The Ragged Edge of the World (16 page)

We spent the next couple of days observing the bonobos in the field. Every time I've been in Africa I have marveled at the logistics involved in getting to the field—sometimes a week of transits and travel is required to reach a spot for a three-day visit. Once I am out in the forest with the animals, however, memories of all the hassles fall away. The air is clean, there is a heady mixture of fragrances from various flowering plants and trees, and the only sounds are the creatures of the rainforest. Around ponds and clearings there is often a tympanic symphony of frogs and crickets. It's a magical restorative.

As we roamed the forests around Wamba, the first Gulf War unfolded a few thousand miles to the north. At dinner we speculated about what it must be like for Iraqi troops, surrounded by hostiles and cut off from food, fuel and water. “You've just described Wamba,” observed Frans.

Indeed, the food was simply awful, and in such small portions. We began referring to dinner as rice and pets, since chickens and goats mysteriously disappeared from the yard only to appear on the dinner table a few hours later. On the other hand, a magic fruit grows in Wamba. It's red and larger than a berry with a nice-tasting but skimpy flesh surrounding the pit. Its virtue is that it can turn anything sweet. If you eat it and then eat a lemon five minutes later, the lemon will taste sweet, no matter how sour it is otherwise.

Three days into our reporting and photographing, an exhausted minion of the commandante showed up, having made the 70-kilometer trek on a bicycle. Shyly and politely he informed us that the commandante and also the commissionaire de zone needed us to return to Djolu immediately for further discussions. Clearly the commandante had figured out that there was more money to be had if he could only get his hands on us. Kano seconded this assessment, based on his own experience.

Once, when the researchers had caught a poacher, Kano had one of his native trackers take the man to Djolu to be charged. Realizing that the poacher had no money but that the tracker had Kano's supposedly deep pockets behind him, the commandante promptly released the poacher and arrested the tracker. Kano had to pay 40,000 Zaires in ransom to get his man released.

We decided to avoid any further encounters with the commandante. I knew that a Missionary Air Fellowship flight was due in about five days, so all I had to do was stall for a while. We gave the messenger a meal and sent him back with our regrets and the word that we would be out there for several more weeks. By the time the enraged commandante dispatched a stronger posse or message, we would be gone.

That's exactly how it worked out. We'd arranged for the car to pick up Mike and me in a week, while Frans decided to stay on to do more shooting. Since we had official permission, we could not ignore the invitation from the commissionaire de zone, so we engineered an exquisitely timed exit in which we would stay at the Mill Hill mission in Yamoseli, 30 kilometers out of Djolu, and then make a lightning stop with the commissionaire before heading for the airport. To implement the plan we had to promise to replace all gas used, so scarce was fuel in the interior.

The mission at Yamoseli was a lovely and tranquil place where Father Piet and a couple of lay nurses spent most of their days dealing with the public health tragedy that has been unfolding in Africa. Father Piet had been in Zaire since 1947, and when he retired or died, there would be no one to replace him—a scenario that was being played out at all the Mill Hill missions in Zaire. In 1991, the youngest Mill Hill missionary in Zaire was sixty, and their number was down to eighteen from the sixty-four who had been there in 1955.

Once settled in my little room at the mission, I got a chance to see myself in the mirror for the first time in several weeks. I was astonished at how much weight I'd lost, mostly due to lack of appetite for such research station entrées as crocodile and goat guts. I was revisiting weights that I hadn't seen in decades.

To minimize opportunities for extortion during our brief time in Djolu, we left all our gear at the mission. Father René came by and said that Ida, a longtime missionary, wanted to meet the new commissionaire. We welcomed Ida's company, since opportunities for shenanigans decrease as the number of witnesses increases.

As it turned out, everything went swimmingly. We'd sent the bicyclist back with a letter hinting that we'd report any further harassment once we returned to Kinshasa, and the last thing the new commissionaire wanted was a negative review submitted to the governor of Equateur. As we headed to the airport a bicycle-riding soldier flagged us down and demanded that we see the commandante. Mike suspected that he wanted to retrieve the illegal convocation he had sent us before it came to the attention of the commissionaire de zone, who, whatever his policy on extortion, was probably not in favor of freelancing by his subordinates. Tough luck. We had already given the commissionaire the letter.

We reached the airport and boarded the plane before anyone else could intercede and flew on to Basankuso, where presumably a boat was waiting to take me to another pygmy chimp research station in truly remote Lomako. Formalities in Basankuso passed without a hitch, and I foolishly allowed myself to begin to think that it might be possible to work in Zaire. I couldn't have been more wrong. I never made it to Lomako. In fact, the Wamba visit was the most successful part of this particular trip.

Why is it so difficult to do the most basic things in Africa? Tasks we take completely for granted in the United States—making a phone call, getting the mail, paying a bill—require strategy and cunning. Why is it that, despite decades of development projects, the roads, railroads and services on the continent are but a shadow of what they were at the end of the colonial era?

I kept thinking back to Ambassador Dan Phillips's speculation about the lack of a social contract—the deal between citizens and their government in which people cede some of their incomes and rights in return for the security and benefits of being part of a larger community. In Africa people did cede their income and rights, if often at the point of a machete or gun, but never received anything in return. In Kinshasa I was regaled with stories of American aid projects that languished even after the money had been approved because Zairois officials saw no reason to sign documents unless they got a piece of the action. I didn't have to hear such reports, however, since I encountered the corrupt face of Central Africa at almost every turn.

This was not for lack of preparation. After many previous trips to the continent and other remote areas, I was familiar with the drill of dealing with corrupt officials, mechanical breakdowns, logistical failures, simple incompetence, civil disorder and natural disasters. By no means do I seek out adventure—if I'm traveling somewhere, it's for a purpose, not for thrills—but I do have reasonably good improvisation skills when I encounter the unexpected. However, Zaire was in a class by itself.

The country was rotten to the core, and as eventually happens in the last stages of rot, things began to fall apart. Encounters with corruption began at the airport in Kinshasa, where weary arrivals had to run a gauntlet of state-sanctioned thievery. In a country where nothing works, officials become punctilious to the extreme as they pore over customs forms and visas looking for any irregularity that might provide an opening to extract a bribe. If they can find none, they still declare the forms improper. On the other hand, offered a generous bribe, they would turn a blind eye if someone arrived carrying vats marked “Ebola virus.”

The airport gauntlet dated back to my very first trip to Zaire in 1974. I remember arriving and hiring a local for $20 to negotiate customs. The young man sitting next to me smugly said he was going to go it alone, since he spoke perfect French. As I whisked past customs, I saw him sweating heavily, his bravado long gone, while a pack of armed men picked through every piece of his luggage as though they were at a one-day sale at Filene's Basement.

For a time I would fly into Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo rather than directly into Kinshasa. In Brazzaville you had to contend with the occasional uprising, but at least you could get through the airport in one piece. From the airport I would go straight to the port on the Congo River and take a short
vedette
ride across to Kinshasa, where the border guards were much easier to deal with. The kleptocracy quickly figured this stratagem out, however, and learned to take aside Westerners and others with baggage. Brazzaville benefited in many other ways from Zairian corruption. When diamond mines in eastern Zaire were looted during riots in the interior, the big diamond buyers happily set up shop in Brazzaville and bought the stolen diamonds for much less than they would have had to pay the government monopoly.

Sometimes the corruption verges on the comical. In the early '90s, rather than wait hours to get a dial tone and pay extortionate rates for international calls, many savvy expats would make private arrangements with those working for the government phone company. The phone worker would put through the call for an agreed-upon price and then assign the charges to some deep-pocketed foreigner. When officials at the U.S. embassy bought some new lines, they were surprised to find themselves billed for thousands of dollars before the phones were even installed.

I learned this last tidbit while watching a rugby match with the American ambassador, some staff from the embassy, and Harry Goodall, the son of missionaries and an American expatriate in Kinshasa. Frans Lanting and I had hired Harry to help expedite our trip to the interior. One of the rules of the road in Zaire is that the more expensive the equipment you travel with, the more opportunities for extortion, if not theft, and Frans traveled with cases and cases of expensive cameras and lenses. Harry's team greased our way through customs, found us a reliable charter plane to take us to the interior, and set us up with Mike Chambers, who would accompany us on the trip.

Just before we had left for Wamba, Harry obtained 30 million Zaires on the black market, so that we could settle accounts in cash. The scene in his office looked for all the world like a drug deal as we sorted out the stacks of cash. Frans set up a shot of him shaking hands with Harry while each was surrounded by a mountain of Zaires and had $100 bills sticking out of every pocket.

Nothing expressed the soul of Mobutu's banana republic better than his currency. In 1974 the Zaire was worth more than the dollar. As hyperinflation took hold in the '90s, the decline of the currency was vertigo inducing. During one of my visits the currency stabilized briefly, yet it turned out that this was not the result of some incongruous return to fiscal sanity, but because Zaire had failed to pay a bill to the German company that printed its money, and the Germans had simply stopped the presses. At the Bank of Zaire the government regularly had to redeploy the soldiers stationed to guard the building—after a week or so on duty they would start asking employees entering the building for money. “You have so much in the bank,” they would say. “Give us some.”

Needless to say, I couldn't wait to get out of Kinshasa, and Mike Chambers turned out to be the perfect guide through the interior. He traveled light, carrying only a small gym bag. His Lingala and French were good, and he knew how to
hondle
. One personality trait was both an asset and a liability—a stubborn streak that manifested itself in the most impractical ways.

His friends regaled me with tales of his adventures. Once, when he was cheated by a politically connected Zairois on a business deal, he pursued the matter so thoroughly that his former partner used his political connections to have Mike thrown in jail. Rather than simply buy his way out, as was local custom, Mike stayed in jail and loudly demanded justice until the dumbfounded and embarrassed officials relented. I was to witness this stubborn streak firsthand in Basankuso.