African Silences (10 page)

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 Garbage 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.

George Schaller’s
The Year of the Gorilla
remains the best book I know of on this area. When Schaller came here in 1959, the year before Zaire gained its independence, Goma was still a neat and charming Lake Kivu resort, a “European center” for Belgian
colons
and tourists alike; by the time he left, in late 1960, the civil strife that would devastate the country had begun. Today the weeds have taken over the walks and formal gardens. The open-air cafés are gone, the pleasant pastels of the storefronts are sadly faded, there is nothing in the stores, and nothing works; the telephone is chronically out of order, the water system is breaking down, and nobody is left who can fix either. To escape the place, we decided to visit the Virunga National Park.

As early as 1889 Léopold II had set up reserves to save the elephants from black people in order that they might be killed by whites. Additional reserves were created by Prince Albert in 1890, but the Virunga Park—the former Albert National Park, in what was then the Belgian Congo—was the first true national park in all of Africa; it was established in 1938 on the recommendation of Carl Akeley, who had collected five gorillas here a few years earlier for the American Museum of Natural History. Since then the park has been considerably enlarged, before and after the independence of Zaire in 1960.

When I first came to Africa, in the early winter of 1961, it was assumed that the Albert Park and all its animals were
being ravaged and destroyed by the hordes of insensate Africans who were making life so miserable for the colonials; but this report turned out to be as exaggerated as many others, and much credit should be given to the park’s African guards, who went unpaid for several years and defended what is now Virunga against the worst of the depredations. At the park entrance there is a plaque commemorating the brave twenty-three who “died for the elephants” in those dark years. Jacques Verschuren, who wrote a moving book about these men, is the former director of the Institut National pour la Conservation de la Nature (INCN), which administers Zaire’s seven national parks; these include vast forest tracts in the interior as well as the group of beautiful reserves among lakes and mountains of the Rift. Because of a strong park tradition as well as a small human population, all seven parks continue to do well.

On Saturday morning we arranged a ride to Nyiragongo, the southernmost of the Virunga volcanoes, which rise to the south of Ruwenzori or “Mountains of the Moon,” just below the equator between East Africa and northern Zaire. Several of the “fire mountains” are still active, and only a year before, on January 10, 1977, Nyiragongo quite suddenly erupted. As five coulees, or lava rivers, poured down its steep sides, the entire Bahutu village of Bukuma utterly vanished and more than two hundred people died. Destroying the prison and many other buildings, the flow reached the northern outskirts of the town of Goma in just twenty-seven minutes, rolling within a half mile of the airport, with its large depot of fuel; had the lava touched that depot, it is said, half of Goma would have been destroyed. The northward road into the Virungas vanished, and not for a month did the lava cool sufficiently to carve out the new road; a pretty graveyard in a grove of tall mimosas not far east of the road was one of the few locations that was spared. A few scorched skeletons of trees still
stand in the shining fields, and these are being chopped for fuel by survivors of the cataclysm, who straighten here and there, in silhouette, to watch us pass.

Climbing the hill, we look across to dense plantations in Rwanda. This region of volcanic ash forms a rich and well-drained soil—one of the few good soils in all of Africa—and Kivu Province, despite civil wars and economic setbacks, continues to produce good crops of tea and coffee, bananas, cinchona, and pyrethrum. There is no smoke from the volcanoes, and on islets of high ground new gardens and banana groves have been established, but one day in the not far distant future, Nyiragongo—the mother of the spirit Gongo—will erupt again.

Augustus Gabula, the young Bahutu warden who guided us uphill on Nyiragongo, was near the summit when the 1977 eruption took place; his family in their village on these lower slopes had four minutes to flee before their hut was destroyed. Augustus himself ran down through a tongue of forest between lava rivers, his path broken by an elephant herd that was stampeding off the mountain. Perhaps because, as mammalogist Jean Dorst informs us, “Having the legs straight with the bones placed vertically one above another, they are quite incapable of leaping,” not all of Nyiragongo’s elephants survived. Augustus led us two or three miles up the main flow to a place where a group of six beasts had been overwhelmed; probably they were asphyxiated as this outpouring of lava burned up the oxygen across the mountainside. Among the hollows in the lava field are scattered a group of amorphous molds left by burnt hardwood trees and large white bones. A few liverworts and
Osmunda
ferns now prosper in these crannies. In one of the graves the whole form of the elephant is still discernible, even the holes made by its tusks (long since removed) and a sad, curved tube of stone where the trunk lay. These were forest elephants (once considered a distinct species), and some of them were young. Although there is
no forage near the graves, only marigold, coarse bracken, and shrubby acanthus with pale lavender thorned flowers, a number of elephants have made their way out onto the cooled lava and communed for a time with the six encased in stone, to judge from the copious amount of dung around the gravesites.

Toward noon, clouds shift and rain comes blowing through the forest, leaving behind a hot and humid sun. The Kivu-Ruwenzori chain is the heart of the African highland-forest habitat, which has outposts in Ethiopia, in the Kenya highlands, and on Mount Meru and Mount Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania, as well as far westward on Mount Cameroon. All of these places share many species of flora and fauna. At the lava’s edge broad carpets of large pale yellow composites mark the transition zone, and within the forest the tree limbs are thickened by moist gardens, mostly fern and orchid. The flowers I recognize are pink
Impatiens
, peas, the gloriosa lily, and a large hibiscus with blossoms of a dark, sinister lavender. Strangely, butterflies are few, and other than elephant trails, with their fresh dung, there is little sign of animals. But a small troop of the beautiful L’Hoest’s monkey barks at our appearance, then retreats with dignity across a tongue of lava; these semiterrestrial cercopithecines are shining black with a bright chestnut oval patch from the shoulders to the base of the long tail and with a striking mass of fluffy white whiskers, and one has an infant clasped to her belly. Compared with its relatives, the mona and blue monkeys, which are widespread in West and East Africa, respectively, the L’Hoest’s monkey has an odd, small, scattered range, being confined to the mountains of eastern Zaire, Mount Cameroon, and the island of Fernando Poo, in the Gulf of Guinea.