Wild Spirit (11 page)

‘Ask Kruger where my load of timber is!' Win would bark. ‘It should have been here last week.'

‘Where are my Land Rover parts?' Jacques would shake his head in despair. ‘Tell him I can't go any further till I get them.' I would relay the queries to Kruger and sit back to wait for his terse replies. I could hear him bristling.

‘The orders have been placed, Madame 'Enderson. This is Africa. Nothing happens quickly.'

Even worse for me were the occasions when Win and Jacques would hand me lists of things to order urgently, by radio, while they stood beside me flushed with frustration. Their enigmatic scribbles on scraps of dirty paper or pieces of plywood meant nothing to me. Jacques' lists were in French, Win's in English. I think they both overestimated my competence with technical French.

Later, when I looked back on these episodes I could laugh, but at the time there was no humour in them.

‘I don't know what you're asking for!' I'd glare at Win. ‘I'm not a bloody builder! Explain it slowly, and I'll try and convey it to Jacques so he can tell me what it's called.' The three of us could have been characters in some comic play. Win would try to explain the function of each item, often with sound effects, or draw a diagram. In turn I would struggle to explain to Jacques so he could tell me the correct
French word. Meanwhile, Kruger would be at the other end of the radio breathing hard.

‘It's a nightmare!' I complained to Doug after a few weeks of these exchanges. ‘I don't know what I'm doing. I need some sort of reference book.' He must have heard the desperation in my voice, because the next time he visited camp he handed me a technical dictionary in French and English, with drawings of tools and hardware, each one labelled in both languages. I kept it on the desk beside the radio, and it saved me much anguish in the months ahead.

To monitor deliveries of supplies when they finally arrived, I needed to be available whenever trucks came in from the
débarcadère
to accompany them up to the warehouse. Deliveries always had to be attended to straightaway to eliminate the risk of pilfering. And they came in at all hours – during meals, at night and in the early morning. The work brought me into close contact with M'Poko Lucien, the
magazinier
or storeman. He was tiny – half a head shorter than I was – and spoke softly, with a gentleness of manner I liked immediately. He always wore a white hard hat and carried a clipboard.

We would usually watch the truck drivers unload together: every item on the dockets had to be checked against the load to make sure nothing was missing. But if M'Poko had finished work for the day, I would check the goods into the warehouse myself and lock up afterwards. The loads were usually mixed – timber, cement, hardware, rations, hard hats, mattresses, drums of fuel, stocks of clothing for the
économat
and drugs for the
infirmerie.
The unpredictable delivery times meant that I never knew when my meals would be interrupted or my evening leisure time cut short. Living on site, glorious as it was, meant I was always accessible. It was
just one of many pressures that would threaten to bring me down as I tried to adjust to life in camp.

While we spent our days scurrying about, deadline-driven, rattled and frustrated at the chaos, the life of the forest continued around us in timeless rhythms. In the camp, thwarted human endeavours held sway; on its periphery, the peace and order of the natural world prevailed. I'd felt this dichotomy almost from the outset – the yin and yang, the interplay of opposites. While urgent tasks demanded my energies much of the time, whenever I walked outside I felt the pull of the forest, a yearning in my spirit to connect with the wildness.

The awe and wonder I'd experienced during our first visit to the camp, when we'd watched the flock of brilliant blue touracos cavorting on the umbrella tree near the guesthouse, had never left me, and in the weeks since we'd moved into camp, an awareness of what lay just beyond the clearing permeated my thoughts night and day.

Of all the wild creatures we would come to know, the giant yellow-casqued hornbills gave me some of my greatest bursts of joy. They were the most visible and dramatic of the birds we regularly saw, and they made me laugh with their raucous exuberant calls. Win and I had first seen them when we'd camped in a rainforest clearing in Cameroon. Initially we couldn't work out what was making the swishing and whirring sound high above the canopy, which grew louder the nearer it approached to us. Then we saw them – three large black and white birds with massive down-curving beaks like toucans, and startling bony projections like centurions' helmets on their heads and upper beaks. They flew in line, slowly, one behind the other, their powerful calls echoing through the forest. When I'd looked them up in our wildlife
atlas I'd learned they often followed bands of monkeys as they travelled to feed. At Belinga, these giant hornbills with personalities to match were never far away, and for me the sight and sound of them became synonymous with Belinga. Often as I walked around camp, I would watch them flying from treetop to treetop, calling constantly, always moving in the same direction – west to east. The sound of their swishing wings lodged in my memory, elements in a soundscape whose meanings were growing clearer with each passing day.

In the late afternoons, Mario, Jacques, Win and I often sat on the porch with a cold beer or a whisky, and allowed the peace of the closing day to enfold us. Sometimes bands of colobus monkeys would appear, playing on loops of vine at the edge of the clearing, leaping and swinging like acrobats on a trapeze. The tufts of fluffy white hair on their faces, backs and tails stood out against the grey of ancient tree trunks and the tangle of foliage. Watching these wild primates cavorting as though we weren't there, I felt hugely privileged – a spectator on a secret world – and I marvelled at the bizarre events that had brought us to this place.

In mid-July, our supply chain from the coast suddenly collapsed. Air cargo destined for the camp failed to arrive in Makokou, and our fresh food was off-loaded in Libreville several times.

‘What the hell's going on down there?' I yelled over the radio to Doug one morning. ‘Hardware we can wait for, but food we need now.'

‘It's this confounded
fête
, Nettie. We've got no control over government requisitions on cargo space. If it doesn't improve, I'll charter a plane to get your food up there.' At times I wondered if the Libreville staff really understood how it felt for us being at the end of the line, at the mercy of every glitch in the transport system.

‘We'll hold you to that,' I replied tersely. I'd had complaints from all the expatriates about the lack of fresh vegetables for dinner and mail from home.

All the supply problems stemmed from the fact that festivities for
la fête
– the anniversary of independence, celebrated annually on 17 August – would focus on
Makokou that year. The preparations for it would distort commerce and transport in our region for a month.

On the radio one morning, Kruger explained the details. An accelerated building program was underway in Makokou to complete several major projects, including a multistorey hotel, a television station, a sports stadium, paved roads and the town's first street lighting. Every square metre of air-cargo space out of Libreville had been officially requisitioned, and planeloads of materials, labourers, colour televisions and luxury furniture were arriving in Makokou at the rate of three per day. Against this backdrop, the cargo destined for Belinga had been assigned a low priority.

There was another problem, too. As part of the celebrations, the new road through to Belinga was to be officially opened. Doug came on the radio one morning to tell Mario we could expect a visit from President Bongo by helicopter on the day of the opening. I watched Mario's face as the implications hit him. He lit three cigarettes in quick succession and paced around the room, his eyes wild with panic. We'd need a helipad, but we had no earthworks machines to create one. A flat area of ground opposite the warehouse would have to be cleared of forest with chainsaws and machetes, and an approach path created adjacent to the guesthouse.

He set teams of labourers to work immediately felling trees and clearing secondary growth. It would be slow work and time was short. I watched from the doorway as the first of the forest giants crashed to the ground.

On the second day of clearing, I was alone in the office. Win and Mario were at the
débarcadère
; the labourers were working nearby, unsupervised. I heard the high-pitched
whine of a chainsaw, followed by the ripping of branches and vines as a tree plunged down through the forest, then a thunderous crash as it hit the earth. All the lights went out in the guesthouse, and the fridge and freezer motors fell silent. There was a moment of absolute silence, then a burst of riotous laughter from the labourers as they realised the tree had fallen on the powerlines.

I strode outside, furious, to find them still doubled up at what they regarded as a huge joke. I stood rigidly facing them, and tried to make myself look as authoritative as I could. ‘This is a big problem for us,' I shouted. ‘All the meat in our deep freezer could go bad, and now the radio won't work!' The men stopped laughing and stood silently in their hard hats, staring at me blankly. Electrical power and freezers meant nothing to them.

I marched up the hill to the mechanics' workshop and broke the news to Jacques. ‘
Merde!
' he muttered, wiping his greasy hands on a lump of rag. It would be his job to repair the lines, and he had more than enough to do already. I walked back down to find the men planning their next move. The massive tree in their sights was perilously close to the guesthouse. If they felled it to the left, it would take out the washing line, the stores shed, and possibly our annexe. To the right, it would completely block the road into camp. I had to do something.

I breathed deeply, braced myself, and yelled, ‘Stop! No more!' They froze, looking at me, then at one another, with wide staring eyes. They must have thought me mad. They were only following Mario's instructions. What was I on about? But they stopped. When Mario and Win returned, the men had been standing idle for an hour, Jacques had inspected the damaged cable, and Étienne and
Bernard were preparing lunch. Next day, Win took over supervision of the tree felling, but still disaster never seemed far away. An even bigger tree narrowly missed the kitchen roof and two of the labourers on its way down. I had given up watching. I hated the destruction, and I had no stomach for the potential disasters involved.

It was just a week after the helipad had been completed, and we had celebrated this milestone, that we received the news: the president wouldn't be coming after all. The opening ceremony would take place at a location out on the new road.

At that moment, I felt for the first time that we were locked into some endless farce, powerless to mitigate the chaos engulfing us. Mario grew more disaffected as the days went by, blaming the management for many of our problems. I watched as his normally buoyant manner disappeared little by little and was replaced by a moody cynicism. Then one day he told us outright, ‘I'm planning to resign. I'll stay for the
fête
, but no longer.' No-one was surprised. We all understood what had driven him to the decision. Still, none of us could imagine how the camp would run once he had gone.

The pressure-cooker atmosphere was further heightened by the dry-season shortage of bushmeat for the workforce. The hunters found it more and more difficult to locate the usual prey animals, as they gravitated towards the river during the dry. Many of the men complained of ‘meat hunger', rubbing their bellies and assuming a pained expression when they saw any one of us. In response, we increased the issue of dried salt fish on ration days, but they regarded this as a poor substitute. As each day passed, I felt increasingly under siege, and I began to lose sleep.

In the midst of all this, there was one positive development: the
combinée
arrived at last, heralding a new and streamlined phase in the building program. Win could barely contain his joy.

 

We had been there a month when Dr Werner Krol, the ninth member of our expatriate team, arrived. It was the end of July and we were battling the pre-
fête
chaos. I hadn't known what to expect of this Bavarian geologist. Perhaps he would be aloof and self-important, I had speculated. He had a PhD, and I had only met one other person with such a high qualification. What would he think of our basic facilities? Would they be too down-market for him?

I need not have worried. The fair-skinned young man who stepped out of the Toyota walked towards us smiling, his hand outstretched. ‘Hello, I'm Rodo.' He spoke perfect English. He had a scholarly face, but a ready sense of humour shone from the blue eyes behind his spectacles. His bald crown was fringed with light-brown hair.

‘Hello, I'm Nettie.' I shook hands and beamed back. ‘Welcome to Belinga! How was the trip up?'

‘Well, it was a little slow, but that's okay.' He had a deep voice, made gravelly by cigarettes. I knew he was new to Africa and unmarried, so I had prepared a welcome pack for him with soap, a towel, a box of tissues and a few personal items. I wanted him to feel at home, as his contract was for two years and he had come straight from university.

‘This is for you,' I said, handing over the parcel.

He blushed bright pink. ‘Oh, thanks – that's very kind!' A hint of German accent coloured his English, and gave a musical rise and fall to his intonation.

For me, Rodo's arrival marked a new and welcome phase. He spoke four languages – German, English, French and Spanish – so I was no longer the only one with English and French. More than that, I had a colleague to share the daily crises with, someone new to Africa like I was, and the same age. Win came down from the workshop, covered in sawdust, to greet him, and I sensed he too felt relief that there was another English-speaker in camp.

I thought Rodo looked too vulnerable to be in remote Africa, though. He seemed too gentle, too shy, and I hoped that the pre-
fête
frenzy would not be too brutal an introduction for him.

‘Your room is ready down in the
cas de passage
,' I said. ‘You'll be near Jacques Poussain, our French mechanic. It's pretty basic, but it's all we have for the moment.' Mario had renamed the surveyors' quarters the
cas de passage
– vistors' lodge – since it now had a suite of single bedrooms as well as toilets and showers. It would accommodate visiting staff and contractors, as well as house all the new staff until their mini-apartments could be built.

‘That's okay,' he assured me. ‘It will be fine.' On that first day, I could not have guessed how closely future events would bind Rodo, Win and me together. All I saw was a sensitive, cultured young man, and I looked forward to working with him.

 

By the second week of August all of us were under pressure, and the crises had piled up as the
fête
drew closer. Our fresh food had been off-loaded in Libreville twice running. Kruger had moved out of his house in Makokou into a cottage and was supervising conversion of his old place into
a guesthouse for the
fête.
Jacques needed to wire the camp for 240-volt power but couldn't get cables. Win had a deadline to meet for completion of the surveyors' office, but couldn't get timber. One of his labourers suffered from epilepsy and could no longer safely operate a concrete mixer, so had to be allocated other tasks. Mario had suffered a black eye and broken spectacles in an altercation with a militant Bakwélé man he had had to dismiss. When he called in the commandant of the Brigade de Gendarmerie at Makokou to quieten down the Bakwélé, the commandant threatened to burn their villages if they didn't settle down.

Teams of carpenters, masons and labourers worked noisily outside the guesthouse all day, and Étienne and Bernard complained daily that they wanted their wives to be brought up from Makokou. The surveyors' gear still had not been cleared through customs, so all they could do was cut brush and clear vegetation from around the old trig stations. Everyone's morale was at rock bottom.

In the midst of all this, the company was vigorously recruiting labour. More tradesmen and labourers were urgently needed to keep pace with expanding work schedules. New recruits arrived in twos and threes on every pirogue, and each man had to be issued with a basic kit of rations on arrival. This task fell to me, but in most instances, I had no warning. Usually, the first I knew was when the men presented themselves at the guesthouse door expecting to receive their woollen blanket, dried fish, rice, palm oil and paraffin.

Many of the new recruits were unaccustomed to frontier life, and expected that the consumer comforts they enjoyed in town – electricity, filter-tip cigarettes, record players
and football boots – would be available in camp. My feeling of being under siege grew stronger each time a worker bailed me up outside the guesthouse with some new demand.

Our supply situation worsened daily as the
fête
approached. Stocks of hardware, timber and vehicle parts from retailers in Makokou were long since exhausted. The supply of manioc had also dried up, because all the manioc from every village in the region had been officially requisitioned to feed the influx of people in Makokou. We issued rice in its place, but this did nothing to appease the men's discontent. The whole camp seemed primed for an explosion.

During dinner each night, work problems dominated the conversation. Each person's tension fed on everyone else's, so the atmosphere around the table grew increasingly poisonous. After several weeks, Mario reached the limit of his endurance. One night we sat down to dinner to find an empty tin can on the table with a hole punched in the top.

‘That's the fine tin,' he announced. ‘Anyone who mentions work during a meal incurs a fine of 1000 CFAs.' It proved to be an inspiration. Dinners became occasions for riotous laughter when people momentarily forgot the rule and everyone else pounced on them and forced them to pay up.

Still, by day I struggled with my role and tried to suppress a growing sense of despair – but I had no privacy, nowhere to go to escape. Our Kombi and the annexe were in the most public area outside the guesthouse, surrounded by noise and activity day and night. When I needed to cry – something that happened more and more
often – there was no refuge. I felt like a caged animal. One day the tears welled up in the middle of the morning. I didn't want anyone to see that I was unravelling – I had too much pride for that – so I left the desk strewn with papers and headed up the hill to a cleared area behind the generator shed. I sank to the ground, leaned back against the corrugated-iron wall, and let wracking sobs take over.

I was discovering exactly what Doug had warned me about. ‘It'll be pretty rough up there for a while,' he'd said. I doubted even he could have known how rough it would become. But I didn't regret our decision to come here. I just had to work my way through the bad patch and hope things improved.

Win could see I was struggling, as I slept poorly and was emotionally brittle. He wanted to help, but there was little he could do, and he had his own battles to fight. I made up my mind I wasn't going to give in. This was the biggest test of my life, and I had no intention of failing it.

My confidence received a boost on 11 August, when I conducted an entire radio link on my own for the first time, without Mario hovering in the background. I had won my six-week battle with French idiom, unfamiliar procedures, bad reception and unrecognisable French voices coming from the Libreville office. It was not a moment too soon – Mario's departure was only days away.