African Silences (2 page)

These journeys comprise the first two sections of this book. In 1980, I joined a safari into remote regions of the Selous Game Reserve, in Tanzania, and in the winter of 1986 I returned to Central Africa, accompanying ecologist David Western, director of the New York Zoological Society’s Wildlife Conservation International, on the expedition
described in the main section of the book. We planned a survey of the Congo Basin—Central African Republic, Gabon, Zaire—with the primary aim of determining the status of the small forest elephant, whose ivory was beginning to replace the larger ivory of the bush or savanna elephant in the world markets; we also hoped to shed some light on the elusive and mysterious “pygmy elephant,” which had been reported from these central forests for nearly a century. In Haut-Zaïre, we would have a look at the last small group of northern white rhinoceros that have survived the wars and poaching in their native range (all other white rhinos not in zoos have been introduced in other countries, from Kenya to South Africa). On our return, we hoped to join an okapi research project in Zaire’s Ituri Forest, home of the Mbuti Pygmies, perhaps the last large group of hunter-gatherers left on earth …

Seen from the air west of Cape Verde, at the westernmost point of Africa, in Senegal, the ocean sunrise, clear red-blue, turns an ominous yellow, and the sun itself is shrouded, ghostly, in this dust of the northeast trade wind of the dry season, known as the
harmattan
, that blows across the great Sahara desert. White birds and wave crests fleck a gray-blue sea, and the lean black pirogues of fishermen are very small off the rocky islets called Les Iles de la Madeleine. On the bare ground of the high cliffs stand the white mosques at Yoff, and beyond, low hills of Africa rise like shadows in hot winds that tilt the ragged wings of kites and scatter the dead paper of the world across Dakar.

Arriving in Dakar on a Sunday morning after a long night of no sleep, we are unable to find any office open, or anyone willing to rent us a vehicle that is up to the rough tracks of the interior; it is not until midday, after several hours of haggling in the great heat, that we come to terms with Mr. Baba Sow, a tall and august Muslim of the Ouolof
tribe, who is putting himself and his small Peugeot at our disposal. We depart in the heat of afternoon, proceeding south and east through the litter of small factories in the red-earth wastes of Dakar’s suburbs, along fringes of the thin eucalyptus trees that have been introduced all over Africa to replace cleared forests and combat the vast erosion that threatens to blow this whole continent away. On this silent Sunday afternoon, kites, pied crows, goats, and vultures rule the dusty streets, as dark figures in Muslim dress cross from one shade to another.

Even in late afternoon, the heat is terrific; the land shimmers in the hot breath of the
harmattan.
Senegal is the western borderland between the desert and the Guinea forests, and this region between desert and savanna, called the Sahel, is an arid country of poor soils, hundreds of miles wide, that stretches all the way east to the Sudan, and its parched thornbush of baobab and scrub acacia, red termite hills, starlings and hornbills, is very similar in aspect to the
nyika
of East Africa; when a ring-necked dove crosses the road, I know I am in Africa again. As the road moves south and east, this thornbush rapidly gives way to an open woodland and long-grass savanna, known to ecologists as the West Sudan or Sudanian Zone, that separates the Sahel and the equatorial forest for four thousand miles, all the way east across Africa to the Nile. In the savanna, small villages of thatched huts, the thatched huts clustered in green islands of banyan, tamarind, and mango, take refuge from the heat and the bright wind.

This journey is a preliminary inquiry into what remains of the wildlife of West Africa, undertaken by Dr. Gilbert Boese of Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo; Dr. Boese, who based his doctoral thesis on the Guinea baboons of Senegal, has invited me along as an observer. I have never been to West Africa before and am eager to see how its people, wildlife, and landscapes differ from those in East Africa and South. Our first destination, some 350 miles inland, is Niokolo
Koba, in the southeast corner of the country near the borders with Mali and Guinea-Bissau, the first national park ever established in West Africa (1954) and the logical place to begin our survey.

Mr. Baba Sow says that Niokolo Koba, which he claims to have visited last year, is no more than three hours from Dakar, but apparently he is a dreadful judge of distance; when three hours have passed, we are not far beyond Kaolack, at least six hours from our destination, with some two hundred kilometers of rough red track between here and the next large town at Tambacounda. Baba Sow seeks to minimize this discrepancy with a speed excessive for this rough
piste
, so that we see little of the countryside besides red dust and blue sky. He is a good driver, with a keen eye for bumps and potholes, but his skill is repaid with a traffic ticket issued by two foot police who flag him down as he bores through an Ouolof village like a conqueror, scattering man and beast in all directions.

Though the ceremonial expostulation on both sides adds a half hour to our journey, it provides an opportunity to inspect these compact villages of square huts, mostly daub and wattle with looped thatching bound into a topknot at the center of the roof, each family cluster separated from the others by a fencing of upright split logs that support walls of raffia-palm matting. The Ouolof here grow cabbages and melons, maize and a few tomatoes, as well as the main crop of Senegal-Gambia and the foundation of its economy, the groundnut or common peanut, imported from South America in the sixteenth century by the Portuguese, who arrived in Senegal in about 1450—the first European contact with any part of Africa south of the Sahara. Near the road in every village stands an archaic red machine that separates groundnuts from their vine debris. The debris provides good fodder for the stock in this season of drought, when the high, pale, stalky grass is being burned and the earth is black. Goats, sheep, donkeys, longhorned
cattle, and even a few horses must be fed, for here as elsewhere throughout Africa, ownership is the foundation of prestige. The donkeys and horses serve mainly to draw the colorful small two-wheeled carts that junket everywhere throughout the villages, which are also provided with wayside benches painted in bright reds and yellows.

By late afternoon the trees in the savanna country include such familiar East African forms as
Terminalia
, the white-trunked
Sterculia
, and the dark, majestic winterthorn acacia. Even so, the landscape is a strange one. The variety of vegetation, not only in the savanna country but in what is left of the dry woodland, seems much greater than in East Africa, and many more species remain green in the dry season; that gray fierce aspect of the bush is missing. On the other hand, there is no sign of animals—a striped ground squirrel is the only mammal seen. Though bird species are few, the huge Abyssinian ground hornbill is abundant, which suggests an absence of large predators, as well as veneration by the tribesmen, for one is struck by the abundance of human beings. Even after dark, two hundred miles inland, where the square huts of the Ouolof are replaced by round huts of Malinke and Fulani, there are few trees between one small village and another.

At nine in the evening we reach Tambacounda, one thousand feet above sea level on the vast plateau of Africa; from here, in
wagons-lit
of the Chemin de Fer de Senegal, which had a certain elegance in other times, one traveled east as far as Bamako, in that part of French West Africa now known as Mali, and from there by one means or another to Timbuktu and Niamey, on the Upper Niger.

From Tambacounda, early in the morning, we head south to the Parc National de Niokolo Koba, which at the time of its establishment, after centuries of remorseless slaughter in the region, had scarcely any wild animals left. In 1920, the last damalisk (the western topi) in Senegal had disappeared, and both giraffe and elephant were near extinction.
A solitary elephant killed in 1917 was the last one in the Cape Verde region, and since there are no recent records for Mauritania, the elephants in Niokolo Koba are probably the last in northwest Africa. With protection, they showed good signs of recovery, and their number may now exceed three hundred, but in recent years the plague of poaching that has done such damage to East Africa’s parks has set in here, with special attention to elephant and crocodile, and so despite the efforts of two-hundred-odd askaris who patrol on foot, bicycle, and by pirogue, the elephants are declining once again. Meanwhile, in the 1960s, the giraffe became extinct, and an effort to reintroduce it from Nigeria came to naught when a cargo of groundnut waste intended to feed the captive group was sent back by mistake, so that the creatures perished in their cages.

Niokolo Koba—which presently includes more than eight hundred thousand hectares—is the last stronghold of large animals in Senegal. The relict creatures of the region were spared by the park’s remote location in the southeast corner of the country, in unsettled tsetse woods well south of the main trade routes. Watered by the upper reaches of the Gambia River, Niokolo Koba includes typical Sudanian savanna as well as the high forest typical of Guinea, which lies just over its south border. Therefore it can claim the only population of wild chimpanzees in Senegal. It also gives shelter to several hundred Derby eland, largest of all African antelopes, as well as the statuesque roan antelope for which the park is named: Niokolo Koba means “Place of the Roan Antelope.” Otherwise, its large mammalian fauna is—or was—quite typical of the Sudanian region, all across West Africa: buffalo, hippopotamus, warthog and bush pig, and such antelope as the western kob, the large western hartebeest, Defassa waterbuck, bushbuck or “harnessed antelope,” Bohor reedbuck, oribi, and a few species of duiker. Officially, at least, all the large predators are here (although the status of the cheetah is obscure). For many
of its species, if not most, Niokolo Koba can claim the most northerly as well as westerly populations on the African continent.

In outlying areas accessible to poachers, Niokolo Koba’s animals are few; one sees instead the round clay cylinders of the dead villages whose lands were taken as the park enlarged its boundaries. Then troops of
Papio papio
appear—the thickset, reddish nominate race called the “Guinea baboon.” (Because European scientists came here early, many of the original descriptions of African fauna and flora derive from Senegal; hence the prevalence of the specific name
Senegalensis
for such widespread creatures as the Senegal cuckoo, which I first saw in Botswana, thousands of miles to the southeast, and renewed acquaintance with this morning in the dump behind the Estekebe Hotel in Tambacounda. And since most of the early naturalists were French, the common names are mostly French, as well; the hartebeest is
le bubale
, the buffalo
le buffle
, and the kob is called
kob de Buffon
, after the eminent taxonomist of the eighteenth century. We see a white-tailed mongoose, a patas monkey, vervets, then the red-flanked duiker, stamping black feet and flicking its tail straight up and down as it regards us: like all duikers, it has short horns and short forelegs and holds its head low to the ground—adaptive characters for quick escape in the dense bush or forest that duikers prefer. This colorful species is common here and very tame—indeed, the tamest of these shy, small, woodland antelopes I have ever come across.