Since male gorillas are equipped with large, sharp canines, this gentle bite left holes in his leg, the scars of which are still impressive. Similar bitings have occurred at Dian Fossey’s camp at Karisoke, in Rwanda, and at Kahuzi-Biega, in eastern Zaire, where I observed gorillas a few years ago, but none have been fatal despite the huge strength and fearsome aspect of what all authorities regard as a gentle vegetarian creature. “Imagine one of these great hunters shooting down a silverback!” Caroline Tutin says with quiet indignation. “It’s hard to imagine a less sporting shot!”
The mountain gorilla of the Central Highlands, which is regularly shot by poachers for tourist “trophy heads” (the young are taken illegally for zoos, a process which usually involves shooting the adults), is now in serious danger, its population having been reduced to about four hundred, but, like the northern white rhino, it is regarded as a geographic race, not a true species, despite marked morphological differences in the two forms. (At present a third race is recognized—the eastern lowland gorilla, now reduced to a few small ranges in eastern Zaire. Between twenty-five hundred and forty-five hundred of this largest of the three gorillas, which include the animals at Kahuzi-Biega, are thought to remain.) Worldwide alarms of gorilla extinction that were sounded a few years ago were based on rough estimates that the combined populations of the mountain and the lowland races did not exceed five to seven thousand animals, but in a recent development—quite the opposite of what we now anticipate for forest elephant—Dr. Tutin and other researchers have discovered an estimated thirty-five thousand gorilla in Gabon alone, and other healthy lowland populations as far west as Cameroon. (Richard Carroll’s more conservative figure is thirty thousand to fifty thousand western lowland gorilla in all five countries of the western Congo Basin—Cameroon, C.A.R., Gabon, Congo, and Equatorial Guinea.) As in the case of the northern white rhino, this raises the question of whether so much conservation effort should be spent on a remnant and perhaps doomed geographic race—the mountain gorilla—when the species as a whole is not in danger.
With Jonah, I accompany Dr. Tutin on an afternoon trek into her forest, which appears far more modified by elephants than the forest at Makokou. Because the gorillas are still shy, she thinks it unlikely that they will show themselves, and she turns out to be right, although we encounter a large number of fresh droppings. Dr. Tutin deftly collects one in a polyethylene bag for food analysis. “Some of these smell quite nice,” she says, and at this point she glances up at Dr. Western, aware that his wife, Dr. Strum, is a noted baboon authority. So gently that Jonah doesn’t notice he is being teased, she whispers with a shy sly smile, “Better than baboons’!” (Remarkably, the best known primate researchers—Goodall, Fossey, Biruti-Galdikas [the orangutan researcher in Borneo], and more recently Drs. Strum and Tutin—are women. The first three—known irreverently in primate circles as “the trimates”—were protégées of Louis Leakey, who felt that women had more patience for prolonged study, but this does not fully account for the phenomenon, for which no behavioral theory has been advanced.)
On a forest ridge, our coming provokes a crashing flight through the dense undergrowth. “Large duiker,” Dr. Tutin whispers. “Yellow-backed, I should think.” We also startle a mustached monkey, one of three guenon species that share this forest with gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills, gray-cheeked mangabeys, and black colobus. Dr. Tutin says that primate species are even more numerous in south Cameroon, at the northern end of this Pleistocene refugia, which extends all the way down to the coast; she has seen gorillas on the seashore at Mayumba, in southwest Gabon.
The ridge opens out on one of the large rocks that jut up from the forest floor, and here we sit still for a little while, hoping to hear the chest thumping and other noises that might betray the whereabouts of the gorillas. What we hear instead is the strange “pant-hooting” of an approaching troop of chimpanzees, each animal’s harsh cries joining with others in a wild ululation that rings and wanders through the trees. “They’ve found something good to eat, or they’ve run into another subgroup, perhaps both,” Caroline murmurs, turning to listen with the same smile of unabashed wonder and approval that is so affecting in the hunting peoples. We cross the ridge to the far side, following the sound of the chimps feeding, but already the apes are falling quiet, all but hidden in the canopies of leaves. “They’re settling down now for the night,” Caroline says, smiling again. “I’ll be here the first thing in the morning.”
In the course of his African elephant survey in 1979, Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton saw a troop of little elephants on the sea beach at Iguela Game Reserve, here in Gabon. Douglas-Hamilton’s escort, Claude Pradel, the director of the hunting preserve of President Omar Bongo at Wonga-Wongue, and a veteran of thirty-three years in this country, told Iain that these elephant were assala, which is the local name for “pygmy elephant.” If we wanted a look at the mysterious assala, the wild tract of thirty-five hundred square kilometers at Wonga-Wongue, extending inland from the coast, seemed very promising, since elephants were more protected there than anywhere else in this casual country.
Not without difficulties and delays, Richard Barnes and his friend Dr. Aart Louis, the director of the national herbarium, have received permission for a brief visit to Wonga-Wongue, and on January 22, accompanied by Dr. Louis and another Dutch botanist, Dr. Jan Reitsma, and escorted by a soldier of the president’s guard, we fly about seventy miles south of Libreville to a tranquil region of forest and meadows parted by clear streams that flow down from high grassy plateaus to the sea. Without much question, Wonga-Wongue, surrounded by vast marshes and lacking road access—one can only come by boat or plane—is one of the loveliest reserves in all of Africa.
M. Pradel lives year-round at the president’s camp on a wooded hill well inland from the coast, together with his wife, Nina, his nineteen-year-old son, Norbert, a German assistant, an African staff, four Bengal tigers, five puma from South America, a young chimpanzee, two zebras, and a very large monitor lizard, which resides in an empty swimming pool by the main house. Most of these creatures are the property of President Bongo, who is usually accompanied here on his rare visits by some other head of state who is anxious to shoot something. Thus Wonga-Wongue is exposed to hunting, as are Lope-Okande and Iguela, but the hunting here is as limited as it is infrequent. From the animals’ point of view, at least, it comes closer to a true national park than any wild area in Gabon.
Monsieur Pradel is away in Ivory Coast at the time of our visit, but Madame Pradel, a handsome redhead from Toulouse, is very hospitable in her husband’s absence. She presides over an exotic living room lined with stuffed birds and monkeys, kudu and sable horns, a monkey-skull fetish, artificial flowers, photographs, amateur paintings, curios, and three saddles mounted on racks; one of the saddles is an ornate cowboy model acquired last year on a visit to Texas, where she also acquired the University of Texas T-shirt worn by young Norbert. The Pradels keep horses here but have not had much luck with them because of sleeping sickness and other, undiagnosed, ailments. “We’ve never kept a horse alive more than four years,” she says. “It’s very sad, watching them die.”
All three Pradels pilot their own airplanes, but Madame Pradel, who sees to Wonga-Wongue’s administration, has not left the reserve for the past two years. “What is there to do in Libreville?” she inquires, throwing her hands up in fine Gallic disdain. “I’m better off here. I don’t wish to die here, but …” She shrugs. The first few years of her sixteen in Gabon were spent at Makokou; she describes to Richard the gigantic Makokou elephants that are now all gone. But what she remembers even better than the elephants are the huge Goliath and rhinoceros beetles in the forest.
Madame Pradel confirms the presence of assala; just the other day she has seen a troop with a tiny infant “no bigger than a toy.” The presence of the infant does not fit our theory that pygmy elephants are nothing more than maverick young forest elephants, with or without precocious tusks, and neither does her accoun
t of a sick assala from Wonga-Wongue which after its death had been stuffed for display in President Bongo’s palace back in Libreville. Judging from the worn condition of its tusks, everyone who saw this little animal, say the Pradels, agreed that it was at least sixty years old. But inspecting the photograph that Madame Pradel shows us, we see what looks like a four-year-old forest elephant, even to the body hair found on young animals. “The tusk wear doesn’t mean a thing,” Jonah says later. “Juvenile tusks often get chipped and worn, and look like tusks of older animals.” What we wish to do as soon as possible is to inspect these assala in the field, and dispel the mystery once and for all.
Norbert Pradel offers to guide us around Wonga-Wongue during our stay. Dressed in camouflage fatigues and cap, packing a pistol, Norbert maneuvers the family’s bush vehicle as rapidly as possible over the red sand roads. We flush one sitatunga, which has wandered up into the grasslands from the marshy lakes, but the only animals seen in abundance are red forest buffalo. Like the forest elephant, the forest buffalo is of the same species as its savanna kinsman, and it, too, is half the size of its savanna race and very different in appearance, carrying its much smaller horns as duikers do, swept back and tight for forest travel. Like their large relatives, the forest buffalo wheel to the four winds when panicked, nostrils high, ears wide and ragged, hummocking along on random courses that often carry them across the path of whatever it is that they are fleeing.
Some years ago, young Norbert’s father was nearly demolished by a bouffle that rose and pursued him after his bullet dropped it, and gored him twice before plunging off into the forest. “And that one was dead,” exclaims Madame Pradel later, ladling buffalo meat onto our plates; she tells us about a woman worker on the reserve plantation who recently survived a severe goring.
Because of its remote location and lack of access roads, Wonga-Wongue is virtually free of all but local poachers, who hunt for meat, and even these (from what Norbert views as a deplorable weakness in the tribal character) are betrayed by their fellow villagers at the first whisper of trouble. Only lately have commercially inclined outsiders started to appear. One such fellow was apprehended with forty-three decaying monkeys, which he hoped would still be pleasing to his customers in Libreville after a journey of seventy hot miles in his pirogue. Much more serious, Norbert relates, was an episode in which a white pilot in a military aircraft gunned down a troop of elephants with rockets. The carcasses were bulldozed under by a confederate on the Wonga-Wongue staff, to be exhumed again when the ivory had rotted free. These people were eventually traced and arrested, thanks to Claude Pradel, who has earned a reputation for enforcing game protection in this country where protection is, at best, a quaint idea.
Even on the highest plateaus, where the grass blows to the horizon, remnant isles of trees rise from the tawny land. The botanists agree with Western that all this country was once forest, and that this vast empty savanna, like the one at Lope, was originally cleared and farmed by Bantu peoples who later fled the pillage of the slave trade. The ancient soil, its minerals leached out by sixty million years of rain, was weakened further, Dr. Louis believes, by erosion caused by primitive cultivation, so that the forests were unable to return. As in the savannas north of the forest, the impoverished grasses, which provide supplementary bulk to the large animals, are too coarse and poor to support the smaller herbivores; even the zebras of President Bongo seem to disdain them. These uplands have attracted some of the same bird life that one sees in the savannas of East Africa—eagles, larks, and swallows, the Senegal plover, the nightjars and spotted eagle-owls of the night roads—but by comparison, the birds are few, and of few species.
By the roadside I see the gleam of a large python, but unfortunately Norbert sees it, too. He yanks the vehicle onto the shoulder and runs it over, nearly losing control of the car in the jolt of the impact. Astonishingly the snake slides away. “Python,” he says, disgusted. “Maybe three meters.” I ask him rather sharply why he wished to kill it, and hearing no criticism, he answers cheerfully, “Because I do not like it. Sont les sales bêtes.”
In the late afternoon, a few elephants come carefully from the forest. Their usual habit is to feed all evening and through the night in the grasslands along the forest verges, returning into the green wall at break of day. Toward twilight, in a dusky sun, seven or eight are moving steadily through sand-colored grass along the distant trees. A solitary cow appears, then a young male, and, finally two cows accompanied by small young and a half-grown female.
Our young guide does not slow down when elephants are sighted, being of the opinion that the pesky things will head straight for the forest, no matter what, and that our one chance is to head them off with the speeding car. Given their chronic exposure to this technique, it was certainly likely that they would head straight for the forest, and all we see are baggy gray hindquarters being swallowed by the trees. But the last group is caught out in the open, and Norbert, cutting across country, rides right up alongside the fleeing animals. They wheel and scream, ears and tails lashing, and head back in the opposite direction, as we assure him we have seen enough. Unquestionably these are adult females with calves bouncing at their flanks, and they are by far the smallest elephants we’ve seen, not six feet high.
“Assala,” says Norbert Pradel, pleased he has shown us “éléphant pygmée” at such close range. I ask him if these little elephants were average size for the assala, and he says they are, reminding us that “big elephants” also occur here.
Next morning, in dense dry season mist, with chimpanzees howling from the forest, we approach on foot a lone adult male at least seven and a half or eight feet high, by Jonah’s estimate. This elephant, too, has round small ears and lacks the protruding brow of male bush elephant, which would stand two or three feet taller at the shoulder, but his large ivory has the pronounced forward curve of the savanna race that we had noted even in one of the diminutive elephants seen up close the previous evening.
We had thought to encounter pure cyclotis rather quickly upon entering the equatorial forest, whether just north of the equator at Makokou or just south of it at Wonga-Wongue. What we had not expected was this very broad zone of hybridization in which large and small elephants coexist.
Traditionally paleontologists have believed that the bush elephant was the ancestral form, since its ancient bones have been found in the savanna. But bones don’t last long in the damp forest (or researchers either), and since there were no savannas in pre-Miocene times, the African elephant must have evolved as a forest animal; either cyclotis is the original elephant or it evolved from the original, with the bush elephant appearing later. The nonadaptive and inappropriate bush habit of destroying trees while feeding was adaptive in the forest, where light must penetrate in order to produce second-growth browse, and this, too, suggests the forest ancestry of Loxodonta, on which most biologists now agree.
The Wonga-Wongue animals come as close to pure cyclotis as any we have seen, not only in morphological characters but in size. But somewhere, Jonah is convinced, there must exist a population with no trace of hybridization, to maintain the genetic characters identified with the forest race. He supposed that such elephants might be found in south Gabon, south Congo, or southwest Zaire.
Throughout our visit to Gabon, we had to return repeatedly to Libreville, not only because aviation gasoline was unobtainable anywhere else but because special clearances were necessary for light plane travel to what were termed “inhospitable regions.” And it was at Libreville airport, on a dead, fetid morning, that we said good-bye to Richard Barnes, whose elephant expertise as well as taut logistical preparations and good company had made an important contribution to our journey.
Richard himself had no regrets about our parting, since he doesn’t much care for light plane travel over long stretches of equatorial forest. “I’m awfully glad,” he said to me with uncustomary fervor, “that I do not have to get back into that airplane.” Had he known what awaited us ov
er the next two days, he would have fallen to his bony knees in simple gratitude.
Heading southeast from Libreville to Kinshasa, in Zaire, on the first leg of our zigzag return across the continent, we cross the great Ogooué at Lambarene, where Dr. Alfred Schweitzer had his clinic, and continued southeast up the N’Gounié River. Two hundred miles out, the plane leaves the forest and crosses a broad country of marshlands and dwindling strands of trees. Here the forest ends. South Gabon, which we had envisioned as a last redoubt of the “pure” forest elephant, turns out to be a deforested land without visible life, only scarce and solitary huts with brown faded smudges of ancient gardens showing through pale weary greens. “Man-made,” says Jonah of this wasteland, and when I wonder aloud about the fate of the men who made it, he says, not altogether seriously, “America.”
According to our obsolete colonial air charts, the wandering red road that we are following runs all the way from Lambaréné to Brazzaville, capital of the Congo Republic, which lies across the Congo—now the Zaire River—from Kinshasa. (Like C.A.R. and Chad, Gabon and Congo were formerly a single administrative unit of French Equatorial Africa.) But not far beyond the Congo border the road diminishes into smaller tracks that scatter out among hill villages. These modern villages must differ little from those of former days, and they appear to be continuing the destruction of the land seen farther north, since the land around them is eroded, and their garden patches are miles distant across a worn-out earth.
The colonial road shown on the chart is gone entirely. We follow a southeastern course, picking up a landmark at the Niari River. Having no clearance for a landing in Congo, we must slip in and refill our wing tanks at a mission airstrip north of Dolisie, in open mining country, then take off speedily, following the new paved road toward Brazzaville.