The Ragged Edge of the World (33 page)

Make no mistake, though—none of the Pygmies I encountered showed any interest in seeking out opportunities to get regular jobs, settle down and raise the kids in the suburbs. The men loved money, but used it mostly for drink. What's remarkable is that while a number of Pygmy villagers have been in contact with Bantu villagers and expatriates for generations, periodically earning wages working as poachers, guides and porters, almost without exception the typical trappings associated with development haven't crossed the boundary between Bantu and Pygmy encampments. To be sure, the Pygmies have been persistently cheated and taken advantage of, but meager compensation does not explain the almost complete absence of modern material goods in the Pygmy villages I visited. Drink does, however, since it can consume a great deal of money and leave no trace except for the ruination of the families involved.

Mike Fay argued back then that, in a perverse way, the exploitation of the Pygmies and their binge drinking actually helped maintain at least part of Pygmy culture, since the only way they could get money was to use their native skills in the forest. Mike noted that they had lived in proximity to Bantu agricultural villages for over a thousand years, and that in all likelihood, the villagers had been exploiting them throughout that time. There had to be some benefit to the Pygmies to continue that relationship, since otherwise they could have easily vanished into the forest. Mike suspected that the lure of the villagers was that they offered access to manioc, bananas, taro and other foods. Since access to such carbohydrates was the biggest problem for Pygmies in the forest, they were locked into a devil's bargain that required that they stay relatively close to Bantu villages.

Perhaps one reason Pygmies don't seem interested in the trappings of modern material culture is that they are so good at making things on the spot. On our hike, one of the Pygmies picked up a nut from the ground, split it with a machete, and quickly fashioned a pick that he used to get out the meat. Whenever it started to rain, the Pygmies would almost instantly construct a domelike shelter out of broad leaves, supple branches and vines. Long before Pfizer began marketing Viagra, Pygmies with flagging sex drives were using
konssou,
a fruit that they described as a “male hospital.” They find the fruit in the forest and trade it with villagers, who sell it to Arabs for a good deal of money.

As we continued our hike, we passed a trophy-sized bongo just off the trail. In other parts of Africa orthodontists from Texas would pay upward of $15,000 to shoot a specimen like this. Teti, who dealt with such white men, asked if we wanted to shoot it. When we demurred, he then offered to get any nearby gorillas to charge us by imitating the call of the females.

Pygmies tend to have strong stomachs. On one of our hikes we passed the rotting carcass of a dead elephant. The smell of decay was overpowering, and a sea of maggots rippled on the exposed innards of the long-dead animal. It takes a long time for a creature as big as an elephant to rot, and I was told of instances where Pygmies had come upon week-old elephant carcasses and then crawled into the infested body cavity and cut through the rotting meat to get to flesh that had not yet begun to spoil. We hastened past the dead animal before any of the Pygmies with us got the idea to do that.

While my journey to the
bais
of the CAR gave me a taste of Pygmy knowledge of the forest, I was to have an immersion experience nine months later when I joined up with Mike Fay for a trip into the Ndoki. As I noted in Chapter 7, my initial reaction upon hearing about this pristine forest was to resist the urge to visit it, and leave it in obscurity for its own sake. Subsequent to my visit to Bayanga, however, Mike contacted me and informed me that logging concessions were encroaching on the area, and that if something wasn't done to let the world know what was at stake and arouse public support, concessions would surely be granted in the Ndoki itself.

It did not take me long to set aside my misgivings. If the Ndoki needed to be introduced to the world, I wanted to be the one to do it.
Time
saw the potential of a first-person account of a visit to this extraordinary place, and I arranged to meet up with Mike Fay in Ouesso in June 1992.

The Ndoki lies in the extreme northwest corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Entering overland from the north would require a long trip through wilderness with little access to water. (On its three other sides, vast swamps protect it.) The easiest entry point involved trekking in from Bomassa, a Pygmy village on the Sangha River. In 1992 there were two ways of getting to Bomassa. The easiest was to travel downriver from Bayanga, but that involved either a cumbersome search by untrustworthy border officials when crossing into Congo from the CAR or an undocumented border crossing. The other way was to fly on one of Congo's rickety jets up from Brazzaville to Ouesso, and then take a motorized canoe up the Sangha to the staging point. I took the latter route.

Ouesso's airport served as a mute emblem of the economic schizophrenia of Africa's resource-based economy. Landing, I noticed at least two half-completed terminal buildings. As it was explained to me, one requirement of the logging concessions was that the companies were obliged to contribute to a public-private partnership to upgrade the airport facilities. They discharged this commitment by building their section of the terminal on at least two separate occasions. Both times, however, the government reneged on its part of the bargain, leaving the city with a series of Potemkin-like facades for a terminal.

Ouesso itself was a dump, a growth of unplanned sprawl encircling what was once a colonial enclave set up to administer the area. Joining me on this trip was Karen Lotz, later the editor of
The Parrot's Lament
. The role she assumed for this trip was photographer. Although she had no prior experience, she's a quicksilver-fast study, and
Time
ended up using a number of her photographs. On arrival we connected with Mike Fay, and after a night at the run-down but once gracious villa rented by the Wildlife Conservation Society, we took a motorized canoe for the nine-hour ride upriver.

On the way we passed Kabo, the center of operations for Nouvelle Bois Sangha, the logging company whose concession extended over much of the territory south of Bomassa. Mike said that the area on either side of the river was largely devoid of game. Hunters and poachers had been using the logging roads cut by the company as a way of gaining access to the forest. He also told us that there were hundreds of shotguns in the area, and that typically, the Bantu owner of a shotgun would hire a Pygmy, who would then go into the forest and hunt for him.

For Mike the pernicious ecology of logging was that it greatly extended the poacher's ability to enter the forest. He had done a study that showed that all game tends to be shot within a day's walk of the nearest road. The many roads built by loggers extend like capillaries into the forest, opening it to hunters, and, in many places, to follow-on colonists who then cut the secondary growth and establish farms. In this sense logging was a crucial first step in the process by which a great forest was destroyed.

Mike was casual in the extreme about his expeditions, and consequently we had gotten a late start out of Ouesso. This meant that we had to pick our way upriver by flashlight for the last several miles of the trip. Because we couldn't see the sandbars, we ran aground several times. This was not to be the last time we would find ourselves traveling by flashlight.

Bomassa lies about 25 kilometers south and west of the Ndoki River, across which lies the enchanted forest that time forgot. In Bomassa a small, spare set of cabins had already been built in anticipation of ecotourists who might someday visit carefully monitored parts of the forest. Mike Fay and others believed it would be necessary to open a small section of the Ndoki to carefully controlled numbers of tourists in order to help the local economy, whose support would be necessary if a larger, inviolate part of the area was to be preserved. Mike was well aware of the curse of ribbon development, and the last thing he wanted was for Bomassa to become a magnet for migrants. So he and his colleagues took pains to bring in workers on temporary contracts rather than enlarge the settlement.

After we settled into the camp for the night, Mike sent out word to the surrounding Pygmy villages that he was looking to hire trackers and porters. The next morning a group of Pygmies showed up, and if we had been hiring on the basis of first impressions, we would have sent the whole lot packing. Most were dressed in ragged clothes. More to the point, they were all drunk. Since it was morning, I had to assume that their response to the news that work had arrived had been to launch an all-night celebration.

Mike showed not the slightest concern, however, and hired two trackers he'd worked with before, Ndokanda and Joachime, on the spot. He also selected as cook a Bantu named Seraphim, whom he had also used before and who had proved to be reliable and good-natured. Mike then laid out all of our food and camping gear so that he could estimate how many porters we needed to hire. His method was to examine the goods and say, “That's half a Pygmy; that's three-quarters,” and so on. Most of us would have counted the backpacks and used that as a base, but I was to learn that there was a purpose to this method.

Instead of putting on a backpack and adjusting the straps, for instance, the Pygmies would pick up a pack and then tie it to other packages, the whole of which would be exquisitely balanced. By using this method, they could carry staggering amounts of weight, especially given their diminutive size. The BaNgombe and BaNbengele Pygmies are taller (just under five feet) than most other Pygmies, but still tiny compared to us. The only one who carried just one backpack was the unfortunate given the job of carrying a single 132-pound backpack. During this repacking, we discovered another casualty of Mike's
que sera, sera
attitude toward jungle treks: We'd left our recently purchased supply of eggs (which last long and efficiently supply nutrients), chocolate and batteries back in Ouesso. We could get by without the food, but the batteries turned out to be an important oversight.

On Sunday morning at 7:30 Mike sent the Pygmies off toward the Ndoki. Ndokanda had gone with Mike into the Ndoki a few years earlier and knew the way to the first camp on this side of the river. It was 15 miles to the crossing point of the Ndoki River, and a good deal of the trek consisted of making one's way through swampy quicksand. With an early start, Mike entertained hopes that we could make it to the crossing point in one day, rather than stopping at a former research site called Djeke. Our hopes were dashed, however, when we set off an hour later and found our men drinking in a Pygmy village just a few hundred meters up the trail from Bomassa. Mike had to threaten to hire new porters to roust the crew, and then made a theatrical show of storming off, with Karen and me following.

By one o'clock we made it to Djeke camp, which had been established by Masazumi Mitani and Suehisa Kuroda in 1987. These legendary Japanese field researchers had been the first to explore the Ndoki, and just those few years earlier it had taken several days to get from Bomassa to the river crossing. Since then the researchers had cut a rudimentary trail and also driven posts into the quicksand so that it was possible to pick your way through the swamps by feeling for the sticks with your toes and thus get to the river's edge without sinking to your thighs with every step.

Two hours later the Pygmies finally showed up. Mike figured that they had purposely stalled so that it would be impossible to get to our destination by nightfall. We had a pleasant dinner of soup, salami and cookies, and as Karen and I settled in to sleep in the tent at about 8:00, I began to wonder whether Kuroda, who had described traveling in the Ndoki as “very, very difficult,” had intentionally overstated the hardships.

Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I felt something on my hand. I flicked it off, only to feel something else crawl on me. Whatever it was that I had flicked didn't like it, and decided to bite me. I woke Karen, who thought I must be having a nightmare, but a second later I heard a strangled cry from her. Suddenly bugs began dropping on us from every direction. I scrambled to find the flashlight, and when I finally got it on, the light revealed that our tent was filled with ants—by now to a depth of several inches. By slapping at them, it seems, we have released some signal for the other ants to attack, and suddenly we were being bitten by hundreds of them at once. We raced out of the tent, stumbling over roots and a massive column of ants, tearing off our ant-infested clothes as we frantically looked for the river—my reasoning being that we could hold our breaths longer than the ants could. As we ran, more ants dropped on us from the trees.

We finally found the stream and, not really caring what might be in it, jumped in, keeping only our noses above water. This did the trick. Eventually we emerged and, shaking out our clothes, got dressed and tried to rouse Mike. He sleepily appeared at the front of his tent and, the soul of sympathy, noted that driver ants could kill a tethered goat. He went back to sleep, but the Pygmies, who had by now also awakened, were clearly amused by the entertaining spectacle of our frantic dash. The ants unaccountably didn't seem to be interested in them.