The Ragged Edge of the World (18 page)

Before coming to Africa, Piet had run a similar operation in India, between Hyderabad and Madras. That business had been a great success, and the neighborhood so honest that he never once locked his shop or quarters. What was the difference? The moral structure, he offered, but also the ecology. The Indians lived in a harsh, semidesert envrironment that forced them to work hard to eke out a living, while in Africa, according to Piet, the forests and rivers supplied game quite readily. Ambassador Phillips was not the only one in Africa who believed in ecological determinism.

We were interrupted in this conversation by the reappearance of Mike—something I'd expected, but not quite so soon. The trip had been a disaster. The piratical companion had rowed out in another boat and jumped aboard carrying a wicked-looking blade, which he always had at hand. Mike finally got rid of him by threatening to call the gendarmes. The motor on the boat broke down halfway to Waka, and they returned to Basankuso by floating with the current, arriving at 2:00 a.m.

There was no way, however, that Mike was going to give up. With yet another fine display of his legendary tenacity, the next morning he set off for the port, determined to recover his 100,000 Zs (as Zaires were called) and then rent another boat with his remaining fuel. It hadn't yet dawned on him that Lomako might not be the optimum choice for an ecotourist site. I wished him luck and fully expected to see him again soon.

My final night in Basankuso was enlivened by stories about the justice system, such as it was, in the interior. The fathers told me about the aftermath of a rape as an illustration. The family of the victim reported the crime to the police, who immediately asked how much it was worth to them to have the police arrest, jail and beat the perpetrators. Once they settled on a price, the police then went to the families of the perpetrators and asked them how much it was worth to them
not
to have the police jail and beat the malefactors. Apparently, the bidding was still going on.

Basankuso had reset my reference points for standards of luxury, and by now I couldn't wait to get back to Kinshasa, which had acquired the allure of Paris. Mercifully the MAF plane arrived the next day, and I headed back to the very city I could not wait to leave a few weeks earlier. Before heading off to Goma and then Burundi, however, I was to have one more memorable experience on this particular trip to Zaire.

On my return to Kinshasa I contacted Harry Goodall. I'd earlier expressed an interest in watching his rugby team, the Kinshasa Barbarians, play the Zairois paratroopers, and he said that there was a game scheduled for the following day, and that he would pick me up in the morning. On the way to the game, Harry handed me a uniform.

“What this?” I asked.

“What does it look like?” he replied.

As it turned out, they were a man short. I'd never played rugby (and in fact had seen my first match only a few weeks earlier), and the idea of playing against a team of paratroopers did not seem like fun. But I could hardly back out, so as we drove to the match, Harry hastily told me some of the rules.

I can't say that I was much of an asset, and although I'd played a bit of football, I was now utterly confused. This was not a good thing, given that bodies were flying around like NASCAR vehicles hitting the wall. Everybody on both teams was tough as nails. A couple of our guys were members of the SAS contingent guarding the British ambassador, and, whatever their skills as soldiers, the Zairois paratroopers were still mean and fit. I endured the entire afternoon, however, and left with only minor injuries (one lost big toenail). Mike Sheehan, an accident-prone lawyer and avid Barbarian, cracked a molar.

It was not until a subsequent trip to Kinshasa that I learned what happened to Mike Chambers after I left Basankuso. His second attempt to get to Lomako proved no more successful than the first. In all it took him about a month to reach his El Dorado, and when he did, he could stay for only a couple of hours or he would have found himself marooned there indefinitely. Mike eventually came to the conclusion that Lomako might not become the ecotourist magnet he'd envisioned.

As the region descended into anarchy and civil war in the middle '90s, the situation in Equateur grew ever worse. Takayoshi Kano was forced to pull out of Wamba, leaving his beloved bonobos in the care of a dedicated but undermanned and underarmed local staff. Bonobo numbers suffered from poaching. Researchers were forced to abandon Lomako as well. With the miseries inflicted by civil war, economic collapse and the remorseless spread of AIDS, the corruption of the Mobutu era now looks like the good old days. One fading ray of light is the dwindling, aging, saintly Mill Hill missionaries, who've taken it as their charge to help those they can as long as they can.

F
or indigenous peoples today, the risks of living at the ragged edge of the world are a matter more of identity than of survival. While the natives manage to live on, their culture withers and dies. For our closest animal relatives, the risks are more existential. A great ape living at the ragged edge of the world faces loss of habitat, loss of livelihood and loss of life.

I've been writing about our poor relations since the beginning of my career. After returning from Vietnam, I switched gears from war reportage to writing about the sign language experiments conducted with chimpanzees in
Apes, Men, and Language
(1974). Since then I've visited research stations studying chimps, gorillas and bonobos in Africa, and gibbons and orangutans on Borneo and Sumatra. But until
National Geographic
assigned me to write “Apes and Humans,” I'd never traveled with Jane Goodall, though I had met her on several earlier occasions.

Jane had long been one of the great apes' most eloquent champions, but even as her fame and recognition soared, the wildlands around her beloved Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania disappeared, marooning a few dozen chimps amid a sea of humanity. The chimps' insurance policy was Jane's international status, but their lives—basically a simian version of
The Truman Show,
as they lived and died in the fishbowl of Gombe—offered a poignant metaphor for the plight of great apes in general. And so I resolved to meet up with Jane. As usual in Africa, this turned out to be an adventure in itself.

Back in Kinshasa after my involuntary, but mercifully brief, exile in Basankuso, I immediately began planning to go to eastern Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi. Apart from connecting with Jane Goodall, I hoped to meet up with Diane Doran, who was then running Karisoke (the famed refuge for mountain gorillas that had been established by Dian Fossey); visit a lowland gorilla site in Zaire called Kahuzi-Biega; and then travel to Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania. It was Jane's work in Gombe that launched her career as a primatologist and ambassador-at-large representing the interests of the great apes. My itinerary was ambitious, given that it involved numerous trips and border crossings, and always on my mind was the inviolate lesson of Central Africa: Traveling can never be taken for granted, no matter how meticulous the preparations.

On a late November Sunday I headed off to the airport to catch a plane to Goma in eastern Zaire, meeting up at the airport with a group of American embassy personnel who were going there as well. All went smoothly until, just as we were accelerating down the runway, the pilot aborted the takeoff and, with no explanation, returned to the terminal, where we were herded to various
salles d'attente
. Meanwhile we watched as the plane was towed off, a fact for which I suppose we should have been grateful.

Five hours later we finally did take off, and headed for the stunning high-country towns of Goma and Bukavu. Bukavu was built as a resort town for the Belgians, and, though run-down, it retained a decaying colonial charm. The Orchid Safari Club, where I arranged to stay, had spectacular gardens winding down to Lake Kivu. The hotel had been purchased by a former Belgian mercenary, who insured his investment by buying a neighboring house, which he promptly gave to the minister of justice. Now, I heard, trouble was afoot. The minister wanted to sell the house, and he was asking more than the Belgian could afford. No one seemed to question the morals of trying to gouge the man who had given him the gift in the first place. (Americans can't get too smug about this, of course, since fourteen years later a similar sordid drama unfolded in California, when Congressman “Duke” Cunningham bought his house below market and sold it above market thanks to the generosity of MZM Inc., a company whose government contracts were subject to the committee the congressman chaired.)

At that time Bukavu and Kivu were probably among the few places on earth where people basically had to leave the country to make a phone call or send or receive mail. Expatriates and Zairois officials alike routinely made a 45-kilometer trek to Rwanda for precisely those services. A popular theory in town held that Mobutu had fostered the collapse of the country's infrastructure because it made it more difficult for any rebellion to be organized.

Still, despite the brutality of Zairois soldiers and the corruption of the politicians, the Zairois remained a cheerful and charming people. Waking up Tuesday morning, I heard the fishermen singing, just as I heard them the night before as they paddled out in the evening.

My one brief mission in eastern Zaire was to visit Kahuzi-Biega, which was situated between two volcanoes of the same two names. At that time—before refugees and rebels overran the park when neighboring Rwanda descended into genocidal madness—it was probably the most accessible place for visitors to see habituated gorillas in the wild. Tourists could get very close to the gorillas as they calmly munched in their natural salad bowl. In fact the scene was quite comical. Given their diet, a good deal of fermentation seems to go on in the gorilla gut, and the reverential mood of the tourists watching these magnificent animals was persistently undermined by the sound of stentorian gorilla farts reverberating through the air.

After returning to Goma, I made plans to set off for Burundi. The drive to Bujumbura—which now took four to five hours rather than the standard two and a half, because rebel activity forced us to drive on Zairean roads—was a pleasant enough trip through mountain passes. Very little forest cover remained in this most densely populated part of sub-Saharan Africa. Coming down through the pass just before we entered Burundi, we drove onto an enormous plain, and then suddenly Lake Tanganyika came into view, vast and blue and guarded on every shore by tall mountain ranges.

At the frontier the Zairean guards were dressed in ragtag clothes and fatigues, while on the Burundi side they were smartly decked out in blue uniforms with blue berets. Unlike Zaire, which did not pay its soldiers (all but guaranteeing that they would steal to support themselves), Burundi had a well-compensated, highly professional army. Once in Burundi, we drove on paved roads with lots of other vehicles sharing them. I was astonished to see real stores selling real merchandise. Burundi had its share of serious problems, but compared to its neighbor, it felt like Switzerland.

After installing myself at the Novotel, I ran around town trying to locate Jane. Realizing that I wouldn't get far on foot, I hired a car and drove out to Geoff Creswell's house. A former zookeeper, Geoff then ran the Jane Goodall Institute in Bujumbura. When I arrived, he was playing nanny to three orphaned young chimpanzees while the institute looked for a permanent site where they might be rehabilitated. Within two minutes, Max, a two-year-old chimp, was climbing into my arms. Geoff told me that Jane would be arriving the following day and going down to Gombe on Saturday. I decided to make a quick road trip to Rwanda to check on Karisoke and then return in time to go to Gombe with Jane.