African Silences (33 page)

In the next surround, a heavy animal wheels and crashes away through the thickets just in front of us, and a woman who has seen the creature comes running down the line of nets shouting,
“Moimbo!”
This is the yellow-back, largest of all duikers, up to a hundred and forty pounds. But the rarely caught
moimbo
slips past the line of nets and flees; only a blue duiker is caught. Another blue duiker, on the final hunt, comes to Atoka but pierces his net in an explosive jump at the last second. Atoka does not complain or appear disheartened, and on the way home he remains behind to gather up wood for the fires. This evening we will eat antelope with the others.

The following day three animals are caught. One is a
moimbo
and another is a water chevrotain, not an antelope at all but a relation of the primitive tusked deer of Asia. The
moimbo
was speared by old Pita, and Atoka, with wild snorts and cries, acts out each second of its final moments, to show how the big yellow-back, pierced between the ribs, twisted frantically on Pita’s spear, heart pumping.

Even dressed out and cut in pieces, the
moimbo
was too big to fit in Pita’s old wife’s basket, and Tambo’s young
wife, asked to help carry the meat, threw a tantrum in the forest, relieving the tensions that build up in an Mbuti camp. She worked herself into a frenzy, screeching and rolling on the ground to ensure attention, hurling wild insults at the people in general and her husband in particular. Gentle Tambo, one of the few unexuberant Mbuti, tries to ignore her like everybody else, but after a half hour, when her drama threatened to disrupt the hunt, he felt obliged to come and beat her. Returning to camp, she started in again, accounting for her behavior with a tearful and aggrieved oration that the people heard out with intense discomfort, after which she took shelter in another hut, among one of the households which, while not rejected, seem subtly excluded from the group that leads the hunting and the singing. (The small family in the hut beside my own, I notice, rarely join in the jokes and banter, which for all I know may be at their expense.) A long, tense silence was broken by some ribald observation that collapsed the whole circle of huts in grateful laughter, after which camp life proceeded in the same gay and offhand way as it had before.

On the first of February we left Ekare, walking straight south to Epulu, about fifteen kilometers away. At the Bougpa spring, black colobus monkeys were making their deep rolling racket; near Lelo two big red colobus, long tails hanging like question marks, sprang into the bare limbs of a high tree to watch us pass. Kenge, who helps Terry Hart with her botanical collections, identified various fruits and medicines along the way, including an orange shelf fungus used by the Mbuti to cure diarrhea. He pointed out odd termite nests like huge gray mushrooms in the tree roots, and the orange paste spat out by fruit bats, and a place where the forest hid the People from the successive
waves of soldiers, rebels, and mercenaries who pillaged and murdered in this region in the first years after independence.

On the night of our return there was an
elima
, or girl’s initiation ceremony, and the sound of drums and chanting came from the Mbuti camp along the road east of Epulu. Later we heard shouting from the Babila village that could only mean trouble, and next morning the local
gendarme
turned up in his crisp green beret and green uniform with red shoulder tabs and made a complaint to Terry Hart, who was talking with me on a terrace overlooking the river. Kenge had got drunk and stirred up trouble, and his family had led in a drunken brawl that had ended with the destruction of a Bantu house, and Atoka and the spirited Asha had been jailed, the
gendarme
said. He suggested that their American friends pay for the damages, having brought them back out of the forest where they belonged. The Harts were mistaken in treating the Pygmies like real people, he continued; they should simply be given food and a few rags to wear. As for Atoka, he should be “tortured,” said this new African, by which he meant—to judge from prior episodes—beaten bloody with clubs, since there was no other way for him to repay his debts. It turned out that the victim had provoked Atoka by denouncing the Mbuti as
“nyama,”
or “wild animals,” an opinion in which the
gendarme
fully concurred. The Pygmies had to be treated like the animals they were, he assured Terese Hart, who winced but said nothing. We stared away over the striking rocks that emerge in the dry season from the Epulu River, which winds southwest to the Ituri, the Nepoko, the Aruwimi, and a final confluence with the great Congo west of Kisangani.

In Mambasa at daybreak, old Father Louis, who was away in Italy on leave when the Simba rebels killed the other Catholic missionaries at this station, is already up and
about, and says good-bye. He has red cheeks and a saintly smile. “I must go to the church,” he explains vaguely, waving both hands. From the evangelist mission, we pick up mail to be posted in Nairobi, and at 6:30
A.M.
leave the mission strip and fly southeast along the overgrown red road toward Beni, where the huge forest ends at last in a populous agricultural region of small hills. The hills open out over the valley of the Semliki, and from here we can see for a brief time the Ruwenzori peaks, in equatorial snows seventeen thousand feet high, named by Ptolemy the Mountains of the Moon.

Where the Semliki River winds down through Zaire’s Virunga Park into Lake Edward, the silver-and-blue plane passes through the Central Highlands. A soft bed of clouds lies on the land between the Virungas and Ruwenzori, but everywhere else the clouds have burned away. Coming out of the dark forest and mountains into the sun of the savanna, the silver plane bursts free into the open air.

In fresh morning light, the plane drifts out across Lake Edward, forty miles wide, with a lone fishing boat far out on the broad shine, and halfway across Jonah turns to look at me. “We are leaving Zaire,” he says with a big grin, as relieved as I am to be back in East Africa. (Not long after our return to Nairobi, Kes Smith notified Jonah from Garamba that the Zairian authorities had come hunting for us twice, intending to arrest us on our return journey.)

Until the most recent despot in Uganda restored the old colonial names to lakes and parks in the hope of reassuring frightened tourists, Lake Edward was Lake Idi Amin Dada. (Lake Albert, farther north, is at present Lake Mobutu Sese Seko, though this, too, must pass.) The far shore is the southern part of Ruwenzori National Park, in southwest Uganda, and here we see herds of hippo at the water’s edge. The destruction of Uganda’s wildlife under Idi Amin was continued by the unpaid and lawless Tanzanian soldiery who helped depose him, but when the Tanzanians
left at last, in 1980, an attempt was made to control any further slaughter, and the animals have started to come back. In the past weeks, the latest tyrant had been deposed by the latest reformer, Yoweri Museveni, in whom the desperate Ugandans have great hope, but Uganda was still in a state of anarchy, and we would not land here to refuel.

Like most of the Ugandan landscape that is not under marsh or open water, the land beyond the national park has been cleared of its last trees, and because this soil, the product of volcanoes, is richer than the ancient, leached-out soils beneath the rain forest, it can support a dense agricultural population. (However, it is the rural population in this region of Uganda that more than any other in the world is beset by AIDS.) Farther south, toward the border with Rwanda, the soil pales out into savanna, and the farmers are replaced by a semipastoral people with large herds of cattle. Their Masai-type oven huts and large corrals are enclosed by thornbush to discourage lions.

The savanna land flows on into Rwanda, and Jonah, more and more content, remarks, “It’s nice to have the freedom to fly and know that you can land anywhere if you have to.” I have the same sense of well-being, understanding why he was reluctant to say such things over the forests. To acknowledge the strain would not have helped and might have harmed us.

The plane crosses the soft hills and lakes of Rwanda’s Akagera National Park, where a group of young elephants released in 1974 have increased to more than forty. The twenty-sixth and largest of this group was killed after it charged and killed Adrien Deschryver’s friend, the photographer Lee Lyon. Jonah descends to a low altitude, and we fly for fun for the first time in weeks; though we see no elephant, we enjoy the hippo and buffalo, eland, topi, and impala, and also a few sitatunga in the papyrus swamps and lakes that stretch away east of the park into Tanzania.

An hour beyond the Tanzania border, boat sails rise
from the fishing villages in the archipelago of islands in the southern end of Lake Victoria. White pelicans glide along the shores, and a flock of avocets slides beneath the plane over the silver shimmer of the open water. The inland sea stretches away one hundred and fifty miles into Speke Gulf and the mouth of the Mbalageti River, in the Serengeti Park, where we can put down almost anywhere to refuel. “From Lake Victoria,” Jonah says, “it will be wildlife country all the way into Nairobi.”

Over Speke Gulf, Jonah reflects a little on our journey. He feels it was “tough but fantastic,” and I agree. In regard to the forest elephant, he has no doubt that both natural densities and the extent of forest habitat are less than the most pessimistic estimates. “We just don’t have the reservoir of forest elephants that we were counting on,” he says, “which puts even more pressure on the bush elephant to sustain an ivory trade. The bush elephant is already in serious trouble, and because of its role in creating habitat, its disappearance will be followed by a substantial collapse of all of the large mammal fauna, which has already happened in West Africa.” These are the findings he will document for presentation to world wildlife authorities to lend weight to conservation arguments, including a campaign to ban the worldwide trade in ivory. Though not good news, it will help end the ivory trade and protect the future of the elephant in Africa.

The Serengeti Plain is a hundred miles across. Flying low over its western reaches, the plane dodges the vultures that attend the endless herds of wildebeest and zebra that scatter away across green grass below. Hyenas in a ditch, a lone male lion. Thousands of wildebeest are streaming across the plain south of the high rock island known as Simba Kopje, near the long road that comes into the park from Ngorongoro and Olduvai Gorge. Nowhere on the Serengeti, in this high tourist season between rains, do we see dust raised by a vehicle, not even one. More ominous
still, on a hundred-mile west-east traverse of the whole park, not one elephant is seen where years ago I saw five hundred in a single herd. “Poachers,” Jonah said. “The Serengeti elephants are down seventy-five percent. What’s left of them are mostly in the north, toward the Masai Mara.”

In 1961, the Serengeti was my ultimate destination in East Africa; in the winter of 1969, it was my home. We land and refuel at Barafu Kopjes, a beautiful garden of huge pale granite boulders and dry trees, in the clear light, where years ago I accompanied George Schaller on long walks across the plain to learn how primitive humans might have fared in scavenging young, dead, or dying animals. The wind is strong in the black thorn of the acacia, and a band of kestrels, migrated from Europe, fill their rufous wings with sun as they lift from the bare limbs and hold like heralds against the wind on the fierce blue sky.

Then we are aloft again, on a course northeast toward the Gol Mountains, in a dry country of giraffes and gazelles. Olduvai is a pale scar down to the south, in the shadow of the clouds of the Crater Highlands, and soon the sacred volcano called Ol Doinyo Lengai rises ahead, and the deep hollow in the land that is Lake Natron, on the Kenya border. We will fly across Natron and the Athi Plain and be in Nairobi in an hour.