routed out at 3
A.M.
, kindly showed us where we might lie down, observing in passing that Zaire was paranoid these days about “mercenaries,” which has been a dread word in this country since the anarchy and massacres of the 1960s. Rumors had implicated Zairois soldiers when seven French whitewater boatmen who had entered the country without permission disappeared on the Zaire River a few months ago. The government revealed that they had perished in the rapids, though their boats were found intact and right side up, and the one body that turned up had been beheaded.

The pilot was flying to Nairobi at daylight, now two hours away, and Jonah, fearing that our friends at Garamba might radio an alarm when we failed to appear, sent off a message to his neighbor Philip Leakey to notify his wife that we were fine.

At 8
A.M.
, the pilot’s Ugandan assistant drove us around to the district commissioner’s house to inquire about our passports. We were referred to the chief of immigration, who referred us to the chief of police, who said he had reported our arrival to his superiors in the regional capital at Bunia and could not return our passports without their permission. Surely Bunia would decide to check our identities at Kinshasa, and, since it was Saturday, it now appeared that we might be detained here through the weekend.

Meanwhile, the authorities had no objection if Dr. Western brought his airplane to Aru; they assumed that he would not vanish, leaving me and his passport behind. As Jonah wished to take off with an empty plane, the obliging police chief returned with him to Dibwa, where the people were ordered to chop brush, knock down termite hills, and fill up ditches while the plane’s extra fuel and other cargo were unloaded for ground transport to the strip at Aru. As
it turned out, the pair who had absconded with my flashlight the night before had used it to off-load all they could find in the unlocked cargo pod under the fuselage, including three jerry cans of fuel, a computer printer destined for Garamba, and a duffel containing all my clothes and personal belongings. The duffel, minus some of its original contents—toilet kit, malaria pills, spare flashlight, sneakers, sweater, hat, and every pair of socks and underwear—was retrieved eventually, but the fuel and the printer were gone for good.

Jonah made a skillful downhill takeoff and followed the road into Aru. By the time he arrived there, word had come to let us go. (Apparently Bunia had learned from Kinshasa that our visit was expected by the minister of national parks.) By early afternoon, we were in the air again, and headed north.

Nagero, on the Dungu River, forms the southern boundary of Garamba National Park. At its small airstrip, we were met by Alison (Kes) Smith, a pretty woman in her thirties with dark red hair. Dr. Smith, born in England and now a Kenyan citizen, is the biologist on the Garamba Northern White Rhino Project, which is funded by various conservation groups and private donors. Her husband, Fraser Smith, is in charge of restoring to good operating order the logistical system of Garamba, which was the first of Zaire’s parks, established by the colonial authorities in 1938. Accompanied by their infant daughter, the Smiths escorted us in the afternoon to the flat rocks by the hippo pool where they had been married just a year before in a roaring and blaring serenade from these hundred hippos. The silver limbs of the dead tree across the Dungu were decked with a winged red inflorescence made by companies of carmine beeeaters, which, with their blue heads, cobalt rumps, and long streaming tails, are among the most splendid of African
birds. With them were some smaller, only slightly less spectacular red-throated bee-eaters, and by its nest on a high tree sat a thickset white bird, the palm-nut vulture. Already we were far enough west so that endemic bird species of East and West Africa were overlapping; I had last seen this peculiar bird in Senegal.

Fraser Smith had constructed a small house on the banks of the Dungu, and the household presently included a large dog (a second dog had been taken by a crocodile), two cats, and a banded mongoose, which had enjoyed the run of the camp before taking up a habit of attacking people; its victims included its mistress, severely bitten twice. Since Dr. Smith had mentioned its bad character, I was unpleasantly surprised to see the snout and beady eyes of this large weasel relative appear beneath the wood stockade of the outdoor shower into which I had limped just before dusk. There was no mistaking the intent of its opened mouth, which was to bite me as speedily as possible, and sure enough it whisked into the shower and nipped my heel before I could take defensive action.

As anyone knows who recalls Kipling’s Rikki-tikki-tavi, a mongoose is much too quick for any cobra, let alone a crippled man in a cramped shower slippery with soap. With my inflamed and swollen ankle, I was already a bit rickety on the wet uneven bricks, and this evil-tempered viverrid, renewing its attack, had me at enormous disadvantage. Jonah and Fraser were away from camp, refueling the airplane, so I called to Dr. Smith, more or less calmly, that she could find her mongoose near the shower. She had meant to take “Goose” for a walk, she said, and commenced to call it. The mongoose ignored her, darting in and out of sight under the stockade. I flicked hot water at it and made frightful growling noises, all to no avail; it backed out of view, came in swiftly from another angle, and sank its teeth into my toe, eliciting a sharp cry of vexation. “Is Goose biting you?” his mistress called. “So sorry!” It seemed that she
was nursing her baby, but would come and fetch the mongoose in a minute.

For the nonce, I seized up a steel bucket and banged it down in front of my tormentor. This drove him back a little but did not deter him. Hopping mad, he dug furiously at the sandy earth—what field biologists call displacement activity, in which strong emotions are vented inappropriately. My toe was bleeding, my ankle hurt, and I, too, was full of strong emotion. Though loath to execute a household pet by bashing its brains out with my bucket, I was considering this last resort when it darted out of sight, made a flanking maneuver, and shot in again from yet another angle, affixing itself to the top of my left foot with a terrific bite. There it remained until I kicked it free, emitting a wild oath of rage and pain.

Perhaps afraid for her pet’s life, my hostess appeared almost at once, joining me in the shower without warning. On the soapy floor, her legs flew out from under her, and she landed on her bottom, careening into the stockade as the mongoose disappeared beneath. Looking up, soaked by the shower, she found herself confronted by the nudity of her amazed guest, covered a bit late by the bucket. “Sorry,” she said, starting to laugh, and I laughed, too. “I have no secrets,” I said, groping for a towel. “Just remove that mongoose.” I pointed sternly at my bloody foot. And with suspicious speed, or so it seemed to me—as if, in this camp, an emergency mongoose-bite repair kit was ever at the ready—Dr. Smith was back at the shower door with bandages and disinfectants. “Sorry,” she said. “Better take care of that. Might turn septic quickly in this climate.”

The mongoose episode occurred exactly twenty-four hours after the forced landing at Dibwa, and considering all that had taken place so early in our journey, I felt the need of a stiff whiskey, in which Kes joined me. I asked her first of all to explain her nickname (it’s from “Kesenyonye,” or “Live in Peace,” a name given her by Masai tribesmen when
she and her first husband, Chris Hillman, who was working on an eland study, lived in Masai Land south of the Ngong Hills) and, second, for details of the white rhino project—specifically, why she felt so strongly that such a large international effort should be expended in a probably doomed attempt to save the last seventeen animals of the northern race, when the very similar southern race is well protected, and the species as a whole not currently in danger.