African Silences (26 page)

In the course of his African elephant survey in 1979, Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton saw a troop of little elephants on the sea beach at Iguela Game Reserve, here in Gabon. Douglas-Hamilton’s escort, Claude Pradel, the director of the hunting preserve of President Omar Bongo at Wonga-Wongue,
and a veteran of thirty-three years in this country, told Iain that these elephant were
assala,
which is the local name for “pygmy elephant.” If we wanted a look at the mysterious
assala,
the wild tract of thirty-five hundred square kilometers at Wonga-Wongue, extending inland from the coast, seemed very promising, since elephants were more protected there than anywhere else in this casual country.

Not without difficulties and delays, Richard Barnes and his friend Dr. Aart Louis, the director of the national herbarium, have received permission for a brief visit to Wonga-Wongue, and on January 22, accompanied by Dr. Louis and another Dutch botanist, Dr. Jan Reitsma, and escorted by a soldier of the president’s guard, we fly about seventy miles south of Libreville to a tranquil region of forest and meadows parted by clear streams that flow down from high grassy plateaus to the sea. Without much question, Wonga-Wongue, surrounded by vast marshes and lacking road access—one can only come by boat or plane—is one of the loveliest reserves in all of Africa.

M. Pradel lives year-round at the president’s camp on a wooded hill well inland from the coast, together with his wife, Nina, his nineteen-year-old son, Norbert, a German assistant, an African staff, four Bengal tigers, five puma from South America, a young chimpanzee, two zebras, and a very large monitor lizard, which resides in an empty swimming pool by the main house. Most of these creatures are the property of President Bongo, who is usually accompanied here on his rare visits by some other head of state who is anxious to shoot something. Thus Wonga-Wongue is exposed to hunting, as are Lope-Okande and Iguela, but the hunting here is as limited as it is infrequent. From the animals’ point of view, at least, it comes closer to a true national park than any wild area in Gabon.

Monsieur Pradel is away in Ivory Coast at the time of our visit, but Madame Pradel, a handsome redhead from
Toulouse, is very hospitable in her husband’s absence. She presides over an exotic living room lined with stuffed birds and monkeys, kudu and sable horns, a monkey-skull fetish, artificial flowers, photographs, amateur paintings, curios, and three saddles mounted on racks; one of the saddles is an ornate cowboy model acquired last year on a visit to Texas, where she also acquired the University of Texas T-shirt worn by young Norbert. The Pradels keep horses here but have not had much luck with them because of sleeping sickness and other, undiagnosed, ailments. “We’ve never kept a horse alive more than four years,” she says. “It’s very sad, watching them die.”

All three Pradels pilot their own airplanes, but Madame Pradel, who sees to Wonga-Wongue’s administration, has not left the reserve for the past two years. “What is there to do in Libreville?” she inquires, throwing her hands up in fine Gallic disdain. “I’m better off here. I don’t wish to
die
here, but …” She shrugs. The first few years of her sixteen in Gabon were spent at Makokou; she describes to Richard the gigantic Makokou elephants that are now all gone. But what she remembers even better than the elephants are the huge Goliath and rhinoceros beetles in the forest.

Madame Pradel confirms the presence of
assala
; just the other day she has seen a troop with a tiny infant “no bigger than a toy.” The presence of the infant does not fit our theory that pygmy elephants are nothing more than maverick young forest elephants, with or without precocious tusks, and neither does her account of a sick
assala
from Wonga-Wongue which after its death had been stuffed for display in President Bongo’s palace back in Libreville. Judging from the worn condition of its tusks, everyone who saw this little animal, say the Pradels, agreed that it was at least sixty years old. But inspecting the photograph that Madame Pradel shows us, we see what looks like a four-year-old forest elephant, even to the body hair found
on young animals. “The tusk wear doesn’t mean a thing,” Jonah says later. “Juvenile tusks often get chipped and worn, and look like tusks of older animals.” What we wish to do as soon as possible is to inspect these
assala
in the field, and dispel the mystery once and for all.

Norbert Pradel offers to guide us around Wonga-Wongue during our stay. Dressed in camouflage fatigues and cap, packing a pistol, Norbert maneuvers the family’s bush vehicle as rapidly as possible over the red sand roads. We flush one sitatunga, which has wandered up into the grasslands from the marshy lakes, but the only animals seen in abundance are red forest buffalo. Like the forest elephant, the forest buffalo is of the same species as its savanna kinsman, and it, too, is half the size of its savanna race and very different in appearance, carrying its much smaller horns as duikers do, swept back and tight for forest travel. Like their large relatives, the forest buffalo wheel to the four winds when panicked, nostrils high, ears wide and ragged, hummocking along on random courses that often carry them across the path of whatever it is that they are fleeing.

Some years ago, young Norbert’s father was nearly demolished by a
bouffle
that rose and pursued him after his bullet dropped it, and gored him twice before plunging off into the forest. “And that one was
dead,
” exclaims Madame Pradel later, ladling buffalo meat onto our plates; she tells us about a woman worker on the reserve plantation who recently survived a severe goring.

Because of its remote location and lack of access roads, Wonga-Wongue is virtually free of all but local poachers, who hunt for meat, and even these (from what Norbert views as a deplorable weakness in the tribal character) are betrayed by their fellow villagers at the first whisper of trouble. Only lately have commercially inclined outsiders started to appear. One such fellow was apprehended with forty-three decaying monkeys, which he hoped would still
be pleasing to his customers in Libreville after a journey of seventy hot miles in his pirogue. Much more serious, Norbert relates, was an episode in which a white pilot in a military aircraft gunned down a troop of elephants with rockets. The carcasses were bulldozed under by a confederate on the Wonga-Wongue staff, to be exhumed again when the ivory had rotted free. These people were eventually traced and arrested, thanks to Claude Pradel, who has earned a reputation for enforcing game protection in this country where protection is, at best, a quaint idea.

Even on the highest plateaus, where the grass blows to the horizon, remnant isles of trees rise from the tawny land. The botanists agree with Western that all this country was once forest, and that this vast empty savanna, like the one at Lope, was originally cleared and farmed by Bantu peoples who later fled the pillage of the slave trade. The ancient soil, its minerals leached out by sixty million years of rain, was weakened further, Dr. Louis believes, by erosion caused by primitive cultivation, so that the forests were unable to return. As in the savannas north of the forest, the impoverished grasses, which provide supplementary bulk to the large animals, are too coarse and poor to support the smaller herbivores; even the zebras of President Bongo seem to disdain them. These uplands have attracted some of the same bird life that one sees in the savannas of East Africa—eagles, larks, and swallows, the Senegal plover, the nightjars and spotted eagle-owls of the night roads—but by comparison, the birds are few, and of few species.

By the roadside I see the gleam of a large python, but unfortunately Norbert sees it, too. He yanks the vehicle onto the shoulder and runs it over, nearly losing control of the car in the jolt of the impact. Astonishingly the snake slides away. “Python,” he says, disgusted. “Maybe three meters.” I ask him rather sharply why he wished to kill it, and hearing no criticism, he answers cheerfully, “Because I do not like it.
Sont les sales bêtes.
”

In the late afternoon, a few elephants come carefully from the forest. Their usual habit is to feed all evening and through the night in the grasslands along the forest verges, returning into the green wall at break of day. Toward twilight, in a dusky sun, seven or eight are moving steadily through sand-colored grass along the distant trees. A solitary cow appears, then a young male, and, finally two cows accompanied by small young and a half-grown female.

Our young guide does not slow down when elephants are sighted, being of the opinion that the pesky things will head straight for the forest, no matter what, and that our one chance is to head them off with the speeding car. Given their chronic exposure to this technique, it was certainly likely that they would head straight for the forest, and all we see are baggy gray hindquarters being swallowed by the trees. But the last group is caught out in the open, and Norbert, cutting across country, rides right up alongside the fleeing animals. They wheel and scream, ears and tails lashing, and head back in the opposite direction, as we assure him we have seen enough. Unquestionably these are adult females with calves bouncing at their flanks, and they are by far the smallest elephants we’ve seen, not six feet high.

“Assala,”
says Norbert Pradel, pleased he has shown us
“éléphant pygmée”
at such close range. I ask him if these little elephants were average size for the
assala,
and he says they are, reminding us that “big elephants” also occur here.

Next morning, in dense dry season mist, with chimpanzees howling from the forest, we approach on foot a lone adult male at least seven and a half or eight feet high, by Jonah’s estimate. This elephant, too, has round small ears and lacks the protruding brow of male bush elephant, which would stand two or three feet taller at the shoulder, but his large ivory has the pronounced forward curve of the savanna race that we had noted even in one of the diminutive elephants seen up close the previous evening.

We had thought to encounter pure
cyclotis
rather quickly upon entering the equatorial forest, whether just north of the equator at Makokou or just south of it at Wonga-Wongue. What we had not expected was this very broad zone of hybridization in which large and small elephants coexist.

Traditionally paleontologists have believed that the bush elephant was the ancestral form, since its ancient bones have been found in the savanna. But bones don’t last long in the damp forest (or researchers either), and since there were no savannas in pre-Miocene times, the African elephant must have evolved as a forest animal; either
cyclotis
is the original elephant or it evolved from the original, with the bush elephant appearing later. The nonadaptive and inappropriate bush habit of destroying trees while feeding was adaptive in the forest, where light must penetrate in order to produce second-growth browse, and this, too, suggests the forest ancestry of
Loxodonta,
on which most biologists now agree.

The Wonga-Wongue animals come as close to pure
cyclotis
as any we have seen, not only in morphological characters but in size. But somewhere, Jonah is convinced, there must exist a population with no trace of hybridization, to maintain the genetic characters identified with the forest race. He supposed that such elephants might be found in south Gabon, south Congo, or southwest Zaire.

Throughout our visit to Gabon, we had to return repeatedly to Libreville, not only because aviation gasoline was unobtainable anywhere else but because special clearances were necessary for light plane travel to what were termed “inhospitable regions.” And it was at Libreville airport, on a dead, fetid morning, that we said good-bye to Richard Barnes, whose elephant expertise as well as taut logistical
preparations and good company had made an important contribution to our journey.

Richard himself had no regrets about our parting, since he doesn’t much care for light plane travel over long stretches of equatorial forest. “I’m awfully glad,” he said to me with uncustomary fervor, “that I do not have to get back into that airplane.” Had he known what awaited us over the next two days, he would have fallen to his bony knees in simple gratitude.