African Silences (23 page)

From the north, across the river, comes a shot; four more ring out in the next half hour. Aliende stops and shakes his head; any animals nearby are sure to flee. He is not a Pygmy, and he grows unsure as he goes farther from the river, for there are no paths. He has marked our course rather casually with panga flicks, and two or three times on the way back, we see him misread his own signs even before he backtracks to pick up the trail. Near the river, there is a sudden burst of rufous animals out of a thicket in the grassy swale—Bohor reedbuck, an antelope we know well from East Africa.

At the river, Aliende slips away in his pirogue, and, waiting for Slaus, Jonah and I sit on the bank gazing out over the water. So far we have gotten on extremely well, perhaps a bit better than I had expected, though we have been friends for fourteen years. Increasingly we can laugh at each other and have fun, and since, on this journey, we share many interests and concerns, we are rarely short of conversation. There by the river, splitting an orange, we are full of well-being and contentment. Jonah tells me about his father, a British building surveyor and city planner who worked for the colonial administration in Dar es Salaam thirty years ago. In his spare time, Arthur Western was a hunter, but, like many hunters in East Africa, he was also a conservationist, and he was instrumental in the establishment
of Mikumi National Park in what in those days was still Tanganyika. He was also an “honorary ranger” who was sometimes called upon to dispatch dangerous rogue elephants, and he was killed by such an animal in the Kilombero Valley, north of the Selous Game Reserve, in 1958, when Jonah was fourteen.

Jonah, who was born in England, returned there in 1961 to find work and complete his studies. “I was only anxious to get back to Africa,” he says. In 1967, he took up residence in Amboseli Park, in Kenya, to complete his thesis (“The Structure, Dynamics, and Changes of the Amboseli Ecosystem”), and for the next ten years he lived mostly at Amboseli, under Mount Kilimanjaro, which he still considers home.

On a reconnaissance flight on our last afternoon, we are sorry to see no elephants whatever in the pans to the south near the Congo frontier, and only a single herd of forest buffalo. But once again there are elephants at Dzanga, which seems to attract most if not all of the local population.

During the flight over the forest, the plane develops a mysterious whine, as some sort of minor oil leak from the propeller films the windshield. I notice that on the return flight Jonah crosses over to the Sangha River and follows it back upstream to Bayanga. On the ground, as we refuel and prepare the plane for tomorrow’s four-hour flight, I ask if coming back along the river had been a precaution, and he said it was. He tells me that that whine is nothing serious, the motor was overhauled completely before we started on this voyage, perhaps we will have it checked in Libreville.

Jonah seems preoccupied and even downcast; he says he is fighting off an achy flu. Walking down the twilight road toward the village, we discuss for the first time the fine points of a forced landing in these jungle rivers. “No margin
for error out there, is there?” Jonah murmurs, managing a grin, and I nod, relieved that he realizes this, too, and feels relaxed enough to say so. He describes how Douglas-Hamilton once conked out over the forest, and, with the usual amazing luck that has rescued our friend from one scrape after another, peered down to see the only clearing in the region, which he glided into.

Since Jonah is nothing if not stiff-upper-lipped, he rarely mentions the awesome inhospitality of the equatorial forest from the perspective of a single-engine plane, perhaps because there is nothing to discuss: in the event of engine failure or forced landing, unless a swamp or river is within gliding range, a light plane would disappear into this greenness like a stone dropped from the air into the sea. (Even if by miracle the plane managed a pancake landing on the canopy without disintegrating or exploding, there are no low limbs on the forest trees, and the injured passengers might find themselves confronted with a jump of at least a hundred feet into the gloom below.) It would do no good to worry people by telling them our course, which is usually remote from radio contact, even if radio contact would be useful. One’s best hope, all things considered, would be death on impact, since survivors could never be found, far less assisted. In short, why talk about it—the less said, the better.

The morning is hazy, and we do not take off until 9:30
A.M.
, after bidding adieu to our cheerful C.A.R. associates and kind Slavic hosts. Climbing above a lens of cloud, the plane heads southwest, crossing the invisible frontier and drifting out over Cameroon. An hour later, by rough estimate, Cameroon’s border with northwestern Congo falls behind. Occasionally we glimpse the green snake of a slough or a dark gray-brown jungle river, the scar of a burned clearing, or even an overgrown red road with the glint of a tin roof
at the end. (Later Jonah estimates that we were in sight of a swamp or river or some other such place to attempt a landing about a third of the time—optimistic in Richard’s opinion and my own, and not heartwarming odds in any case, quite apart from one’s prospects during and after such a desperate measure.

In Congo, we peer down at Souanké, a human outpost perhaps an hour from the Karagoua River and two hours from the Gabon border, at the bitter end of the most remote road in all the world. We cross the northernmost province of Gabon, then the southeast corner of Río Muni, a former Spanish colony currently known as Equatorial Guinea. Then we are back over Gabon again, crossing the steep green Monts de Cristal, from which fierce whitewater streams course down to the Atlantic. The Gulf of Guinea comes in sight within the hour, a dull streak on the gray tropical horizon. A rough crust on the sea edge is Libreville, the capital of Gabon, where we must seek permission to visit Makokou, in the tropical forests we have just flown over.

Makokou, on the Ivindo River of northeast Gabon, lies less than fifty miles north of the equator. The Makokou Institut de Recherche en Ecologie Tropicale, founded originally by the French, seems just the place for Richard Barnes to perfect the techniques for censusing the forest elephant, a task in which he is cheerfully assisted by his fiancée, Karen Jensen; Ms. Jensen has trained herself carefully in analysis of dung, which provides forthright and honest evidence of elephant numbers. An easygoing and informal young American from Long Beach, California, where they are to be married in July, she appreciates Richard’s rather formal personality (and vice versa) and suits herself up in full jungle regalia for their expeditions, just as he does.

Richard and Karen met a few years ago at Dian Fossey’s
gorilla camp at Karisoke, in Rwanda, where Richard was director of research and Karen was a research assistant. Both were impressed by Miss Fossey’s fierce commitment to and thorough knowledge of gorillas, and both were alarmed by her misanthropic personality, which expressed itself most disagreeably in her violent prejudice against Africans, including her own cowed and frightened staff. “They lived in dread of her return,” says Richard, “and when she arrived, the morale went all to pieces. She liked to abuse and humiliate African men, and because they had families, and jobs were scarce, they had to take it. We were told she would have poachers stripped, then thrash them head to toe with nettles; when she was drunk, she fired her pistol over people’s heads.”

One cannot question the veracity of Dr. Barnes, who goes out of his way to be conservative in his opinions, and Miss Jensen supported him in all he said. “At the end,” he told us, “she rarely went out into the field unless cameramen or reporters were in camp. She loved gorillas, perhaps, but she had no love for human beings. We were certain there was going to be violence, with which, on moral grounds, we didn’t wish to be associated. It never occurred to us that she might be the victim until we spoke with the American ambassador, whose comment was, ‘One of these days, they’re going to come after her with pangas, as they did Joy Adamson.’ Finally I went to the authorities and advised them strongly not to renew her visa. They had already heard how serious things were, but they said she attracted tourist income to Rwanda, which was badly needed, and they couldn’t refuse her. Under the circumstances, we resigned; we felt we could not work there any longer.”

Karen Jensen nodded her agreement; she has unpleasant memories of her own. That a colleague who started out so well (and won the admiration of such peers as George Schaller and Jane Goodall) should have come to such an
ugly end was very upsetting, but their impressions of the last years of Dian Fossey are widely shared by others who had dealings with her. At a primate conference in 1985 in San Diego, Miss Fossey informed Dr. Western that the only meaningful approach to conservation in Africa was to hand out condoms. “I thought I was talking to a crazy person,” Jonah says. “I told her I didn’t think we had much to talk about, and walked away. She was spitting mad.”

In his years at Amboseli, Jonah worked continually with Africans, in particular the Masai, whose cattle competed with the wild animals for the scarce grass, and he is convinced that conservation that does not cooperate with the local people is of limited value, confining the preservation of animals to the artificial limits imposed by the boundaries of a national park. “Putting a boundary around Amboseli did not protect it. If you work with the people, show them the benefits that may come to them, show them the compatibility of human use and conservation, they will support what you are doing, even help with antipoaching. This way, wildlife conservation can extend beyond park boundaries.” Jonah shrugged. “Things still go wrong, of course. The Masai
morani
are forbidden to kill lions these days, and so last year, to prove themselves, they killed forty elephants instead. Nevertheless, cooperation with the other interests, with the farmers or pastoralists, or with the foresters, is far more effective in the long run than fighting everyone as Dian Fossey did. For one thing, the governments can support both interests instead of always having to choose.”