‘A coop? What on earth’s a coop?’
‘We pile all the branches on the ground at the foot of the tree – a great big pile, you understand – and then the monkeys come down the tree and they go into the coop, and you catch them.’
It sounded highly unlikely to me, but I could tell, from the seriousness of his face, that he meant what he was saying.
‘When could we organise a drive?’ I asked.
‘The day after tomorrow I can do it.’
‘Fine,’ I said. And we want to be there when you actually start, so that we can film everything. You understand? So you mustn’t start without us.’
‘No, sir.’
‘We’ll be there about nine o’clock.’
‘Oooohhh . . . that’s very late, sir,’ he said.
‘You see, we can’t film before then because there’s no light,’ I explained.
‘Well . . . if we get the monkeys near the proper tree, can you film from then?’ he asked me anxiously.
‘Yes . . . if there’s enough light,’ I said. ‘If it’s about nine o’clock or nine-thirty. Then there’ll be enough light for us to film.’
He thought about this for a bit.
‘All right, sir,’ he said. ‘You come to the village at nine o’clock, and I’ll have the monkeys ready there for you.’
‘All right. Thank you very much.’
‘Don’t mention it, sir,’ he said, and put on his solar topee and strutted off through the crowded market place.
So, two days later, we rose very early. All the camera equipment and the sound recording equipment was carefully checked and we set off for the village where the monkey drive was to take place. When we arrived we were led along a narrow path through a banana plantation, and then some distance into the forest. Gradually, an enormous uproar made itself heard from somewhere ahead of us, and eventually we came to the place where they had got the monkeys. My first impression was that there was a hell of a lot of noise and confusion, and about three hundred Africans hacking down the undergrowth in all directions, with Mohammed strutting about among them shrieking, at the top of his voice, instructions which apparently nobody obeyed. They had succeeded in getting two troops of Colobus into one enormous tree, and they were busy cutting down all the undergrowth that could possibly form escape routes for them. As they gradually sealed off the escape routes, the monkeys began to panic. One or two of them leapt out of the huge tree, hurtling perhaps one hundred and fifty feet down into the top of a palm tree, and escaping; whereupon all the Africans would yell in unison and redouble their efforts.
I hate felling trees at the best of times, and I hated to see some of these trees go crashing down, but I knew that this area was going to be cleared for a cocoa plantation anyway, so the trees would have had to come down in the end. Finally, the last big tree that could have formed an escape route crashed into the undergrowth, and then all that was left were several palm trees from which they had to cut away the great fronds. As each frond was severed and fell to the ground it made the most wonderful whispering, rustling sound, like somebody curtseying in a stiffly starched crinoline.
By now the efforts of my noble band of hunters had felled a considerable area of forest round the main tree, and I waited expectantly for the next move – which consisted of the African equivalent of a tea break. Some of them cut lengths of a certain creeper which is hollow and contains quite a large quantity of water inside – it’s a sort of living well – and these they held up to their mouths and sucked the water from them. They were hot and thirsty and dripping with sweat and they all argued, as they drank from the creepers, about the best way to go about the following stage of the operation.
The next thing, Mohammed informed me in his piping voice, was to build the coop. So there was further hacking and sawing and great branches and palm fronds were piled in a conical mass round the base of the tree. This we surrounded with nets. Having done this, the Africans all went into the surrounding undergrowth and cut themselves long forked sticks. These were necessary because, when the monkeys finally came down into the coop and then out of the coop into the nets, one had to have a forked stick to pin the net down over them so that one could get a grip on their head and their tail.
I had been keeping a careful watch on the top of the tree in which the monkeys were congregated, but the foliage was so thick that I couldn’t tell exactly how many were up there, although I knew I had the two species of Colobus we wanted. Mohammed told me that everything was now in readiness and, in a spirit of bonhomie rather than conviction, I ordered the cages to be carried up to the front line. I wasn’t at all sure that their methods were going to be proved right, but there was just a chance that we might catch the Colobus and I wanted to be prepared. Then two men produced, from God knows where, an enormous and very ancient saw which had practically no teeth at all, and they climbed over the nets, up the coop to the trunk of the great tree, and started to saw at it.
‘What,’ I enquired of Mohammed, ‘are they trying to do?’
‘If the monkey thinks that we are cutting down the tree, sir, he go come down to the coop, and then we catch him,’ he explained, wiping the perspiration from his brow.
I trained my field glasses on the top of the tree. The sawing didn’t appear to be having any effect upon the monkeys. The tree was of an enormous girth and it was quite obvious that it would take the men approximately six months to get through it with that antiquated saw. After half an hour or so I was convinced that their efforts were going to be in vain. I called Mohammed over.
‘Yessir,’ he said, coming at a run and saluting smartly.
‘Look, Mohammed, I don’t think we are going to do it this way,’ I said. ‘The monkeys don’t seem to be a bit disturbed by the sawing, and it’s going to take them ages to get through that tree. Why don’t we try something else?’
‘Yessir. What else, sir?’ he asked.
‘If you clear a small area at the base of the tree,’ I said, ‘so that the actual coop itself doesn’t catch fire, and you light a small fire there and put plenty, plenty, plenty of green leaves on it, then the smoke will go up into the tree and maybe this will make the monkeys come down.’
‘All right, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ll try.’
He went off, screaming at the top of his voice like a seagull, and presently a small area had been cleared at the base of the tree and the fire had been lit. I watched the smoke from it coil lazily up, sneaking its way round the trunk of the giant tree, climbing higher and higher. And then I looked to see what the effect on the monkeys was going to be. As they smelt the first few wisps of smoke, the Colobus I could see moved about a bit anxiously, but otherwise did not seem unduly perturbed. But presently, when more green leaves had been piled on the fire, and the smoke grew thicker and thicker and thicker, they began running to and fro among the branches.
Now, in strange contrast to the extraordinary cacophony that had been going on when the undergrowth had been cleared, the circle of some three hundred Africans had fallen absolutely silent and were standing in a ring round the net, their forked sticks at the ready. I was just about to tell Mohammed to impress upon the Africans not all to rush at the first monkey that came down – if, indeed, it did come down – thus leaving practically the whole net unguarded, when a Black-and-white Colobus leapt from the top of the tree, landed gracefully on the coop and, to my astonishment, disappeared inside it. There was a sort of ‘Aaahhh’ from the Africans, rather like a football crowd when a goal has been scored. There was a long pause and then, quite suddenly, the Colobus popped up and ran straight into the net. As I had predicted, most of the Africans rushed forward eagerly with their forked sticks.
‘Tell them to get back into line . . . to get back into line!’ I shouted to Mohammed.
He, screeching orders, drove the men back into line, leaving only two of them to deal with the Col
obus. They pinned it down successfully under the net, and I ran forward to look at it. By this time one man had got a good grip on the back of its neck and a firm hold on the base of its tail, and was lifting it out of the net. It was a female, half-grown, I judged, and in beautiful condition. Although they look so sombre and so tractable, these monkeys can, in fact, give you a wicked bite, and they have to be handled with great care. We carried her over to one of the cages, put her in and shut the door on her, and then covered the cage with palm leaves so that she would feel more secure in the dark. Then, as I turned back from doing this, the tree suddenly seemed to rain monkeys. They crashed down on to the coop, one after the other, so fast that I couldn’t count them, and by the time they were on the coop and I tried to count them there, they’d disappeared inside the branches.
Now there was complete pandemonium. Monkeys were appearing and diving into the net one after the other, and the Africans were pinning them down with their forked sticks and shouting and screaming. The confusion was indescribable. I could do nothing, except stand by the cages and rapidly try to sex and count the monkeys as the Africans brought them to me.
It is amazing, looking back on it, how many things your mind has to think of at once. As each pair of Africans came towards me, carrying a struggling monkey, I would wonder whether they were handling it too roughly or holding it too tightly. Then I’d got to check what sort of condition it was in. If it was an adult, and the teeth were well worn, it meant it was a fairly old specimen; in which case, how well would it settle down in captivity? I had to watch carefully while they put them into the cages because they were tending to slam the doors and catch the monkeys’ tails in them. Then I’d be wondering, in the back of my mind, how much shock the animal had suffered? Was it cool enough? Would it survive the journey back to the beef mines? And if I got it back there, how would it settle down? It was curious that, in spite of the fact that the capture must have frightened the monkeys considerably, they were most of them accepting food from my hand within a couple of hours of capture.
When the final monkey had been caged, we examined the coop carefully to make sure that there were no more lurking inside the branches. At last I could go and examine my captives individually, and count them. All I knew, up to that point, was that we had been incredibly lucky to catch both the Red-and-black and the Black-and-white in one fell swoop. When I examined the cages I found that we had caught, in fact, ten Red-and-black Colobus and seven Black-and-white, of varying ages and sizes and sexes, which was the important thing. Each cage, carefully covered with palm leaves, had to be lashed to a pole and we set off in a troop through the forest, the men carrying the swaying cages between them in a long line, chanting a gay and triumphant song.
I felt very exultant. After all the weeks of waiting, and all the sweat and labour we’d put into the trip, we’d achieved our final objective, we’d caught our Colobus. But this was only the first stage of the game, I reflected, as the cages were packed into the back of our giant Land Rover, and we drove slowly over the bumpy road back to the beef mines. Now came the crucial test: could we keep them?
7. Keep Me a Colobus
Sirs,
We will be grateful if you can attend our dance tonight which will be at 9.00 p.m. prompt. The dance is for our sister Regina who joined the police force and is now out. It is just a sendoff dance. You are all invited to this dance.
Awaiting for an immediate reply.
The address is
J.B. Musa Bambawo
M.C. J.P. Musa
As I had suspected, catching the Colobus was one thing, keeping them alive was quite another. The chief difficulty was not that they did not settle down to captivity; they were almost resigned to it immediately. The difficulty lay in feeding them. In the wild state they live in the uppermost branches of the trees and feed almost exclusively on leaves, moss and other coarse green matter and, I rather suspect, the occasional bird’s egg or lizard forms part of their diet. In consequence, the stomach, instead of being a simple sac as in other monkeys, has developed into a succession of dual lobes to extract the greatest possible nourishment from this rather un-nutritive bulk of food. In many ways these resemble the stomachs of the hooved animals that chew the cud. Often, in the Colobus, the stomach is so large that a quarter of the animal’s weight can be attributed to it and whatever it contains.
To begin with we could feed them with the natural foods that we obtained from the forest around us, and they ate ravenously. But this, I suspect, was something to do with the shock of capture because, within twenty-four hours, their appetites had trailed away to almost nothing. We began to get worried indeed. In desperation, we went down to the market in Bambawo, at the bottom of the hill, and bought large quantities of the green-stuffs that the Africans grow to make their stews and food with. There were several different varieties of this – some resembled spinach, some a rather large-leafed clover – and we tried these on the Colobus. To begin with they displayed no interest at all, then they started feeding, in a rather desultory fashion. And then, as though they had decided to accept their fate, all the Black-and-white ones started feeding quite normally on the green-stuff that we got from the market, but the Red-and-black ones continued to eat just sufficient to keep themselves alive. They were so totally different in character that you wouldn’t have thought that they were both Colobus. The Black-and-whites were alert and lively and soon tamed down so that they would take food from your hand. The Red-and-blacks, on the contrary were sullen and morose and seemed to withdraw into themselves in what could only be described as a fit of sulks.
The two things that worried me most were, firstly, that we were shortly due to go back to Freetown to catch the boat home, and secondly, that we had, in some way, to teach the Colobus to eat something other than their natural food – something which we could supply them with on the voyage, like apples, carrots, and so on. Unfortunately, most of these foods were unobtainable in Bambawo or in Kenema. We did manage to obtain some apples at colossal cost, but the Colobus merely sniffed at them and threw them away. In the hope that we might be successful in catching Colobus, I had got the Accra to bring out with it large quantities of carrots, cabbage, and every other sort of vegetable I could think of that might tempt them, but the scorn with which they received the apples made my heart sink, I began to think that they wouldn’t be willing to feed on any of the foodstuffs that we could give them on the ship.
Eventually, it came to the point where the Red-and-blacks were so sullen and withdrawn, and eating so little, that it was obvious it would have taken months of patient work to adapt them to captivity and to an unnatural diet. To my intense disappointment I decided that we would have to let them go, and this we did. However, as compensation for this, the Black-and-whites continued to thrive and do well, although they would still look with scorn upon anything like apples or bananas. Because the green-stuffs withered so quickly in the heat, they had to be fed four or five times during the day, and this was terribly time-consuming, for we not only had the filming to do but the rest of the collection to look after as well.
It was just about that time that I did one of those stupid things that one is liable to do on any trip. We had been two or three miles down the road into a patch of forest to film a sequence, travelling in the small Land Rover that the BBC had brought up country with them. When we had finished filming and were returning home, I sat on the tail-board of the Land Rover and, presently, travelling quite fast, she hit an enormous bump in the road. I was thrown upwards and sideways and landed, fortunately, back on the tail-board, but badly bruising the base of my spine and breaking two ribs. Up till then I had always considered that a broken rib was really not all that painful. I have now changed my views completely. It is extremely painful. First of all, I had great difficulty in sitting down, owing to the bruise at the base of my spine; secondly, if I bent down, or even if I breathed, the ribs caused me the most exquisite agony. This m
ade the animal work even harder because, when cleaning cages, you are forced to bend over quite often, as when carrying buckets of water or doing similar operations. The only pills I had with me were ordinary headache pills which didn’t have the slightest effect on the pain. I hoped that after a few days this would wear off. Unfortunately it didn’t; if anything, it got worse, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to cope with the collection and the filming that needed to be done on board ship. We needed a third person.
As luck would have it, I knew that Jacquie was getting back to England from the Argentine at roughly the same time as the Accra was leaving to come out to West Africa and pick us up. I cabled her and suggested that she came out on the Accra, but without telling her why. All this had to be done through Catha at the zoo, of course, because I was not sure of the exact position of Jacquie’s ship and so couldn’t cable her direct. I presently received a cable in reply saying that Jacquie’s ship would arrive at such a time as to give her only forty-eight hours to make all the arrangements to catch the Accra at a completely different port. Was it imperative that she join me? I didn’t want to cable back the truth of the situation, because I knew that it would worry her, so I merely cabled: ‘Jacquie joining me not imperative. Merely that I love my wife.’ This had the desired effect of getting her on to the Accra , and also caused a certain amount of consternation to the various telegraphists through whose hands it had to pass. Apparently, one isn’t supposed to be so outspoken in cables.
The day eventually came when we had to leave the beef mines and travel down to Freetown. On any collecting trip it is always a difficult decision to try to make as to whether to travel by day or by night to your destination. If you travel by day your animals get terribly hot and the bumpy roads don’t enable them to eat. If you travel by night, though you still have the bumpy road to contend with and your animals can’t get any sleep, at least they are cool. I decided that we would travel by night. We had to have three lorries, as well as our giant Land Rover, to transport all the animals that we had collected. The thing that really worried me was the baby animals as they would suffer most on the journey down to Freetown.