African Silences Page 6
On Easter Sunday, we returned to Abidjan on the “Grande Route,” which is memorable chiefly for the number of dreadful wrecks along the way. A head-on collision of the night before was still being unraveled, and a little farther on was a truck-and-trailer, upside down, that had rocketed deep into the jungle. As in Senegal, the new two-lane roads are too narrow for the novice drivers, most of them young and inexperienced like Mamadou, whose total lack of anticipation in combination with slow reaction time and love of speed makes his driving a grave business indeed. We passed a sunny Easter morning on the brink of dire emergency, veering southward among rich plantations of coffee, oil palms, rubber trees, and pineapple, disputing the road with the great timber trucks that are bearing away the downed giants of the forest. At Ajamé, the whole landscape is a patchwork quilt of Sunday laundry, which is done for the prosperous Ivoiriens by poor people from Upper Volta fleeing south in a desperate search for work; at Banco we pass a forest reserve that according to Jacob no longer contains a single animal of any kind.
Jacob Adjemon is the born tourist in our group. For his homecoming, he is attired in a new kanzu bought at Man, and among the many souvenirs he has acquired on our journey is one of the mass-produced antelope lamps knocked out and shined up in the art factory at Daloa. In his opinion, old masks and carvings and awale games from the back country are of no use to the new African, and obviously he feels about them much the same uneasiness and disrespect that he feels for wildlife. Mamadou, on the other hand, bought an imaginative traditional bird-toy of wood covered in dried skin that comes originally from the Niger, and had hung it from his mirror as a charm; within the day, he had lost interest in this pretty thing, and when it fell, had flung it sullenly aside, perhaps in envy of all Jacob’s shiny purchases, or perhaps because Jacob had spent all of the money that he was supposed to give to Mamadou for his return journey. This injustice came to light after Jacob had been dropped off with his pile of packets near the beach, where he had persuaded us, wrongly as usual, that there was plenty of space in the hotels; his primary aim, it now appeared, had been to lure us somewhere close to his own lodgings. But Mamadou had not betrayed him, and even now, when we offered to advance Mamadou money, he refused our help until we promised that we would not get the perfidious Jacob into trouble with his employers. Thus was Jacob Adjemon repaid with kindness for his own selfish and unscrupulous behavior.
Poor Mamadou, poor Jacob—doomed to return to Hôtel Ivoire, we felt depressed. It seemed to strike us all at once that in hundreds of miles of travel overland in Ivory Coast, the only animal we ever saw outside the parks was that lone monkey on the westward road from Boundiali, and that the greatest concentration of wild mammals we had seen in the whole country were the fruit bats in the city park here in Abidjan. Nor did anything that we could learn of other countries in West Africa promise much better.
Earlier today, passing the road that leads toward Grand Lahou, Jacob had said, “In Abidjan, when we wish to regard elephants, we simply fly in an airplane to Grand Lahou, and there look down upon them.” Mamadou, at first impressed but now fed up with the grand airs of his compatriot, had stared at me to see if I believed this arrant nonsense. But perhaps Jacob had sensed that we were saddened by the disappearance of wild animals from Ivory Coast, as well as by the many signs that for all the “reserves” that have been set aside, for all the governments’ proclamations of intention, the fatal destruction of West African wildlife still continues. The arrays of steel gin traps in the Man market, the gangs of hunters on the roads, the hunting dog with the rattan hoops, the “bush meat” offered in back-country restaurants, the unobstructed poaching that, for lack of serious intervention, will soon destroy the remnant creatures, and thereby aggravate the protein lack in all these overpopulated countries—this obliteration of the native fauna is a crucial loss throughout West Africa, for reasons that go very much deeper than that “conservation of a priceless heritage” that white well-wishers like to prate about, having practiced it too late in their own lands. The animals are the traditional totems and protectors of the clans, the messengers of the One God that most Ivoiriens still perceive in all creation, the links with the world of the unseen, with the cosmic balance. Now the animals are gone, or at least so scarce that they have no reality in daily life. And perhaps even an urban boy like Jacob Adjemon, who has not bothered to go home to his Beté people in the last eight years, who is proud of the Hôtel Ivoire and disdainful of “the bush,” now grows uneasy. And so he says in a bored voice, “In Abidjan, when we wish to regard elephants, we simply fly in an airplane to Grand Lahou, and there look down upon them.”
* Geoffrey Gorer, African Dances (1934).
* Advisory Report on Wildlife and National Parks in Nigeria, 1962; G. A. Petrides.
* 1970 IUCN Report,
* B. Heuvelmans, Two Unknown Bipedal Anthropoids, Rome: Genus, 1963.
OF PEACOCKS
AND GORILLAS: ZAIRE
(1978)
In 1913 the young ornithologist James Chapin of the American Museum of Natural History, doing fieldwork in what was then the Belgian Congo, discovered the rufous wing quill of an unknown bird in an African’s headdress. He kept that feather for many years without finding anyone, white or black, who could identify the bird. In 1934, in the African museum at Tervueren, near Brussels, he matched the feather to the hen of an old pair of stuffed fowls that were thought to be juvenile domestic peacocks. The cockbird was dark blue and green, with a russet neck patch, while the hen was green above, russet beneath. The hen had peafowl-like eyes on the green feathers, and both sexes had peafowl-like crests; and while not true peafowls (Pavo), they turned out to be the only known African representatives of the great pheasant tribe, Phasianidae, separated by thousands of miles of desert and mountain from their nearest relatives in Asia. Subsequently, in 1949, the animal collector Charles Cordier obtained a small number of these birds trapped by local people near the lowland village of Utu, in the Congo basin, though he himself never saw the species in the wild. These seven “Congo peacocks” (Afropavo congensis) were exhibited at the Bronx Zoo in the 1950s, and subsequently a small captive flock was established at the Antwerp Zoo.
In the spring of 1978 Audubon magazine sent a small expedition in search of Afropavo congensis. Its leader was the British ornithologist Alec Forbes-Watson, who had known James Chapin and still regards him as “the best ornithologist who ever worked in Africa”; according to Forbes-Watson, Chapin was the only known non-African who had ever seen the Congo peacock in the wild. Alec was to be assisted by his friends George Plimpton and George’s sister Sarah, who had been keen birdwatchers as children and have taken it up again in recent years; while in Africa they would also search for the three other “most desirable” birds on this huge continent—not “little brown birds,” as Forbes-Watson describes them, but species that are spectacular as well as rare. “The peacock is first, indubitably,” Alec had told me in Nairobi in 1977. “Then comes the shoebill stork, the lyre-tailed honeyguide, and the bareheaded rock fowl. On the fifth bird, no two ornithologists would agree; you’d get an argument whichever one you chose. The Pel’s fishing owl, perhaps, or the yellow-crested helmet shrike, or the wattled crane.” He discounted as unrealistic any search for the Prigogine’s owl, or Congo bay owl, a nocturnal forest relative of the barn owls with a masklike face; Phodilus prigoginei, known from a single specimen found dead in 1951 at Muusi in the Bukavu highlands, has never been observed alive. Unlike Afropavo, it belongs to the same genus and resembles the Asian form, P. badius, and therefore its voice might be similar as well (for those who might wish to listen for it, the call of the Asian owl has been described as a high, whistling ülee-uu üwee üwee üwee üwee.) Alec himself had already seen the lyre-tailed honeyguide and the rock fowl, both of which occur on Mount Nimba in Liberia; as far as was known, the Congo peacock (if it still existed) was confined to the lowland forests of Zaire. For the shoebill, the most accessible location seemed to be the Bangweulu swamp in Za
mbia.
My hope was to join Forbes-Watson and the Plimptons at Mount Nimba in late March 1978 in time to see the rock fowl and the honeyguide, then accompany them on the search for Afropavo in Zaire. On Friday, March 24, I was at Man in western Ivory Coast, where I was assisting in a wildlife survey; Mount Nimba was less than a hundred miles away. But local informants assured me the journey was not possible, and by the time I’d made my way back to the coast and got a flight to Roberts Field, Monrovia, it was already Monday afternoon, when my friends would be preparing to depart Mount Nimba. Frustrated, I remained at the airport hotel.
Plimpton turned up early on Tuesday, between plumages. He was heeled over in the hot and humid sun by random baggage that included a stray tripod without telescope, and he wore a trim street hat, hot woolen blazer, soiled bush shirt, and checked Bermuda shorts. His face was flushed with sunburn and the heat, and his very long pale legs were livid from attacks by jungle insects—here was a birdman, tried and true! We spent an agreeable morning at the bar celebrating his tenth wedding anniversary and making plans for a rendezvous a fortnight later in Zaire. At Mount Nimba, he said, all three of them had seen the rock fowl (which, like Afropavo and Prigogine’s owl, may derive from an invasion of Asian fauna in the far past, and is separated from its closest relatives by thousands of years as well as miles), and Alec and Sarah had every hope of catching up with the lyre-tailed honeyguide this very day. He had heard there was a track across the Liberian frontier that joined the road to Man, and he regretted that I had not found it.
Having wasted three days in airports and hotels, I hoped Plimpton was mistaken, but Forbes-Watson, arriving the next morning, assured me he was not; a new road across the border to Mount Nimba had been put through about three months before, he said, ordering a beer and sitting back to enjoy my expression. Had I used it, he continued, I would certainly have seen both the rock fowl and the honeyguide, which he and Sarah had observed in its extraordinary courtship flights the day before. (It was James Chapin who had first linked the lyre-tailed honeyguide to the weird “song” it makes at courtship time with the odd curving feathers of its tail.) Alec happened to know that I had already seen the shoebill stork in the great marsh called the Sudd, in the south Sudan, and he regretted my bad luck even as he took delight in my chagrin: “You know, of course, that had you been with us yesterday, you would now be the only living ornithologist to have seen three of our four birds.” Because our plane had broken down in Dakar and would not arrive here until next daybreak, eighteen hours late, I spent yet another day of airport life digesting this exasperating news and taking such comfort as I could in the lovely pratincoles that coursed at dusk along the jungle walls of the St. Paul River. To console me Alec pointed out my first white-throated blue swallow, which sat dejectedly on the pilings of the hotel dock.
While still in London Forbes-Watson had tried to make connecting reservations that would take us on from Kinshasa, east of Zaire’s Atlantic coast, to Bukavu, in the center of the continent, but Air Zaire had not once answered its phone. Arriving in Kinshasa on Thursday morning, March 30, we were informed that there was not room on any flight to Bukavu until the following Tuesday. After a number of dispiriting encounters with lesser officials, we boldly sought out the chef de base, in charge of the whole airport, who promptly called in the Air Zaire man and ordered him to put us on the next day’s flight to Goma, whether there was room or not. In Goma we would surely find a means of reaching Bukavu, eighty miles off to the south. Anything was better that staying in Kinshasa, where the rains had arrived in flood just two days before and where we would certainly go broke in very short order. Zaire has been staggered by inflation since the drastic fall in the world price of copper ore in 1974, and its transportation difficulties, always serious in a land so vast (“Without a railroad, the Congo isn’t worth one red cent!” declared Henry Morton Stanley), have been severely compounded by the escalating price of fuel; advertisements in the Kinshasa paper offer new cars ordered from Europe for which the owners have not bothered to turn up.
The city on the Zaire River (formerly the Congo) seems haunted by the corruption and brutality of its days as Léopoldville, seat of power of the cruel and terrible King of the Belgians, whose “Congo Free State,” with its murderous abuse of conscripted labor (the Zairois estimate that ten million people died in the period between 1880 and 1910) continued the depopulation of this shadowed country that the terrible days of slaving had begun. The Belgian Congo colonial administration, though less brutal, continued the exploitation of the country while doing nothing to educate the people for the transition that was already inevitable, and when independence came at last, in 1960, there was no bureaucratic structure to maintain order. The consequence was anarchy and chaos, including the murder of the legitimate prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, the only leader with a national following, followed by installation of a puppet colonel who would dutifully endorse the further exploitation of the country’s resources.
The saying “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” is bitterly true in the former Belgian Congo. Some privileged blacks now share the booty with the whites (in 1972, Zaire imported more Mercedes automobiles that any country in the world), but as in the colonial days the land is being ransacked by foreign investors, and whole forests will fall for the enrichment of a few, with no thought whatever for the people or the future. To a degree unusual even in modern Africa, graft and corruption are a way of life, and their chief proponent is President-for-Life Mobutu Sese Seko, who was imposed on a war-weary land by American and European interests. (In September of 1960 this Colonel Mobutu, thrust forward by the United States, seized control of the central government from the legitimate prime minister Lumumba. In 1965, he consolidated his military dictatorship, and he has ruled the country ever since. As in the case of Houphouët-Boigny, Idi Amin, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, and many other African despots, Mobutu is assumed to have acquired an immense personal fortune at the expense of his precarious new nation.) Even as this sick old capital of King Léopold sags and collapses, Mobutu spends millions on his play city at his home village Gbadolite, south of the Ubangi, complete with unused international airport, two presidential palaces, a Swiss dairy farm, and elaborate plans for a private Disneyland. With a personal fortune of four billion dollars, skimmed from his patrons’ exploitation of Zaire’s immense natural resources in copper, industrial diamonds, gold, cobalt, timber, and water, Mobutu can afford it. In this huge, famine-haunted country where next to nothing is undertaken for the public welfare, our man in Zaire is the richest ruler in all Africa and perhaps the world.
The scattered vehicles that pass in the night streets are mostly old taxis or expensive cars belonging to the prospering Europeans or to favored Zairois in the good graces of the president. As if oblivious of human life, the automobiles speed through the hordes of Africans who wander the dark and dingy streets in quest of some means of survival, and the hordes close again behind them. The rotting old colonial mansions use spiked fences and watchdogs and armed guards to ward off refugees from the starving countryside, whose tin huts and shantytowns and half-finished or burned-out cement-block shelters crowd right up to their barbed-wire walls and spread like a crusting mold along each potholed boulevard and muddy byway. To forestall starvation, the refugees grow vegetables in the gaps in the cracked concrete of the broken city. In the utter breakdown of municipal systems, there is no way to control Kinshasa’s population, which is thought to be close to four million, and this in a city that entirely lacks the most rudimentary sanitation system. Litter and sewage have become a part of the human habitat. At N’dola airport, where the refugees overflow the ramshackle hangars and abandoned service buildings, human excrement is all over the runways.
The Zairois seem proud of their one city, which they refer to affectionately as “Kin.” To the Europeans, mostly Belgian, who put up with life in this depressing place because it is so profitable, Kin is known as Poubelleville, or Gar
bage Can Town.
Zaire is eighty times the size of Belgium—larger, in fact, than all of Europe—and the next day we flew a thousand miles in order to reach Goma, which lies on the frontier with Rwanda. At Goma airport, awaiting our baggage, we discovered that another Air Zaire plane out on the airstrip was the connecting flight to Bukavu, the only one that would leave before next week. Air Zaire at Kinshasa had not told us of this plane, far less booked us on it, though they knew we wished to go to Bukavu; perhaps they resented the intercession on our behalf by the chef de base, but more likely they knew nothing about it. The Goma agents would not discuss the matter until we had reclaimed our baggage, by which time the plane was filled, or so they said; we later learned from passengers who made this flight that a number of seats had been empty after all. The Zairois themselves refer to their national airline as “Air Peut-être” (“Air Perhaps”) and estimate that the chances of any scheduled flight being completed are less than fifty-fifty, often for no better reason than a decision by the pilot, almost anywhere en route, that he has had enough flying for that day. “Sometimes they change schedules in midflight,” one Belgian told me. “One never knows where they are. Perhaps this is why they are never hijacked.” For the next five days, in any case, there would be no plane to Bukavu, nor (for want of fuel) was there a bus, nor a hired car for less than $350, nor any space on the Sunday boat south on Lake Kivu.