African Silences (9 page)

On Easter Sunday, we returned to Abidjan on the “Grande Route,” which is memorable chiefly for the number of dreadful wrecks along the way. A head-on collision of the night before was still being unraveled, and a little farther on was a truck-and-trailer, upside down, that had rocketed deep into the jungle. As in Senegal, the new two-lane roads are too narrow for the novice drivers, most of
them young and inexperienced like Mamadou, whose total lack of anticipation in combination with slow reaction time and love of speed makes his driving a grave business indeed. We passed a sunny Easter morning on the brink of dire emergency, veering southward among rich plantations of coffee, oil palms, rubber trees, and pineapple, disputing the road with the great timber trucks that are bearing away the downed giants of the forest. At Ajamé, the whole landscape is a patchwork quilt of Sunday laundry, which is done for the prosperous Ivoiriens by poor people from Upper Volta fleeing south in a desperate search for work; at Banco we pass a forest reserve that according to Jacob no longer contains a single animal of any kind.

Jacob Adjemon is the born tourist in our group. For his homecoming, he is attired in a new
kanzu
bought at Man, and among the many souvenirs he has acquired on our journey is one of the mass-produced antelope lamps knocked out and shined up in the art factory at Daloa. In his opinion, old masks and carvings and
awale
games from the back country are of no use to the new African, and obviously he feels about them much the same uneasiness and disrespect that he feels for wildlife. Mamadou, on the other hand, bought an imaginative traditional bird-toy of wood covered in dried skin that comes originally from the Niger, and had hung it from his mirror as a charm; within the day, he had lost interest in this pretty thing, and when it fell, had flung it sullenly aside, perhaps in envy of all Jacob’s shiny purchases, or perhaps because Jacob had spent all of the money that he was supposed to give to Mamadou for his return journey. This injustice came to light after Jacob had been dropped off with his pile of packets near the beach, where he had persuaded us, wrongly as usual, that there was plenty of space in the hotels; his primary aim, it now appeared, had been to lure us somewhere close to his own lodgings. But Mamadou had not betrayed him, and even now, when we offered to advance Mamadou
money, he refused our help until we promised that we would not get the perfidious Jacob into trouble with his employers. Thus was Jacob Adjemon repaid with kindness for his own selfish and unscrupulous behavior.

Poor Mamadou, poor Jacob—doomed to return to Hôtel Ivoire, we felt depressed. It seemed to strike us all at once that in hundreds of miles of travel overland in Ivory Coast, the only animal we ever saw outside the parks was that lone monkey on the westward road from Boundiali, and that the greatest concentration of wild mammals we had seen in the whole country were the fruit bats in the city park here in Abidjan. Nor did anything that we could learn of other countries in West Africa promise much better.

Earlier today, passing the road that leads toward Grand Lahou, Jacob had said, “In Abidjan, when we wish to regard elephants, we simply fly in an airplane to Grand Lahou, and there look down upon them.” Mamadou, at first impressed but now fed up with the grand airs of his compatriot, had stared at me to see if I believed this arrant nonsense. But perhaps Jacob had sensed that we were saddened by the disappearance of wild animals from Ivory Coast, as well as by the many signs that for all the “reserves” that have been set aside, for all the governments’ proclamations of intention, the fatal destruction of West African wildlife still continues. The arrays of steel gin traps in the Man market, the gangs of hunters on the roads, the hunting dog with the rattan hoops, the “bush meat” offered in back-country restaurants, the unobstructed poaching that, for lack of serious intervention, will soon destroy the remnant creatures, and thereby aggravate the protein lack in all these overpopulated countries—this obliteration of the native fauna is a crucial loss throughout West Africa, for reasons that go very much deeper than that “conservation of a priceless heritage” that white well-wishers like to prate about, having practiced it too late in their own lands. The animals are the traditional totems and protectors of the
clans, the messengers of the One God that most Ivoiriens still perceive in all creation, the links with the world of the unseen, with the cosmic balance. Now the animals are gone, or at least so scarce that they have no reality in daily life. And perhaps even an urban boy like Jacob Adjemon, who has not bothered to go home to his Beté people in the last eight years, who is proud of the Hôtel Ivoire and disdainful of “the bush,” now grows uneasy. And so he says in a bored voice, “In Abidjan, when we wish to regard elephants, we simply fly in an airplane to Grand Lahou, and there look down upon them.”

In 1913 the young ornithologist James Chapin of the American Museum of Natural History, doing fieldwork in what was then the Belgian Congo, discovered the rufous wing quill of an unknown bird in an African’s headdress. He kept that feather for many years without finding anyone, white or black, who could identify the bird. In 1934, in the African museum at Tervueren, near Brussels, he matched the feather to the hen of an old pair of stuffed fowls that were thought to be juvenile domestic peacocks. The cockbird was dark blue and green, with a russet neck patch, while the hen was green above, russet beneath. The hen had peafowl-like eyes on the green feathers, and both sexes had peafowl-like crests; and while not true peafowls (
Pavo
), they turned out to be the only known African representatives of the great pheasant tribe, Phasianidae, separated by thousands of miles of desert and mountain from their nearest relatives in Asia. Subsequently, in 1949, the animal collector Charles Cordier obtained a small number of these birds trapped by
local people near the lowland village of Utu, in the Congo basin, though he himself never saw the species in the wild. These seven “Congo peacocks” (
Afropavo congensis
) were exhibited at the Bronx Zoo in the 1950s, and subsequently a small captive flock was established at the Antwerp Zoo.

In the spring of 1978
Audubon
magazine sent a small expedition in search of
Afropavo congensis.
Its leader was the British ornithologist Alec Forbes-Watson, who had known James Chapin and still regards him as “the best ornithologist who ever worked in Africa”; according to Forbes-Watson, Chapin was the only known non-African who had ever seen the Congo peacock in the wild. Alec was to be assisted by his friends George Plimpton and George’s sister Sarah, who had been keen birdwatchers as children and have taken it up again in recent years; while in Africa they would also search for the three other “most desirable” birds on this huge continent—not “little brown birds,” as Forbes-Watson describes them, but species that are spectacular as well as rare. “The peacock is first, indubitably,” Alec had told me in Nairobi in 1977. “Then comes the shoebill stork, the lyre-tailed honeyguide, and the bareheaded rock fowl. On the fifth bird, no two ornithologists would agree; you’d get an argument whichever one you chose. The Pel’s fishing owl, perhaps, or the yellow-crested helmet shrike, or the wattled crane.” He discounted as unrealistic any search for the Prigogine’s owl, or Congo bay owl, a nocturnal forest relative of the barn owls with a masklike face;
Phodilus prigoginei
, known from a single specimen found dead in 1951 at Muusi in the Bukavu highlands, has never been observed alive. Unlike
Afropavo
, it belongs to the same genus and resembles the Asian form,
P. badius
, and therefore its voice might be similar as well (for those who might wish to listen for it, the call of the Asian owl has been described as a high, whistling
ülee-uu üwee üwee üwee üwee
.) Alec himself had already seen the lyre-tailed honeyguide and the rock fowl, both of which occur on Mount
Nimba in Liberia; as far as was known, the Congo peacock (if it still existed) was confined to the lowland forests of Zaire. For the shoebill, the most accessible location seemed to be the Bangweulu swamp in Zambia.

My hope was to join Forbes-Watson and the Plimptons at Mount Nimba in late March 1978 in time to see the rock fowl and the honeyguide, then accompany them on the search for
Afropavo
in Zaire. On Friday, March 24, I was at Man in western Ivory Coast, where I was assisting in a wildlife survey; Mount Nimba was less than a hundred miles away. But local informants assured me the journey was not possible, and by the time I’d made my way back to the coast and got a flight to Roberts Field, Monrovia, it was already Monday afternoon, when my friends would be preparing to depart Mount Nimba. Frustrated, I remained at the airport hotel.

Plimpton turned up early on Tuesday, between plumages. He was heeled over in the hot and humid sun by random baggage that included a stray tripod without telescope, and he wore a trim street hat, hot woolen blazer, soiled bush shirt, and checked Bermuda shorts. His face was flushed with sunburn and the heat, and his very long pale legs were livid from attacks by jungle insects—here was a birdman, tried and true! We spent an agreeable morning at the bar celebrating his tenth wedding anniversary and making plans for a rendezvous a fortnight later in Zaire. At Mount Nimba, he said, all three of them had seen the rock fowl (which, like
Afropavo
and Prigogine’s owl, may derive from an invasion of Asian fauna in the far past, and is separated from its closest relatives by thousands of years as well as miles), and Alec and Sarah had every hope of catching up with the lyre-tailed honeyguide this very day. He had heard there was a track across the Liberian frontier that joined the road to Man, and he regretted that I had not found it.

Having wasted three days in airports and hotels, I
hoped Plimpton was mistaken, but Forbes-Watson, arriving the next morning, assured me he was not; a new road across the border to Mount Nimba had been put through about three months before, he said, ordering a beer and sitting back to enjoy my expression. Had I used it, he continued, I would certainly have seen both the rock fowl and the honeyguide, which he and Sarah had observed in its extraordinary courtship flights the day before. (It was James Chapin who had first linked the lyre-tailed honeyguide to the weird “song” it makes at courtship time with the odd curving feathers of its tail.) Alec happened to know that I had already seen the shoebill stork in the great marsh called the Sudd, in the south Sudan, and he regretted my bad luck even as he took delight in my chagrin: “You know, of course, that had you been with us yesterday, you would now be the only living ornithologist to have seen three of our four birds.” Because our plane had broken down in Dakar and would not arrive here until next daybreak, eighteen hours late, I spent yet another day of airport life digesting this exasperating news and taking such comfort as I could in the lovely pratincoles that coursed at dusk along the jungle walls of the St. Paul River. To console me Alec pointed out my first white-throated blue swallow, which sat dejectedly on the pilings of the hotel dock.