African Silences (20 page)

At Bangui, where we spent two days conferring with wildlife officials, we resided at the Hotel Minerva, a more modest establishment than the Rock Hotel (which boasts a bar called “Scotch Club du Rock”), yet very lively, especially at noon when the offices close, most of them for the remainder of the day. The bar just inside the front door fairly swarms with elegant
poules de luxe
with high heels, long legs, liberated breasts, and sumptuous steatopygia, waving hard-puffed cigarettes in long cool hands. One young woman affects jeans and a T-shirt inscribed
CHICAGO COSMIC
, but most are attired in wide-open blouses and transparent skirts. The colorful ladies are well known to the
colons
and sullen-faced paratroopers in harsh haircuts who represent France’s small “military presence” in its “special relationship” with its former colonies in Africa. These men
squeeze the ladies’ hands as they enter the bar—
Ça va bien! Et toi?
—and meanwhile the women are boisterously admired by their tattered young compatriots, who await the rare tourists outside in the street. The young men sell ethnic wood stools, dried forest butterflies, and bows and arrows said to come from the Babinga Pygmies in the south.
My fren? My fren? You wish a bow, a arrow?

Perhaps in frustration, a young peddler teases a beer-bellied
colon
as he leaves the bar, and the big man whirls with a threatening gesture, causing the boy to back away. The white man waves contemptuously at the youth’s wares, his poverty, his whole African being. “You think you are a somebody, is that it?” Offended, the other Africans crowd forward and the man retreats, slamming his car door—
Ça
non,
messieurs!
The youth appreciates my disgusted reaction, though his face is sad.
“Champion fistique,”
he explains. “He does not know how to laugh.”

Our main business in Bangui is to urge the creation of a national forest park and promise the New York Zoological Society’s cooperation to Raymond Mbitikon, minister of waters and forests, fishing and hunting, who asks us to prepare a survey and recommendation while we are down in the Bayanga region. The park was originally proposed last year by Richard Carroll, a former Peace Corps volunteer in C.A.R., now a doctoral student doing his thesis on lowland gorillas. Monsieur Mbitikon kindly dispatches a ministry vehicle for Bayanga with a week’s provisions and drums of aviation fuel. The journey is about five hundred miles and fourteen hours over a rough road, and the truck will meet us there tomorrow.

To venture very far outside Bangui, according to a brochure of travel in these parts prepared some years ago by Air Afrique, “it is necessary to equip oneself seriously and be prepared for rather long delays.” Since we are flying
out tomorrow to Bayanga, in the far southern corner of C.A.R., we have seriously equipped ourselves with traveler’s checks, to pay not only for provisions but for aviation fuel, for fuel comes very high indeed in what people living here believe to be the most expensive city in the world. We have lunch on the Ubangi River with the kind and helpful ambassador and officers of the American embassy, and the ambassador’s wife, Katia de Jarnette, escorts me to a Peace Corps clinic, where my mongoose bites are thoroughly cleansed and a tetanus shot administered by a cheerful nurse appropriately christened Kandi Christian.

We are also “prepared for rather long delays,” and a good thing, too. At the airport next morning we find that the compressor on the gas pump has broken down, and that gasoline in drums that cost three dollars a gallon yesterday will, for unmysterious reasons, cost five dollars today. We protest this piracy, and wait, and eventually the compressor is resuscitated. Before the plane can be refueled, however, a general failure of airport electricity knocks out the gas pump for a few more hours, and not until three-thirty in the afternoon, after flight clearance from the airport tower, customs, and immigration, do we clear the ground. We are accompanied on this flight by the British elephant biologist Richard Barnes, who made all the arrangements for us here in Bangui, and also by Gustave Doungoubey, director of management of wildlife, who is kindly escorting us to Bayanga.

Immediately southwest of Bangui, the plane crosses a huge palm-oil plantation and heads out across the rain forests of the Congo Basin. There is no savanna anymore, the rare patches of swamp are small, the scarce red tracks are narrow, shrouded by trees. Except for the rivers, which are not always in view, there is no place to come down in one piece. Some years ago in eastern Zaire I flew over this Congo Basin forest in a light plane, from Bukavu to Obaye, then north to Goma, and the sight of its monotone expanse
of green, undulating in all directions to the green horizon, is just as disturbing now as it was then.

Even so, the rolling foliage is magnificent. Forest green and gray-green, jade, emerald, and turquoise, pond green, pea green—all the greens of the world unroll below our wings, set off by bright fire red leaves of the
azobe
(or
bois de fer
or “ironwood”). Here and there in the wet sloughs is a strand of raffia palms, said to be a favored haunt of pygmy elephants. Just once in the whole flight between the Ubangi and the Sangha do I see a sign of human habitation, two poor huts in a clearing near a forest stream.

The first glimpse of the Sangha River is a silver sliver among darkening hills in the late afternoon light. The plane swings south over slow rapids, the trees of the river islands mirrored in the silted water, and then the river opens out onto broad sandbars that in the dry season appear in front of the Bantu village called Bayanga.

Bayanga lies in the Lobaye Forest, in the farthest southern territory of C.A.R., surrounded by forests of the Congo Republic and Cameroon. Originally our plan had been to swing well east over the Congo Republic and count the elephants along the swamps and rivers, but M. Doungoubey received word this morning that Congo soldiers were crossing into C.A.R. in a border dispute, and might shoot at a small circling airplane, not realizing that elephants and not themselves were being studied. (Later we learn that the Congolese soldiers have withdrawn to their own border post, down the Sangha River, which flows due southward through that country to its confluence with the Zaire. “They put up their flag in our territory and we take it down again,” said a C.A.R. soldier.)

Bayanga is named for the Sangha or Yanga fishing people (“Ba”—“Wa” in East Africa—is a Bantu prefix signifying plural man or “people”) attracted here by Slovenia Bois, a Yugoslav lumber concession whose mill lies at the south end of the settlement, and whose acting manager,
Janez Mikuz, is kind enough to meet us at the airstrip and refresh us with cold beer at the company mess overlooking the river before installing us at a comfortable guest house in the compound. But to our embarrassment our friend Gustave Doungoubey and his cousin, Monsieur Babisse, who has arrived with a soldier-driver in the truck, are installed separately in lesser quarters. Gustave, a bright, equable fellow who permits nothing so small as this to trouble him, seems not to mind; he has many friends here, all of whom come to embrace him. Next morning at breakfast, there is more discomfort when Monsieur Babisse and the local forestry official polish off a half bottle each of Slovenia Bois’s good Côtes du Rhône white wine, pouring it into man-sized tumblers and drinking it straight off like spring water. Our friends show no effects of their glad refreshment, then or later, but the Yugoslavs, who do not seem fond of Africans (Jonah remarks that this tends to be true of most Eastern Europeans), are irritated, plainly regretting that the natives of this country must be permitted at their European mess. However, they are civil to the Africans, and kind and hospitable to the whites throughout our stay.

From the settlement a bright red road runs southwest through the forest, crossing a bridge in a big thicket of bamboo and climbing a steep hill to a forest ridge. Manioc and long papaya fend for themselves in the thick weeds grown up around the unbranched columns of black skeletal trees a hundred and fifty feet in height. Like all forest Bantu, the Yanga practice the primitive slash-and-burn agriculture that has already destroyed most of the rain forest of West Africa. Often a forest garden is abandoned and a new one started even before the poor soil is depleted, since slashing and burning is easier than keeping up with the fierce weeds. In regions of dense population, such as West Africa, primitive agriculture leads inevitably to total degradation
of the forest together with the disappearance of the animals, but in Central Africa, where the human population is so low, the random agriculture, by encouraging second growth, makes forage more accessible, and, where not intense, may actually increase wildlife populations.

The dust of the road is broken by the shifting soil prints of thick vipers, and the snake patterns are interspersed with tiny human prints of Babinga Pygmies (sometimes called Ba-Aka, after their Aka language). Lost in the weeds between road and field are the Pygmies’ low leaf-thatched huts, which are woven of a strong latticework of saplings stuck into the earth to form the walls, then bent over and lashed together as the roof, giving great tensile strength to a light structure while obtaining the maximum space of a rounded dwelling. (Huts constructed on this principle are also made by the Turkana and Masai and are in fact found all over the earth. Even the Inuit igloo is quite similar, including the long tubular entrance on one side, and so are the modern tents we carry with us.) Though the huts are scarcely four feet high, the tiny sleeping platforms of bamboo are often set one above another, in order to keep more people clear of the earth floor.

The middle-size descendants of those Babinga who have interbred with their Bantu neighbors have inherited few of the fine points of either race, seeming neither as handsome and husky as the Bantu nor as alert and merry as the forest people. By our rather narrow Western standards, most Babinga are unprepossessing, seeming stunted and bent rather than small, with scared, uncomprehending faces and the slightly averted gaze of uneasy animals. At a roadside camp, three naked little boys, feeling behind them with their hands, withdraw into the foliage in the slow way of wild things not wishing to be seen, and one drops to all fours before disappearing into the leaves, peering back at the huge white men over his shoulder.

Last night after dark we listened to Babinga drums, and
this morning near the airstrip we hear raised voices, a simple wistful three-note descending chorus,
dee-do-do
, like a human echo of the sad sweet song of an emerald green bird, Klaas’s cuckoo, which I watched this morning at the forest edge. According to the Bayanga people, the Babinga come here only in the dry season, to take advantage of old manioc plantations and perhaps work in the lumber mill. They erect their leaf huts outside the mill and the Yanga village. They are thought of as forest demons, not quite human, by the Bayanga. Like most Pygmy groups, they have a certain interdependence with their Bantu neighbors, who live mostly in rectangular wattle-and-daub huts, with tin roofs brought in by the lumber company, and are served by makeshift shops and a small bar. (Outside the Bar Patience is a decrepit jitney bus on which is painted
SANGHA EAGLE.
As a parting shot to those left in its dust, a message painted on the rear end reads
GOOD WILL NEVER
! It has been quite a while since the Sangha Eagle traveled anywhere. How it got here or where it used to go has been forgotten.)