Around the World in 50 Years (49 page)

Add to this volatile mix the recent discovery of three major oil fields east of Lake Albert, enough oil to soon move Uganda into the big leagues as a producer, and you have a dire situation where Nature loses out. Forty percent of the lions in Queen Elizabeth National Park had been slaughtered by farmers in the past decade to avenge the depredations on their cattle. In DRC's Virunga NP, the first (1925) national park established in Africa, 120 rangers have been killed trying to protect its mountain gorillas from poachers and from timber cutters making charcoal. People who live nearby have petitioned the DRC government to reduce the size of that park by 90 percent. The president of Uganda, ever mindful of the voters, had steadfastly refused to evict any of the thousands of illegal squatters who are living in and burning and farming in Uganda's national parks. And the future is as misty as the tops of those towering volcanoes in the haze of an Equatorial afternoon.

I bused to visit the gorillas at the Parc des Volcans in northern Rwanda, home to 480 of the 786 mountain gorillas remaining on our planet, according to a thorough census in 2010. I joined a burgeoning coterie of ecotourists that had grown from 7,500 in 2003 to 26,500, putting more than $12 million a year of trekking fees into the park treasury, ten percent of which is shared with the locals or spent on such projects as trenches and buffalo walls to protect the crops from destruction by the wildlife. For now, the system is working because the villagers have accepted the notion that the animals have real value. The villagers in the hamlet of Kinigi, where I stayed, abutting the gateway to the park, have so taken the primates to their bosoms that they hold a festive annual ceremony to name the baby gorillas born the previous year, and boast how the park's gorilla population has increased 26 percent in ten years.

Permits must be reserved many months in advance (at $500 a person) and are handed out each morning at 8:00 a.m. to 80 people who are divided into squads of eight, each to visit, for one hour, a different one of the ten major habituated gorilla bands in the park. I got the Hirwa band, of which Lucky was the silverback boss, and which boasted a new set of twins, then seven months old.

In the old days, your group and its ranger trekked blindly through the multiple ridges and valleys of the steep volcanoes to search for its assigned gorilla band. That has changed. Now a ranger stays with each whoop of gorilla until it makes a nest for the night. He then returns to that nest early the next morning and keeps pace with the gorillas as they forage for food (bamboo leaves are a favorite) and informs, via walkie-talkie, the rangers at the base of their location. (For some reason they don't use GPS coordinates, but rely on landmarks.) It took us four hours of difficult hiking, including 2,400 feet of vertical climbing, until we reached Lucky and his delightfully rambunctious family of twelve, including the twins, each the size of a basketball.

The instructions during our orientation forbade us to approach closer than seven meters from any gorilla, but someone forgot to tell that to Lucky and his playful band, who often crawled, rolled, or knuckle-walked to within two feet of where we sat enthralled. I'd been chosen as our group's designated grunter, having won that dubious honor by most closely sounding like a gorilla. Accordingly, whenever Lucky or one of his band grunted at us, I'd return the grunt to show that we were all pals, the verbal equivalent of a dog wagging its tail. It was a rich, fascinating, enlightening, and unforgettable hour, especially when Lucky, roused from a nap by his squabbling younger kids, suddenly leaped up and bounded over our outstretched legs on the way to let those kids know, big time, that Dad needed some peace and quiet. Lucky clearly adhered to the obsolescent concept that you spoil the child if you spare the spanking.

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Six thousand miles and more than 200 hundred years after the guns, germs, and steel of the American colonists uprooted the Native Americans who occupied lands sought by ranchers, farmers, and railroads, the Pygmies of Africa are suffering a similar fate because they occupy lands similarly coveted for “white progress,” in this case ecotourism. The Pygmies had inhabited the vast Ituru Forest unmolested for a thousand years, until someone noticed they had the unfortunate proclivity of subsisting on bush meat, and had also, from time to time, been known for (or at least accused of) undertaking the contract killing of a gorilla for some mandarin in Hong Kong who wanted a hairy-foot ashtray for a conversation piece.

Whatever the truth, many Pygmies had been forcibly relocated from the forest depths with even less concern and provision than we made for our “Indians” when we dumped them into wasteland reservations. In the DRC, CAR, and Uganda, most Pygmies are now in tourist villages, where vacationers bring them salt, sugar, sewing implements, and cigarettes, while they pose for stiff photos. In Rwanda, they'd been recently relocated onto small patches of farmland, but these hunters had not been taught how to use it. I visited several of their plots of struggling potatoes, where it was clear to this old gardener that they did not understand the rudiments of tilling, planting, mounding, weeding, or watering—and that their crops will not survive. Their children whom I visited were home alone, their parents off getting drunk. Many of these kids were so weak and neglected that they seldom had the energy to attend school. Sometimes the Pygmies tediously plucked chrysanthemum flowers they sold for about two dollars a pound. The buyers turn the flowers into the insecticide pyrethrum; the Pygmies turn the cash into banana beer. If times are really hard, they will pull up their own seed potatoes to sell for alcohol.

Several groups of caring citizens in the countries involved were undertaking efforts to improve the status of their Pygmies, but prejudice persisted against the little folk because they were mistakenly regarded as stupid. But how stupid can you be if you've been able to survive for many hundreds of years in the densest forests with no help from “civilized society”?

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Few of the citizens in this region of Africa have faith in their governments. In this entire quadrant composed of Ethiopia, Chad, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Burundi, DRC, and Zimbabwe, there had been no fair elections, no representative government, no concern for the common citizen. Instead, the citizens were exposed to uncontrolled corruption, stuffed ballot boxes, false vote counts, imprisonment or execution of political opponents on fabricated charges, the muzzling of the press, the murder of investigative journalists, the warping of the judiciary, the cult of the Big Man and, despite solemn election promises, revisions pushed into national constitutions to allow the people who were in power to remain in power. All this has led, in most of these countries, to economic retardation, civil wars, crumbling infrastructure, deep cynicism, famines, starvation, high inflation, high infant mortality, low life expectancy, and a host of other woes. Of the six nations ranked the lowest in the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, five hailed from this region. Ironically, the only country in the region that had held free and fair elections and had a popular government was Somaliland—which is not even a recognized country.

My journey through this quadrant brought me to the front lines of a war—as yet undeclared and underacknowledged—of potentially supervening importance for the hearts and minds, resources and power, of a large swatch of Africa north of the Equator, a war that would have drastic consequences for the rest of the world if it finds fertile ground and escalates.

It's a struggle between militant Islam, on the one side, and moderate Islam and non-Islam on the other, between the deeply devout, proselytizing, and fervent followers of the Prophet Muhammad and those they condemn as infidels or pity as nonbelievers and blame for the “Westoxification” of their homelands. It is the same war Islam almost won a thousand years ago, when the Saracen sword slashed its bloody way to the walls of Madrid and the borders of China, but a war in which Islam today has three formidable weapons—nuclear bombs (in Pakistan and possibly Iran), control of the lion's share of the oil needed by the rest of humanity, and ample funding from some deep-pocket fundamentalists in the Gulf States. It is also a struggle for the soul of the Arab Spring, between that nascent Muslim attempt at representative government, pluralism, and self-expression, and the harsh, hate-filled world of the angry militants and their ultraconservative allies.

I witnessed Islam expanding in Ethiopia, one of the earliest states to convert to Christianity, and long evenly balanced between Christians and Muslims. The Christian areas, in the north and west, remained as they had long been, centered around their large, solidly stone, ornate churches. But the Muslims were moving in. Everywhere I looked—hamlets, villages, fields—they were buying old houses, stores, warehouses, and farms, erecting an adjacent two- or three-story tower to serve as a minaret, and,
voilà!,
they had a mosque sending forth its calls to prayer.

In Chad, I detected further signs of creeping Islamization. As I walked through villages, I heard the chanting of the Koran from madrassas behind high walls, where the Muslims were inculcating the youth, which may shift the balance of power there. The government, sensitive to the issue, announced a rally to celebrate Peace Among Religions Day in the capital's capacious Plaza of the Nation. I was one of the few people to attend.

In Somalia, the radical Islamists of Al-Shabaab still controlled large parts of the country, although neighboring Christian Kenya vowed to oust them. But they had already left their imprint on the citizenry. Somali women had previously been known for wearing the most resplendent robes, shimmering red and iridescent purple embroidered with gold. No more. Under the rule of the Al-Shabaab, which demanded modesty, they'd switched to all black or dull shades with few patterns. When I visited the central cathedral in Mogadishu, it was still a ruin, without steeple, roof, nave, arch, window, or pew, and the diocese had no plans to rebuild it. In contrast, the central mosque, which also had not escaped damage during the years of battle, had been totally rebuilt. It was standing proud, intact, and functioning on its hill overlooking the city—shining, beckoning, ready to do battle for the souls of the people, ready to fill the vacuum a passive Christianity had allowed.

In Kenya, the Islamic warriors have launched terrorist massacres and kidnapped and killed visitors, endangering that country's vital tourist business. Guides and vendors in Nairobi told me tourist traffic was off by two-thirds as a result of the post-election violence and the kidnappings.

Neighboring Tanzania was swept by religious riots during which twelve churches were burned and looted.

In Nigeria, radical Muslims in the northern half were challenging the power of their traditional sultans and emirs and were extending their influence to oppose anything they deemed at odds with their beliefs, including polio vaccinations. During Christmas, three churches were bombed and burned and more than a dozen Christians killed. And a radical Islamic group of killers and kidnappers called Boko Haram vowed to extend its reach to the entire nation, the most populous in Africa, the seventh most populous on the globe.

In Mali, the violent jihadis of Ansar Dine and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb murdered a German traveler in Timbuktu and kidnapped his three companions shortly after I left, ruining the tourist trade on which Mali relied for foreign exchange, and began threatening to conquer Mali and turn it into a base for international terrorists. From Mali I also heard the saddest tale of all, impacting the Dogons who'd fled from Islam to the Bandiagara Escarpment. The Dogons are a nature-worshiping, spiritual people who rely on sanctuaries where they store their “spirit symbols” to make those artifacts readily available when a Dogon is feeling lost or depressed and needs to recharge his soul. Two travelers I met coming from Mali told me that radical Islamists had been inducting individual Dogons into their faith, sending them to camps in Saudi Arabia for training, and then ordering them back to their native villages with instructions to burn the spirit houses to shatter the souls and spirits of the Dogons.

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Having been refused a visa to Angola, I used that freed week to travel, for two long days each way, to visit Somaliland, a province north of Somalia, whose people, fed up with the constant dangers farther south, had broken away from it 20 years before and established the world's closest entity to a country that is not recognized as a country. It's a pity and a political miscalculation that the Western democracies have kept Somaliland in what its foreign minister called a “twilight zone” by refusing to recognize it as an independent nation, even though it satisfies every requirement of statehood, because the West believes that such recognition will wreck their quixotic attempt to resurrect Somalia to its former borders and maintain the myth that the government in Mogadishu is in control throughout the land.

In Somaliland I heard freedom ring. Although consummately poor, it was a land of joy whose people were pumped and walked about free and proud. They had created a popular parliament that blended democracy with the traditional leadership of clans and elders. The streets resounded with happiness, laughter, bustling business, and exuberance for life. These were not the repressed, downtrodden denizens of the other East African states where Big Men held sway by perverting the political process. The grand arch welcoming me into Hargeisa proclaimed,
EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW
, and these good people walked that walk in every way. Theirs was a government of, by, and for the people, with no corruption, no nepotism, no tribal favoritism, a model for the peaceful resolution of conflict and the construction of democratic institutions that flourished in these infertile soils. If Hitler, Marx, Stalin, and Mao could look upon this scene, they'd understand that their philosophies never had a lasting chance and that the human spirit craves something no dictatorial or collectivist society can offer.