In 1949, as a young boy, Deschryver was brought by his Belgian parents to Bukavu. He was always interested in animals, he says, and after he completed school, he became a professional hunter—a very good one, it is said. But perhaps because of his training with James Chapin, he remained concerned with conservation, and in 1965 he requested that his hunting block at Kahuzi-Biega be made a national park; this was finally done in 1975. Though a few elephants still occur there, his main concern was for the gorillas, which were being killed by Africans for food. The gorilla’s range extends into these lowlands, and in 1975, at Deschryver’s urging, the boundaries of Kahuzi-Biega were considerably enlarged; the park now extends all the way west to Utu and to Uku, in a vast tract that includes much of the known range of the Congo peacock. Meanwhile, Deschryver has been featured in two television films on the gorillas, both widely distributed in the United States and Europe.
In 1967, at the time of the Vita ya Schramm, Deschryver was forced to leave the country. When he returned about six months later, his house and property had been destroyed. “I lost everything,” he says, “everything,” and as he speaks, that sad and bitter mask tightens his face.
Deschryver had been acquainted with Jacques Schramm, who had a coffee plantation in this region before he became a mercenary, but Schramm had never been a friend. “He wasn’t doing what he did only for money,” Deschryver remarked suddenly, after a silence; he made a forward pushing movement with his clenched fist. “No, he was hard!” He nodded. “He was too hard.” Yes, he had heard that Schramm was still a mercenary in southern Africa—he shrugs again. “Who knows where that man is? He just disappeared.”
The airplane crosses the brown Lua River. The lone road has degenerated to a thin brown track with a grass strip down the middle, a sign that vehicles are very few—we have not seen one. A brown scar in the forest to the north, surrounded by thin, isolated smokes, is Walikale. Here the Lua flows into the Loa, and the land is flat, for the white rapids of the highlands have disappeared. “The Loa is full of crocodiles,” remarks Deschryver, coming as close as he ever comes to satisfaction. Not far to the west of Walikale the Loa will join the upper Lualaba, once called the Congo.
Under the plane the forest is primeval, without a sign of track or hut or smoke, green green green green as a green ocean, with here and there a glint of river under the islets of white cloud. The jungle stretches away under the leaden sky two thousand miles to the South Atlantic and beyond, along the Gulf of Guinea, to the westernmost African rain forest in Guinea.
The strip at Obaye is no more than a minute tear in this green fabric. It is already in view when Deschryver says, “I don’t know whether my calculations are right or not, but Obaye should be just here.” Soon he is circling the strip, and he makes a false landing to clear it of Africans, who are already running in from all directions. The roar scares up a number of big white-thighed hornbills that sail away among the strange umbrella trees, musanga (almost identical in appearance to a South American forest tree of an entirely different family and therefore a remarkable botanical example of the phenomenon called parallel evolution).
The smiling people at the airstrip are Banianga, who as recently as twenty years ago were famous cannibals, selling off their excess captives to like-minded tribes; they practice the shifting cultivation of those early Bantu who came down out of Cameroon in the first centuries A.D. Standing tall among them is a big white man with glasses and neglected teeth who has been out here since the cannibal days as manager of the tin mines for Sominki. Victor Delcourt is surprised to hear of the quest for the paon de Congo, “Why, I have eaten it!” he exclaims. “Very good, too!” Yes, but has he seen it in the wild? “B’en oui! Je l’ai tué moi-même!” Twenty years ago he had seen one by the roadside, stopped his truck, and shot it. There seems no reason to doubt a man so innocent of his own accomplishment.
I leave Sarah and Alec in the hands of the only white man ever known to have seen, killed, and eaten Afropavo, We part with regret, for we have got on very well; there is talk already of another expedition, perhaps to one of the three avian regions left in Africa that Alec does not know. But since all three—Namibia, Angola, Ethiopia—are presently in a state of war, it is hard to imagine when this expedition might take place.
Deschryver is anxious about the weather; it is time to go. When the plane takes off again, the children run behind it, down the airstrip, and the big hornbills with white patches on their wings rise once again to flap and sail to far umbrella trees.
On the eastward flight Deschryver opens up a little and even speaks out once or twice of his own accord; when he chooses, he has a pleasant smile and a good laugh. But heavy weather is closing in behind us, and by midday, as Adrien had predicted, the weather has changed suddenly for the worse. Due to rising heat and moisture—the transpiration of this vast expanse of humid jungle—the rain clouds build up steadily all morning, and now they are bursting all around us, as rain comes in a hard patter on the windshield. Deschryver, frowning, forced off course, feels his way around the thunderheads, emerging finally well south of his intended route, at the northern boundary of the Kahuzi-Biega Park. A beautiful waterfall comes and goes in a mist of gray and green, and then we see that enormous rock, like a leaning tower, that we had passed on its south side on the trip west. “We are near Wagongo,” Deschryver says, and he points to the heavy cloud mass not far south that shrouds Kahuzi. “If I flew there”—and once again he makes that cutting gesture with his hand—“then we are finished. When pilots get lost out here, that’s it. So it’s very good that I know just where I am.” At Goma we would learn that due to weather his charter to the Ruwenzori had been canceled; we might as well have stayed there at Obaye.
The plane drifts along the western shore of Kivu, with its beautiful islets and sheltered coves hidden by the green steep walls of drowned volcanoes. The water turns in patterns of pure blues, deep, dark, and pale—whether cloud shadow or sign of depth it is hard to tell. Already wind streaks gather in the silver sheen that will form into gray chop this afternoon. At the north end of Kivu, where in 1912 broad coulees of lava boiled the lake, small craters guard the shore, and one of these is far out in the water, forming an emblematic U just off the mouth of a hidden harbor. Nyiragongo comes in view, a dim shadow in the heavy weather that is closing off the north, a specter of the fire mountains, quite unreal, and once again I am struck by the great beauty of this heartland of a continent, exclaiming aloud that it must be one of the loveliest regions in all Africa. Deschryver nods, as if this fact were tragic; despite his Zairian wife and children, he is not permitted to become a citizen. I ask if he intends to spend his life here. “Why not?” he says, turning to look me squarely in the face for the first time since I have known him. “What else am I to do?” (He died in 1989, still in his forties.)
A few weeks later I received a letter sent from Paris by Sarah Plimpton. George had joined them, and although they had not actually seen the Congo peacock, they believed they had heard the gowé-gowah that Chapin had recorded. According to Charles Cordier the cock calls loudly in the night—ko-ko-wa!—to which the hen responds—hi-ho, hi-ho,
* The Tree Where Man Was Born (New York: Viking Press, 1972).
PYGMIES AND
PYGMY ELEPHANTS:
THE CONGO BASIN
(1986)
On the last evening of 1985, the all-but-empty flight from Dakar-Monrovia-Lagos to Nairobi is crossing the lightless forests of the Congo Basin, passing at midnight over the Central African highlands of the Zaire-Rwanda border, where the earth’s last bands of mountain gorillas sleep in their nests. Down there in the dark, the outraged Africans who are thought to have murdered the gorilla researcher Dian Fossey are still in hiding; Fossey is being buried there this very evening. On the screen is a South African movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a simple-hearted tale (though politically disingenuous, with its slapstick guerrilla squad of foolish blacks led by a caricatured Cuban). It’s easy to follow without the s
oundtrack, and I especially enjoy the wistful grace of the Kung Bushman, whom I knew as Komsai seven years ago when his band was living in Botswana’s Tsodilo Hills. Komsai had worked in South Africa’s mines, he spoke the South African lingua franca called Funhalarou, and perhaps this is why he was chosen for this movie. When I crossed his path, he had gone back to the Kalahari and he was a hunter, with a newly killed eland in his camp, and the huge fresh lyre horns of a kudu bull, both taken with his bow and poison arrows. Somewhere I have heard that since participating in the film, Komsai has died; perhaps this is not true, perhaps the gods are not crazy after all.
At 2 A.M. in the new year, I am met in Nairobi by the savanna ecologist David Western, a husky, trim, and well-kept Kenyan citizen of forty-two. Dr. Western is the resource ecologist for the New York Zoological Society, best known for its Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium; he is also pilot of the NYZS aircraft in which we shall embark the day after tomorrow on a survey of the rain forests of Central Africa, paying special attention to the numbers and distribution of the small forest elephant, which may be seriously threatened by the ivory trade. As Dr. Western—known since a small boy as Jonah—wrote me in a letter last September, “We still know remarkably little about either the forest elephant, which now accounts for sixty per cent of the ivory leaving Africa, or the Congo Basin, an area including about twenty per cent of the world’s tropical equatorial forests. The forest elephant is something of an enigma, and reason enough for the entire trip.”
The African elephant, Loxodonta africana, has been seriously imperiled by ivory hunters; recent analyses of market tusks show that the poaching gangs, having reduced the savanna or bush elephant, Loxodonta africana africana, to less than a half million animals, are increasingly concentrating on the much smaller forest race, L.a. cyclotis, Unlike L.a. africana, which is easy to census by light plane, cyclotis spends most of the daylight hours hidden in the forest, and estimates of its numbers have been mainly speculative. Proponents of the ivory trade maintain that the forest canopy hides very large numbers of small elephants, while ecologists fear that in this inhospitable habitat the numbers have always been low. It is generally agreed that an African elephant population of two million or more animals could probably sustain the present slaughter for the ivory trade, which until very recently, at least, has produced about seven hundred and fifty tons each year. However, computer analyses indicate that if fewer than a million elephants are left, as many authorities believe, then the species is already in a precipitous decline in which half the remaining animals will be lost in the next decade. The future of Loxodonta may depend, in short, on an accurate estimate of the numbers of the forest race, which would lay the foundation for a strong international conservation effort on behalf of the species as a whole.
“There will be a large gap in our understanding of the forest elephant until we understand the forest better,” Western’s letter said. “That is one of the purposes of this survey. The truth is, we know very little about forest ecology. Only in recent years, with the realization of how rapidly the rain forests, with their great abundance and variety of life, are disappearing, especially in South America and southeast Asia, have we come to realize that the forest is a very important biome that cannot be ignored by anyone committed to conservation and the future of the earth. Because of its inaccessibility and low human population, the Congo Basin is still largely intact, but there is no reason for confidence that it will stay that way.”
As for me, I am interested in both the forest and the forest elephant, and I enjoy the company of biologists, who teach me a great deal that I wish to know about the origins and structure and relationships of the natural world, which have filled me with awe and fascination all my life. Throughout our journey we shall be working with ecologists already in the field, and an elephant biologist will meet us in Central Africa and accompany us throughout the first part of the journey. Later we shall accompany okapi biologists and Mbuti Pygmy hunters into the Ituri Forest of Zaire.
Since our main destinations will be wilderness regions of the Central African Republic, Gabon, and Zaire, we will travel nearly seven thousand miles, from Nairobi, in Kenya, to Libreville, on Gabon’s Atlantic coast, and back again. So far as Dr. Western knows, this transcontinental forest journey has never before been made in a light plane, but the feat interests us much less than the discoveries we might make along the way. With luck, for example, we shall learn more about the mysterious “pygmy elephant” in C.A.R. and Gabon, widely reported for almost a hundred years. With the exception of the mokele mbembe, an elusive dinosaurlike denizen of the vast swamps of the Congo Basin, the pygmy elephant, Loxodonta pumilio, is regarded as the last large “unknown” animal in Africa. In a forest of such size and inaccessibility, it would be unwise to dismiss the pygmy elephant out of hand; the gorilla was reported for nearly a century before its existence was scientifically accepted, and the okapi, a large forest relative of the giraffe, eluded detection entirely until 1908.
Dr. Western and his wife, Dr. Shirley Strum, the distinguished social anthropologist and student of the baboon, have a new baby and a new house that faces across the Mbagathi River, which forms the boundary between the Nairobi National Park and the Kapiti Plain, in Masai Land. Driving out the Langata Road, passing the demolished car of a New Year’s celebrant, Jonah assured me that early in the morning I might see black rhino from his guest-room window.
Calls of the ring-neck and red-eyed doves reminded me as I awoke that I was once again in Africa. Now it is sunrise, and I see no rhino, but there are eland, impala, and giraffe, and a small herd of buffalo on the thorn landscape, still green and fresh after December’s short rains.
The bureaucracy in the new Kenya is under stern instruction from President Daniel arap Moi to serve the people rather than abuse them, as has been the popular custom on this continent, and preparations for our air safari go quite smoothly. But this morning the Directorate of Civil Aviation was down to a single airport clearance form, though six were needed, and all the copiers in the ministry were out of service, and by the time we filled out the long form and took it downtown to be copied, and completed the strict airport preparations and procedures, and passed through customs, it was already two in the afternoon, with a long flight across Kenya and Uganda into northern Zaire to be made by nightfall.
The New York Zoological Society’s aircraft is a single-engine Cessna 206, which normally can go six hours without refueling. It has been specially fitted with a cargo pod and extra gas drums to give us a range of fourteen hours, very critical in the vast reaches of Central Africa where sources of fuel are few and undependable. This heavy-duty blue-and-silver plane is the sole survivor of a group of three that were formerly attached to the European Economic Community’s Jonglei Canal Project, designed to bypass the Great Sudd of the south Sudan and carry Nile water more efficiently to the Muslim north. The southern tribesmen—Nilotic pastoralists of the Nuer and Dinka tribes—dispute what they see as continuing Muslim aggression at their expense. In recent years, the spear-carrying “rebels” have been supplied with modern arms by Ethiopia, and not long ago they blew up two of the Jonglei planes. The remaining one was sold to the NYZS. Its former pilot, a Kenyan citizen named Gwynn Morsen, was held hostage by the rebels for more than a year. “Spent most of my time thinking up ways to strike back,” he told us this morning at Wilson airport, “and I think I’ve settled on a plague of rinderpest. Can’t infect them with cholera or human plagues because they have all that already, so I’ll hit them where it really hurts—their cattle!” Two years ago, when Jonah and I first discussed this journey, we planned to look at the great herds of kob antelope on Sudan’s Boma Plateau, and the beautiful small park on the White Nile at Nimule where I first saw white rhino in 1961; but now one cannot land safely there, nor in Uganda, so pervasive are the civil wars on this sad continent.
“You’re leaving too late,” Shirley remarks when she comes to see us off, and we both know this, but by now we are frustrat
ed, anxious to get going. Jonah, an experienced bush pilot of thirteen years’ experience, reckons that we will still reach the airstrip in Zaire’s Garamba Park before dark. There we will refuel the aircraft from our spare fuel drums and spend a day with Kes and Fraser Smith, who are studying the last northern white rhinos. The following day we will head west to our first destination in the Central African Republic.
Leaving Nairobi, the plane turns northwest across Kikuyu Land and the Rift escarpment, heading up the great Rift Valley between the Mau Range and the Aberdares. As it crosses Lake Naivasha, I peer down upon the bright white heads of fish eagles and a shimmering white string of pelicans; off the white soda shores of Lake Nakuru is a large pink crescent made by thousands upon thousands of flamingos. Then we are crossing the equator, droning northwestward over the Kakamega Forest, the easternmost outpost of the equatorial rain forests that extend all the way into West Africa. Off to the north rises Mount Elgon, on the Uganda border, as a great migratory flight of European storks passes south beneath the plane, on their way, perhaps, to winter range in the Serengeti.
The high winds of the new monsoon, blowing out of Chad and the Sudan, have shrouded the rich farmlands of Uganda in a haze of dust. The sun looms, disappears again, behind bruised clouds that are thickened by the smoke of fires in this burning land. The rebel forces of Yoweri Museveni might bring peace and stability to this bloodied country—in early January of 1986 still under the control of the violent soldiery of the beleaguered Milton Obote, who is now known to have presided over the tribal slaughter of even more thousands of his countrymen than did his predecessor, Idi Amin. (Even among African countries, Uganda seems unusually beset by bloody-minded tyrants, who were already ruling when the first explorers came up the Nile; in the days of Henry Morton Stanley, the despotic ruler was a man named Mwanga, for whom Idi Amin named his son.) The long red roads are strangely empty of all vehicles, for the countryside below, so green and peaceful in appearance, is in a state of utter anarchy and fear, with all communications broken down and the hated, vengeful army of the latest tyrant in retreat across the land, looting and killing.