In the next set, a blue duiker escapes, nothing is caught. Rain comes. The Mbuti seek out a big tree with heavy lianas, which thicken the canopy above with their own leaves, providing shelter. With his hands idle, Atoka is restless. “This is the work of the Forest,” he says. “We hunt, we wait, we get up and go again.” So far today he has caught nothing, but he knows that in the partition of the antelopes his family will be given meat. “The first thing we learn is kosalisa—to take care of others. We Mbuti do no one any harm. If I sleep hungry, you sleep hungry; if I get something from the forest, you will have it, too.”
In the next surround, a heavy animal wheels and crashes away through the thickets just in front of us, and a woman who has seen the creature comes running down the line of nets shouting, “Moimbo!” This is the yellow-back, largest of all duikers, up to a hundred and forty pounds. But the rarely caught moimbo slips past the line of nets and flees; only a blue duiker is caught. Another blue duiker, on the final hunt, comes to Atoka but pierces his net in an explosive jump at the last second. Atoka does not complain or appear disheartened, and on the way home he remains behind to gather up wood for the fires. This evening we will eat antelope with the others.
The following day three animals are caught. One is a moimbo and another is a water chevrotain, not an antelope at all but a relation of the primitive tusked deer of Asia. The moimbo was speared by old Pita, and Atoka, with wild snorts and cries, acts out each second of its final moments, to show how the big yellow-back, pierced between the ribs, twisted frantically on Pita’s spear, heart pumping.
Even dressed out and cut in pieces, the moimbo was too big to fit in Pita’s old wife’s basket, and Tambo’s young wife, asked to help carry the meat, threw a tantrum in the forest, relieving the tensions that build up in an Mbuti camp. She worked herself into a frenzy, screeching and rolling on the ground to ensure attention, hurling wild insults at the people in general and her husband in particular. Gentle Tambo, one of the few unexuberant Mbuti, tries to ignore her like everybody else, but after a half hour, when her drama threatened to disrupt the hunt, he felt obliged to come and beat her. Returning to camp, she started in again, accounting for her behavior with a tearful and aggrieved oration that the people heard out with intense discomfort, after which she took shelter in another hut, among one of the households which, while not rejected, seem subtly excluded from the group that leads the hunting and the singing. (The small family in the hut beside my own, I notice, rarely join in the jokes and banter, which for all I know may be at their expense.) A long, tense silence was broken by some ribald observation that collapsed the whole circle of huts in grateful laughter, after which camp life proceeded in the same gay and offhand way as it had before.
On the first of February we left Ekare, walking straight south to Epulu, about fifteen kilometers away. At the Bougpa spring, black colobus monkeys were making their deep rolling racket; near Lelo two big red colobus, long tails hanging like question marks, sprang into the bare limbs of a high tree to watch us pass. Kenge, who helps Terry Hart with her botanical collections, identified various fruits and medicines along the way, including an orange shelf fungus used by the Mbuti to cure diarrhea. He pointed out odd termite nests like huge gray mushrooms in the tree roots, and the orange paste spat out by fruit bats, and a place where the forest hid the People from the successive waves of soldiers, rebels, and mercenaries who pillaged and murdered in this region in the first years after independence.
On the night of our return there was an elima, or girl’s initiation ceremony, and the sound of drums and chanting came from the Mbuti camp along the road east of Epulu. Later we heard shouting from the Babila village that could only mean trouble, and next morning the local gendarme turned up in his crisp green beret and green uniform with red shoulder tabs and made a complaint to Terry Hart, who was talking with me on a terrace overlooking the river. Kenge had got drunk and stirred up trouble, and his family had led in a drunken brawl that had ended with the destruction of a Bantu house, and Atoka and the spirited Asha had been jailed, the gendarme said. He suggested that their American friends pay for the damages, having brought them back out of the forest where they belonged. The Harts were mistaken in treating the Pygmies like real people, he continued; they should simply be given food and a few rags to wear. As for Atoka, he should be “tortured,” said this new African, by which he meant—to judge from prior episodes—beaten bloody with clubs, since there was no other way for him to repay his debts. It turned out that the victim had provoked Atoka by denouncing the Mbuti as “nyama,” or “wild animals,” an opinion in which the gendarme fully concurred. The Pygmies had to be treated like the animals they were, he assured Terese Hart, who winced but said nothing. We stared away over the striking rocks that emerge in the dry season from the Epulu River, which winds southwest to the Ituri, the Nepoko, the Aruwimi, and a final confluence with the great Congo west of Kisangani.
In Mambasa at daybreak, old Father Louis, who was away in Italy on leave when the Simba rebels killed the other Catholic missionaries at this station, is already up and about, and says good-bye. He has red cheeks and a saintly smile. “I must go to the church,” he explains vaguely, waving both hands. From the evangelist mission, we pick up mail to be posted in Nairobi, and at 6:30 A.M. leave the mission strip and fly southeast along the overgrown red road toward Beni, where the huge forest ends at last in a populous agricultural region of small hills. The hills open out over the valley of the Semliki, and from here we can see for a brief time the Ruwenzori peaks, in equatorial snows seventeen thousand feet high, named by Ptolemy the Mountains of the Moon.
Where the Semliki River winds down through Zaire’s Virunga Park into Lake Edward, the silver-and-blue plane passes through the Central Highlands. A soft bed of clouds lies on the land between the Virungas and Ruwenzori, but everywhere else the clouds have burned away. Coming out of the dark forest and mountains into the sun of the savanna, the silver plane bursts free into the open air.
In fresh morning light, the plane drifts out across Lake Edward, forty miles wide, with a lone fishing boat far out on the broad shine, and halfway across Jonah turns to look at me. “We are leaving Zaire,” he says with a big grin, as relieved as I am to be back in East Africa. (Not long after our return to Nairobi, Kes Smith notified Jonah from Garamba that the Zairian authorities had come hunting for us twice, intending to arrest us on our return journey.)
Until the most recent despot in Uganda restored the old colonial names to lakes and parks in the hope of reassuring frightened tourists, Lake Edward was Lake Idi Amin Dada. (Lake Albert, farther north, is at present Lake Mobutu Sese Seko, though this, too, must pass.) The far shore is the southern part of Ruwenzori National Park, in southwest Uganda, and here we see herds of hippo at the water’s edge. The destruction of Uganda’s wildlife under Idi Amin was continued by the unpaid and lawless Tanzanian soldiery who helped depose him, but when the Tanzanians left at last, in 1980, an attempt was made to control any further slaughter, and the animals have started to come back. In the past weeks, the latest tyrant had been deposed by the latest reformer, Yoweri Museveni, in whom the desperate Ugandans have great hope, but Uganda was still in a state of anarchy, and we would not land here to refuel.
Like most of the Ugandan landscape that is not under marsh or open water, the land beyond the national park has been cleared of its last trees, and because this soil, the product of volcanoes, is richer than the ancient, leached-out soils beneath the rain forest, it can support a dense agricultural population. (However, it is the rural population in this region of Uganda that more than any other in the world is beset by AIDS.) Farther south, toward the border with Rwanda, the soil pales out into savanna, and the farmers are replaced by a semipastoral people with large herds of cattle. Their Masai-type oven huts and large corrals are enclosed by thornbush to discourage lions.
The savanna land flows on into Rwanda, and Jonah, more and more content, remarks, “It’s nice to have the freedom to fly and
know that you can land anywhere if you have to.” I have the same sense of well-being, understanding why he was reluctant to say such things over the forests. To acknowledge the strain would not have helped and might have harmed us.
The plane crosses the soft hills and lakes of Rwanda’s Akagera National Park, where a group of young elephants released in 1974 have increased to more than forty. The twenty-sixth and largest of this group was killed after it charged and killed Adrien Deschryver’s friend, the photographer Lee Lyon. Jonah descends to a low altitude, and we fly for fun for the first time in weeks; though we see no elephant, we enjoy the hippo and buffalo, eland, topi, and impala, and also a few sitatunga in the papyrus swamps and lakes that stretch away east of the park into Tanzania.
An hour beyond the Tanzania border, boat sails rise from the fishing villages in the archipelago of islands in the southern end of Lake Victoria. White pelicans glide along the shores, and a flock of avocets slides beneath the plane over the silver shimmer of the open water. The inland sea stretches away one hundred and fifty miles into Speke Gulf and the mouth of the Mbalageti River, in the Serengeti Park, where we can put down almost anywhere to refuel. “From Lake Victoria,” Jonah says, “it will be wildlife country all the way into Nairobi.”
Over Speke Gulf, Jonah reflects a little on our journey. He feels it was “tough but fantastic,” and I agree. In regard to the forest elephant, he has no doubt that both natural densities and the extent of forest habitat are less than the most pessimistic estimates. “We just don’t have the reservoir of forest elephants that we were counting on,” he says, “which puts even more pressure on the bush elephant to sustain an ivory trade. The bush elephant is already in serious trouble, and because of its role in creating habitat, its disappearance will be followed by a substantial collapse of all of the large mammal fauna, which has already happened in West Africa.” These are the findings he will document for presentation to world wildlife authorities to lend weight to conservation arguments, including a campaign to ban the worldwide trade in ivory. Though not good news, it will help end the ivory trade and protect the future of the elephant in Africa.
The Serengeti Plain is a hundred miles across. Flying low over its western reaches, the plane dodges the vultures that attend the endless herds of wildebeest and zebra that scatter away across green grass below. Hyenas in a ditch, a lone male lion. Thousands of wildebeest are streaming across the plain south of the high rock island known as Simba Kopje, near the long road that comes into the park from Ngorongoro and Olduvai Gorge. Nowhere on the Serengeti, in this high tourist season between rains, do we see dust raised by a vehicle, not even one. More ominous still, on a hundred-mile west-east traverse of the whole park, not one elephant is seen where years ago I saw five hundred in a single herd. “Poachers,” Jonah said. “The Serengeti elephants are down seventy-five percent. What’s left of them are mostly in the north, toward the Masai Mara.”
In 1961, the Serengeti was my ultimate destination in East Africa; in the winter of 1969, it was my home. We land and refuel at Barafu Kopjes, a beautiful garden of huge pale granite boulders and dry trees, in the clear light, where years ago I accompanied George Schaller on long walks across the plain to learn how primitive humans might have fared in scavenging young, dead, or dying animals. The wind is strong in the black thorn of the acacia, and a band of kestrels, migrated from Europe, fill their rufous wings with sun as they lift from the bare limbs and hold like heralds against the wind on the fierce blue sky.
Then we are aloft again, on a course northeast toward the Gol Mountains, in a dry country of giraffes and gazelles. Olduvai is a pale scar down to the south, in the shadow of the clouds of the Crater Highlands, and soon the sacred volcano called Ol Doinyo Lengai rises ahead, and the deep hollow in the land that is Lake Natron, on the Kenya border. We will fly across Natron and the Athi Plain and be in Nairobi in an hour.
* David Western, Discover, October 1986.
* S. Diallo, Zaire Today (Paris: Editions j.a., 1977).
EPILOGUE
In the course of a forest elephant survey in January and February 1986, I had an opportunity to look into reports of the pygmy elephant. The survey combined 12,000 km of aerial reconnaissance over Zaire, C.A.R., Cameroon, Gabon, Congo Republic, and western Uganda with more detailed ground work at five locations in three countries—C.A.R., Gabon, and Zaire. Peter Matthiessen accompanied me on the entire trip, and Richard Barnes, who is conducting a detailed study of forest elephant for New York Zoological Society, joined us in C.A.R. and Gabon … We were fortunate in getting a clear view of about a hundred and twenty elephants in three different locations in C.A.R. and Gabon … Our direct observations confirm [that] the pygmy elephant is a juvenile forest elephant …
Pygmy elephant reports do not rest solely or even mainly on mistaken age identity of forest elephants. After direct observation of elephants in C.A.R., Gabon, and Zaire, in discussion with field biologists, indigenous forest peoples and hunters, and after reviewing the literature and looking at photos taken of elephants throughout these countries, I believe there is a far more compelling reason for the belief in the pygmy elephant: there are genuinely two races of elephant in the forest … Yet the bigger form is the regular bush elephant, the smaller one the forest elephant …
The Pygmy peoples are correct about there being a big and small race of elephants in the forest. It is the naturalists who have wrongly deduced that two sympatric races of elephant in the forest must mean that there are two races of forest elephant.
—David Western*
Forest elephant numbers are very hard to estimate, not only because of the forest canopy but because of the variety of habitats—tall and low forests, disturbed and undisturbed areas, swamps, abandoned gardens—all of which affect elephant numbers. In 1989, after completing his studies in the field, Dr. Richard Barnes concluded that there might be about 400,000 animals in forested regions of West and Central Africa (a more recent estimate is 250,000), and that among all of these countries, Gabon was the most promising because of huge and uninhabited forest areas, large elephant populations (he estimates 74,000—1990) and small numbers of humans, low rate of deforestation, and an absence of those military weapons that have made poaching so devastating elsewhere. Gabon, Barnes feels, might well become the last great refuge of Loxodonta africana.
In 1986, on David Western’s recommendation, Wildlife Conservation International (WCI) and the Leakey foundation returned Dr. Richard Carroll to southwest C.A.R., together with botanist Michael Fay. At the end of December 1990, their original idea of a forest wildlife reserve came into being with the creation of Dzanga-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve and the contiguous Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, which together total 1,737 square miles of range of forest elephants, bongo, gorilla, and other species threatened by the destruction of this habitat. WCI also seeks to help establish contiguous forest reserves in the northern Congo Republic and in southeast Cameroon, which has the highest density of forest elephants—and probably elephants of any kind—now left in Africa. Since an estimated 40 percent of elephants are now in rain forests, and since the rain forest itself becomes more precious every day, this reserve is a stirring project that demands support from conservation groups around the world.
WCI’s researches into forest elephant numbers, and the finding that these numbers were so low, had a direct effect on the campaigns of recent years to achieve full protection for the whole species, all the more so when it was realized that, small as it was, the forest population comprised nearly half of Africa’s remaining elephants.
In 1970, as described in my book The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972), the problem in East Africa was too many elephants; since then, 80 percent of East Africa’s elephants have been destroyed. In the legendary elephant park at Tsavo, in Kenya, they are down from an estimated forty thousand in the mid-sixties to 5,360 in 1988. In 1977, when Iain Douglas-Hamilton was completing his studies at Manyara Park, in Tanzania, there were 453 animals in discrete herds; by 1987,
his own air survey could locate but 181, most of them juveniles. With the “big ivory” already gone, the poaching trade had turned upon the females, and not a single matriarch was left to provide these frightened orphan bands with continuity and direction.
In 1980, as recounted in Sand Rivers (1981), Tanzania’s remote and vast Selous Game Reserve held an estimated one hundred ten thousand elephant; that number was halved by the time of an aerial count made six years later. In a single decade, the entire continental population was reduced from 1.3 million (1979) to 625,000, while the price of ivory doubled to one hundred dollars a pound. This made it worthwhile to kill juveniles as well as females, with three times the number of animals killed to produce the same quantity of ivory. And all too commonly the officials in the afflicted countries participated in the ivory trade, even though the income from illegal ivory was far less than the income from world tourism, which was now threatened.
The loss of the rhinos was another blow to the tourist industry. In 1970, an estimated 60,000 black rhino remained in Africa; at the time of this writing, there are fewer than 4,000, of which perhaps 500 are in Zimbabwe. A few relict animals in Cameroon and Chad are probably the westernmost in Africa. In Kenya, the surviving black rhinos are being transferred to a fenced sanctuary at Lake Nakuru, and mostly in Nairobi National Park, where the population has increased to more than sixty.
On a Sunday evening in October 1987, Kenya’s five captive white rhinos were slaughtered by poachers and their horns hacked off within sight of the warden’s house in Meru National Park; the same year, three Kenyan rangers were killed at Shaba Game Reserve in a poachers’ ambush. As Jonah Western wrote me from Nairobi, “Elephants are running into deeper trouble than ever. Ivory is up to $160.00 a kilogram. Poaching in Tsavo and Meru is out of control. Armed gangs with AK-47s have taken over. It’s war out there.” The following May, when paleontologist Richard Leakey was made head of the wildlife department, he ordered his rangers to shoot poachers on sight. Not everyone cared for Leakey’s methods, but from the elephant’s point of view, they worked. Thirty poachers were killed in the first four months after his appointment, while the elephant death rate shrank from three a day to less than one every three days. Last July he captured world attention by persuading President Daniel arap Moi to burn twelve tons of confiscated ivory, a three-million-dollar pile eighteen feet high.