The Ragged Edge of the World (15 page)

On these hikes to
salines
and
bais,
I was accompanied by Andrea, a few Ba'Aka Pygmies, and, sometimes, Nick. To attract gorillas, one of Andrea's Pygmy assistants, Teti, made a scream like that of a female gorilla, but none appeared. Later he tried to call chimps by making the screams of a duiker (a tiny deerlike ungulate) giving birth; chimps will often come when they hear these screams, hoping to eat the placenta (or, some claim, the baby duiker). Again no luck, but two blue duikers did show up. The richness of the area was evident in the constant parade of wildlife we did encounter, including white-nosed monkeys, bongo, and on and on.

Later still we came upon an extreme rarity—a yellow-backed duiker. Andrea had seen only two of them in the previous five years. Somewhat larger than the diminutive ungulate that most people think of as duiker, the yellow-backed version has a golden patch on its back. There's speculation that it was a sighting of yellow-backed duikers that gave birth to the legend of the Golden Fleece.

On another trip to a
bai
we encountered a group of paratroopers from the French Foreign Legion. At that time, the French maintained troops in a number of Francophone sub-Saharan countries. Ostensibly, they were there at the invitation of the government to help preserve stability, but they also served as a subtle reminder to corrupt leaders of their former colonies that there were limits to their sovereignty. While the French had high tolerance for these leaders' abusing their own people, French expatriates were off limits, and economic ties and commercial relationships, which gave French businesspeople a decided edge over other expatriates, were not to be tampered with. Great Game-like maneuverings aside, we were happy to encounter the Europeans. Their captain told us that they had flown out for some R and R, and they wanted to visit the
bai
.

In the course of the conversation we discovered that they planned to fly back to Bangui later that day. I was looking for a way to get back to Bangui, and, preposterous as it sounded, I asked if I could get a lift with the paratroopers in their military plane. The captain pondered for a moment and then said,
“Pourquoi pas?”
Only in Africa would a military commander agree to such a request, and before he could change his mind I dashed back to gather my gear, agreeing to meet up at the airstrip.

When I reached the strip, however, I learned that there had been a change of plans: The legionnaires had received orders to take part in a military exercise, and instead of flying to Bangui, they were heading north. My ears pricked up when the captain told me that they were stopping in Bouar. With an eye to trying to meet up with Bernard N'donazi, the healer Rebecca Hardin had mentioned, and knowing that it would be easier to find a lift to Bangui from Bouar (which is connected to Bangui by a decent road), I made an instant decision and asked whether I could at least accompany them to Bouar. Again, the captain agreed.

Compared to bouncing in the back of a lurching truck, the minimalist benches of the paratroop transport felt as comfortable as the seating on a private jet. The trip was an easy one, and though the Legion contains some of the toughest and most disciplined soldiers on earth, my companions were affable and easy to talk to. I fell into conversation with a paratrooper from Ireland and another from Turkey, both of whom were looking forward to French citizenship. The etiquette of the Legion prohibited any discussion of why they could not return to their native lands.

Though larger than Bayanga, Bouar is still a small town, and I quickly found Rebecca at home with her French boyfriend, Pascal. One of the charms of Africa is that you can drop in on someone you hardly know and be met with genuine warmth. They offered to put me up while I was in Bouar, and Rebecca began making inquiries so that I could meet N'donazi.

As noted earlier, many of the organizations and experts attempting to foster African economic development regard indigenous practices as impediments to progress and indigenous knowledge as worthless. (There's a practical, if wrongheaded, reason for this: The entrepreneurial spirit is anathema to many indigenous peoples whose cultures stress communal decisions and sharing of wealth.) Once exposed to the power of the West and its images, many young tribal people adopt these same prejudices, either physically abandoning their people or, as I saw in New Guinea and Borneo, simply checking out mentally from their tribe. The depressing result in Africa, as everywhere, has been a silent holocaust in the realm of knowledge, as wisdom—about the medicinal properties of plants, about the migration patterns of animals, about the interplay of different species—disappears, simply because nobody speaks the language of the wisdom keepers or wants to listen to the elders.

N'donazi proved to be a perfect subject for my story. As a boy he had been initiated into some of the healing knowledge of his Souma tribe while spending time in the male house. Part of his initiation rite involved enduring an incision that had been cut into his side and that briefly exposed his intestines. (Rites like this probably make it easy for the young to abandon tribal ways.) N'donazi was one of the last initiates to live in the male houses since his father, a village elder, fell under the influence of a Catholic abbot who considered the rituals pagan. His father ordered the destruction of the male house, and with its burning, the tribe lost a cultural and medical tradition that extended back to antiquity.

N'donazi, however, had not forgetten everything he had been taught. After receiving training as a health technician, he discovered that many Western medicines derived from plants. He began wondering why it made sense to sell poor villagers prohibitively expensive Western drugs when there were plants right at hand to treat many common ailments. He began documenting the knowledge he remembered from his youth as well as what he could collect by interviewing local healers.

N'donazi's vindication came some months before my visit, when he was contacted by nuns from a nearby Catholic mission hospital. One of their patients was suffering from a gruesome ailment in which subcutaneous amoebae were eating away the skin covering his chest cavity, leaving cysts to develop and eventually explode.

The nuns reached out to N'donazi because the man's infection had failed to respond to any treatments they had available. After examining the patient, N'donazi tried a treatment he had learned from his father, washing and crushing soldier termites and applying them to the open wounds. The patient, named Thomas Service, made a remarkable recovery, as attested to in photographs N'donazi showed me. Service himself showed up during one of my interviews, as since his recovery, he has made the 17-kilometer trek from Kpocte to N'donazi's clinic every Sunday, bearing a gift to express his gratitude.

As in every story in Africa, however, things are never as straightforward as they first seem. When William Coupon, the celebrated photographer contracted to shoot my story, arrived some months later to shoot a portrait of N'donazi, the healer's family essentially held Coupon hostage and demanded that he pay a fee of a few thousand dollars before they would let him depart. Since he had chartered a plane to fly in, they may have felt that he was rich, and photography arouses intense emotions in Africa. Whatever their motivations, Coupon's story left a sour taste about the healer.

My own exit from Bouar was smoother, though less elegant than departure by chartered plane. The saintly Rebecca found me a lift with Patrice, a local businessman who with his driver was making the 445-kilometer trip back to Bangui. For a reasonable sum (I paid for the gas), I could go along. The first part of the drive took us through savannah-like country, marked by tall grass and low trees. We passed through many Fulani villages, all traditional. About 100 kilometers out from Bouar a tire went flat. The competent driver managed to fix it, but now we had no spare.

After finishing the repair, he started the car with a screwdriver. This aroused slight feelings of concern, since we still had several hundred miles to go. Another 85 kilometers down the road, the car overheated. When Patrice lifted the hood we discovered that there was no radiator cap—only a rag stuffed into the hole where the cap should be. Patrice was irate, but we had no choice but to make do with the rag, given that we were in the middle of nowhere. (Once we left Bouar we didn't see another vehicle for 300 kilometers.)

As we entered more populated areas I was treated to the one-size-fits-all tendency of African drivers. Flying through villages and populated areas, they seem grimly determined not to touch the brakes. Consequently we left behind us a wake of vehicular mayhem whose victims included a chicken, a goat and at least one old dog. I understood why the driver didn't stop—we'd have been mobbed by angry villagers—but I couldn't get him to slow down.

Safely in Bangui, I cleaned up at the Sofitel (whose amenities shop featured hard-core French comic-book pornography in its bookstand). The next morning, the transportation comedy continued as I tried to make my way to the airport. Having failed to wave down a succession of fully loaded taxis, I hitched my way to the center of town, where I finally found a cab. No sooner did we start for the airport, however, than we ran out of fuel. The driver headed off with a quart bottle to a nearby gas station, but when he poured the gas into the tank the car simply died, my guess being that the fuel had actually been flavored water. I found another taxi and managed to get to the airport, where I headed for the relative civilization of Kinshasa.

I
was standing in the dilapidated, sweltering office of a tinpot commandante of the gendarmerie in a two-bit town called Djolu in the heart of Equateur, Zaire. With me were an affable missionary, Father Piet; Mike Chambers, a capable Canadian fixer; and Frans Lanting, the wildlife photographer. While Mike negotiated with the swaggering commandante, I idly glanced at the crude paintings that had been chosen to enliven the walls of the jail. One showed soldiers flailing at half-naked women with clubs. I suspected that the commandante himself was the artist, and that he was drawing from memory. I knew then that I very much wanted Mike's negotiations to succeed.

We shouldn't have been there at all, of course. Father Piet, who was from the local Mill Hill mission at Yamoseli, had agreed to have his driver take us out to a pygmy chimp (or bonobo) research station near the neighboring village of Wamba. Earlier, back in Kinshasa, the capital, we had arduously gathered all the requisite permissions to report and take photographs as part of an assignment from
National Geographic
. As was customary in Africa, we had come with a letter of introduction that was so bedecked with seals and stamps that it looked like an international treaty. But the commandante, who'd desperately bicycled out to the dirt airstrip where we'd been dropped off an hour earlier, had taken one look at Frans's many cases of expensivelooking equipment and promptly declared in French, “You don't have
my
permission.”

He had a point, given that we were a long way from Kinshasa, not that official permission would have gotten in the way of a bribe-seeking opportunist in the capital city, either. In any event, Mike persuaded him to expedite his “permission” for something like 110,000 Zaires (at this point in 1991, about $30), and we hightailed it to Wamba before the extortionist could decide that he had lowballed us. Since we had the benefit of the only working car for miles around, we assumed that once we were at the research station we would be beyond the reach of his bicycle. This turned out not to be the case.

I've visited primate research stations all over Africa, Asia and Latin America, and Wamba was one of the more primitive facilities. It consisted of a series of mud-brick and thatch huts, and its outhouses were mere pits. On the other hand, it had a nice bamboo shower, and water carriers brought visitors one bucket of warm water in the evening.

Takayoshi Kano, who had founded the station seventeen years earlier, may have intentionally avoided making improvements. For one thing, Japanese field researchers are about as tough a group of scientists as there are, and they seem to take some satisfaction from enduring hardship. Kano also may have kept things as austere as possible so that he did not live noticeably better than the natives in the village a few kilometers down the road. That would minimize resentment, and also reduce incentives for thievery.

On arriving at the station we were greeted warmly by Kano and Ellen Ingmanson, an American then doing graduate work on bonobos. Over dinner we heard some of the gossip about other field researchers, including news of one eminent primatologist whose wife left him after getting word that he had slept with a local. “Absence makes the dark grow blonder,” muttered Frans, quoting the apt but politically incorrect remark of an expat British wildlife cinematographer.