African Silences (13 page)

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!”

Finding their voices, the frightened guides yell at the gorilla,
“Wacha maneno yako!”
a Swahili expression often used to silence impertinent inferiors; loosely it means, “Don’t give me any of your guff!” One of the Bashi, Seaundori, is scared and delighted simultaneously; grinning, he first asks eagerly if all had seen the charge of the gorilla, and then, imagining he has lost face by betraying excitement, he frowns as deeply as M. le Conservateur himself and fires nervous and unnecessary orders. The visitors, too, are babbling
in excitement; only the small Batwa trackers, grinning a little, remain silent. They follow the gorillas, never rushing them, just flicking steadily away with their old pangas in the obscuring tangle of lianas. Even when the creatures are in view and no clearing is needed, the trackers tick lightly at the leaves as if to signal their own location to the gorillas and avoid startling them and provoking a panicked charge. This is the only danger from gorillas, which are as peaceable as man allows. Though a leopard has been known to kill an adult male,
Gorilla
has no real enemies except for
Homo
, and after years of protection at Kahuzi-Biega two of the three gorilla troops that are more or less accessible have placed an uneasy trust in man’s good intentions. For the second time they permit us to come within twenty feet before the bushes start to twitch and tremble, a sign that the ones still feeding in plain view might be covering for those that are withdrawing. And though our views are mostly brief, there comes a time when
Homo
and
Gorilla
are in full view of each other for minute after minute, not thirty yards apart. The apes are more relaxed than we are and also more discreet, since they do not stare rudely at our strange appearance; on the contrary, they avert their gaze from the disorderly spectacle that we present, lolling back into the meshwork of low branches of big leaves and staring away into the forest as they strip branches of big green leaves and push the wads of green into their mouths. At one point a dozen heads or torsos may be seen at once in a low tier of green foliage just below us; the black woolly hair is clean, unmatted.

I count twenty-six white human beings and ten black ones in a loose line on the steep slope, slipping clumsily on the slick green stalks cut down by the
pisteurs
; at the fore, amateur
cinéastes
are jockeying for position, while from the rear come muffled cries of pain. Once again our path has crossed that of the safari ant,
siafu
, which is biting the hell out of women and children alike. Forbes-Watson and I try
to move the tourists from harm’s way, but supposing us to be competing for a better snapshot angle, they keep on milling until it is too late. By now Alec is reduced to desperate oaths, apologizing to Sarah for each obscenity and vowing that never, never again will he observe wildlife under such conditions: I wonder what my friend George Schaller, who pioneered gorilla observations when gorillas were still considered very dangerous, would have made of this peculiar woodland scene. To cries of “Silence!” from the adults, much louder than the original disturbance, unhappy children fret in the dark forest, and the
conservateur assistant
, gazing at the sky, makes an erroneous forecast of hard rain by way of an inducement to depart.

In the confusion the gorillas sink again into dense thicket. Departing, they must cross the path made by the trackers in trying to head them off, and at least fifteen pass in view, including
le gros mâle
, With a sudden roar he rears up, huge-headed, from the green wall, as the nervous Bashi guides yell,
“Rongo!”
—“Bluffer!”—and the whites fall over one another in the backward surge: the head of the adult gorilla is so enormous that it seems to occupy more than half the width between the shoulder points. But the threat display seems perfunctory and rather bored;
le gros mâle
regards us briefly before turning to give us a good look at his massive side view and the great slope of his crown. Then he drops onto his knuckles once again and shoulders his way into the forest. From neckless neck to waist he is silver white.

The apes are gone, and man troops down the mountain. Despite the frustrating indignities of this hot day, Alec, Sarah, and I are exhilarated and excited, but for our companions their first sight of the wild gorilla was
“très fatiguant”
and even
“un peu déçevant
,” or so they write in the park register; one took advantage of this opportunity to register
a public complaint about the high price of film here in Zaire. Part of the group identifies itself as
“la famille Poisson”
and it may be that the others were
“la famille Boeuf.”

Before leaving Zaire I crossed paths again with these inheritors of King Léopold’s bloody legacy. At Goma airport, their voluminous luggage had been increased by enormous crates of vegetables, one to each person, and they were abusing Air Zaire’s black agent for charging them overweight; had they traveled this primitive airline for two weeks only to be repaid with his stupidity? (
“Merci, messieurs,”
the agent said.) Tourists would
never
come back to the Belgian Congo as long as they received such ungrateful treatment! The Belgians slap their money down, they wheel, they rant:
“Ça
non,
monsieur!”

Next morning we return again to the realm of the gorillas, taking a direction south and west and moving higher on the mountain. Still unsettled by the throngs of yesterday, we had suggested to the
conservateur assistant
that we would be happy to make do with a single tracker and no guide, but this antihierarchical idea upset his sense of order very much. (
“Les guides ne sont
pas
les pisteurs! Il y a le Conservateur—c’est moi!
Puis,
les guides!
Puis,
les pisteurs!”
) As special visitors with a letter from le Conservateur Mushenzi, we were entitled to two
guides
and three
pisteurs
, and that was that.

I had assumed that the small trackers were Batwa or Twa, the name used by Bantu speakers for all of Africa’s small relict peoples, including the Bushman and the Pygmy. But these
pisteurs
are called Mbuti by the guides, and Adrien Deschryver later told me that they are apparently Bambuti or Mbuti hunters from the Ituri forest to the north who were hunting gorillas in these mountains even before colonial times and maintain a small, separate village about five miles away from the nearest Bashi. Perhaps a certain mixing has occurred, for these little people are not “yellow,” as the
Mbuti Pygmies of the north are said to be, and may even be a little larger, though none of the three
pisteurs
has attained five feet. They have large-featured faces—big eyes, big jaws, wide mouths, and wide flat noses—in heads that seem too big for their small bodies. But it is the way they act and walk that separates them most distinctly from the guides, for their bearing is so cheerful and self-assured that one is soon oblivious of their small size; they move through the undergrowth and with it, instead of fighting the jungle in the manner of white people and Bantu. In the presence of the guides the leader of the three identifies himself as Shiberi Waziwazi;
waziwazi
, in Swahili, signifies one who comes and goes and is rather derogatory. But later he murmurs that Shiberi Waziwazi is the “African” name given to him by the Bantu, and that his true name, his “forest” name, is Kagwere. At this, the one called Kahuguzi says eagerly that he, too, has a forest name: it is Mukesso! And the forest name of the third Mbuti is Matene. Kagwere’s left hand has been shrunken to a claw by fire, and he and Matene have the incised scars between the eyes and down upon the nose that are a mark of the Mbuti. All three have lightly filed brown broken teeth and small, neat, well-made legs, which stick out from beneath diminutive olive-colored raincoats and disappear into olive-colored rubber boots so old and torn that one wonders what might serve to keep them on. This
pisteur
uniform, with rain hats to match, is a sign of high prestige, to judge from the fact that they wear it over rough sweaters in this humid heat even while hacking at the torpid thickets with their pangas. The color hides the Mbuti in these forest shadows, through which, like the gorillas, they know how to move in utter silence, even in these ragged rubber boots.