African Silences (31 page)

Before daybreak arises a great shift and murmur, some loud spitting. Infants are restless, somebody whoops, another person takes advantage of the quiet to vent a grievance, the whole camp is laughing at some shouted joke. Laughter is constant; at one fire or another it springs up and ripples around the circle of leaf huts. Soon the women, tending the plantains laid into the embers, are splicing into twine the shredded bark dried at the fire overnight, while the hunters mend and weave new mesh into their nets before folding them neatly for the journey.

We start off early, led by the elder Omudi, a tiny man who looks surprised and worried at the same time; Omudi wears his net in two drapes over his shoulders and a loop in front, like a churchman’s cowl. Vines have overgrown the path, which is very old, the people say; perhaps it was made by elephants, since it was here even before the Ancestors. Omudi opens up the path with little neat clips of his panga, making low tunnels through the undergrowth at just the right head height for a man scarcely more than four feet tall. In other places the understory is open, revealing the trunks of the great trees that forge upward toward the glints of sky above. By comparison to the lowland forests in Gabon and C.A.R., this part of the Ituri Forest seems smaller, drier, more like an immense woodland than tropical jungle. The dominant plants, besides the euphorbias, are the leguminous
Caesalpiniaceae
and the milky-sapped
sapotes, which include the gutta percha rubber trees sought by the Belgians.

Within the hour the others overtake us, for the Mbuti have few possessions and travel light. All but the youngest are self-propelled, running to keep up with the quick pace, and most will lug something, if only a leaf packet of food. The men carry their nets and weapons, and the women bear embers wrapped in heavy leaves and food-filled fire-blackened pots, mortars and pestles, and leg-trussed chickens on broad basket tops.

Everyone goes barefoot but two lepers; these men wear old European street shoes not because they are ashamed of their diseased feet but because their soles hurt. In recent years, the traditional bark-cloth aprons of the hunters have been replaced by hand-me-down boys’ shirts and shorts from the bales of old clothes sent by church groups to the Third World, and bought from the depots by Zairois entrepreneurs who resell them at a great profit to the Pygmies. A hunter known as Avion wears the black remnant of an Apple Computer T-shirt; another has a kid’s gray sweatshirt that reads
PITTSBURGH STEELERS
.

The Mbuti delight in Sarah Hart, a fair-haired child of seven in lemon T-shirt and sky blue pack who flits along the path like a forest butterfly. Where we cross a log over a stream, the Mbuti women, wading the ford above, call out to her “Salah! Salah!” and she runs off to catch up with them. Sarah, who returned here with her parents a few weeks ago, is not at home yet, and I wonder how long it will be before she realizes that her own kind are nowhere to be seen, that she is alone in the dark forest with little folk whose tongue she cannot speak. Soon I hear her voice raised in apprehension, and I come upon her around a corner of the path, mouth wide, eyes round, not far from tears. “I was a little scared,” she says. I bend to give her a reassuring hug, and she puts her arms around my neck. Later I come upon another little girl, this one leaf brown,
scarcely three. She has run her small nude body to a standstill and now waits, thumb in mouth, beside the leafy trail, calm in the knowledge that she is safe here in the forest, that someone will be along who will gather her up.

In an overgrown camp by the Bougpa spring, an hour north of Lelo, are big marijuana plants ready for harvest. A hunter walks over, plucks some sticky leaves and smiles, murmuring
“bangi.”
Soon women appear, fires are started, the old huts swept out with leaf brooms, the dooryard weeds chopped down to the red earth. From somewhere comes an immense pipe, a hollowed plantain stem longer than the reclining men, who tamp the resinous leaves and inflorescence into the clay bowl. Embers are laid upon the top, and the pipe moves slowly around the circle.

One of the Bougpa huts has been demolished by an elephant, and nearby there is fresh elephant sign, perhaps seven or eight prints and a few droppings. I am inspecting the first one when a hunter overtakes me.
“Tembo,”
I say, and he says,
“Bongo.”
Excited, I peer all about for tracks of the beautiful big forest antelope, and the hunter laughs. Both words mean elephant. “Ki-Swahili
tembo
,” he explains, “ki-Mbuti
bongo
” (pronounced
bawn-go
). When he says ki-Mbuti, he means ki-Mbira, though the Pygmies speak this Bantu tongue in the singsong Mbuti way.

Soon the hunters decide that Ekare is too far, it will be too late to make a hunt after arriving, we must hunt here at Bougpa and continue on to Ekare tomorrow. When I suggest that our own small party proceed to Ekare, from where the Harts hope to begin a reconnaissance tomorrow, Omudi says no, the people must stay together. Quickly, without discord, everyone rises to go. Ekare is not far after all, the people say, it has good hunting, the men can make a quick hunt there this afternoon.

Even when nearing the Ekare region, the hunters maintain a continual hooting and shouting, slipping along in swift single file on the shadowed path. “Come on! Let’s go!
It’s a long way to the camp! There we can rest!”—these are the sort of things that they are calling. Sometimes they imitate birds and animals—chimpanzees, hornbills, duikers. They say that this din does not scare away the animals, not even elephants, which only withdraw from the smoke of human fires. Like all else, fire comes from the great forest, to cook the forest food and provide warmth, and to warn the leopard.

The Ekare camp, in a glade on the ridge above the river, is hidden from the sky by the high canopy. There has been rain here. The huts are rotten but soon they are swept out, and transparent fire smoke drifts on the sunlit air. Everything is done swiftly and easily, yet these easygoing people are never idle even when sitting by the fire but are always working something with their hands.

In early afternoon, the Harts and Western arrive from Epulu with a new group of Mbuti led by Kenge. The people call Jonah Piloto and they call me Mangese, meaning Venerable One, as in Mangese ya Pori, the Ancients of the Forest. Though not yet sixty, I am an elder by African standards. I feel honored by my title and approximately as pleased as I was when a withered old Bandaka woman came out of her hut as we left Epulu, pointing at me and crying out, “Take care of him, for he is old like me!”

In the five-hour walk north from Epulu, Jonah reports, all they have seen are a few monkeys, high in the canopy. As an East African ecologist, Jonah is accustomed to large numbers of large mammals, readily studied; in the forest, as we have learned throughout this journey, large mammals are uncommon and elusive, and difficult to observe even when found. “I’m glad to have come to Central Africa, glad to have seen the rain forest,” he says, “because it’s one of the most neglected biomes, and one of the most important. But I could never work in forest. So much time is necessary to gather so little information!”

Jonah is particularly disheartened by the relative scarcity
of elephant sign in an undamaged habitat where poaching has apparently been minimal: “We must assume, contrary to our hopes, that in large regions of the Congo Basin there are scarcely any.” The elephant’s decline must be partly attributable to hunting, but John Hart says there are few guns in the villages. As for the Mbuti, they take what they need in the way of food and medicines but affect the forest life scarcely at all.

More and more it seems apparent that unbroken rain forest is inhospitable habitat for large mammals. Except along the watercourses, or in clearings made by the fall of a giant tree, the available food is mostly in the canopy, far out of reach of okapi and gorilla as well as elephant. In the absence of elephants, which modify the forest by creating and perpetuating second growth, other animals are bound to be scarce as well. Jonah concludes that, while high human impact will impoverish the forest, moderate impact in the form of shifting cultivation—that is, slash and burn—creates a good deal of secondary forest that is accessible to animals, and that a patchwork of primary and secondary forest is the optimum condition for prosperity as well as diversity in animal populations. (“Low human population is essential if this is to work,” John Hart observes. “Higher populations assure impoverished forest no matter which farming technique is used.”)

Increasingly Jonah is fascinated by the impact of man on the environment, which in his view is not always destructive to its wildlife and can, in fact, be very beneficial. In the sixties, he says, European and American biologists turned to the African savannas as the last great natural bastion of primeval life, unchanged since the Pleistocene; they held to the traditional view that this stability, providing time for evolution, was a condition for speciation and diversity, which accounted for the great variety of savanna life. Jonah concludes that, on the contrary, the savanna is a patchwork of different habitats, and is always changing, having been
modified for thousands of years not only by fires and elephants but by man. John Hart has learned that a layer of charcoal two thousand years old underlies much of this region—good evidence of a dry savanna period, and of fires set by human hunters. (In South America, there is evidence of fires twenty to thirty thousand years old, and comparable evidence may yet turn up in Africa. Dr. Jan Reitsma, the botanist who accompanied us to Wonga-Wongue, in Gabon, had pointed out that, structurally, tropical rain forests in South America and Africa are very similar, but that while undisturbed forest in South America is still plentiful, Africa has scarcely any. Not only man but the large herbivores have modified African forests, and the greatest modifier is the elephant.

In Dr. Western’s view, man has always had a profound impact on savanna systems, ever since he burned off the first grassland to improve hunting. “Remember that savanna woodland between Garamba and Bangassou? Hundreds of miles of what looked like wonderful wildlife habitat, without any sign of human impact—where were the animals? I very much doubt if the complete absence of wildlife was entirely attributable to overhunting. When man and his fires disappeared, the wildlife declined, too. One can’t say that man’s activities are ‘good’ for wildlife, but neither are they always bad, and this is particularly apparent in the forest.”

Tree burning restores minerals to the old soils for a few years, but it destroys the specialized fungi known as mycorrhizae that are critical to forest growth. Where large populations of primitive agriculturalists burn down the forests, as in the derived savannas seen in Gabon and western Zaire (and also throughout West Africa), the destruction must lead to flood, erosion, and degraded land on which only a few pest species can survive. (This is a necessary consequence, not of intense settlement but of poor land
use; large populations have lived off certain Asian lands for thousands of years.)

But where humans are few, and the burning moderate, gorillas as well as elephants are drawn to second growth; abandoned clearings, which the elephants maintain, sustain many other birds and animals. Similarly, disruption and change through fires, floods, and landslides, the silting of deltas, the meanderings of rivers, even big trees crashing down and creating clearings—all these produce a patchwork of habitats that increases diversity of life, since it prevents dominance by a few species. This is why life in the open light of river margins, with thick growth accessible from the ground, is so much richer than in primary forests between rivers, which are almost empty.

The following day, while Rick and I go hunting with the Mbuti, Jonah accompanies the Harts on a reconnaissance of the Itoro River to the north, where elephant sign is more abundant and a good deal fresher, not only in secondary forest but along the drainage lines. But even here, “as far from humanity and habitat destruction as one could get,” poachers had left their slash marks in the undergrowth, and Kenge told him that the elephants were far less numerous than they were ten years ago. Even so, he does not feel that enough elephants remain here to create habitat that would support a larger population. If the Ituri may be taken as a rough gauge of elephant numbers in wilderness regions of Zaire, then, as in Gabon and C.A.R., that number cannot significantly exceed one animal every two square kilometers, in a rain forest already more reduced in size than we had anticipated. If anything, Douglas-Hamilton’s rough estimates of forest elephant numbers—the most conservative in general circulation, and the ones we expected to corroborate—are much too high.