African Silences (15 page)

Deschryver had been acquainted with Jacques Schramm, who had a coffee plantation in this region before he became a mercenary, but Schramm had never been a friend. “He wasn’t doing what he did only for money,” Deschryver remarked suddenly, after a silence; he made a forward pushing movement with his clenched fist. “No, he was
hard!”
He nodded. “He was too hard.” Yes, he had heard that Schramm was still a mercenary in southern Africa—he shrugs again. “Who knows where that man is? He just disappeared.”

The airplane crosses the brown Lua River. The lone road has degenerated to a thin brown track with a grass strip down the middle, a sign that vehicles are very few—we have not seen one. A brown scar in the forest to the north, surrounded by thin, isolated smokes, is Walikale. Here the Lua flows into the Loa, and the land is flat, for the white rapids of the highlands have disappeared. “The Loa is full of crocodiles,” remarks Deschryver, coming as close as he ever comes to satisfaction. Not far to the west of Walikale the Loa will join the upper Lualaba, once called the Congo.

Under the plane the forest is primeval, without a sign of track or hut or smoke, green green green green as a green ocean, with here and there a glint of river under the islets of white cloud. The jungle stretches away under the
leaden sky two thousand miles to the South Atlantic and beyond, along the Gulf of Guinea, to the westernmost African rain forest in Guinea.

The strip at Obaye is no more than a minute tear in this green fabric. It is already in view when Deschryver says, “I don’t know whether my calculations are right or not, but Obaye should be just here.” Soon he is circling the strip, and he makes a false landing to clear it of Africans, who are already running in from all directions. The roar scares up a number of big white-thighed hornbills that sail away among the strange umbrella trees,
musanga
(almost identical in appearance to a South American forest tree of an entirely different family and therefore a remarkable botanical example of the phenomenon called parallel evolution).

The smiling people at the airstrip are Banianga, who as recently as twenty years ago were famous cannibals, selling off their excess captives to like-minded tribes; they practice the shifting cultivation of those early Bantu who came down out of Cameroon in the first centuries
A.D.
Standing tall among them is a big white man with glasses and neglected teeth who has been out here since the cannibal days as manager of the tin mines for Sominki. Victor Delcourt is surprised to hear of the quest for the
paon de Congo
, “Why, I have
eaten
it!” he exclaims. “Very good, too!” Yes, but has he seen it in the wild?
“B’en oui! Je l’ai tué moi-même!”
Twenty years ago he had seen one by the roadside, stopped his truck, and shot it. There seems no reason to doubt a man so innocent of his own accomplishment.

I leave Sarah and Alec in the hands of the only white man ever known to have seen, killed, and eaten
Afropavo
, We part with regret, for we have got on very well; there is talk already of another expedition, perhaps to one of the three avian regions left in Africa that Alec does not know. But since all three—Namibia, Angola, Ethiopia—are presently in a state of war, it is hard to imagine when this expedition might take place.

Deschryver is anxious about the weather; it is time to go. When the plane takes off again, the children run behind it, down the airstrip, and the big hornbills with white patches on their wings rise once again to flap and sail to far umbrella trees.

On the eastward flight Deschryver opens up a little and even speaks out once or twice of his own accord; when he chooses, he has a pleasant smile and a good laugh. But heavy weather is closing in behind us, and by midday, as Adrien had predicted, the weather has changed suddenly for the worse. Due to rising heat and moisture—the transpiration of this vast expanse of humid jungle—the rain clouds build up steadily all morning, and now they are bursting all around us, as rain comes in a hard patter on the windshield. Deschryver, frowning, forced off course, feels his way around the thunderheads, emerging finally well south of his intended route, at the northern boundary of the Kahuzi-Biega Park. A beautiful waterfall comes and goes in a mist of gray and green, and then we see that enormous rock, like a leaning tower, that we had passed on its south side on the trip west. “We are near Wagongo,” Deschryver says, and he points to the heavy cloud mass not far south that shrouds Kahuzi. “If I flew there”—and once again he makes that cutting gesture with his hand—“then we are finished. When pilots get lost out here, that’s it. So it’s very good that I know just where I am.” At Goma we would learn that due to weather his charter to the Ruwenzori had been canceled; we might as well have stayed there at Obaye.

The plane drifts along the western shore of Kivu, with its beautiful islets and sheltered coves hidden by the green steep walls of drowned volcanoes. The water turns in patterns of pure blues, deep, dark, and pale—whether cloud shadow or sign of depth it is hard to tell. Already wind streaks gather in the silver sheen that will form into gray chop this afternoon. At the north end of Kivu, where in 1912 broad coulees of lava boiled the lake, small craters
guard the shore, and one of these is far out in the water, forming an emblematic U just off the mouth of a hidden harbor. Nyiragongo comes in view, a dim shadow in the heavy weather that is closing off the north, a specter of the fire mountains, quite unreal, and once again I am struck by the great beauty of this heartland of a continent, exclaiming aloud that it must be one of the loveliest regions in all Africa. Deschryver nods, as if this fact were tragic; despite his Zairian wife and children, he is not permitted to become a citizen. I ask if he intends to spend his life here. “Why not?” he says, turning to look me squarely in the face for the first time since I have known him. “What else am I to do?” (He died in 1989, still in his forties.)

A few weeks later I received a letter sent from Paris by Sarah Plimpton. George had joined them, and although they had not actually seen the Congo peacock, they believed they had heard the
gowé-gowah
that Chapin had recorded. According to Charles Cordier the cock calls loudly in the night—
ko-ko-wa!
—to which the hen responds—
hi-ho, hi-ho
,

On the last evening of 1985, the all-but-empty flight from Dakar-Monrovia-Lagos to Nairobi is crossing the lightless forests of the Congo Basin, passing at midnight over the Central African highlands of the Zaire-Rwanda border, where the earth’s last bands of mountain gorillas sleep in their nests. Down there in the dark, the outraged Africans who are thought to have murdered the gorilla researcher Dian Fossey are still in hiding; Fossey is being buried there this very evening. On the screen is a South African movie,
The Gods Must Be Crazy
, a simple-hearted tale (though politically disingenuous, with its slapstick guerrilla squad of foolish blacks led by a caricatured Cuban). It’s easy to follow without the soundtrack, and I especially enjoy the wistful grace of the Kung Bushman, whom I knew as Komsai seven years ago when his band was living in Botswana’s Tsodilo Hills. Komsai had worked in South Africa’s mines, he spoke the South African lingua franca called Funhalarou, and perhaps this is why he was chosen for this movie. When I crossed
his path, he had gone back to the Kalahari and he was a hunter, with a newly killed eland in his camp, and the huge fresh lyre horns of a kudu bull, both taken with his bow and poison arrows. Somewhere I have heard that since participating in the film, Komsai has died; perhaps this is not true, perhaps the gods are not crazy after all.

At 2
A.M.
in the new year, I am met in Nairobi by the savanna ecologist David Western, a husky, trim, and well-kept Kenyan citizen of forty-two. Dr. Western is the resource ecologist for the New York Zoological Society, best known for its Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium; he is also pilot of the NYZS aircraft in which we shall embark the day after tomorrow on a survey of the rain forests of Central Africa, paying special attention to the numbers and distribution of the small forest elephant, which may be seriously threatened by the ivory trade. As Dr. Western—known since a small boy as Jonah—wrote me in a letter last September, “We still know remarkably little about either the forest elephant, which now accounts for sixty per cent of the ivory leaving Africa, or the Congo Basin, an area including about twenty per cent of the world’s tropical equatorial forests. The forest elephant is something of an enigma, and reason enough for the entire trip.”

The African elephant,
Loxodonta africana
, has been seriously imperiled by ivory hunters; recent analyses of market tusks show that the poaching gangs, having reduced the savanna or bush elephant,
Loxodonta africana africana
, to less than a half million animals, are increasingly concentrating on the much smaller forest race,
L.a. cyclotis
, Unlike
L.a. africana
, which is easy to census by light plane,
cyclotis
spends most of the daylight hours hidden in the forest, and estimates of its numbers have been mainly speculative. Proponents of the ivory trade maintain that the forest canopy hides very large numbers of small elephants, while ecologists fear that in this inhospitable habitat the numbers have always been low. It is generally agreed that an African
elephant population of two million or more animals could probably sustain the present slaughter for the ivory trade, which until very recently, at least, has produced about seven hundred and fifty tons each year. However, computer analyses indicate that if fewer than a million elephants are left, as many authorities believe, then the species is already in a precipitous decline in which half the remaining animals will be lost in the next decade. The future of
Loxodonta
may depend, in short, on an accurate estimate of the numbers of the forest race, which would lay the foundation for a strong international conservation effort on behalf of the species as a whole.