African Silences (14 page)

Before entering the forest the Mbuti set up a kind of altar of sharp sticks stuck upright into the earth; they kneel before it, chipping at the soil in a strange manner with their pangas and crying out some sort of invocation, then pluck
fresh leaves and press them down in seeming offering. Yesterday Alec dismissed this ritual as some sort of nonsense
folklorique
for tourists, comparing it to the “Chika dances” in Kenya’s Embu region, but later our kind friend Semesaka, headman at the Bashi village and a former soldier in the rebellion (known locally as the
Vita ya Schramm
, or “War of Schramm,” after that last and most notorious mercenary in Kivu Province), assured him that it was sincere, and so, today, we pay the ceremony more attention. Afterward Forbes-Watson asks some questions, but because he does so in front of the two Bashi, Kagwere is apparently embarrassed. He says what we had already supposed, that the ceremony is to help in locating the gorillas and to keep the trackers safe; pressed, he says in a false, wheedling tone that the
mungu
they are praying to is Jesus Christ. I watch Mukesso and Matene; they stare at Kagwere, look shy, then begin to laugh, and Kagwere is trying very hard not to laugh himself. We laugh, too, as Alec answers in Swahili, “Oh, come on, now, I’m no missionary!” At this all three Mbuti laugh much harder, but they cannot change the story now, not in front of the Bashi, who look from the whites to the Mbuti and then back again, sullen and mystified. So Forbes-Watson asks what the ceremony meant before the missionaries came into the forest, and the quickwitted Kagwere says, “How could I know? I wasn’t here!” At this all three of the little men roll on the ground, and even the two Bashi laugh, and the whites, too.

The trackers point their pangas at high forest to the south, consulting in a rapid murmur as they roll thin cigarettes with makeshift papers. Then they set off up the mountain in a small-stepped amble that reminds me of the Hadza hunters of Tanzania, checking gorilla droppings, following the gorilla paths in search of some fresh sign of feeding; a place is marked where the gorillas have exposed a whole
large bed of small white woodland mushrooms, and these will be gathered on the return journey. Tambourine doves hurtle down the path, and from the forest all around come their long, sad, falling notes; we climb onward as a green-blue stretch of Lake Kivu comes in view, down to the east.

Mukesso stops short, he has heard limbs cracking. We hear nothing. But Mukesso is sure, and Kagwere and Matene do not doubt him; the Mbuti strike off into dense jungle, making no effort to keep down the noise, and have not gone a hundred yards when they cross the gorillas’ path. The guides are nervous in this tangle, and even the trackers seem uneasy. They stop to listen every little while, ticking the vines and branch tips with their pangas to let the hidden shapes know where they are. One whistles to the others, backs away a little. There is a big dark movement in the nearest bush, only feet away. We see the branches move, glimpse shifting blackness. Then the apes are gone, and the Mbuti do not follow. This place is dangerous, we must wait a little to see which way the apes will go.

Not so long ago, we had been told, a gorilla had killed one of the Mbuti and carried the body about with it for several days, but like the story of the exotic past of the old steamboat
Lt. Col. Potopoto
, this exciting story is not true. It was a Bashi who was seriously bitten, not so long ago, when a panicked gorilla charged past him in making its escape, and this may account for the nervousness of the two guides. Most of the time Seaundori and the other guide, Rukira, are sullen and officious; no doubt they know that we don’t feel we need them in the forest, for the
conservateur assistant
is not tactful with his staff, to put it mildly. To track gorillas, to hack paths through the forest is Pygmy work; since the guides carry no rifles, like true askaris, they must know that they serve no purpose here whatever. Like people all over Africa who have lost touch with the old ways, they live in mixed fear and contempt of the wild animals. Seaundori yesterday, Rukira today, were unnerved by the threat display
of the great apes, although both must have observed it many times, and so, to save face, they shout a lot of senseless orders and answer questions in querulous, aggressive ways.

Eventually, though we hear nothing, Kagwere jumps quickly to his feet and heads away into the forest, hacking and clipping, with Mukesso and Matene close behind. They trace an old path for perhaps a half-mile, following it around the east face of the mountain, pausing to listen, moving on again. The creatures are now well below us, working their way slowly up the hill; the Mbuti have anticipated their route of forage, we have only to ease along the mountainside, they will come to us. And soon the Bashi, growing bored, stop ordering us about, even let us walk ahead so that we may observe the Mbutis’ deadly tracking. “Real bushmen,” Forbes-Watson mutters. “I love being with people like this.” I do, too, there is nothing I like better.

Soon a young gorilla comes in view, climbing high into a tree. From a point a little farther on, a vast female is visible, sprawled in a comfortable crotch, in sun and shade, perhaps fifteen feet above the ground. Avoiding our stares, she stuffs big, broad leaves into her mouth and pulls a thin branch through her teeth to eat the fresh light bark.

Slowly we sink down into the foliage. Through the wind light of the canopy the sky is blue, and to the nostrils comes the pungence of crushed leaves, the fresh green damp from this morning’s rain, the humus smell of the high forest. Overhead a honeyguide, a tinkerbird sing fitfully; in the thrall of apes we pay them no attention. Observing the big female as she eats, a big male leans back into the vines on the ground behind her; probably he is too heavy now to climb. And seeing his vast aura of well-being, one understands the Africans’ theory that the gorilla was formerly a villager who retired into the forest in fear of work.

Young gorillas come, still curious about the forest;
they play with each other and with the trees, using their opposed toes to brace their climbing. One juvenile lies belly down over a branch, all four limbs dangling; he rolls over and down, to hang by one hand in the classic pose and scratch his armpit. He has wrinkled gray bare fingers and gray fingernails. Briefly he roughhouses with an infant, who flashes a little pale triangle of bare rump that I had not seen before, and the Mbuti laugh, mopping the sweat from their wet faces with handfuls of fresh leaves. For a time the young ape hangs suspended by both arms like a toy gorilla; lacking the discretion of his elders, he leers at man in a thin-lipped, brown-toothed grimace that matches his brown eyes, those eyes with the small pupils in a flat and shining gaze that does not really seem to see us. The gorilla face looks cross and wild and very sad by turns, though scientists assure us that no primate but man is capable of emotive expression.

To sweet-scented dung, like rotted flowers, comes a yellow butterfly; somewhere unseen the flies are buzzing, and a tambourine dove calls. From the undergrowth come deep contented grunts, then stomach rumblings and the sharp crack of a branch that does not break the rhythmic sound of the females’ chewing.

Soon the last of the gorillas has swung, climbed, lolled, chewed, cleaned its bottom, beaten its chest in those soft tappeting thumps in different series, lowered to the ground the bellyful of vegetation that makes gorilla legs look small and thin, and vanished once more into the forest. We have watched them for an hour, and we are delighted; we talk little, for there is little to be said. On the way home the Mbuti cut themselves packets of bark strips for making bush rope and gather up the small white mushrooms to take home.

Deschryver had said he would come around on Thursday evening to confirm departure plans for Friday, and when he
fails to appear, we find ourselves fretting once again, in this continual frustration about transportation; even Alec, who has stayed calm throughout all the delays and difficulties, grows a bit morose. Neither of us is used to traveling in this helpless way, entirely dependent on expensive, uncertain transport, and we vow that it will not happen again. I keep on saying hopefully that Deschryver must have got in late and is sure to turn up in the morning; now it is 9
A.M.
, and still he has not come. We are just looking for a car to go in search of him when he turns up at the door of the hotel. He is ready to take us to Obaye, he says, but he cannot stay, since later today he must fly government dignitaries from Goma north into the Ruwenzori. Since otherwise I shall be stranded, I have no choice but to return with him to Goma, on the first leg of my departure.

At the airport entrance, under a big sign reading
TOUS POUR MOBUTU, MOBUTU POUR TOUS
, a number of ragged Africans are chopping weeds. As we arrive, the airplane of the U.S. embassy is coming in, and we wonder aloud why the United States maintains consulates in such out-of-the-way corners as Bukavu and Lubumbashi, in Shaba. “There is the CIA plane,” Deschryver remarks, and I ask if he shares the popular opinion that Lumumba was murdered at the instigation of the CIA, that CIA agents are merely errand boys for international big business. Deschryver shrugs as if to say, What does it matter?

Deschryver is worried about the weather, which looks heavy toward the western mountains; in this season the good flying hours are in the morning. We are airborne a little after ten, circling slowly in the single-engine plane before climbing westward toward Kahuzi and Biega. The plane will cross between these peaks, which, unlike the Virungas, are not volcanic but granitic, a part of the great central rift of Africa. The highland forest of great trees, many of them now in flower, gives way with increasing altitude to the light feathery greens of the bamboo zone;
somewhere below, hearing our motor, the gorillas may pause briefly in their chewing, though I doubt it. On the western slope, white torrents cascade steeply down into the Congo Basin, setting out on the long passage to the sea. To the north, leaning over at an extraordinary angle, a mass of granite rises out of the deep greens like a stone whale; otherwise the green extends unbroken as far out to the west as the eye can see. This is the Maniema Forest, a stronghold of cannibalism until after World War II, when measures such as execution may or may not have put the practice to a stop.

At lower altitudes a few Bantu huts appear; penetration of the forest here, Deschryver says, is very recent. He picks up the road that crosses the mountains and follows it north and west toward Walikale, less for purposes of navigation than because it is the only place to land in case of trouble. “Otherwise you are finished,” he remarks, gazing out over the green expanse and making a cutoff motion with his hand. He points down at the small village of Hombo where several years ago, in the company of Lee Lyon, he had bought a snared
paon de Congo
for about two dollars. “They sold it to us like a chicken. I gave it to the international research station at Bukavu, but it died.”

In 1949, as a young boy, Deschryver was brought by his Belgian parents to Bukavu. He was always interested in animals, he says, and after he completed school, he became a professional hunter—a very good one, it is said. But perhaps because of his training with James Chapin, he remained concerned with conservation, and in 1965 he requested that his hunting block at Kahuzi-Biega be made a national park; this was finally done in 1975. Though a few elephants still occur there, his main concern was for the gorillas, which were being killed by Africans for food. The gorilla’s range extends into these lowlands, and in 1975, at Deschryver’s urging, the boundaries of Kahuzi-Biega were considerably enlarged; the park now extends all the way
west to Utu and to Uku, in a vast tract that includes much of the known range of the Congo peacock. Meanwhile, Deschryver has been featured in two television films on the gorillas, both widely distributed in the United States and Europe.

In 1967, at the time of the
Vita ya Schramm
, Deschryver was forced to leave the country. When he returned about six months later, his house and property had been destroyed. “I lost everything,” he says, “everything,” and as he speaks, that sad and bitter mask tightens his face.