Wild Spirit (5 page)

Even though I didn't particularly like the aniseed taste of Ricard, I accepted a second glass: I wanted to prolong the encounter. Kruger had a repertoire of anecdotes of African life, and once he realised I had an insatiable appetite for them, he loosened up.

‘What about traditional beliefs and practices, Monsieur Kruger? Does much of that survive today?'

His face twisted into a wry grimace and he told me another story. There was a Gabonese army officer who had three wives, a man of some ability who had prospered under the French command and risen to a senior rank. But he had one major problem – he was impotent. Notwithstanding his western education and professional position, the officer consulted the local witchdoctor, who counselled him to eat the genitals of a Pygmy. Accordingly, he ordered the secret killing of a Pygmy and went through with the ritual.

I couldn't comprehend that such beliefs had survived into the present, but that was only my naivety. It turned out that the officer's crime had been discovered and he was ‘rotting in Makokou jail' (as Kruger put it) as we spoke.

‘And where did this happen?' I asked.

Kruger's face remained impassive. ‘Just one hour up river from where you will be living.'

If he was trying to shock me, he had succeeded. So that was the environment we were going into – a place where superstition and witchcraft still held people in their thrall. More and more it seemed, as I listened, that little had changed since Mary Kingsley's time.

Kruger grasped a solid bronze object from a shelf and handed it to me. ‘Here, feel this.' I took it and almost dropped it because of the weight.

‘What is it?'

‘They're called slave bracelets. The women used to be forced to wear them around their ankles to stop them from escaping.' The bracelet was a broken circle with a bulbous knob on each end. I estimated its weight at three kilos. When I put it on my wrist, my arm dropped like a stone and I could barely lift it.

‘Do the people around here still make traditional artefacts?'

‘Not much. Not like the old days. The missions stopped most of that, as far as they could. When they came, they collected all the objects linked with tribal religion and witchcraft and buried great piles of them in the forest, then set about trying to convert the people. The missionaries were the only ones who knew where the things were buried. The story goes that years later, traders from the Middle East came through and paid off the missions to sell them the stuff, then quietly smuggled it out. That's Africa, Madame 'Enderson!'

I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly eight o'clock. ‘We must be going,' I said, edging out of the armchair. ‘What are the arrangements for tomorrow?'

‘You will leave at nine-thirty: I'll send the chauffeur around to collect you. The pirogue will be ready and you'll each have a life jacket. You can ask Roger and Boniface to prepare you a picnic lunch. It'll be a long ride because the river's low, so you'll get hungry. I'll see you down at the
débarcadère
– the landing stage. There'll be bread and fresh food for the camp to go up with you.'

Kruger got up and walked us to the car. As we rounded the corner of the house, an outside light was burning. He stopped, bent down and picked something up, cursing. Straightening up, he held out his hand to reveal a black rhinocerous beetle the size of a small bird. Screwing up his face, he hurled the beetle at the concrete wall and it fell stunned to the ground. Then he picked it up and threw it into a plastic bucket to join dozens of its deceased relatives.

Back at the Roux house, Roger had prepared soup, steak and salad, followed by cheese and fruit. After dinner, we explored the sanitary facilities. There were two showers and two toilets. Running water and handbasins had been installed, but Boniface had forgotten to light the fire under the triangular flat-iron hot-water tank – and there was little firewood anyway – so we settled for a cold wash and crawled into the sagging double bed.

Mosquitoes whined around our heads, and muffled singing and shouting reached our ears from somewhere in the town. I finally dropped off to sleep thinking about Carmen Roux, leprosy and rhinoceros beetles.

 

Next morning, slits of pale grey light showed through the gaps in the bedroom shutters, and the rise and fall of African voices passing under the window brought us to full consciousness. It was just after eight o'clock and out in the street, groups of people had gathered to talk. Given the noises we had heard the night before, I wondered when these people ever slept! After breakfast, we left Roger and Boniface to prepare our lunch while we went to look for Kruger.

From the verandah of Kruger's house we looked out on the bend of the Ivindo River: Makokou lay on its
western bank. It was still early morning, and a leaden sky blocked out any warmth from the sun. The river lay brown, glassy and deserted. Along the banks the forest stretched, forming a green corridor. Wisps of morning fog hung in the air, filmy wraith-like patches, low over the water and drifting through the branches. Kruger wasn't at home.

The
débarcadère
was a steep clearing on the riverbank, where a group of pirogues bobbed in the shallow water. A rusty iron barge lay beached nearby in the mud. Part-way up the slope, a corrugated-iron shed with a padlock and chain on the doors provided storage space for outboard motors and fuel.

Gabonese men ran in all directions, people were shouting orders, but no-one listened because everybody spoke at once. Children bathed and played in the shallows. Women washed clothes in the river. Flies buzzed. Men in white hard hats loaded lengths of timber into a twelve-metre pirogue, along with drums of outboard fuel, spare motors, and bundles of local food wrapped in banana leaves. All the company's Gabonese staff wore hard hats with SOMIFER printed across the front. They came up in turn to greet us. Their calloused hands felt like old rope as they gripped mine.

Kruger stood astride a petrol drum, amidships in the pirogue. He appeared to be having a rough time of it, and I sensed that now was not the moment for small talk. He came ashore, shook hands briefly, and after barking a few more orders in the direction of the boatmen, disappeared to keep a radio liaison with Belinga back at the office.

We returned to the house and settled down to wait for the chauffeur. Instead, about ten o'clock, Kruger himself pulled in near the kitchen door, red-faced and agitated. He loaded our bags hastily into the car and announced that we'd be
sharing the pirogue with the
sous-préfêt
(the deputy district governor) and a trade union representative, who were making a routine trip to Belinga. When we climbed in, he reversed out into the street and gunned the accelerator, sending clouds of red dust into the air.

At the riverbank, the frenzy had abated. Our luggage and the iceboxes of fresh food were stowed, then there was a last-minute flurry to find enough life jackets and folding chairs for all of us, and position them in a line down the middle. Finally, everything was ready. We climbed in and took our places, the
sous-préfêt
at the front. The huge black pirogue slid quietly backwards into mid-stream. At the stern, the
pinnassier
, the boatman, sat grave-faced with his hand on the tiller. At the bow, the navigator peered intently into the water. Then the outboard shuddered into life, and with a last-minute warning from Kruger not to make any sudden movements or we could tip over, we were off, sliding through the tea-brown water and watching the hill of Makokou grow smaller and smaller behind us.

 

For the first hour no-one spoke, and the only sounds were the thudding of the outboard and the swish of the bow wave past the gunwales. We were seated one behind the other on the folding chairs, with no room to move in any direction. A long corrugated-aluminium canopy stretched over our heads almost the full length of the canoe. We might have been a set of the carved ebony figurines sold in the markets, sitting motionless and bolt upright in their carved ebony boats.

The great forest slid by on either side, massive walls of jungle that were reflected back in the water, so that it was hard to tell where the forest ended and the reflections
began. Here and there, clearings with small groups of mud huts dotted the riverbank. A tiny pirogue occasionally emerged from one of these, under the shadows of overhanging vines. I breathed in the sights and silence, conscious of a profound peace settling into my mind. I thought again of Mary Kingsley and how she had travelled up the mighty Ogooué River in a pirogue nearly a century before. Now I was here.

Around midday, we opened the lunch boxes and had cold beer, crusty French rolls filled with garlic salami and tomato, and fruit and biscuits.

The
sous-préfêt
and the trade union representative had made no effort at conversation during the morning and still kept to themselves. The
sous-préfêt
was evidently a keen hunter, judging by the shotgun slung across his knees. I had noticed his request to sit in the front seat, where the canopy just stopped short of the bow. In the early afternoon, when we were becoming drowsy, he said something fast in dialect to the
pinnassier
, who immediately cut the motor. We drifted silently and the s
ous-préfêt
stood up in the bow, sighting his barrel at the forest. I spotted his prey just before he fired – a colobus monkey, distinctive against the solid green of the forest with its long black hair, white-ringed face and striking white dorsal ‘cloak'. In the silence the shot cracked out deafeningly, and the monkey's contorted body plummeted from the branch into the depths of the understorey. The
sous-préfêt
turned to flash a triumphant smile in our direction, his chest visibly bulging, but I wasn't about to acknowledge him. I struggled to hide my disgust, and stared fixedly at my feet.

I wouldn't have minded if he had needed to kill it for food, but to me this was barbarism. No-one spoke. I sensed
Win tighten, but there was nothing to say. This was my first intimation of what might lie ahead for us as we entered the world of African hunters.

Towards two o'clock, the outboard suddenly spluttered and stopped, and the
pinnassier
retrieved a large wooden paddle from the bottom of the pirogue and slowly steered us towards the riverbank. When the bow was securely settled on the mud, everyone climbed out and sat on the bank while the
pinnassier
tinkered with the motor. It would have been easy to fall asleep. We were nowhere near any village, and I wondered idly what would happen if the motor could not be coaxed into life. Finally he decided to give up on that motor and fit the spare one. With everyone back on board, we moved out again into the middle of the river.

We watched, half-mesmerised, as the reflected images of jungle slid past. Ahead, the river stretched as far as we could see. I had begun to doze off when the
pinnassier
's low voice roused me: ‘
Madame! Madame!
' I jerked upright. He pointed dead ahead and upwards to the east. ‘Belinga!' he said, nodding vigorously and smiling. It took me a few moments to realise what he meant and to focus on the distant point he was indicating. Then I saw it – far on the horizon, a long blue-green hump of mountain that rose above the intervening ridges like some giant slumbering beast. ‘Belinga! Belinga!' he kept repeating. Excited, I twisted around to look at Win: ‘That's it, sweetheart! Can you see it?' His whole face had lit up, his eyes fixed on the horizon as he nodded acknowledgement. I tried to focus on the hazy image as it hung there, high and distant. From the river, it looked utterly inaccessible. A burst of adrenalin coursed through my veins. Up there our new life awaited.

After a while, the river took a turn and the mountain
vanished. The day began to close in and a sharp chill descended. It was hard to believe we were just one degree off the equator.

Throughout the day we had peered at the forest for signs of wildlife, but apart from the colobus monkey, there had been none. Now, just on dusk, we caught sight of a large brown and white shape perched in a dead tree: a fish-eating eagle of the type common to Africa. We said nothing, hoping the s
ous-préfêt
would not notice it, but his hunter's eye picked it up almost immediately. He ordered the
pinnassier
to halt, and without even waiting until the canoe had fully come to rest, he took aim and fired. The fish eagle's body fell like a stone into the canopy below.

I wanted to shout out that the magnificent bird was precious, that its death was a tragedy, but I was powerless to speak. He was a senior official, and I was a visitor in his country with no official status. Heaviness settled on my chest. Back in Australia, I had known nothing of the world of hunting. My encounters with animals had been mainly in zoos and wildlife parks. Now I had had my first experience of the way many Gabonese viewed wildlife – as bushmeat or hunting trophies.

As we moved off into the gathering dusk, the walls of jungle on either side began to throb with the insect chorus – faintly at first across the water, but quickly rising to a cacophony. The air had grown bitingly cold, and the river took on an eerily mysterious quality in the fading light. At last the outboard was cut and the pirogue drifted slowly towards a muddy embankment. In the last vestiges of daylight, I made out the silhouette of Doug waiting for us at the water's edge, and groups of figures clustered in the background.

We pulled into the bank, and climbed out. Doug came forward and shook our hands. ‘You took your time!' His laid-back humour was never far from the surface. For me, it was an enigma that he could remain relaxed running a project like this.

The river journey had taken eight hours. We were now deep into the remote interior; a village called Mayebut lay a short way back from the water's edge. The only speck of western civilisation within reach was our camp on the mountain. Several Gabonese men wearing hard hats came forward and shook our hands.