African Silences (19 page)

The eastern two-thirds of the Central African Republic, like northern Haut-Zaïre, is classified by ecologists as “Guinea savanna,” after the broad belt of grass and woodland extending eastward from northern Guinea, in West Africa, all the way across the continent into south Sudan and Ethiopia. North of the guinea savanna—a rolling plateau
country up to three thousand feet high—lies the Sahel, a dry grassland which, in the great drought that began about 1970, has been steadily invaded by the Sahara Desert. To the south lies the tropical rain forest, which extends from southern Guinea along the West African coast to Cameroon, widening out in the great Congo Basin and spreading eastward to the highlands of Central Africa.

This broad savanna with its sinuous reaches of riverine forest, stretching away north toward the Sahel, is entirely beautiful and awesome, and yet the great silence that resounds from a wild land without sign of human life, from which all of the great animals are gone, is something ominous. Mile after mile, we stare down in disbelief; we are not prepared for so much emptiness, for such pristine and undamaged desolation. Beyond Garamba we had encountered a few elephants, but these must have strayed out of the park, to judge from their great scarcity farther west. In hundreds of miles of unbroken wilderness, without so much as a distant smoke in sign of man, we see no elephant whatever, nor the elephant trails that give away the presence of these animals even from high in the air.

With its notably sparse population of human beings (the whole country has less than three million people, and a third of these, by present estimate, have crowded into the few cities and towns), C.A.R. would seem an ideal environment for elephants. Before 1970, there were thought to be well over a hundred thousand in this country, and as late as the mid-seventies, when elephants were disappearing almost everywhere else, it was hoped that this region in the heart of the African continent would survive as a last stronghold of the species. Instead, the animals were exposed to unrestricted slaughter, and official exports of ivory from C.A.R. jumped from four tons to a hundred and sixty-five tons in a single year. In just five years, here in the east part of the country, it is thought that four-fifths of the elephants were killed.

Jean Bédel-Bokassa, the “emperor” of what he called the “Central African Empire” until he was deposed in 1979, is said to have ordered the slaughter of thirty thousand elephants by helicopter gunships and other means. He wished to support his family enterprise, La Couronne, in its near-monopoly on ivory exports, which, according to the elephant biologist Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who made a continental survey of African elephants in 1979, were largely based on ivory illegally imported from Zaire and the Sudan. (Zairian elephants, he discovered, were also being massacred by government troops.) In 1980, after Bokassa was deposed, bans on ivory exports were announced in both C.A.R. and Zaire, but neither was meant to be enforced, and the slaughter continued unabated. With official reopening of the ivory trade in 1981, as Douglas-Hamilton pointed out in a paper presented at a wildlife conference at Bangui in late 1985, C.A.R. was the only country left in Africa in which ivory hunting was “entirely legal, authorized, and operational.”

In addition to the local people, the massacre attracted tough poaching gangs from Sudan and Chad that had run out of elephants in their own countries. The Sudanese favored camel transport and automatic weapons scavenged from the wars all around the region, while Chad’s wild desert horsemen stuck to traditional methods, riding up on the great beasts from behind and ramming their sides or crippling their legs with long sharp spears. (Out of thirty-two animals examined by a Peace Corps group in 1983, twenty-five had been cut down by spears.) Already “big ivory” was hard to find, and between 1982 and 1984, exports declined from two hundred tons to forty. In 1984, an air survey of C.A.R.’s northern parks sponsored by several international conservation organizations could locate no more than forty-three hundred elephants, indicating a decline of nearly ninety percent in just four years. As Douglas-Hamilton observed at Bangui, “What happened in
northern C.A.R. was caused by regional crises involving not only C.A.R. but Chad, Sudan, and Haut-Zaïre. Ten years ago this regional resource was beyond compare, five years ago it was in serious danger, today it is largely destroyed.” In recent years, Sudan, Gabon, and C.A.R., responding to international pressure, have ordered an official ban on ivory export, but nobody thinks that this has slowed the killing.

Ivory hunters and others also killed every rhinoceros they came across, since the price of rhino horn had risen from thirty-five dollars a kilo in 1974 to five hundred dollars in 1979. In 1970, there were twenty thousand black rhino in Kenya; today there are five hundred fifty, and figures are similar all over Africa; four of the black rhino’s seven geographic races are as precarious as the northern white rhino. In 1982, it was supposed that three thousand black rhino roamed the C.A.R.—the only significant population left in all of West and Central Africa. Two years later, the air survey noted above was unable to locate a single one. A few black rhino in Cameroon are the last of their species in Central and West Africa.

A parallel drastic decline in buffalo and Derby eland is partly attributable to a rinderpest plague brought by the starving livestock herds from Chad and Sudan that overran the northern parks as a fifteen-year drought all across Africa moved the Sahara ever farther south. Whatever the reasons, a great silence has descended on one of the last redoubts of wildlife on the continent.

Already much of the recent harvest was coming from the smaller forest elephant, whose straight tusks are composed of a harder, whiter ivory that is easily detected in the shipments. Ian Parker, a wildlife entrepreneur based in Nairobi and a student of the world ivory trade, was maintaining that about sixty percent of the ivory turning up in Hong Kong and Japan, much of it illegal ivory being exported through Burundi, came from the forest elephant.
Yet Parker, a longtime participant in the trade, was also claiming that elephants were still so numerous that tusks harvested from natural mortality alone would adequately support the ivory commerce, which handled an annual average of seven hundred and fifty tons in the ten years between 1975 and 1985; except locally, he said, there was no such thing as an elephant crisis, since at least three million elephants were still at large in Africa. Douglas-Hamilton, on the other hand, had estimated a population of 1.3 million, and was convinced that
Loxodonta africana
was already endangered as a species.

Dr. Western believes that even the smaller figure may be too high; the most recent analyses of ivory-trade records indicated that elephant numbers can no longer exceed one million, far less three. Between 1979 and the present, he says, the average weight of marketed tusks declined by one half, which meant that roughly twice the number of animals had to be killed to maintain that 750-ton harvest. It also meant that more than half the slaughtered animals were females, which in the old days were rarely shot at all. Analysis of ivory exports indicates that the average tusk weight is about three kilos, in an animal that formerly produced tusks of thirty-seven kilos each; computer analysis has shown that once average tusk weight falls below five kilos, a collapse of the entire population is at hand. The main source of these little tusks are juvenile males between five and ten years old—well below the age of reproduction—and mature females, twenty to twenty-five years old. Not a single tusk came from an animal over thirty-five years old, in a species which may attain four times that age. If there really were three million elephants, as Parker claimed, why was no one shooting mature males? And why did the tonnage drop off drastically in 1985 to four hundred and eighty tons, despite dedicated killing by ivory hunters all across Africa?

By using an arbitrary equation that correlates elephant
density with average rainfall, Ian Parker concludes that very large numbers of forest elephant—about two per square kilometer—are hidden by the forest canopy, a figure higher than the highest density found anywhere in the savanna. Dr. Western, whose own data Parker borrowed to construct his estimates, reminds me that elephants may eat three hundred pounds of fodder in a day, and defecate fifteen to eighteen times in the same period. “If you think of Parker’s density figures in terms of a dung fight,” he says wryly, “I can only say that you would never be out of reach of ammunition.”

As Western had written to me in September, “The discrepancy hinges on the different estimates of forest elephants in Zaire, and to a lesser extent in Congo Republic and Gabon. There is very little disagreement elsewhere.” If densities in primary forest are as low as he believes, then the African elephant as a species is in serious trouble.

The main hope of this expedition is to resolve that discrepancy once and for all. It is not that we are anxious to prove that the forest elephant is an uncommon animal—how much more exciting it would be to prove the reverse!—but that this proof, by dispelling self-serving data and wishful thinking, might lay the groundwork for a new era of responsible elephant conservation.

Bangassou, on the Mbomou River, described as a center of cotton, coffee, oil palm, lumber, and diamond production, is the only town in eastern C.A.R. (which together with Chad was known as Ubangi-Shari after their great rivers, in the days when both were still a part of French Equatorial Africa). We put down quickly to refuel at the Bangassou airstrip—we have no clearance—then take off again and continue west across savanna and forest to our next landmark, the Ubangi River. Below the Kouimba rapids, the Ubangi makes a great loop north. We do not follow it but
maintain our course, crossing the river and flying three hundred miles over the jungles of northern Zaire in order to meet the Ubangi once again where it sweeps south on its last descent to the Zaire River. On this leg of the journey, like the one before it, there is scarcely a sign of human presence—no tracks, no huts, no smoke, near or far—though an artificial city has been built for Zaire’s billionaire president somewhere off there to the south, at Gbadolite. Nor are there tracks of animals, nor visible life of any kind except huge black hornbills with broad white patches on their wings, flapping and sailing over the forest canopy and slow green rivers. Then the forest opens out on the great Ubangi, where a few pirogues hold more human beings than we have seen in the eight hundred miles since we left Garamba.

The river slides south to a great bend, and here rocks part it into rapids presided over by Bangui (the Rapids), the small capital of the erstwhile Empire of Central Africa. According to my trusty map, this pretty town inset in small steep hills lies just upriver from two villages, Bimbo and Zongo.

A French trading post established in 1889, Bangui, with its fine river prospect, is a typical colonial town turned capital city in the new Africa. Its decrepit villas, European cars, and more or less modern commercial buildings housing the remnants of colonial enterprises are set off by potholed red-earth streets, fragrant markets, head cargoes, traditional peasant dress, radio music and impromptu dancing, flowers and colors, and, everywhere, a restless proud humanity in bright clean clothes, streaming along under the trees to quarters that, for more people than not, will be tin-roofed shacks without electricity or plumbing.

The capital is set about with triumphal arches erected in his own honor some years ago by Emperor Bokassa, for
whom the imperial boulevard into the city from the grandiose and empty airport was also named. It is now called the Avenue des Martyres, after the two hundred schoolchildren who were slaughtered on imperial whim, with the emperor’s own wholehearted participation. Because Bokassa was a “charismatic” Francophile (he once presented a gift of diamonds to French premier Valerie Giscard d’Estaing), this by no means isolated episode disappointed his many French admirers, who for investment reasons had supported him long after his bloodthirsty predilections became known. When the schoolroom adventure drew international attention, the emperor and most of his country’s money were hurried off to La Belle France, where he was living in the greatest comfort and “was very popular,” or so we were told by his bewildered countrymen. (In October 1986, of his own accord, Bokassa returned to C.A.R., where he was tried for arthropophagy as well as multiple assassinations. The following June he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, apparently in the basement of the presidential palace, where he lives today.)