African Silences Read online

  That afternoon, for want of a better plan, we went down to the national parks office to talk to Citoyen Mushenzi, whose name means “mongrel” or “bastard” in Swahili. Mushenzi, an amiable and helpful man who gave us permission to camp at Kahuzi-Biega National Park as well as a note of introduction to its chief warden, is said to be amused by his own name, though we did not feel it was a joke that we should share. At the parks office there was an infant gorilla, apparently abandoned by its parents at Kahuzi-Biega; the young gorilla was completely trusting of human beings, and when it reached out to me, I took it up as one would a young human, cupping its small seat in my hand. It was entirely relaxed, astonishingly so, a solid little coarse-haired thing of no more than twenty pounds that leaned its head quietly against my chest as it gazed about, eliciting an unfamiliar surge of maternal feeling.

  Jacques Goossens of the local travel office was kind enough to invite us out to his pleasant house for an aperitif in the late afternoon. On the way he pointed out a sort of monument, the tail of a white fighter plane sticking up out of a field. The downed plane had belonged to Jacques Schramm, the notorious mercenary for the international cartel that had attempted to separate the rich province of Katanga (now Shaba) from the new Zaire and thereby keep the copper wealth all to itself. As luck would have it, Schramm had not been aboard the doomed plane; somewhere in some warring African country, it was said, the man was still in his old line of work.

  Goossens’s house sits on the easternmost of the five Bukavu peninsulas, and the Rwanda border lies but a short distance away, across the swift Ruzizi stream that flows south into Lake Tanganyika. Except for a period in the late 1960s, when Belgians were made to feel unwelcome, Jacques Goossens has worked in this country for forty years, and he speaks the equatorial Lingala tongue that is understood in most parts of Zaire. Unlike many former colons, Goossens would like to see the new Africa succeed, and although he met Patrice Lumumba once and didn’t like him—“He was a big mouth,” says the gentlemanly Goossens—he thinks that Lumumba had no choice but to fight the secession of Katanga and try to hold this country in one piece. Like most people in Zaire, both white and black, Goossens supposes that the CIA had its long finger in Lumumba’s murder and that United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was murdered, too, in the same year, for the same reason: international big money was at stake, and both men were in the way. Hammarskjöld directed the U.N. attempt to conquer Katanga and reunite Zaire, and people forget, our host observes, that Hammarskjöld’s brother was a director of the cartel’s competition, Anaconda Copper. Goossens shrugs. It has been a long time since anything surprised this charming, wise, and weary European.

  In February of 1961, hitching rides south from Khartoum, I was stranded for some days in Equatoria. These were the bloody days that followed the Katanga secession, and Belgian refugees were streaming across the border into south Sudan; the small hotel at Juba was overflowing, and its grounds were littered with abandoned cars, broken down or out of gas. In mid-February I was at Nimule, across the border from Uganda, and, with two other whites met on the journey, came rather too close to being killed in the burst of anger that swept like a flash fire across Africa.

  Those days at Nimule I recall as the longest in my life. There was no point in trying to cross the border, as the nearest town was far away across an arid plain. For fear of missing the stray vehicle that might pass through, we waited forever at the guard post, and during this period—though we never knew the reason for the crisis until days later, when finally we got away into Uganda—Patrice Lumumba, the firebrand of the new Africa, was murdered at Katanga in the Congo.

  Overnight the friendly Sudanese became bitterly hostile. Guards and villagers gathered in swarms, their pointing and muttering interspersed with shouts and gestures. We could not understand what was being said, but it seemed clear that our crime was being white—so far as we knew, there were no members of our race closer than Juba, a hundred miles away—and that our fate was being decided. (Numbers of whites were killed that year in Africa; a thousand died in Angola alone.) Until then, the people of Nimule had been gentle and hospitable. The schoolmaster had offered us his hut, and even his own cot, and when our food ran out, the border guards shared their calabash of green murk and tripes into which three dirty white hands and seven or eight black ones dipped gray mucilaginous hunks of manioc …

  After a day and night of dread, peremptorily, we were summoned once more to eat from the communal bowl. Doubtless the schoolteacher had interceded for us, though he had been at pains to seem as hostile as the rest. I knew we must accept the food to avoid discourtesy, and the South African agreed; bravely he gagged down his tripe, retiring immediately behind a hut to puke it up again …*

  A fortnight later, on a plane from Nairobi to Bombay (I was off on an expedition to New Guinea), I found myself next to a mercenary pilot who was drinking hard, unable to get drunk; he felt threatened because he “knew too much” and was getting out of Africa as fast as possible. As I recall, this man was an Australian. He’d just come from the Congo, where he’d seen enough dirty work, he said, to last a lifetime; he described a recent episode in which some Africans had ordered him to fly a political prisoner to an airstrip in Katanga, where the prisoner was first beaten and then murdered; the killing bothered this man less than the sadistic beating that preceded it. It was not until long afterward, when the circumstances of Lumumba’s death became known, that I took this tale as seriously as it deserved.

  Considering the violence and rapine that have torn this land from the bloody slaving days of the early nineteenth century to that shameful period of recent years when Belgian interests, backed by international cartels, encouraged the copper-rich Katanga province to secede and thereby set one group of Zairois against another in a horrifying civil war that made a travesty of the country’s independence—considering that, it amazes me not that so many Belgians have been permitted to return here—for the Zairois know all too well that they need help from Europeans until a new education system can replace them—but that Belgians, French, and white people in general are treated with such politeness and forbearance. Perhaps, out of all their years of horror, the Zairois have acquired a sense of identity, a national purpose that transcends the tribalism of the past; perhaps their acceptance of the white man’s poor opinion of them has been displaced by a more cynical opinion of the white man. Since 1972, the Zairois call each other citoyen and are encouraged to discard Christian or European names in favor of “authentic” ones; thus, Alexandre Prigogine, a mixed-blood Tusi nephew of the celebrated ornithologist and the operator of a tour service in Goma, has dubbed himself Negzayo Safari. The women in their elegant long caftans braid their hair in marvelous patterns, while the men have abandoned European shirts and ties in favor of the abas-cost (à bas le costume, or “down with suits”), a light bush jacket. T-shirts are popular with the nation’s youth, particularly shirts that advertise professional teams in the United States, including a mysterious baseball club called the Boston Giants. Despite hard times and a harsh regime, the people appear happy, and perhaps they hope that the immense resources of Zaire will one day be well organized to the profit and benefit of the Zairois themselves.

  Most Zairians are wry about their president, Mobutu Sese Seko, whose somewhat foolish photographic likeness in big glasses, leopard cap, and leopard foulard presides over every public room and office in the country. At present his discredited regime is exceeded only by the governments of Equatorial Guinea and South Africa in the brutality of its political repression. The Zairois are beginning to resent this “leader” who is so fond of demanding sacrifices for the Popular Revolutionary Movement. The Belgians also bled Zaire, but at least they knew how to run the country.

  Drink in hand, I listen contentedly to the evensongs of a tropical boubou and a robin chat, as Goossens speaks about the great days of the early 1970s, when the prospects for Zaire and for the Zairois seemed almost limitless. At that time, he was stationed at
Banana, the seaport for Kinshasa and the only port on the short coast of this huge country. One day early in that year he received a wire from the ministry of tourism, instructing him to prepare accommodations for the forty-five hundred tourists arriving by sea for the world-championship prizefight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Since Banana could scarcely accommodate five hundred, the news of the huge ship threw the town into panic; huts for the tourist hordes were thrown up on every side without regard for sewage disposal or the threat of plague. But the Great Boat for Banana was as illusory as prosperity for Zaire; it never appeared, and Goossens wonders whether it ever existed at all.

  Returning from Goossens’s house that evening, we passed the car of Adrien Deschryver, who turned up next day to meet with us in La Fiesta Bar. At thirty-eight, Deschryver is a husky, blunt, laconic man with short-cropped dark hair gone a little gray and the restlessness of somebody in pain; though courteous enough, he offers little, averting his flat, pale blue eyes and smiling a private knowing smile that he means you to see. As a young man Deschryver was trained in taxidermy by James Chapin and had assembled a collection of some seven hundred skins of local birds. All of these, together with his library, were lost during the period of the revolution; he has never had the heart to start again. “C’est un homme bizarre,” Goossens had told us, accounting for Deschryver’s reputation for being difficult. “He has had a lot of trouble in his life. I don’t know if that is a good reason, but it is a reason.”

  Lee Lyon was with him several years ago, Deschryver says, when he saw two Congo peacocks, still alive, that were snared at Hombo; it was not true that she had seen the peacock in the wild. “She was never away from me,” he adds enigmatically, “so I would know.” He seems to doubt that Chapin saw the peacock, although Forbes-Watson loyally assures us that he did. (In Birds of the Belgian Congo, Chapin says that he hunted for the bird in 1937; he does not say that he found it. William G. Conway, the director of the New York Zoological Society, tells me that he once asked Chapin whether he had actually seen the bird and that Chapin said he had not. However, Chapin’s notes record that on July 16, 1937, near Ayena, “I noticed something dark running under the bushes of the forest floor, and called to Anyasi. He pursued it, fired, and then I saw a fine male ‘peacock’ rise with noisy wingbeats and escape.”) With Lee Lyon, Deschryver had hoped to film the peacock, but since her death he has lost heart for this project. However, our keen interest seems to reawaken his own; he agrees to join our party in the search. In Deschryver’s opinion the best place to start is the region of the mine camp at Obaye. He will fly us there early on Friday and stay over until Sunday or Monday, when I must return with him to Bukavu and go to Rome. Meanwhile, we shall visit Kahuzi-Biega and spend two days—we hope—with the gorillas.

  Kahuzi-Biega is in the mountains twenty miles above Bukavu, and at seven in the morning a taxi was found with enough fuel to take us up there, though not back; the driver planned to coast down all the way. Before departing, he stopped to borrow the spare tire that is shared by Bukavu’s old taxi fleet, and a good thing, too, as he had a flat not fifteen minutes out of town. Since his car had no jack, we found some villagers to help us hoist the taxi into the air while the tire was changed. Afterward we proceeded without incident uphill through the plantations, until the Hagenia trees appeared that marked the beginning of the montane forest.

  Since arriving in Bukavu three days ago, we have not seen a single tourist and had hoped to have the gorillas to ourselves. But as luck would have it, two carloads of Belgian visitors turn up right behind us at the village of Bashi Bantu people by the park entrance. We have permission to camp here overnight, and the head warden, or conservateur assistant, has promised us our own guide for tomorrow, but today only one guide is available, and so all visitors must stay together. These six people who are to be nos copains de safari intend to take with them a very large brown-and-yellow plastic ice chest full of lunch. Rather than lug it up the mountain by its handles, the unfortunate African assigned to it steps into the bushes and with his panga cuts some strips of flexible green bark for “bush rope”; with this he rigs himself a tumpline in order to carry the big chest on his back.

  Disgruntled, we walk through the Bashi village and follow a path cross-country on the mountain. Though still early, the day is hot and humid. Our little band, following the three small Batwa trackers—les pisteurs—pushes through tangles of coarse bracken, elephant grass, cane, and lianas between the tall trees and the overgrown plantations. Since there is little forage in unbroken forest, the gorillas are drawn to the abandoned fields of the Bantu peoples’ shifting cultivation, where the sun encourages a variety of leafy growth, and are often found too close to the villages for their own good. The trackers descend into swampy streams and up again into the forest, investigating the paths made by the apes and the freshness of their droppings; since gorillas are entirely vegetarian and must eat vast amounts by way of fuel, the droppings are abundant, large, and rather greenish, with a mild sweet smell.

  In midmorning there comes a sound of cracking limbs from a tree copse on the far side of a gully; the small pisteurs are pointing with their pangas. But one of our gaie bande, a silver-haired man who looked flushed even before he started, has not kept up; he is back there doubled up over a log, suffering heart flutters, attended not by his own party but by Forbes-Watson. “I thought I had a corpse on my hands,” said Alec later; he was unable to persuade the man to remove the cameras that were dragging down his neck. Meanwhile, I am warning his compatriots about nettles, about the sharp spear points made by panga cuts on saplings, about false steps, mud slides, safari ants—

  “Ngaji!”

  The first gorilla is a large dark shape high in a tree, a mass of stillness that imagines itself unseen. Then, near the ground, a wild black face leans back into the sunlight to peer at us from behind a heavy trunk, and the sun lights the brown gloss of its nape. Soon a female with a young juvenile is seen, then—le gros mâle! Voilà! There is high excitement as a huge silver-backed gorilla, rolling his shoulders, moves off on his knuckles into the tangle. The shadows close again, the trees are still. In the silence we hear stomach rumbles, a baboonlike bark, a branch breaking, and now and then a soft, strange “tappeting” as a gorilla slaps its chest; this chest slapping is habitual and not usually intended as a threat.

  Midday has come. The gorillas have retired into deep, hot thicket, and no one thinks it a good idea to push them out. The dapper conservateur assistant, who likes to be called M. le Conservateur, has come up with more guides, and trackers, leading a highly colored troop of tourists that also includes a group of adolescents. Vivid as a parakeet in a suit of green, M. le Conservateur strides up and down before the silent thicket, warning the whites of the dangers from great apes while declaring himself ready to assume responsibility. Clearly he senses a threat to his authority from a dashing Belgian in his group, whose playsuit, as bright blue as his own is green, has assertive brass studs up and down the fly; this fellow’s fingers are hooked into his belt whenever his arms are not akimbo. Frowning deeply to indicate the seriousness of the situation, the Belgian joins the conservateur assistant in peering meaningfully in all directions; their stance declares their intention to defend the women and children from attack by incensed gorillas that might come at us suddenly from any quarter.

  And so the apes doze in their bush, while the human beings wait dutifully in the damp sun. Pale children fret—and doubtless a few black hairy ones, back in the bush, are fretting, too—and a mother distracts her youngest child by swathing it like a mummy in pink toilet paper, thereby enhancing the festive colors of this jungle scene.

  A Klaas’ cuckoo sings, long-crested hawk eagles in courtship sail overhead, and from the thicket comes the sweetish chicken-dung aroma of gorillas, accompanied by low coughs and a little barking. It is a standoff. On one side of this big thicket perhaps thirty large and hairy primates are warning the restless young among them to be quiet, and on the other, a
like number of large, hairless ones are doing the same thing. But all at once the suspense is broken by the ceremonial opening of the plastic ice chest, which incites a rush upon the lunch; the meat sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs that appease the hairless carnivores assail the platyrrhine nostrils of the hairy herbivores back in the bush, for there comes a wave of agitation from the pongid ranks. The thickets twitch, shifting shadows and a black hand are seen; the humans stop chewing and cock their heads, but there is no sound. The gorilla, like the elephant, is only noisy when it chooses, as in the definition of the true gentleman, “who is never rude except on purpose”; and the sad face of a juvenile, too curious to keep its head low as it sneaks along a grassy brake, is the first sign that the apes are moving out.

  Gorilla gorilla goes away under cover of the bushes, easing uphill and out across the old plantation and down again into dark forest of blue gum, leaving behind a spoor of fine, fresh droppings. Up hill and over dale comes Homo in pursuit, but Gorilla is feeling harassed now, and Homo is driven back from the forest edge by the sudden demonstration charge of a big-browed male who has been hiding in a bush. An oncoming male gorilla of several hundred pounds, with his huge face and shoulders and his lengthy reach, commands attention, and when the black mask roars and barks, showing black-rimmed teeth, we retreat speedily. The gorilla sinks away again into the green. To a branch just above comes a big sunbird with long central tail feathers—“Purple-breasted!” cries our dauntless birdman. “That’s a new one!”