Twenty minutes north of Mbandaka, we turn due eastward from the brown Zaire up the Lulonga, a quiet and serene black river whose water is so clear that sandbars are visible deep under the surface off the downstream end of river islets. Soon the water is a transparent tannin color, clear as red amber, and to my elated eye intensely beautiful. Along the river are lone pirogues and tiny villages, none of them more than a few huts under the shade trees on the bank. “This is Stanley’s Africa,” Jonah says, delighted. “Hasn’t changed at all.” At last we are flying over forest that could shelter elephants, and we discuss the one critical discovery we have made in the past few days: most if not all of the tropical forest of south Gabon, south Congo, and western Zaire, which we had thought must be the heartland of the forest elephant, and which is still included as viable habitat in charts and estimates of elephant population, has long since been destroyed or degraded. It is barren land where no elephant could exist.
The very wide hybridization zone extending deep into the Congo Basin, in which elephants of pronounced bush characters may be met with south of the equator and beyond, establishes beyond question that very dissimilar elephants live in the forest, and that widespread reports of a dwarf elephant have a basis in fact. The large hybrid form with its distinctive bush characters is the “big elephant” with which a much smaller animal is everywhere compared. The so-called assala is the forest elephant, L.a. cyclotis, which is very small by comparison to the bush race when not heavily endowed with the bush genes. Pygmy elephants—not everywhere distinguished from the assala—are not a distinct species or race but simply juvenile cyclotis, mostly young males, that separate early from the cow herds and may sometimes form small herds of their own. The two pygmies of outsize tusks and aggressive temperament at Dzanga Pan provided the first evidence, and the herd of little assala at Wonga-Wongue confirmed it.
Elephant authorities Iain Douglas-Hamilton and Cynthia Moss, who would separately inspect Jonah’s photographs after our return, were fascinated by the discovery of the vast hybridization zone, which has never before been defined; until now, most observers had assumed that those “bush elephants” seen in the forest were wanderers or refugees from the dangerous open country to the north. Furthermore, both Moss and Douglas-Hamilton were fully persuaded by Jonah’s explanation of the pygmy-elephant mystery provided by his photographs, which clearly show bush hybrids, forest elephants, and pygmies, all in the same picture. Of that five- or six-year-old that brandished big tusks at a hybrid male more than twice its size, then interacted in a filial manner with its mother, Moss remarked, “Without those tusks, I’d think that was a baby elephant. The tusks make it look sub-adult, at least fifteen years of age.” Douglas-Hamilton agreed that on the basis of its tusks it might easily be called an adult “pygmy elephant.”
In resolving one enigma, we appear to have stumbled upon another: where is the “pure” forest elephant, with its small head, low round ears, and vertical tusks? We cannot be sure that such elephants don’t persist in this vast trackless forest below, but I wonder aloud if in our time the pure cyclotis might have disappeared due to a mingling of the bush and forest races caused by the disruptive impact of mankind, not only in two centuries of ivory slaughter but in the accelerating destruction of the forest ever since. Jonah shrugs. Closer to the forest edge, he says, my theory might be sound, but it could not account for the hybrids much farther south. He speculates that the immense contraction of the forest caused by natural drying in recent millennia would account for the fact that the hybridization zone has spread so widely. Only two thousand years ago, conditions were so dry that woodland-savanna elephants were widespread throughout what is now rain forest, with the forest race confined to a few patches. Since this is only about thirty elephant generations, the bush genes are still apparent, perhaps throughout the forest populations.
At Basankusu, we land at the mission airstrip and refuel the wing tanks as people come out on foot and bicycle to greet us; this time we have a clearance paper, and nobody tries to detain us when we depart. Once in the air and headed east, we eat rolls scavenged from the hotel breakfast table, much amused by the realization that this is our first lunch in three days, not because we had no food along but because on both the previous days, the tense flight conditions and suspense had killed our appetite.
The broad flat wilderness of central Zaire is the bottom of the shallow Congo Basin. From here in the center of the continent the green monotone of forest spreads in a great circle to the far horizons. There is only the Lulonga, growing smaller, then its tributary, the Lopori, with scarce and diminishing hut clusters along the bank. Miles from the river, miles and miles and miles from the nearest voice, is the tiny scar of a crude slash-and-burn clearing, but the human being there stays out of sight. Who is this solitary Homo sapiens, so content to live so far off by himself, in a closed universe of hut and garden? No doubt he is down there staring up at his own small patch of sky, for not so many aircraft can have passed this way; we are many miles off to the north of the air routes of Zaire. Perhaps there are forest elephants down there, but we do not know.
Some three hundred miles east of its confluence with the Zaire, the Lulonga-Lopori makes a great bend toward the south, and here we forge straight on over the rain forest, sixty miles or so, to complete the crossing of the great north bend and return to the Zaire River. In a sun-filled, windless afternoon, enjoying the peaceful sweep of the upper river, we continue upstream 150 miles to Kisangani, where the Tshopo and the Lualaba come together below Stanley Falls as the Zaire River, the great Congo.
If Kinshasa is one of the saddest cities in all Africa, Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville) is among the loveliest, despite the testimony of its bullet-scarred façades and the bleak aspect of the Place des Martyres; this main square commemorates the victims of the execution that took place here in the violent civil wars of the early sixties, when Kisangani was the headquarters of the rebel government. The happy spirit of the place, in its pretty location on the river, is reflected in the harmony and order of even the humblest wattle-and-daub hut in the clean-swept yards, the absence of litter, the neat bundles of charcoal and vegetable produce set out unguarded by the wayside, and, most important, in the unfrowning demeanor of the people seen on the evening road in from the airport. Along the riverfront, in fire light of setting sun, large pirogues tend the gaunt fish weirs, and a fish eagle crosses the broad, slow expanse of the silver current that carries the weight of the Central Highlands rains toward the sea.
Flying east from Kisangani, the Cessna follows the Bunia road, a rough red section of the trans-African track that winds across Africa from the Gulf of Guinea to the Kenya coast. This forest region still shows the effects of the anarchic period that followed Zaire’s independence in 1960, when many people, villages, and gardens were destroyed by the successive waves of soldiers, rebels, and white South African and Rhodesian mercenaries that swept in and out of Kisangani. In the quarter-century since, with the region depopulated and communications broken down, the colonial airstrips and many of the side roads still indicated on the charts are little more than shadows in the trees, having been subsumed by the surrounding forest. Excepting the rivers, the trans-African itself, barely maintained, is the only landmark, a welcome thread of human presence in this dark green sea.
On all sides, to the shrouded green horizons, lies the unbroken Ituri Forest, in the region perceived by Henry Morton Stanley as the very heart of “darkest Africa.” The Ituri extends north to the savannas and east to the foothills of the Central Highlands, with contiguous regions of wild forest to the south and west. In the nineteenth century, the region was a famous source of ivory, which was carried back to the coast at Zanzibar by the slave caravans of Tippu Tib, and by all accounts was a great redoubt of elephants throughout the decades of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo. Even today the Ituri remains largely intact, since it lies on the rim of the Congo Basin, above the waterfalls of smaller and less navigable rivers. In Western
’s opinion, any estimates we make of the Ituri’s present population of forest elephants may be used as a fair gauge for the rest of Zaire’s forests. In so much wilderness, in the absence of good information, it is tempting to imagine large companies of elephants passing unseen beneath these silent canopies, but past estimates are probably much too high.
In the 1920s, the colonial authorities moved the scattered Bantu villages onto the new road, where the people could be more easily taxed, conscripted for labor, and otherwise administered. This concentration, and the road itself, attracted ambitious new immigrants—the shopkeepers, hotel owners, gold panners, truck drivers, and the like. The newcomers who make up what anthropologists refer to as “the road culture,” with its dependence on the big cargo trucks that comprise most of the scarce vehicles on the trans-African. On the fringes of the road culture live twenty thousand to forty thousand Mbuti (no one quite knows), the largest and most culturally intact of the Pygmy groups that are scattered here and there across the rain forest, from the Central Highlands west into Cameroon; the Pygmies are one of the most ancient of African peoples, and among the continent’s last groups of hunter-gatherers.
At the Epulu River, Dr. Western buzzed the camp of American biologists John and Terese Hart, and a number of people ran outside to wave. With the help of the Mbuti, the Harts—John is an okapi biologist and Terese is a forest ecologist—have begun the first serious study of the elusive forest relative of the giraffe called the okapi, which is found only in this region of Zaire.
Due to our difficulties in western Zaire, we are already a day late, and at the airstrip at Mambasa, about forty miles east of Epulu, the missionaries tell us in reproving tones that the Harts had made the five-hour round trip yesterday for nothing, that we must go to the center of town and hitch a ride on one of the trading trucks that also serve as buses in this area. And so, at noon, we find ourselves set down in the shade of a big mango, with plenty of time to observe the village life of these Babila Bantu. The soft-voiced courtesy of village people is the other side of the insecure loud rudeness in the towns, and we have hardly arrived when two little boys are sent out with wood chairs for the visitors; our benefactor never appears.
From across the way drifts the smell of cooking fires. Pale maize in sheaves is drying on the thatch of rectangular small huts of daub-and-wattle. To the sound of chickens, and yellow weavers in the palms, two young women with upright hair in sprigs, using hardwood pestles and an old wood mortar, pound bitter manioc into white flour with alternating thumps, thrusting out colorful kanga-clad behinds on every stroke. Nearby, the men chop new bamboo for a hut with a bamboo frame, lashing the cross-pieces to the uprights with green palm fronds. The panga chop and pestle thump fall into rhythmic counterpoint of bursts of laughter, hoots, and noonday squalling. The cheerful faces belie the depredations of both Simba rebels and government soldiery, some twenty years ago, when most of the priests and missionaries of this region fled or were massacred, and the starving people went into hiding in the bush. The last Simba war chief, with his Mbuti guide, was captured in the forest in 1970, and both were shot here in Mambasa’s street.
Along the road trundle big bicycles with heavy cargoes; on their head the women tote big shallow bowls of aluminum or tin filled with food or washing. Umbrellas, popular all year round as shelter from cascading rains and equatorial sun, set off a bright new kikwembe, the all-purpose wraparound cloth used as a garment throughout eastern Africa.
A red truck does not stop for us. Two hours pass. High sun and soaring cumulus, bright clothes spread to dry on the fresh grass.
From the well, in single file, comes a line of little girls, each with a container on her head. “Nyayo Polo,” they sing in wistful harmony as the child bringing up the rear chants in hard counterpart, “Nyayo Polo!” The tallest girl, who leads, is Polo. Follow Polo!
In early afternoon, a trucker agrees to carry us westward to Epulu. He is a strong man, bare to the waist, and he wears a towel prizefighter-style around his neck. When Jonah inquires in Swahili how long it will take to reach Epulu, he answers shortly, “It takes time.” He is intent on a flirtatious young woman passenger, but his interest is not romantic. “Citoyenne,” he insists in a low voice, hard hand extended, and she flounces a little in contempt before she comes up with the fare. Most of these traders on the road, and the shopkeepers, too, are of the Nande, an energetic Sudanic tribe of the foothills to the east who moved down into this depopulated region after the Simba Rebellion to prey upon the mission-softened natives.
I climb onto the cargo and arrange myself to enjoy the journey, much as I did twenty-five years ago, traveling south through Sudan. My compagnons de voyage are a noisy band of local people, and the cargo consists of oil drums, shovels, sacks of maize flour and manioc, plantains, a wood peanut huller, and a tethered cockerel, bill gaped wide in fear and thirst. The truck jolts forward to a roadblock set up by the Zairois soldiery for the main purpose of extracting some sort of livelihood from all who pass.
Jolting and trundling through potholed hill country, the truck comes up behind a funeral procession. The driver nudges into the procession, which is led by a chanting seminaked shaman in a long-tailed fur cap, waving a long fur strip to the beat of drums, and dancing in a continuous slow circle in front of a coffin draped in new blue kikwembes. When the crowd will not part for it, the truck takes its place in the procession, grinding along for fifteen minutes in low gear. The mourners turn off on a path into the forest as the sky behind us darkens, with first gusts of a wind that will bring rain.
A man steps from the forest, holding a dead guenon by the tail; the passengers shout and bargain with him, but nobody buys his monkey meat. When the rain comes, a tarp is lashed across the frame over cargo and passengers, and we lurch on, along the deeply rutted road. The truck stops again when a Land-Rover headed eastward turns around; John Hart and a friend, Rick Peterson, have come to meet us. The truck passengers help unload our gear, which includes provisions for the Harts, and we continue westward on this rain-filled main road across Africa that is all but impassable in the rainy season.
Outside the village of Epulu, two small figures carrying spears trot along ahead of us. They jump sideways into the roadside grass and smile and wave hard as we pass. John Hart, an ebullient redhead, thirty-five years old, yells out to them in greeting, and I see that they aren’t boys at all but short-legged little men of the Mbuti, called Bambuti by the Bantu cultivators.
Until recently it was supposed that the Mbuti were driven south from the savannas by the expansion of those Bantu peoples who followed the rivers into the forests, probably as a consequence of population pressure or because of prolonged drought; today it is thought by the Harts and others that the two peoples arrived together. The Bantu probably brought agriculture here about four thousand years ago, perhaps in a dry period when this region was not forest but savanna woodland; very likely the Ituri was uninhabited before that time. But unlike the Mbuti, the so-called forest Bantu have never become acclimated to the forest. They maintain their clearings and their bare swept village yards as a defense not only against snakes but against the overwhelming trees, with their darkness and malevolent night spirits. (Even a sophisticated Zairois writer dreads the forest: “Anyone venturesome enough to try to blaze a trail through it would soon beat a hasty retreat. Everyone who knows it well—hunters, medicine men—never strays more than a short distance beyond the clearings … Whatever the legends may say, hunting expeditions and incantations of witchcraft never take place very far from settled areas … Even to its most intimate acquaintances, the proud forest reveals itself only through a few clearings scattered along its periphery.”*
We stop at Bosco’s Okapi Sport Hotel and Bar for some cold beer, then head downriver to the Hart camp, where we are met by Terese Hart—called Terry—John’s sister Nina, the young Hart daughters, Sarah and Rebekah, and a crowd of friendly and enthusiastic Pygmies. Glad to be in the Ituri at last, we sit down happily to a warm s
upper of plantains, rice, and manioc greens cooked with bits of fish from the Epulu River. In this dry season, collared pratincoles fly like terns along the river and African cormorants sit like sentinels on the dark rocks.
The camp is preparing to set off for five days in the forest to the north, where the Harts hope to find a promising location for okapi study. With Rick Peterson, a young anthropology student born in Zaire and raised by missionary parents in Equateur Province to the west, Nina Hart and seven-year-old Sarah will start out a day early, in order to cut Sarah’s long trek in half. Because I am still a little lame and because I am anxious to get into the forest, and because Rick Peterson, who is fluent in the Zairian lingua franca called Lingala, can translate for me with the Mbuti, I shall accompany the advance party. Led by a young Mbuti hunter named Atoka, we will join a large group of his tribesmen at their hunting camp on the Lelo River, meeting Jonah Western and the Harts at the Ekare River camp the following day.
Before it slips away into the forest, our path traverses slash-and-burn farm plots dominated by lone trees. By the path is an old calabash wrapped in rotten netting under a shelter of banana leaves, beside which hang a hippo tooth, a piece of wood with a crucifix scratched on it, and a strange wrinkled black fruit. I wonder what the local missionaries would make of this Christianized dawa, or medicine, concocted to keep thieves out of the garden; the netting will carry the corpse of the transgressor who does not take warning, says Atoka.
Like the other Mbuti men, Atoka carries little besides the hunting net draped in hanks across his shoulders. With quick small steps, his wife, Masumba, humps along beneath a cargo basket braced by a bark tumpline, an infant riding on her shoulders. The other diminutive women are similarly equipped, for the head cargoes borne with such elegance by the village women are not practicable here on forest paths. Once in the trees, away from judgmental Bantu eyes, the women go bare-breasted; a few wear only a small loin string in order to move more freely in the humid heat.