African Silences (27 page)

Heading southeast from Libreville to Kinshasa, in Zaire, on the first leg of our zigzag return across the continent, we cross the great Ogooué at Lambarene, where Dr. Alfred Schweitzer had his clinic, and continued southeast up the N’Gounié River. Two hundred miles out, the plane leaves the forest and crosses a broad country of marshlands and dwindling strands of trees. Here the forest ends. South Gabon, which we had envisioned as a last redoubt of the “pure” forest elephant, turns out to be a deforested land without visible life, only scarce and solitary huts with brown faded smudges of ancient gardens showing through pale weary greens. “Man-made,” says Jonah of this wasteland, and when I wonder aloud about the fate of the men who made it, he says, not altogether seriously, “America.”

According to our obsolete colonial air charts, the wandering red road that we are following runs all the way from Lambaréné to Brazzaville, capital of the Congo Republic, which lies across the Congo—now the Zaire River—from Kinshasa. (Like C.A.R. and Chad, Gabon and Congo were formerly a single administrative unit of French Equatorial Africa.) But not far beyond the Congo border the road diminishes into smaller tracks that scatter out among hill villages. These modern villages must differ little from those of former days, and they appear to be continuing the destruction
of the land seen farther north, since the land around them is eroded, and their garden patches are miles distant across a worn-out earth.

The colonial road shown on the chart is gone entirely. We follow a southeastern course, picking up a landmark at the Niari River. Having no clearance for a landing in Congo, we must slip in and refill our wing tanks at a mission airstrip north of Dolisie, in open mining country, then take off speedily, following the new paved road toward Brazzaville.

Unaccountably this road swings off to the north, so once again we travel by dead reckoning, tending south across high barren country. The Zaire River cannot be very far, and in fact we cross a river soon thereafter, a swift narrow torrent through a gorge—too small, we agree, to be the great broad Congo with its famous steamers, largest river in all Africa. We forge on, southeast across a vast lonesome plateau. The empty land goes on and on and on, no end in sight, and no great river; more mystifying still, our maps show no roadless area of this extent in southern Congo. We stare at our watches and compass in disbelief. At midafternoon we see a small mission settlement with an airstrip; like it or not, we must land to refuel and find out where we are.

If the peasants who come rushing to the plane cannot read our map, they at least make it clear that they are citizens not of the Congo Republic but of Zaire. When I tell Jonah we are in Zaire, his jaw actually drops—one of the few times in my life that I have witnessed this comic phenomenon, though neither of us are in any mood to laugh. In fact, we are stunned by the realization that that narrow torrent in the gorge, so very different from our expectations, had been the mighty Congo after all.

When I ask for the general direction of Kinshasa, the people point at all points of the compass, and when I protest, one of them reproves me. “How are we to know? We
are just here!” Feeling ashamed, I apologize and ask if they will lead me to the missionary. While Jonah refuels the plane, I set off quickly for the house of a kind Italian, Father Nicolo, who puts his finger on the map at a point more than a hundred miles southeast of our destination.

The Zairois, at first friendly and polite, are now comparing their suspicions. They begin to agitate and grow excited, for this place is just east of the Angola border, with its Cuban mercenaries (and its guerrilla war, largely financed, it is said, by the ivory from one hundred thousand slaughtered elephants). As it turns out, the people here are as paranoid about mercenaries as the peasants we met earlier in Haut-Zaïre. On my way back to the airstrip, they tug at my elbow, saying that it is too late in the day to reach Kinshasa. When I shake my head, they insist with increasing hostility that the people need to satisfy themselves that we are not spies; we must stay here until this “brusque” visit is investigated by the proper authorities. The spokesmen, more and more excited, start to shout, drawing attention to their own high sense of civic duty, and I realize with a pang of dread that unless we move fast, our history at Dibwa may repeat itself. I alert Jonah, who has refueled quickly. “We can just make it,” he says, by which he means, There’s just enough light to get us to Kinshasa, assuming we make no more mistakes. We have to chance it anyway, especially since, this very evening, we have an important meeting in Kinshasa that is the whole purpose of this leg of our journey.

We shoulder our way through the Africans and get into the plane and spin the prop to drive the shouters back. Father Nicolo stays well apart, wishing no trouble. Fortunately, in this mission settlement, there are no firearms. Jonah taxis to the far end of the strip as the spokesmen pursue us, and one tall screeching man in a red shirt holds his ground as the airplane comes at him, waving his arms wildly to flag us down, running aside only at the last minute.
Having done his best to stop us, he is philosophical, no longer angry, and grins and waves with all the rest as we roar past.

The blue-and-silver plane crosses the upper Wamba River, then the Kwango, and returns north over the stark emptiness of the great plateau. As in so much of this country, the darkening villages appear abandoned, their starving inhabitants whirled away as if by wind into the human sink of Kinshasa. We watch the sun move down behind the clouds off to the west. Because the mission station was not on our map, and the missionary rather vague about locations, our heading can only be approximate. Over the great hollow of the river basin, there is mist, and with the last light failing fast, we are not sure if we are up or down the river from Kinshasa. Just as it appears that oncoming night may force us to make an emergency landing in a field, we see the broad expanse of Stanley Pool, then a city tower. As dusk comes, we are making our way in to the international airport called N’djili.

I am limp with strain and exhilaration and relief, and so is Jonah, to judge from the fact that he approaches the airport from the wrong direction and is on the runway when the man in the tower, peering through the descending dusk in the opposite direction, is still instructing him on his angle of approach. Jonah is embarrassed, but not very. He knows as I know that we are lucky to be here at all, that but for clear weather and good visibility, this day could have ended very badly. That we failed to recognize the river is my fault as much as his. Neither of us knew—and his chart failed to show it—that the great wide Congo, below Stanley Pool, narrows to a torrent that plunges down a canyon toward the sea.

Anyway, this is no longer the man who analyzed for days the reasons for the forced landing at Dibwa. Perhaps because light-plane flying in poorly charted jungle countries
is so difficult, accounting for “mistakes” seems beside the point, and Jonah can now smile at our mishaps. “We must be the only travelers,” he sighs later, “who ever missed both the Nile and the Congo on the same journey.”

All is smoothed over at N’djili by M. Mankoto Mbele, the director of Zaire’s national parks, whose staff sees us rapidly through customs and escorts us through Kinshasa’s streets to our hotel. Later he meets us for a pleasant dinner at the house of Patrick Towers-Picton, a local representative of the European Economic Community who is interested in wildlife, proposed parks, and elephant projects. Jonah speaks persuasively on the importance of forest conservation in Zaire and of the possibility of creating an international forest park in the Sangha River region of C.A.R., Congo Republic, and Cameroon. We return to the hotel at 1
A.M.
, knowing we must rise at dawn to resume our journey.

Last night, our host referred to the wilderness between Kinshasa and Kisangani, our next destination, as “Zaire’s Bermuda Triangle,” because of the number of unlucky aircraft that have disappeared into that forest without a trace. As it turns out, special clearance is needed to fly a light plane into Zaire’s immense forest interior. Also, we have not counted on the Kinshasa bureaucracy, which, even more than in Libreville and Bangui, is noisy and rude and inefficient on a heroic scale, so that even the simplest transaction requires at least ten times longer than is necessary. Questions are shouted and our answers scratched down on scraps of paper—snatched up, perhaps, from the floor or wastebasket—that may as well be instantly returned there, so certain does it seem that the information scrawled thereon will never be read again. The demanded passport or other document is waved about, picked up and dropped,
or fanned in open incredulity and contempt for the lies and obfuscations it contains, when in fact the only thing amiss may be the bureaucrat’s inability to read it.

The show is not intended for the traveler, who knows better, but for the swarm of lesser personages behind each desk—the relatives, the fetchers of soft drinks—who are desperately trying to justify their own niches in this system, and vie with each other in agreeing with the boss. Thus each must grab at and bang down the offending paper, expressing his professional dissatisfaction in the strongest terms, until finally everyone is shouting his own interpretation of the regulations. All this is conducted over the indecipherable static of the airport squawk boxes, which are invariably turned up to highest volume, and which, in conjunction with the senseless human din, make any significant communication out of the question.

Then suddenly the smell of money changing hands is in the air, and disputes collapse like froth in a boiled pot: the time has come to pay taxes and fees. However, the traveler’s monies are rarely in the required currency, and no one behind the desk quite knows how to count, and anyway there is no change, and no one knows where change might be obtained. There are hints that the traveler might do well to forget the change, since gifts are in order for these worthy public servants who have cleared up the confusion that these mendacious documents have brought down upon them. To perceive such gifts as “bribes” is to fail to realize that they serve as salaries for these government workers who, in the corrupt anarchy of Zaire, may subsist unpaid for month after month, with no more prospect of a decent life than they had under Belgian rule.

Once customs is through with us, civil aviation refuses to clear our flight; the thousand miles over the forests to Kisangani is too dangerous for a single-engine plane. Eventually Jonah prevails, but it is past 11
A.M.
, after four hours at the airport, when the last official has satisfied himself that
our documents and flight plan are in order. By this time, a large storm front to the north has appeared on the tower computers, but we are not notified of this until we have flown north for a half hour. We are warned to bear west of our course for the next hundred miles, after which we might locate a break in the front, and cross the river to Basankusu. Once again, we are fated to travel late, and will race the last light to Kisangani. In order not to waste time and precious fuel Jonah holds the plane as close as possible to the great storm front, a swirling mass of ugly grays with columns of rain and sudden lightning.

Our course is approximately northeast, but in the next hour and a half the storm forces us remorselessly to the northwest, over the burned and ruined plateaus of the Congo Republic. The storm shows no sign of diminishing, the airplane cannot find a way through. Trying to cut closer to gain time, the plane is caught by an immense wind and plunges drastically. The earth jumps up, causing the cargo to bang the cabin roof, as something breaks. The plane lurches and jolts as it veers away to westward, and a moment later the fuselage is struck by one of the black swifts that hurtle along the dark wall of the storm. The hard ping is like the ring of a hurled stone.

The storm is dangerous, we can see no end to it, and besides, we have used up too much fuel. We race the gray mass back toward the south, but it moves in over the river
as the plane banks eastward below Brazzaville. Forced to low altitude by poor visibility, beating its way back up the river, the plane seems blocked by wild wind over the boiling rapids where the Zaire narrows into its gorge below Stanley Pool. Incredibly that gorge carries more volume than any river on earth except the Amazon, and so fierce is the torrent (we are later told) that no one has ever set foot on this forested island that looms through the blowing rain beneath the wing. Once across the rapids, the plane fights for headway among the small skyscrapers of Kinshasa.