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Authors: Annette Henderson

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BOOK: Wild Spirit
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After that, torpor settled over the room. People spoke in whispers. Outside, the storm had abated, and the sound of rivulets cascading down the hillside filled our ears. The four of us sat respectfully and waited. The heat had made us thirsty, so Rodo passed out the remaining bottles of beer. Louise had managed to record some of the music.

Another hour passed before one man in the circle stood up and shouted to the crowd to clear him a space, prompting the mass of seated figures to retreat toward the
walls. He started circling the fire and taunting the crowd with wild gestures. The drummers took up their positions again and played in a frenzy of abandonment, gyrating their bodies and rolling their eyes – the drug appeared to have taken effect. The dancer's body trembled convulsively. At intervals he lunged at people in the crowd with a bare dagger and transfixed them with grotesquely bulging eyes.

I sensed the climax was approaching. The man threw himself on the ground and moved around on his bottom, with his bare feet just touching the burning wood and his eyes rolling like a madman's. Jumping upright again, he careered around the fire, lurching precariously. Then in an instant he had lost his balance and fallen headlong into the live coals, sending a spray of them towards the front row of spectators. The crowd drew back in horror, then several men leapt to their feet and dragged the dancer clear of danger. Dazed and physically spent, he appeared to feel no pain, and allowed himself to be carried off to recover.

The proceedings had come to a temporary lull. It was after one o'clock, and our numb legs and backsides cried for reprieve, so we stood and stretched, then picked our way through the crowd to where Chief Augustine sat quietly in a corner. One by one, we gravely shook his hand and thanked him.

Outside, the air had chilled after the storm. The forest dripped, and frogs sang in a chorus of clicks, squeaks and chirrups. A jumble of questions rattled around in my head. What beliefs underlay the rituals? What did they mean? How ancient were they? I doubted I would ever know the answers – our time at Belinga would be much too short.

We all slept late next morning. Over breakfast, Win and Louise talked food and cooking, and she asked if she might bake a cake for lunch. There were lemons from an old tree near the
cas de passage
, and we had flour, baking powder and spices in the cupboard. I left Win to show her where things were and drove down to invite Rodo up for coffee and cake in an hour.

I didn't realise it at the time, but that Sunday was to be the last before the influx of new staff and contractors arrived. The camp lay at peace, with insects buzzing and birds feeding outside our windows on the heads of grass seed. By the time Rodo arrived, the homely smell of baking filled the flat.

Louise's lemon teacake came out of the oven golden brown and fragrant. We sat around the table talking, eating and drinking coffee, and looked out over the forest. As we chatted, I reflected on the long chain of circumstances that had brought the four of us together from opposite parts of the world. The chances of our meeting would have seemed nonexistent just a year earlier.

Before she left, Louise thrust her home address into my hand. ‘I hope I'll see you again before you leave. If not, you can always contact me in the States.' As we saw her off, we could not have guessed that this intrepid, slightly built woman would go on to have a distinguished research career in tropical mammalian biology. She would discover new species in South America and elsewhere, and thirty years after our time in Gabon would be described as one of the greatest tropical biologists to have ever lived.

chapter fifteen
R
AIN
,
RAIN
,
RAIN AND NEW PEOPLE

The onset of the big wet coincided with the long-awaited arrival of expatriate staff and the drilling contractors from Canada. The expatriate population in camp ballooned from nine to seventeen, propelling my battles over fresh food supplies to a new level of frenzy. The
vivres frais
normally arrived twice weekly, when flights operated between Libreville and Makokou. I had doubled the size of the orders, and waited anxiously for each consignment that came up on the pirogues. But I hadn't bargained for how much the wet season could disrupt transport throughout the country.

The problems began one day in April. I had waited all day for a consignment, but when the truck arrived from the
débarcadère
all the driver had on board was hardware and drums of fuel. I felt my anger rising, and at the five o'clock radio session I gave Doug a blast. ‘What the hell's happened to our
vivres frais
? We got absolutely nothing today! How are we expected to manage?'

Doug's voice came over the air through a burst of crackle. ‘Nettie, I know for certain the
glacières
were loaded
on the plane. Godart specifically told me he supervised it himself.' Godart was SOMIFER's accountant and manager in the Libreville office. ‘I'll look into it and let you know first thing tomorrow.' My imagination went into overdrive – if they'd been loaded, then what had happened to them in transit? After I finished at the radio, I put Étienne and Mambo Bernard in the picture, as they had been expecting ingredients for that evening's meal, then drove down to the
cas de passage
to tell Samba Bernard and Léon the same story. We had plenty of tinned vegetables to fall back on, but I knew that everyone's tolerance for them would wane quickly.

At nine o'clock the following morning, I switched on the radio and called up Libreville. Doug's voice came on, sounding harassed. ‘Nettie, you're not going to believe this. The
glacières
were loaded all right and the plane left, but on the approach to Makokou the pilot couldn't land because the weather was so foul and the beacons at the airport were out of order, so the son-of-a-bitch was forced to turn around and come back to Libreville.'

‘Oh great!' I groaned. ‘What do we do now?' It was a reprise of the supply problems we had experienced in the lead up to the
fête
eight months before, except that now I had less patience with the chaos that constantly dogged our endeavours and we had twice as many people depending on the food supplies.

‘Nettie, I'll charter a special plane if we have to. Give me a couple of hours to work on it, and let's talk again at eleven.' By the time we spoke again, Doug had arranged a charter. It would leave Libreville that day. With any luck the food would reach us within a day and a half.

The three
glacières
arrived late the following afternoon. I expected the worst, since they had been in transit for so
long, and wasn't disappointed. I opened them to find squashed tomatoes and wilted celery covering what lay underneath, and a jumble of ruptured tubs of yoghurt that had leaked all over the bags of eggplants and capsicums. The cheeses, meat and salamis had fared better, though, and some of the cabbages and cucumbers looked salvageable.

Étienne looked on in dismay as I sorted through it. He shook his head. ‘
Les légumes sont fatigués, madame
,' he said. Tired vegetables – yes, that captured it perfectly, I thought. Étienne's highly individual way of expressing himself always brought a smile to my face – like the night he had encouraged me to eat up some remaining salad at dinner because ‘
Ça ne dort pas, madame
,' – it doesn't sleep. From that night on, I could never think of a lettuce salad without recalling that it wouldn't sleep.

At the afternoon radio link, I told Doug the food had made it, but that it seemed an expensive way to move perished vegetables around the countryside – the air charter had cost US$1000. It was to be the first of five charters in the three weeks that followed, however, as the depredations of the weather and the unreliability of the navigation beacon at Makokou combined to disrupt aircraft movements. Our radio links became more frequent – two in the morning and two in the afternoon – to coordinate the movement of extra pirogues and keep us informed. As the radio sessions gobbled up more and more of my time, I cursed the wet season and the chaos of Africa and began to look forward to the time, just months away, when I wouldn't be doing the job any more.

I often started work before 7 am and finished after dark – much depended upon the arrival and departure times of
pirogues. All the empty containers – 200-litre fuel drums, gas bottles,
glacières
and
cantines
– had to be returned promptly to Makokou. If we didn't keep them moving, Kruger would become testy because it messed up his system. So I established a routine of assembling the empty gas bottles,
glacières
and
cantines
at the door of the guesthouse the night before, ready for the truck driver to load. The non-return of empty fuel drums emerged as a sore point from time to time, but I couldn't help that, as I had no control over them and no idea of their whereabouts. Whenever Kruger got cranky about them, I referred him to Eamon.

Each month the cash and stock at the
économat
had to be reconciled to ensure the company recouped its outlays on the huge volume of merchandise purchased for resale in the village. The
économat
now stocked over 150 different lines, from bicycles to double foam mattresses, and everything had to be accounted for. And because I felt sorry for Rodo at the end of each month when he had to prepare the 100 pay packets for the men, I also worked with him adding up the hours and deducting any advances people had received.

My tiny salary was laughable given the job to be done, but I rarely thought about it. Like everyone else, I did whatever was necessary to keep things running. When I did stop to ponder it, I weighed up the frustrations of the job against everything our life in the camp had brought: our time with Josie, the visit to the bat cave, and my hour with Ikata. Those were the things that would remain with me forever, whereas I knew the chaos would pass.

For me, the arrival of the two new expatriate couples brought fresh faces and the promise of a fuller social life at last. My nine months as the only white woman in camp had ended. Both men were geologists, both the wives were nurses, and all had worked elsewhere in Africa. The recently married French couple, Michel and Marie-Claire, had come to Gabon from Mauritania. Michel looked to be about forty, tall, with thinning hair and an ebullient personality. Marie-Claire was younger, tall and slim with olive skin, quietly spoken and serious. She'd spent a year delivering babies in Mauritania, and as I grew to know her I formed the impression she could handle almost any situation with equanimity. It had been agreed that she would run the
infirmerie
once they settled in. Like most of the French people we had met in Gabon, neither of them spoke any English.

By contrast, the American couple, Jim and Carol, had come straight from a year's work in Sierra Leone, where the national language was English, and they only spoke a smattering of French. Jim was short and stocky. He reminded me of the sort of Australian men who had gone to Papua New Guinea as
kiaps
or patrol officers in the 1950s: he wore khaki shirts and pants and a broad-brimmed hat, and used words sparingly. Carol had enough zest and personality for both of them. She was in her twenties, with an engaging smile, long brown hair and a zany outlook. I warmed instantly to her and knew we were going to get on.

The two couples moved into the brand-new mini-apartments that Win and the carpenters had recently finished. Rodo and Jacques had moved into similar ones several weeks earlier. Each dwelling was equipped with
power, bottled gas for cooking, showers and a septic system with flushing toilets.

I had little contact with the team of Canadian drillers once they began work. They came from the French-speaking part of Canada, but I soon discovered that I could understand very little of what they said. I was puzzled until Jacques explained that the French they spoke derived from a much older form of the language, and had changed little since the time of the early French settlers. I wasn't the only one having trouble – the Gabonese workers couldn't understand them either. All four of them were short and muscular and they smoked a lot. Although they were courteous whenever I met them, they were used to a rough life in frontier environments, and seemed uncomfortable talking to a woman. They kept to themselves, so I had no opportunity to get to know them. They moved into the suite of upgraded rooms in the
cas de passage
and took their meals there alongside the surveyors.

The chance to get to know Carol, Jim, Michel and Marie-Claire better came at Easter. We invited them and Rodo to our flat for cheesecake and sangria on the Saturday night. It was the first gathering we'd had in the flat, and it made me realise how much I had missed a normal social life. Win spent the afternoon baking a lemon cheesecake, using dozens of the miniature tubs of Petits Suisses – a soft white cheese intended as infant food – that Libreville had been sending us. He sprinkled the top with grated lemon rind and spice, so that when it came out of the oven it looked like an illustration from a gourmet cookbook.

Rodo arrived carrying a small box, but wouldn't tell us what it contained. Only when we had finished the sangria,
demolished most of the cheesecake, told stories and laughed a lot, did he reveal what was inside – six hens' eggs, one for each of us, finely painted all over in brilliant colours and intricate patterns. No two were the same.

I thought at first they were ceramic. ‘Where did you get these? Did your mother send them from Germany?'

‘No, no. I had Étienne hard-boil them for me, and I painted them myself this afternoon with felt pens. That's what we do in Bavaria at Easter.' He presented each of us with one and wished us happiness.

I had never seen their like. The delicate patterns could have been Persian miniatures. ‘Rodo, they're exquisite!' I said, and hugged him hard. All the trials of the past months had not toughened Rodo or lessened his sensitivity. With this gesture, he'd made us all feel like a family, even though we came from four different countries. Everyone was in such high spirits by the end of the evening that we decided to have a barbecue at the Djadié the next day, weather permitting.

 

Wind-swirled fog swept through the forest as we drove out in convoy after breakfast. Win had packed steaks and Carol had brought potatoes and onions to bake in the fire. On the way we stopped to watch bands of monkeys leaping from tree to tree, hornbills in flight, and a family of partridges feeding at the edge of the road.

The fog had cleared by the time we reached the river. Jim and Michel gathered wood and built the fire while Win coated the steaks with powdered garlic, and Marie-Claire, Carol and I wrapped the potatoes and onions in foil. With glasses of red wine in our hands, we sat in a long line on an
old upturned pirogue to watch the fire burn down to coals. I felt myself relaxing into a warm and mellow state. The fragrance of the burning wood, the peace of the river and the camaraderie all conspired to consign the worries of the camp to somewhere beyond the borders of my mind.

We lingered over the juicy steaks and jacket potatoes, not talking much, just listening to the cries of birds echoing through the forest. After lunch, everyone swam in the river and lay on the sandbank to dry off. Only a change in the weather forced us to pack up and leave. Light rain soon developed into a downpour that lasted all the way home. When we arrived back, the camp was quiet: there had been no crises, and Eamon had done the radio link for me.

 

Now that the apartments were finished and occupied, Win and his men were able to concentrate their efforts on finishing Eamon's house in time for the arrival of his wife from America in May. Doug had christened the house ‘Eamon's Palace' because of its size and luxurious design. Win had designed it as a showpiece, using the finest local timbers for the internal finishes. The floors were varnished wood, exposed beams supported the roof, and a huge stone fireplace dominated the living room. Like the guesthouse, it was built in natural stone – rough lumps of red ironstone that blended in with the red earth. It occupied an elevated site just below the forest line, and the front windows afforded views out over the camp towards the village. As each week passed, I watched it take shape, and with it saw Win's creative satisfaction blossoming.

Just when it seemed that things were starting to settle down around the camp, a bombshell dropped: Jacques,
our experienced and tireless mechanic who could fix anything anytime, had had enough. He submitted his resignation and would be gone in a month. We found it difficult to imagine how the camp could function without him, and braced ourselves for an increase in the chaos.

BOOK: Wild Spirit
9.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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