Last Chance to See (8 page)

The big man in particular seemed to wish us no personal ill as he guided us gently through the insanity to which it was his duty to subject us, and I came to recognise a feeling I've heard described when oddly close and touching relationships develop between torturers and their victims or kidnappers and their hostages. There is a feeling of all being in this together. The forms we had to fill in were headed 'Belgian Congo', crossed out, with 'Zaire' written in in pencil, which meant that they had to be at least eighteen years old. The only form they didn't seem to have was the only one we actually wanted. We had been warned by friends that we had to get ourselves a currency declaration form when we entered Zaire or we would hit trouble later on. We repeatedly asked for one, but they said they had run out. They said we could get one in Goma and that would be all right.

They toyed with the idea of confiscating my Cambridge Z88 laptop computer just in case we were planning to overthrow the government with it, but in the end the small nasty man merely confiscated Chris's car magazine on the grounds that he liked cars and then, for now, we were free.

We went into the town of Bukavu in a sort of taxi-like thing. The town turned out to be an enormous distance from the airport, probably at the insistence of the taxi-drivers. As we bounded along the appallingly rutted road that followed the margin of the lake and along which a significant proportion of the population of Zaire seemed to be walking, our driver kept on diving beneath the dashboard of the car for long periods at a time. I watched this with some alarm, which was severely increased when I eventually worked out what he was doing. He was operating the clutch by hand. I wondered whether to mention this to the others but decided that, no, it would only worry them. Mark later mentioned that we had not passed any other motor vehicles at all on the drive, except for a couple of trucks which had been parked for so long that they no longer had any rear axles. I didn't notice this myself, because once I had identified what the driver was doing with the clutch I simply kept my eyes closed for the remainder of the journey.

When at last we arrived at the hotel, which was surprisingly airy and spacious for such a dilapidated town as Bukavu was, we were rattled and exhausted and we started to yawn at each other a lot. This was a kind of unspoken code for being fed up with the sight of one another despite the fact that it was only six in the evening. We each went off to our respective rooms and sat in our separate heaps.

I sat by the window and watched as the sun began to go down over the lake, the name of which I couldn't remember because all the maps were in Mark's room. From this vantage point, Bukavu looked quite idyllic, situated on a peninsula which jutted into the lake. Lake Kivu. I remembered the name now. I was still feeling very jangled and jittery and decided that staring at the lake a bit might help.

It was placid and silvery, shading to grey in the distance where it met the fading shapes of the hills that surrounded it. That helped.

The early evening light cast long shadows over the old Belgian colonial houses that were stepped down the hill from the hotel, huddled about with bright blossoms and palm trees. That was good too. Even the green corrugated roofs of the cruder new buildings were soothed by the light. I watched the black kites wheeling out over the water and found that I was calming down. I got up and started to unpack the things I needed for the night and at last a wonderful sense of peace and well-being settled on me, disturbed only by the sudden realisation that I had once again left my toothpaste in last night's hotel. And my writing paper. And my cigarette lighter. I decided it was time to explore the town.

The main street was a grim hill, wide, dishevelled and strewn with rubbish. The shops were for the most part concrete and dingy, and because Zaire is an ex-Belgian colony every other shop is a pharmacie, just like in Belgium and France, except that none of them, as it happened, sold toothpaste, which bewildered me.

Most of the other shops were in fact impossible to identify. When a shop appeared to sell a mixture of ghetto blasters, socks, soap and chickens, it didn't seem unreasonable to go in and ask if they'd got any toothpaste or paper stuck away on one of their shelves as well, but they looked at me as if I was completely mad. Couldn't I see that this was a ghetto blaster, socks, soap and chicken shop? Eventually, after trailing up and down the street for half a mile in either direction I found both of them at a tiny street stall which also turned out to sell biros, airmail envelopes and cigarette lighters, and in fact seemed to be so peculiarly attuned to my needs that I was tempted to ask if they had a copy of New Scientist as well.

I then realised that most of the essentials of life were available out on the street. Photocopying, for example. Here and there along the street were rickety trestle tables with big old photocopiers on them, and I had once or twice been hailed by a street hustler and asked if I wanted to have something photocopied or sleep with his sister. I returned to the hotel, wrote some notes on the writing paper, which for some reason was pink, and slept as if I were dead.

The following morning we flew to the town of Goma. Here we discovered that even when making internal flights in Zaire you still had to go through the full rigmarole of immigration and customs controls all over again. We were held under armed guard while a large and thuggish airport official interrogated us in his office as to why we hadn't acquired any currency declaration forms at Bukavu.

The fact that they hadn't had any currency declaration forms to give us at Bukavu cut no ice with him.

`Fifty dollars,' he said.

His office was large and bare and contained just one small desk with two sheets of paper in a drawer. He leant back and stared at the ceiling, which had obviously seen a lot of this sort of thing going on. Then he leant forward again and pulled the palms of his hands slowly down over his face as if he were trying to peel it off. He said again, `Fifty dollars. Each,' and then stared idly at the corner of his desk and rolled a pencil slowly in his fingers. We were subjected to an hour of this before he finally tired of our appalling French and let us go.

We emerged blinking from the airport and, miraculously, met up with the driver that some friends of Mark's had organised to take us up into the Virunga volcanoes where the mountain gorillas lived.

The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaire to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaire and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I'm not sure that that's an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there's a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don't find out you're in town. At least with the gorillas you know that there's no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history, so you can visit them with impunity. They are, of course, only collateral relatives - nth cousins, n times removed. We are both descended from a common ancestor, who is, sadly, no longer with us, and who has, since Darwin's day, been the subject of endless speculation as to what manner of creature he/she was.

The section of the primate family of which we are members (rich, successful members of the family, the ones who made good and who should, by any standards, be looking after the other, less well-off members of the family) are the great apes. We do not actually call ourselves great apes, though. Like many of the immigrants at Ellis Island, we have changed our names. The family we call the great apes includes the gorillas (of which there are three subspecies: mountain, eastern lowland and western lowland), two species of chimpanzee, and the orang utans of Borneo and Sumatra. We do not like to include ourselves in it - in fact the classification `Great Apes' was originally created specifically to drive a wedge between us and them. And yet it is now widely accepted that the gorillas and chimpanzees separated from us on the evolutionary tree more recently than they did from other great apes. This would mean that the gorillas are more closely related to us than they are to the orang utans. Any classification which includes gorillas and orang utans must therefore include us as well. one way or another, we and the gorillas are very very close relatives indeed -almost as close to each other as the Indian elephant and the African elephant which also share a common, extinct ancestor.

The Virunga volcanoes, where the mountain gorillas live, straddle the border of Zaire, Rwanda and Uganda. There are about 280 gorillas there, roughly two-thirds of which live in Zaire, and the other third in Rwanda. I say roughly, because the gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of passports, currency declaration forms and official bribery, and therefore tend to wander backwards and forwards across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them. A few stragglers even pop over into Uganda from time to time, but there are no gorillas actually living there as permanent residents because the Ugandan part of the Virungas only covers about twenty-five square kilometres, is unprotected and full of people whom the gorillas, given the choice, would rather steer clear of.

The drive from Goma takes about five hours, and we made the hastiest departure we could manage after two and a half hours of serious madness with a ticket agent, a hotel manager, a lunch break and one of the larger national banks, which it would be tedious to relate, but not half as tedious as it was to undergo.

Things hit a limit, though, when I was set upon by a pickpocket in a baker's shop.

I didn't notice that I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals. Everybody else in the shop did notice, however, and the man was hurriedly manhandled away and ejected into the street while I was still busy choosing buns. The baker tried to tell me what had happened but my Zairois French wasn't up to it and I thought he was merely recommending the curranty ones, of which I therefore bought six.

Mark arrived at that moment with some tinned pears, our gorilla permits and our driver, who quickly understood what was going on and explained to me what had happened. He also explained that the currant buns were no good, but said we might as well keep them because none of the others was any good either and we had to have something. He was a tall, rangy Muslim with an engaging smile, and he responded very positively to the suggestion that we should now get the hell out of here.

When people talk of `darkest Africa', it's usually Zaire they have in mind. This is the land of jungles, mountains, enormous rivers, volcanoes, more exotic wildlife than you'd be wise to shake a stick at, hunter-gatherer pygmies who are still largely untouched by western civilisation, and one of the worst transport systems anywhere in the world. This is the Africa in which Stanley presumed to meet Dr Livingstone.

Until the nineteenth century this enormous tract of Africa was simply a large black hole in the centre of any European map of the dark continent but it was only after Livingstone's penetration of the interior that the black hole began to exercise any gravitational effect on the outside world.

The first people to pour in were the missionaries: Catholics who arrived to teach the native populace that the Protestants were wrong and Protestants who came to teach that the Catholics were wrong. The only thing the Protestants and Catholics agreed about was that the natives had been wrong for two thousand years.

These were closely followed by traders in search of slaves, ivory, copper and suitable land on which plantations could be established. With the help of Stanley, who was on a five-year contract to open up the interior of Africa, King Leopold of the Belgians successfully laid claim to this vast region in 1885 and promptly subjected its inhabitants to an exceptionally brutal and ruthless form of colonisation, thus giving them a practical and convincing demonstration of what `wrong' actually meant.

When news of the worst atrocities leaked to the outside world, Leopold was forced to hand over `his' land to the Belgian government, who took it upon themselves to do virtually nothing about it. But by the nineteen-fifties independence movements were sweeping across Africa and, after riots and appalling massacres in the capital, Kinshasa, in 1959, the colonial authorities were shaken so badly that they granted independence the following year. The country eventually changed its name from the Belgian Congo to Zaire in 1971.

Zaire, incidentally, is about eighty times the size of Belgium.

Like most colonies, Zaire had imposed on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function of which was to refer decisions upwards to its colonial masters. Focal officials rarely had the power to do things, only to prevent them being done until bribed. So once the colonial masters are removed, the bureaucracy continues to thrash around like a headless chicken with nothing to do other than trip itself up, bump into things and, when it can get the firepower, shoot itself in the foot. You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.

Five hours of sleepy bumping in the van brought us to Bukima, a village in the foothills of the Virungas which marks the point where the road finally gives up, and from which we had to travel on by foot.

Set a little way above the village, in front of a large square, was an absurdly grand ex-colonial building, empty except for an absurdly small office tucked into the back where a small man in an Army uniform pored over our gorilla permits with a grim air of bemusement, as if he'd never seen one before, or at least not for well over an hour. He then occupied himself with a short wave radio for a few minutes before turning to us and saying that he knew exactly who we were, had been expecting us, and that because of our contacts with the World Wildlife Fund in Nairobi he was going to allow us an extra day with the gorillas, and who the hell were we anyway, and why had no one told him we were coming?