Wild Spirit (23 page)

 

Ever since our weekend at CNRS and my encounter with Ikata, I thought constantly about my dream of becoming an anthropologist. Apart from the excitement I felt at the prospect, there were many practical things to sort out. It wasn't just my future at stake: I had Win to consider. How would he feel about my embarking on a degree in my thirties? What would it mean for us financially if I had to give up work to do it? How would his life change if I spent four years burying myself in books and assignments?

I chose my moment to broach the subject. It was a Sunday when we had a morning to ourselves, with no distractions.

‘Sweetheart, what would you say if I said I wanted to go back to university?' I began.

Win's eyebrows shot up and he fixed a searching gaze on me. Then he swallowed hard and readjusted his weight in the chair. ‘I'd be delighted for you. I think you're capable of doing anything you set your mind to – you've proven that time and time again. What do you have in mind?'

‘Well, I've been thinking about Josie and Ikata, and rereading that article about Biruté Galdikas working with the orangutans in Kalimantan. I can't get it out of my mind. And Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, too. They've all forged good careers working with great apes. It's not something I would ever have contemplated before we came
here, but I want to try. I'd like to do something for gorillas, and I really want to be with them. If I could make my living working with them, I couldn't imagine anything more wonderful. But I'd need a formal qualification first and I believe that, with my humanities background, that should be anthropology.'

Win's mind immediately turned to the practicalities. ‘What would be involved if you did? Where would you start? How would you get into it?'

I had few answers. ‘I'm not sure. I'm not even certain that anthropology would be the best pathway, but Biruté has an undergraduate degree in anthropology, so that's what I'd investigate first.'

‘So how do you find out?'

‘Well, I'd have to contact some universities once we finish here. Assuming we go back to Brisbane, the University of Queensland would be the obvious first port of call, but I don't know what they offer or even whether I'd get in without a science background.'

‘And would you do it part-time or full-time?'

‘I'd probably have to do it part-time and work during the day, to pay for the fees. The only problem with that is I'd be forty before I finished. If I did it full-time, you'd have to support me. Either way, it wouldn't be easy.'

We sat in silence for a few moments, looking out the louvre windows onto the forest. I could see Win was weighing up all the likely ramifications. We both loved the forest and the gorillas, and after our time at Belinga we were unlikely ever to settle into a conventional suburban life. And he knew that once I had set my heart seriously on something, I pursued it relentlessly. I always finished what I started and didn't do things by halves.

He looked hard at me. ‘Well, if that's what you want to do, I'll support you every step of the way. You know that, don't you? I want you to be happy, and I want to see you fulfil your potential, because you haven't been able to do that so far. I've had my chances – now it's your turn.'

‘Thank you, sweetheart.' My eyes misted over and I hugged him hard. I could have hoped for no greater expression of devotion and commitment than that. Our love and partnership were stronger than ever, and together we would plan and work steadily towards a new future.

The beginning of May heralded our last three months in the camp: at the end of July our contracts would end, and we would return to the world we had left behind eighteen months before. Soon we would have to decide whether that world would be Australia or England.

We knew that leaving would not be easy. Our life in the forest had taken hold of us so deeply that it had become part of who we were. Living in the mountain wilderness had changed how we saw ourselves, and created a world in which cities and highways, technology and possessions were only incidental to our lives. It had opened our minds to another way of being, where we found joy in the presence of native animals, in the cycle of the seasons and the exquisite colours and shapes of fungi, fruit and insects. Each time I thought about leaving I felt the bite of sadness. But beneath that, there were forces driving us to go.

When we had first arrived, we had little concept of the impact the project would have on the forest and wildlife. That realisation took time. It wasn't that vast areas of forest
were being cleared: that would come later, if the iron ore were ultimately mined. Rather, it was the steady encroachment of local access roads for surveying and drilling that disturbed the animals and made them more vulnerable to hunting. It was the noise from dozers and graders that shattered the silence. We had never stopped to consider at the outset that creating a settlement of over 500 people, where before there had been none, would generate an insatiable demand for bushmeat.

Now we had seen for ourselves the slaughter of gorillas and chimpanzees. We had witnessed hunters parading their kills of a silverback and other endangered wildlife. We had watched the
sous-préfêt
shoot the fish-eating eagle from a pirogue, and seen the rare bongo antelope cornered and gunned down. Indirectly, we were complicit in this simply by being there. That was the dark side of being in the forest, the bitter, inescapable reality, and it created a dilemma of conscience that we couldn't ignore. Even if Doug offered to extend our contracts, we could no longer countenance being a part of the problem. We knew hunting would always be a way of life for the people who lived in the vast interior of Gabon – they had lived that way for thousands of years – and for outsiders to criticise how they obtained their food would be presumptuous. But it didn't alter our distress at the slaughter of rare animals.

Overlying all of this was the weariness we both felt, the battle fatigue from pitting ourselves against forces we couldn't control. Life at the frontier seesawed between the excitement and unpredictability of wildlife encounters on the one hand, and the frustration and chaos that dogged our endeavours on the other. Our day-to-day life engendered ambivalence – a love/hate mixture increasingly veering
towards the hate end of the spectrum. I now understood the pressures that had driven Mario to leave, and I guessed that they also underlay Jacques' decision to go.

For weeks, Win and I weighed up the pros and cons of returning to Australia versus going back to England. Australia was on the other side of the world. If we went back, the chance to travel abroad again might never come, we reasoned – whereas if we resumed our life in London for a while, we could work and save for the future and take some holidays in Europe at the same time. Besides, England had the added attraction of being an ideal place to explore my study options. I could visit the libraries, zoos and museums, and begin reading everything I could find about anthropology. London Zoo even had gorillas.

The more we considered it, the more we favoured England. We weren't ready to be absorbed back into the life we had left behind in Brisbane three and a half years before. In fact, the mere thought of it felt like a negation of the people we had become. So, in the end, the decision was easy. We would fly back to Europe in the summer and take up where we left off.

‘The first thing we'll do is have a holiday in Greece!' Win said. ‘We've earned it.' It sounded a brilliant idea to me. I thought back to our time in Greece three years before – the clear Mediterranean light, the stony hillsides, the white churches against a turquoise sea and the ruined temples set in cypress groves. Yes, I thought, I could stand a dose of Greece.

 

Eamon's wife, Noni, arrived early in May. She was a veteran of the early days of Belinga, having lived there during Eamon's first tour of duty in the 1960s. When we
met, her guarded expression told me nothing of how she felt to be back. I tried to picture how she would have looked when she'd last lived at Belinga. Now she was in her late fifties, small and motherly, with steel-grey hair, a subdued manner and, I thought, a long-suffering air. I had sewn curtains for her new house the week before, partly because I wanted her to feel welcome and partly because without them, she and Eamon would be living in a fishbowl.

One morning we sat down together over tea in the guesthouse and I asked her about her life in Gabon in the old days. I never tired of hearing the history that the old hands could tell me. She brightened, and seemed to welcome the chance to talk about it. She spoke slowly and carefully in her Midwestern accent.

‘When we first came to Gabon, we stayed in the deserted mission house at Ndjolé while we waited for a trailer home to be provided. The only water supply was from the river. One day I had to entertain the American ambassador and his wife. There were no chairs, so all I could offer them to sit on were dirty mattresses. They sat on those filthy things with such aplomb, as if they were tapestry-covered sofas!' She smiled gently at the recollection.

As I listened, I warmed to this quiet woman, whose demeanour suggested she had endured much during her life. She reminded me of the pioneering women of early America I had seen in films. Even in the luxury home she would soon occupy, I knew she would need all her resilience to cope with life in the new Belinga.

I wish I had asked her more about which deserted mission house she meant, because there had been more than one in the Ndjolé area. Mary Kingsley had been there,
and gone on to nearby Talagouga, where an American missionary, Dr Nassau, had established the earliest mission in the region in 1882. Others had followed. I discovered decades later that Caroline Alexander, an American scholar who became fascinated by Mary Kingsley, had travelled to Gabon in the 1980s to retrace Kingsley's journeys and written about it in a book called
One Dry Season
:
In the Footsteps of Mary Kingsley
. When I read her account of a visit to the ruined Catholic cathedral at Asange, near Ndjolé, shivers rippled across my skin, and I thought of Noni and the old mission house:

Even as I listened to Noni over tea in the guesthouse, long before I had read Caroline Alexander's book, I thought how transitory human endeavours were in these African tropics. White people came, built structures, pursued dreams and ultimately left. Then mildew and decay took over, turning everything back into a ghost of itself. That
would be the fate of the Belinga camp too, I knew. Ultimately the forest reclaimed everything.

 

Win and I told Doug that we would definitely finish up at the end of July.

‘You know we could find things for you to do if you wanted to stay a bit longer,' Doug cajoled.

‘Oh, I don't doubt that,' Win replied, ‘but actually we're ready to go. We've reached an end point and we need to move on.' We didn't elaborate, but Doug could see we'd made up our minds and he didn't press the offer.

‘Well, Nettie, we'll need someone to take over all the things you've been doing. How do you think Carol would go?'

‘She'd be a natural,' I said. ‘She's bright and energetic and she rolls with the punches. She'll pick up the French pretty quickly once she's in the job.'

‘Okay. I'll have a talk to her and see if she's interested.' When Doug approached her about it, Carol didn't hesitate. She needed something to do and saw the job as a challenge. We agreed that I would start teaching her the ropes as soon as possible.

There would be little time to focus on our future in the weeks ahead, as the pace of change was about to escalate even further. After more than ten months, the surveyors had completed their work. For them, the job had been a nightmare. The punishing terrain, tight deadlines and the delay in arrival of their equipment – combined with vehicle problems and the hardships of the wet season – had pushed them to their absolute limits. At the farewell party Eamon put on for them, they made no secret of their delight to be
going home. I hadn't come to know them much, except for big Andy, the Yorkshireman, whose hair I had cut whenever he couldn't stand its unruliness a moment longer. I would always remember his good nature and ready smile, even when there was little to smile about.

Doug broke the news one day that we needed to plan for the visit of a high-level delegation in mid-June. The Comité Technique – a twelve-member body of experts representing all the partners in the consortium – would hold a meeting at Belinga to coincide with the end of stage one of the project, a chance to showcase everything that had been achieved in the first eighteen months. The vice-president of Gabon, Monsieur Mébiame, would be among the party, so the guests would need to be housed and fed in as close to VIP manner as we could manage for three days and nights. We had just four weeks to prepare. I hoped there would be some respite from the chaos that usually surrounded us to allow me to get on with the complex task of organising it, but that was not to be: two unusual events provided unwelcome distractions.

The first of these involved one of our domestic staff. One day, Mambo Bernard turned up for work drunk. Normally immaculate, his clothes were dishevelled and his speech slurred, and he lurched when he walked. Étienne, who rarely drank, was clearly upset. He took me aside and whispered that he couldn't work with someone in that state.

I had never had to discipline any of the domestic staff, and I felt more disappointed in Bernard than angry with him because I liked and respected him, but I couldn't let it go. For some minutes, I racked my brain as to the best way to handle it. Then I remembered a sanction that Mario had occasionally invoked – suspension from duty for three
days. It was known as
mise à pieds
. As a result, the worker lost pay, and it usually proved effective. I checked first with Eamon to be sure of my ground. When he concurred, I took a deep breath and strode into the kitchen to find Bernard swaying between the stove and the bench. I looked him in the eye and assumed my sternest expression.

‘Bernard, go home now – and don't come back for three days. You're drunk!' I was sure he would want to argue. Instead, he looked back at me blearily, struggled to take in what I had said, then hung his head and lurched out through the dining room and down the road towards the village.

That left Étienne the only one on duty in the guesthouse. He turned to me looking desperate – there was dinner for five to be prepared, but he didn't cook. ‘Madame, what am I going to do?'

‘
Ça va, Étienne
,' I soothed. ‘We'll get you some help.'

I drove down to the
cas de passage
to look for Patrice, a new cook who had joined us the month before, and told him we needed him up in the guesthouse for a few days while Bernard was away. We drove back together in the Méhari, and I saw relief flood Étienne's face when we arrived. I left them to sort out dinner and prepared to do the five o'clock radio link.

I doubted we would see Bernard until the end of the week, but the next morning he came to the door, nursing a severely swollen black eye and looking sheepish.

‘Madame, why did you send me away?'

‘Because you came to work drunk, Bernard,' I said. ‘That is not acceptable, and we cannot tolerate it.'

‘But madame,' he pleaded, ‘I've done nothing wrong.'

As calmly as I could, I explained what we expected of him and that I didn't want this situation to happen again.

He looked at the ground, shifted from one foot to the other and murmured, ‘
Oui, madame.
' His eye looked extremely painful. The lid had completely closed over and the whole socket was suffused with a pattern of bright purple and black. It looked so bad I thought his sight might be permanently affected. As he turned to walk away, I called after him, ‘What happened to your eye?' I assumed he'd been in a fight, but the truth was even worse.

‘It's my wife, madame, she hit me with a rock!'

My shock must have shown. I would never get used to the domestic violence that erupted in the village far too often. ‘Well then, you must go down to the
infirmerie
straightaway and let Madame look at it,' I insisted. ‘You have a very nasty injury.'

‘
Oui, madame.
'

I thought Marie-Claire should look at it, in case he needed to go to Makokou to see the doctor: we had a responsibility to attend to the health of the workforce. He left then, dejectedly nursing the eye, and slowly walked down the hill towards the clinic.

The eye must have been all right, because when he returned to work at the end of the week, the swelling had gone down and his sight appeared unaffected. I said no more about the incident, and we behaved as though nothing had happened. After that, the tensions between the domestic staff seemed to subside.