The Ragged Edge of the World (14 page)

Even then, Mike was hard-core. Back when he was a Peace Corps volunteer, he had spent time up in the north part of the Central African Republic, hard by a large tract controlled by a French national named Michel LaBureur. Although he had come to help the people, rampant poaching had convinced Mike that direct action was necessary. He teamed up with LaBureur on daily poaching patrols during which they regularly got into armed confrontations with Sudanese hunters. In the bush Mike often travels with Pygmies from various groups, and after one particularly arduous trek with Ba'Aka Pygmies they gave him the nickname “Concrete.”

When I arrived in Bangui on September 17, 1990, Mike was not yet back in the Central African Republic (CAR), but he had put me and
National Geographic
photographer Nick Nichols in touch with Andrea Turkalo, a biologist studying elephants who was also based in Bayanga, and who was then Mike's wife. Andrea was in Bangui on business, and it was she who offered us the truck ride out to Bayanga. We set off from Bangui on September 18 for what we hoped would be an uneventful 530-kilometer drive across the country. The route would take us along the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and then south into the extreme southwest corner of the CAR—a toothlike projection bordered by Congo to the east and the Sangha River and Cameroon to the west.

We'd intended to leave at 6:30, but we didn't get off until 10:30, since Andrea was suffering from food poisoning, courtesy of a goat meat lunch she had consumed the day before. Not long out of Bangui, we drove by signs for Bimbo, one of the CAR's small towns. (Looking at a map, I see that there is also a city called Bazoum, causing me to imagine the headlines if the then-president of Gabon came for a visit—“Bongo Visits Bimbo; Raves about Bazoum!”)

Not long thereafter we encounter the first of ten roadblocks we had to negotiate during the drive. The excuse for many of such barriers was that the roads were impassable because of rain, but in this case the rain had ended hours earlier. Guards would seize any excuse to keep the barriers up, and after cadging bribes would let us continue on the supposedly impassable roads, or would insist that we could not pass unless we gave a ride to X or Y (who had presumably paid them off). Sometimes we encountered roadblocks ostensibly set up to guide cars around potholes, and in these cases workers would be energetically using picks and shovels to repair the damaged road. They would drop their tools and flag us down to help pay for the worthy public works (leaving us to wonder how long before we arrived they had actually picked up the tools). Andrea muttered that it had been her experience that often the repairs were being done on potholes that had been diligently dug earlier by the very same crew. If the road had a pothole with water in it, another scam was to stand innocently beside it and, when splashed by a passing vehicle, demand payment for dry cleaning. I was amused by the idea of there being a dry-cleaning establishment in towns that lacked electricity. (I was familiar with such compensation scams from my trips to New Guinea, and if the ingenuity that went into these petty attempts at extortion could be directed more productively, both Africa and New Guinea would be economic superpowers.)

Wearying of the constant demands at roadblocks, we developed a good cop/bad cop routine. I assumed the role of the big boss from the United States, admittedly a bit of a stretch, but in his bush attire Nick looked more like an unstable soldier of fortune than a visiting fireman on a site visitation (the unintentionally hilarious word—conjuring the image of visits from the spirit world—often used for official visits). When we were accosted for a ride, Andrea would start to accede to a demand and then turn to me, whereupon I would sternly remind her of company policy against giving rides to non-employees because of liability problems in the past. It worked for a while—if exposure to the developed world has given Africans anything, it is experience with bureaucrats and their leaden rules.

Andrea knew of a shortcut—a relative term in the Central African Republic—that required us to head through a logging concession. The logging roads were an obstacle course of mires and deep ruts, and we inched along, often precariously balancing the wheels on the ridges between the ruts. After some hours of lurching and bucking travel, we arrived at a beautiful river in the middle of the concession. To get across we had to take a rudimentary ferry, which, attached by a rope and ring to a cable strung across the river, used the current against the attitude of the boat to go back and forth. For instance, if the prow was pointed slightly upriver, the current would push the ferry in that direction, since the cable to which it was attached by a ring would not permit the boat to go downriver. To get back, the ferry masters simply pointed the prow in the other direction.

We arrived at the river crossing at 5:10, knowing that if we didn't get across before dark we would be spending the night in the truck. Unfortunately the ferry sat abandoned on the other side of the river. On our side we saw a bunch of empty pirogues, and when we located the crew members at a palm wine stand, they all turned out to be drunk. Judging by their unsteady state, I could tell that our good cop/bad cop act, polished and rehearsed at a dozen roadblocks, was about to be tested to the limit.

When they saw us, however, the crew sobered up considerably at the prospect of easy money and hustled back to work. The chief demanded 5,000 Central African francs, payable in advance, to take us over. With the gravity of a hard-nosed executive accustomed to cutting budgets, I refused, and Andrea began protracted negotiations. Against my advice Andrea agreed to pay about half that sum once we were in the middle of the river, but at least that got the ferry over to our side of the river. Once we were aboard, the stillhalf-in-the-bag crew mishandled every conceivable maneuver, including the simple task of untying the ferry. Then, after we got the truck on the boat, they again demanded payment, and again we refused, anticipating they would simply demand more. When we finally reached the other side they refused to put up blocks for the truck without additional payment. By now it was growing dark, and Andrea finally lost her temper. In rapid French she scolded them: “I've been here ten years helping Africans, and these people have come from the U.S. Is this the impression you want them to have of your country?” Finally, they relented, and we were on our way.

Six hours later we arrived at Andrea's simple bungalow in Bayanga, passing only one car heading in the other direction during the entire trip. We entered to find that three Peace Corps volunteers had moved in during her absence. After a thirteen-hour drive, and weakened by food poisoning, Andrea was ready to cry.

The volunteers, however, affably agreed to find other digs, and even offered to cook dinner. Having written about the impact of voluntary aid on Africa over a decade earlier, I was interested to hear what the volunteers had to say about the results of their work. One of them, Rebecca Hardin, was nearing the end of her stint, and had no illusions about the failure of efforts to bolster local economies. She told me of a Peace Corps review of a fifteen-year effort to improve beekeeping; to its credit, the Corps wanted to know why this long-term project had failed. Rebecca pointed out that the Africans had done sufficiently well with their inefficient method of collecting honey by smoking the hives to chase away the bees (which often killed the queen in the process). Moreover, they made the rational decision that selling the honey in local markets for smaller amounts of money was better than the added work and risk of bandits that selling the honey in Cameroon for twice as much would entail. A similar study of fish farming produced similarly disheartening (from the Peace Corps' point of view) results, as the villagers proved unwilling to do even the minimal maintenance needed to keep the ponds viable.

Rebecca's story resonated with some ideas that Dan Phillips, the American ambassador to the Republic of the Congo, had offered earlier during a dinner in Brazzaville. He speculated that one reason why the social contract—the idea that individuals would cede some rights to the government in return for the security and opportunities that being part of a larger community offered—was so underdeveloped in sub-Saharan Africa might be that the penalties of going it alone were not so terrible for an African villager. Food—in the form of fruits and carbohydrates—was often readily available, and that knowledge skewed the risk/reward calculation when villagers were asked to put aside immediate self-gratification for the vague and unreliable prospect of larger gains that might accrue from investment in the community. When one examines them from this perspective, one reaches the disheartening conclusion that the petty extortion schemes we encountered on our trip might have been the result of an entirely rational risk/reward analysis.

One story Rebecca told, however, stayed with me. While my main purpose in Bayanga was to gather material for a
National Geographic
story on apes and humans, I was also doing some reporting for my
Time
article on the loss of indigenous knowledge. Rebecca had mentioned a Western-educated health administrator named Bernard N'donazi who had decided that the traditional healing techniques that he had been taught as a child were more effective, more available and cheaper than the Western medicines he had been trained to distribute. He was based in Bouar, a few hundred kilometers to the north, where Rebecca and her boyfriend were living. Before she left, I mentioned that I might want to talk to her again. At that time, I had no intention of going to Bouar, but the French Foreign Legion changed those plans a few days later.

I spent the next few days interviewing various people in connection with the apes story, and taking desultory hikes to different
bais
(a
bai
is a type of clearing) scattered through the forest, in fruitless search of gorillas. One of the reasons I was interested in the area was that it had populations of both gorillas and chimps. Mike Fay theorized that chimps tended to fare better where the forest was denser, while gorillas prospered where it was more open so that sunlight could penetrate to spur the growth of monocots and other so-called terrestrial herbaceous vegetation. According to Mike, the key to this seesaw was the elephant, which diligently opened the forest by tearing down trees. It was an interesting theory, in part because it offered the promise that humans, chimps and gorillas could find a way to live in harmony—if humans stopped short of clear-cutting. “Looked at this way,” Mike told me, “humans are nothing more than mechanized elephants.”

We found only teasing evidence of the presence of gorillas on this trip—severe hunting pressure had made them very wary of humans. Nick Nichols spent twelve days walking the forest and had a single distant contact. In the course of several days of hiking, I saw only one gorilla, and that was by the side of the road on the drive back from Bai Hokou. During these forays I began to think again about a wondrous forest that supposedly lay directly to the south, an area that had been characterized as perhaps the most perfectly intact rainforest haven on the planet—a place where gorillas, chimps and other animals never encountered humans—but I had no plans to go there.

Mike Fay had described this area to me when we had first talked about Africa. Then, in July 1990, I went to the International Primatological Society's congress in Nagoya, Japan, where Masazumi Mitani told me about his research in this forest, which he called the Ndoki. He said the conditions there were “very, very difficult,” and well aware of the Japanese field researcher's legendary capacity for enduring hardship, I could only imagine that the Ndoki must be a very tough place indeed.

During my initial research forays for the apes and humans article, however, I also felt that such an unknown and unspoiled area should be left alone. With no protection in place, the last thing the Ndoki needed was publicity that might inspire an influx of adventurers, hunters and their camp followers. The situation changed in 1992, but during this first trip to Bayanga, I still felt that the Ndoki's best protections were its remoteness and obscurity.

If the Bayanga region proved to be a disappointment for seeing gorillas in the wild, it held many other charms. There was Dzanga Bai, for instance, a clearing in the Dzanga Sangha park, where tens of thousands of African grey parrots and scores of elephants would gather in the evening for a couple of hours of raucous socializing before settling down for the night. Before Dzanga Sangha received protection a few years earlier, the elephant population had been poached mercilessly, but now numbers were recovering, and elephants that had earlier moved away because of the poaching were starting to come back.

Access to the
bai
was through a relatively short trail. The only real hazard was the omnipresent danger of inadvertently surprising an elephant. Elephants are admirable in almost every respect, but they are also known as the most dangerous animal in the rainforest. Nick Nichols had photographed every conceivable African animal, but during one of our walks to the
bai
he remarked that he knew very little about elephants. After he was nearly trampled during one attempt to photograph them, I told him that I had prepared a motto to be inscribed on his tombstone: “He died as he lived, knowing very little about elephants.”

Mike Fay believes that elephants play by different rules when they enter human-controlled areas than when they are in the forest. Typically they aren't aggressive when they encounter humans on human turf, and they expect humans to reciprocate when they enter the elephants' domain. In any event they don't react well to being surprised (a few years after this trip, Mike barely escaped being crushed after an unscheduled encounter with a female elephant in Gabon), and I was always alert for elephants on the walk to a mirador that had been constructed as a perch from which to watch the life of the
bai
.