African Silences (30 page)

Like the other Mbuti men, Atoka carries little besides the hunting net draped in hanks across his shoulders. With quick small steps, his wife, Masumba, humps along beneath a cargo basket braced by a bark tumpline, an infant riding on her shoulders. The other diminutive women are similarly equipped, for the head cargoes borne with such elegance by the village women are not practicable here on forest paths. Once in the trees, away from judgmental Bantu eyes, the women go bare-breasted; a few wear only a small loin string in order to move more freely in the humid heat.

The path, though ancient and well worn, is narrow and overgrown, and the people keep in touch with one another with loud whoops and hootings, which also serve to push elephants and buffalo and leopards from their path. So close to Epulu, there is little sign of elephant or other creatures, and the whooping is mostly an expression of sheer exuberance and joy at the return into the forest.

At a slow, clear stream, Atoka fashions a fresh green-leaf cup, and we drink gratefully. A monkey hurtles through the branches. There are three species of colobus here, six guenon species, two mangabeys, the chimpanzee, and the olive baboon, but so close to the road they are all heavily hunted. We will see more tomorrow, Atoka says. Soon we come across the first footprint of an elephant, which he believes passed about three weeks ago, to judge from dried mud scraped on a sapling. “This is our soap,” he says of the gritty river clay. Farther on, he finds the first hoofprint of okapi, though this print, too, is more than a week old.

In his lyrical and elegiac book
The Forest People
(which is dedicated to Atoka’s father, Kenge), the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who worked here at Epulu in the fifties, perceived the Mbuti as hunter-gatherers who could survive entirely on forest products and whose independent culture
was threatened by the demands of the agricultural Bantu, “a rather shifty lazy lot who survived the ravages of Tippu Tib’s slave-traders by treachery and deceit.” But John Hart, who did a master’s thesis on Mbuti hunting and economy based on research done in the Ituri from 1973 to 1975, no longer believes that the Mbuti survived on hunting and gathering in the forest, since for most of the year primary forest cannot supply them with sufficient calories. (He points out that during the sixties, when waves of invading soldiery stripped Bantu gardens, many Mbuti also starved to death.) What he found was a complex symbiotic situation of “cultural reciprocity,” in which the Mbuti were in close economic and cultural relation with the forest Bantu. The government encourages them to put in gardens, but as Turnbull remarks of any Mbuti project undertaken outside the forest, it rarely amounts to more than “a lot of noise and big ideas.” Terry Hart says, “They realize the value of a garden, and they have the strength and enthusiasm to chop down trees, but they very rarely follow through. They work hard in the Bantu gardens, slashing and burning and at harvest time, but rarely keep up the few gardens of their own.”

Both Harts believe that the Mbuti have always led a nomadic rural life in community with the agricultural peoples, who provide them with iron tools, tobacco, and vegetables in exchange for day labor in the fields, hunted meat and honey, mushrooms, forest medicines, thatching, and firewood. The Mbuti are also depended on for sacred songs and dances, propitiary sacrifices, and ceremonies at funerals, marriages, and other rites of passage, being thought of as closer than the Bantu to the old ancestral roots and still in touch with forest spirits that the Bantu—but not the Mbuti—fear. The Mbuti, in turn, depend upon the Bantu to organize their own weddings and funerals, and regulate quarrels. Their relations are mainly amiable, even though the Bantu dismiss the Mbuti as inferiors—undisciplined
and undependable wild flighty creatures, woefully lacking in social or political structure. (Unlike the traditional villagers, the new “road culture” Bantu have few dealings with the Mbuti, whom they disdain as “barbarians” and “wild animals.”) Among themselves, the irreverent Mbuti use similar terms for the superstitious Bantu, at whom they have a tendency to laugh.

“The Mbuti like money like everybody else,” John Hart says, “but when they want to go back to the forest, no amount of money can stop them. That’s what I like about them—that devil-may-care quality, so rarely seen among the Bantu. They are happy to sell you their good spear even though they may need it the next day. But if they are capricious, they are also free; they swoop in and out like birds, they never worry about tomorrow. That lack of forethought and dependability can make dealing with them pretty exasperating, but they make up for it in many other ways. Without them, in fact, it would be impossible to work here in the forest.”

The Harts are both bright, cheerful people with pragmatic determination to make things work, despite the logistical frustrations of operating in Zaire. John came here originally with the encouragement of Colin Turnbull, and Terry as a Peace Corps volunteer. After they married, in 1977, she became a student of forest ecology with emphasis on botany, and John turned to wildlife biology; both received their Ph.D.s last year. They communicate with the Mbuti in
ki-ngwana
, a breezy version of Swahili used in Haut-Zaïre (and not always comprehensible to Jonah Western, who speaks the classical Swahili of the Tanzania coast), and they share a sincere affection for Africans in general and the Mbuti people in particular. In return, they have won the approval of the Mbuti, who help them gladly whenever helping suits them.

In his years in the Ituri Forest in the mid-seventies and again in the early eighties, John Hart had only a few glimpses of the okapi, about whose natural history almost nothing is known, and Jonah and I have no serious hopes of seeing one. The animal is wary and elusive, despite its large size and boldly patterned legs and high striped haunches—a very odd creature altogether, with its long hyenoid head and a long pink giraffe tongue it uses to pluck leaves at the stem rather than browse them. Probably the one okapi we shall see is the young captive female at the government’s Okapi Station at Epulu, where holding pens for zoo-bound animals were set up originally back in the twenties by an eccentric Harvard man named Patrick Putnam—the original settlement here was called “Camp Putnam”—and are now being refitted for a capture project by the Miami Zoo.

What the Harts hope to do after finding a good location is to capture a few okapi in leaf-covered pit traps, fit them with radio collars, then release and follow them, in the hope that eventually they will become tolerant of human proximity if not human company and reveal some of their habits in the wild.

Understandably the Harts are eager to get their study under way before the Ituri is overrun by local gold panners and ivory poachers, and by the inevitable European interests to which Zaire’s compliant president has already granted huge timber leases in the forests to the west. At the moment, John says, there are still very few guns in this remote region, and the disruption caused by gold panners may be more serious than the occasional incursion by armed poachers, though the increasing scarcity of local elephants would tend to belie this. What they would like to see—and intend to promote—is a national park in the Epulu region. The Maiko Park in the Maniema Forest to the south is supposed to shelter the okapi and the elusive Congo peacock, but it exists mostly on paper and has no
funds for antipoaching measures, nor even much evidence that the two creatures it is set up to protect are there.

The Lelo camp of sixteen or seventeen leaf huts is set in a rough circle in a forest glade near the Lelo River. The round or oval bun-shaped huts, which are made in a few hours, are higher and more open than the huts of the Babinga Pygmies that we saw west of the Ubangi, which were oven-shaped and closed except for the tubular entrance on one side. No fresh leaves have been added since the last hunting trip, two months before, but one woman weaves big round arrowroot leaves into a new latticework of saplings stuck into the ground, then bent and lashed together over her head, deftly locking each leaf by pinning it with its own stem. Leaves of another arrowroot are used for plates and wrapping food packets, and both species are gathered into the women’s baskets as the people move along the forest paths, together with wild fruits and tubers, medicines, and the lianas used for netting twine and basket weaving.

In midafternoon, the hunters have not yet returned. There are only naked infants and old women, puppies, a few chickens, a soft murmuring in the fire smoke and sun shafts. Every little while the oldest woman calls out in a deep resonant voice
“UAO-ba-hey!”
She is summoning the hunters home. “This is the forest,” Atoka explains. “We must be together.” And soon small men appear out of the trees, two here, three there, nets folded like great hoods on their heads. Some carry the spears once used for killing elephants, others have tiny two-foot bows with poisoned arrows, used for birds and monkeys. Each man comes to us quietly, extending a shy hand; some make a little bow. Soon there are a dozen men in camp, and more will come.

“Tata akumi, nzala esili,”
sing the women. The father has come, hunger has ended.

The hunting has been poor, just two blue duiker, pretty little blue-gray forest antelope with big dark eyes
gone glassy in death. The duikers are dressed, singed on the fire, cut up and cooked in bent-rimmed blackened pots. Besides metal blades and cheap Chinese flashlights with dead batteries, the pots are the only road-culture implements in camp. The women scrape manioc and forest tubers, including a wild yam.
Etaba
, they call it, “the potato of our Ancestors,” known long before the true potato (and manioc, plantains, and maize) were brought to Africa from the New World during the centuries of the great slave trade. Rick Peterson asks if the people ever planted this “potato” (I had noticed taro planted outside the clearing) and Atoka shakes his head.
“Ye moko aloni yanga,”
he answers in Lingala.
Ye
—“He Himself,” meaning the Forest—grew it. The Mbuti speak pidgin Swahili and Lingala, but among themselves they use ki-Mbira, the tongue of the Bambira people east of Epulu. “Ki-Mbuti and ki-Mbira are the same,” they say, unaware that their own language was lost long ago.

Each household cooks separately, over a separate fire; some fires have a rack built over them, for drying meat. All are in easy speaking distance of one another, and the older hunters sit with their wives by the opening of their huts, close as two birds. The men fashion chairs of four stout sticks bound in a bundle with vine thongs, then spread in a four-legged seat platform. The younger men gather in the center of the glade, laughing and talking as the children and small hunting dogs wander through. The dogs glean a meager living from the human leavings, and are struck almost every time they come in reach.

The sun is falling now, only the treetops all around are still in sunlight, and the fire smoke that drifts toward the blue sky. The noisy camp, well fed, fills with well-being. This is the Mbutis’ world; no Bantu come here.

Men and women alike, in their spare moments, work at the manufacture of the nets that are the foundation of the hunting life. (Hunting with nets is not confined to the
Mbuti, nor do all Pygmy groups resort to it; it is practiced by a Bantu group in Equateur Province, says Rick Peterson, but not by the Babinga Pygmies who were our trackers in Central African Republic.) The inner bark of a euphorbia liana is stripped off in lengths, dried in the fire smoke, then rolled hard on the thigh, after which it is spliced to greater lengths and rolled again into a hard green twine, gathered in hanks. “One can climb into the trees with it,” the people say admiringly, though in fact even large duikers break through the nets. The twine is manufactured by both sexes, and the hunters weave it into mesh, then string it with shiny amber seeds from another euphorbia favored by duikers, the better to attract them.

This is the first return to Lelo and the first hunt in two months; therefore offerings and propitiation must be made to the Mangese ya Pori—the Ancients of the Forest, the Ancestors, or “Those Who Were Here Before Us”—to ensure the success of the hunt. At dark, the hunters erect an altar table of fresh saplings in the forest, laying their hunting nets before the altar on the forest floor. An elder, Asumani, chants the names of the Ancestors, tossing cooked rice furnished by the white people in the four directions; after each name, the hunters, seventeen or more, grunt in deep soft voices,
“Nyama!”
which in both Swahili and Lingala means wild animal, or meat. Chanting the names of Ancestors and spirits will summon up the beneficence of the forest.

Asumani has given us his hut; he and his old wife will sleep beside the fire. We protest that there is no need, that we are happy to sleep outside, but Atoka tells us that to refuse him would be rude.

Though the night is clear, there is thunder from the north; rain comes and goes. Cheerfully the people blame the rain on the thoughtless children who slapped the water while playing in the river. Tomorrow, they say, we shall all go to better hunting grounds on the Ekare River. Exhilarated,
the men hoot and whoop, bursting out loudly and spontaneously throughout the evening; often they make a loud hollow report by cupping one hand and smiting an air pocket made by holding the elbow to the chest. Rain, embers, stars. A man gets up and dances joyfully from fire to fire, to make the people laugh, and women are singing brief, wistful songs that seem to echo the haunting birdcalls from the forest.