African Silences (28 page)

Jonah requests clearance to land at the airfield called N’dola, which is much closer to the city than N’djili, but a medley of voices less calm than his own is haranguing him with irrelevant questions and issuing conflicting instructions, not only in two languages but from both towers. The plane is now in the black heart of the storm, with lashing rain and thick sinking clouds that keep it down among the buildings and a violent wind that tosses it from one building toward another with sickening jumps and drops and lurches. I pray that my partner is more confident than I that his airplane won’t fly apart under such a beating.

I steal a look at him, with some idea that I might as well know the worst, and am relieved though not surprised by what I see. Jonah’s face is grim and tense, just as my own must be, but there is no panic, only a twitch of exasperation at the instructions on the radio. When one of his tormentors
orders him to proceed into N’djili and land toward the south—that is downwind—he answers tersely that he is proceeding to N’dola, after which he breaks off communication. In the tumult, he is holding the plane on its bounding course with sheer physical strength, and he has to concentrate on the approach. N’dola looms in the blurred windshield, and, maintaining his speed, he beats his way in very low over the sprawl of tin-roofed dwellings, lurching and tipping all the way onto the rainswept concrete.

For a few minutes in the lashing rain, we sit in the plane in silence. We have lost a day, and will therefore miss tomorrow’s contact at Mambasa, in the Ituri Forest, where people must make a five-hour round trip to fetch us. Also, we have wasted many gallons of expensive fuel. But, for the moment, none of this matters, so grateful are we to be on the ground. I am mightily impressed by the pilot’s cool and skilled performance under stress, and saying so, I embarrass Dr. Western by reaching out to shake his hand.

“I didn’t care much for that experience,” I say, a note of hysteria in my laugh, and Jonah shakes his head. The front, he says, was hundreds of miles long, far longer than any storm front he has ever encountered in East Africa, and the storm jolt that struck us over the Congo Republic he estimated at eighty miles an hour, the most severe he had ever experienced. Jonah had been told that such storms were not uncommon in the Congo Basin, especially in the rainy season, which has now begun, and we still have the whole of Africa ahead of us. Back there over the Congo Republic this afternoon, he says, he could have made an emergency landing on the burned plain, but such a storm would be very dangerous if it forced us off course over the forest, with no maps we could trust and no place to come down.

Silenced by these thoughts, we refuel the plane and complete most of the paperwork for tomorrow. By the time
we return to the city through the raining streets, bitterly disappointed to be back, our relief has given way to intense depression. For the first and last time on the trip, we feel utterly disheartened, and we do not hide it. There have been bad patches before now—the descent of the Ivindo River into mist and mountains was one of the worst, so far as Jonah is concerned—but after two long days of stressful flying, racing the darkness, rarely certain where we were, after that scary approach into Kinshasa, and with the prospect of more bad storms to come, I feel tense and worried, dreading the days ahead.

Though he will not say so, Jonah is worried, too. After so many weeks spent with this man, day after day, meal after meal, under strain in the air and frustration in these cities, I know him a bit better than he imagines. He does not lose his head, rarely shows anger, and remains commendably sensible and decisive, but under stress, his voice goes a notch tighter, and he reverts to a rather stiff, officious manner, using my first name a lot, as if he were speaking to a child.

At supper Jonah is somber and withdrawn; he has done all the flying, borne all the responsibility, and he looks exhausted. Yesterday he was already suggesting that he should return home earlier than planned, that we should cut our stay in the Ituri Forest from ten days to five, that perhaps we should eliminate it entirely, although from the start we have regarded the Ituri as the main reward of a long, arduous journey.

In the depths of our gloom, we discuss our drastic choices, such as skirting the tropical rainy-season storms by backtracking northward to Bangui before returning eastward, or even, if storms trap us in Kinshasa, storing the aircraft here until the rains are past, and flying home—he east, I west—by commercial carrier. Either choice would eliminate the visit to the Ituri, and neither is an acceptable
defeat; we both know even as we speak that we will get up at dawn tomorrow morning and try again.

Next morning we are at the airport at six-thirty. The plane is fueled, our flight plan is approved, the miasmal depression of the night before has vanished with the rain. There are even patches of blue sky, and with any sort of luck, I think, we shall escape Kinshasa, getting at least as far as Mbandaka, four hundred miles to the northeast on the Zaire River. But whereas at N’djili our main delays were caused by wholehearted incompetence, at N’dola we are subjected to a merciless fleecing by every official who can lay his hands on us, each one discovering something wrong with embarkation tax, flight plan, even dates on vaccination cards, at least until some hard cash is forked over. The negotiation of so much graft takes time, as we are waved into office after office, and increasingly we are aware that once again the day is starting to get away from us, that even if good weather holds it is nearly a thousand miles to Kisangani. Eventually we make a show of temper, shouting threats to expose such greed to our friend, the minister Mankoto. We bluff our way back to the airplane, but it is well past 9
A.M.
when we take off.

Early clouds over the swamps east of the river gradually burn away during the morning. The plane cuts northeast across the Zaire’s great wide bends, traversing the plateaus of the Congo, then a vast swamp of raffia palms east of the river. The map shows few roads in this great central region of Zaire, and anyway we have learned not to depend upon these roads, since so many deteriorate and disappear. For navigation we must count upon the rivers. On our left, where the great flood sprawls out over the land in an archipelago of river islands, is the mouth of the Sangha River, which we last saw at Bayanga. Farther on is
the broad delta of the great Ubangi, which has come south from Bangui. Then, once again, we are over the Zaire, enjoying the steamers that push barges of cargo between river towns.

The clouds are vanishing, the day is beautiful, and passing the airstrip at Mbandaka (formerly Coquilhatville) I feel a great burst of exhilaration; we have made our escape from Poubelleville, even if we should meet a storm in the next half hour. I look over at Jonah, and he grins; he is happy, too. Already we feel sure our luck has changed, that the long day we had anticipated as the hardest of our journey will turn out to be the easiest and most enjoyable.

Twenty minutes north of Mbandaka, we turn due eastward from the brown Zaire up the Lulonga, a quiet and serene black river whose water is so clear that sandbars are visible deep under the surface off the downstream end of river islets. Soon the water is a transparent tannin color, clear as red amber, and to my elated eye intensely beautiful. Along the river are lone pirogues and tiny villages, none of them more than a few huts under the shade trees on the bank. “This is Stanley’s Africa,” Jonah says, delighted. “Hasn’t changed at all.” At last we are flying over forest that could shelter elephants, and we discuss the one critical discovery we have made in the past few days: most if not all of the tropical forest of south Gabon, south Congo, and western Zaire, which we had thought must be the heartland of the forest elephant, and which is still included as viable habitat in charts and estimates of elephant population, has long since been destroyed or degraded. It is barren land where no elephant could exist.

The very wide hybridization zone extending deep into the Congo Basin, in which elephants of pronounced bush characters may be met with south of the equator and beyond, establishes beyond question that very dissimilar elephants live in the forest, and that widespread reports of a dwarf elephant have a basis in fact. The large hybrid form
with its distinctive bush characters is the “big elephant” with which a much smaller animal is everywhere compared. The so-called
assala
is the forest elephant,
L.a. cyclotis
, which is very small by comparison to the bush race when not heavily endowed with the bush genes. Pygmy elephants—not everywhere distinguished from the
assala
—are not a distinct species or race but simply juvenile
cyclotis
, mostly young males, that separate early from the cow herds and may sometimes form small herds of their own. The two pygmies of outsize tusks and aggressive temperament at Dzanga Pan provided the first evidence, and the herd of little
assala
at Wonga-Wongue confirmed it.

Elephant authorities Iain Douglas-Hamilton and Cynthia Moss, who would separately inspect Jonah’s photographs after our return, were fascinated by the discovery of the vast hybridization zone, which has never before been defined; until now, most observers had assumed that those “bush elephants” seen in the forest were wanderers or refugees from the dangerous open country to the north. Furthermore, both Moss and Douglas-Hamilton were fully persuaded by Jonah’s explanation of the pygmy-elephant mystery provided by his photographs, which clearly show bush hybrids, forest elephants, and pygmies, all in the same picture. Of that five- or six-year-old that brandished big tusks at a hybrid male more than twice its size, then interacted in a filial manner with its mother, Moss remarked, “Without those tusks, I’d think that was a baby elephant. The tusks make it look sub-adult, at least fifteen years of age.” Douglas-Hamilton agreed that on the basis of its tusks it might easily be called an adult “pygmy elephant.”

In resolving one enigma, we appear to have stumbled upon another: where is the “pure” forest elephant, with its small head, low round ears, and vertical tusks? We cannot be sure that such elephants don’t persist in this vast trackless forest below, but I wonder aloud if in our time the pure
cyclotis
might have disappeared due to a mingling of the
bush and forest races caused by the disruptive impact of mankind, not only in two centuries of ivory slaughter but in the accelerating destruction of the forest ever since. Jonah shrugs. Closer to the forest edge, he says, my theory might be sound, but it could not account for the hybrids much farther south. He speculates that the immense contraction of the forest caused by natural drying in recent millennia would account for the fact that the hybridization zone has spread so widely. Only two thousand years ago, conditions were so dry that woodland-savanna elephants were widespread throughout what is now rain forest, with the forest race confined to a few patches. Since this is only about thirty elephant generations, the bush genes are still apparent, perhaps throughout the forest populations.

At Basankusu, we land at the mission airstrip and refuel the wing tanks as people come out on foot and bicycle to greet us; this time we have a clearance paper, and nobody tries to detain us when we depart. Once in the air and headed east, we eat rolls scavenged from the hotel breakfast table, much amused by the realization that this is our first lunch in three days, not because we had no food along but because on both the previous days, the tense flight conditions and suspense had killed our appetite.

The broad flat wilderness of central Zaire is the bottom of the shallow Congo Basin. From here in the center of the continent the green monotone of forest spreads in a great circle to the far horizons. There is only the Lulonga, growing smaller, then its tributary, the Lopori, with scarce and diminishing hut clusters along the bank. Miles from the river, miles and miles and miles from the nearest voice, is the tiny scar of a crude slash-and-burn clearing, but the human being there stays out of sight. Who is this solitary
Homo sapiens
, so content to live so far off by himself, in a closed universe of hut and garden? No doubt he is down there staring up at his own small patch of sky, for not so many aircraft can have passed this way; we are many miles
off to the north of the air routes of Zaire. Perhaps there are forest elephants down there, but we do not know.

Some three hundred miles east of its confluence with the Zaire, the Lulonga-Lopori makes a great bend toward the south, and here we forge straight on over the rain forest, sixty miles or so, to complete the crossing of the great north bend and return to the Zaire River. In a sun-filled, windless afternoon, enjoying the peaceful sweep of the upper river, we continue upstream 150 miles to Kisangani, where the Tshopo and the Lualaba come together below Stanley Falls as the Zaire River, the great Congo.

If Kinshasa is one of the saddest cities in all Africa, Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville) is among the loveliest, despite the testimony of its bullet-scarred façades and the bleak aspect of the Place des Martyres; this main square commemorates the victims of the execution that took place here in the violent civil wars of the early sixties, when Kisangani was the headquarters of the rebel government. The happy spirit of the place, in its pretty location on the river, is reflected in the harmony and order of even the humblest wattle-and-daub hut in the clean-swept yards, the absence of litter, the neat bundles of charcoal and vegetable produce set out unguarded by the wayside, and, most important, in the unfrowning demeanor of the people seen on the evening road in from the airport. Along the riverfront, in fire light of setting sun, large pirogues tend the gaunt fish weirs, and a fish eagle crosses the broad, slow expanse of the silver current that carries the weight of the Central Highlands rains toward the sea.