Someone Wishes to Speak to You (2 page)

So it had been during Mathew’s early days at Scaife University, an exclusive liberal arts college in Tupelo, Mississippi, that his liberal views on segregation had been tested to the extreme. In particular, when he had learned about George Corley Wallace’s inaugural speech as Governor of Alabama with his foretelling: ‘In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’, and how in September 1963 Governor Wallace attempted to stop four black students from enrolling in four separate elementary schools in Huntsville.

In spite of public segregation officially ending in the USA in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act, Mathew had been sensitive to the fact that there remained formidable forces resisting change in the Deep South and that, even among some of his Scaife University colleagues, there were some who were finding it difficult to come to terms with the act. The assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968, which had occurred during Mathew’s final year at Scaife, had prompted him to join Tupelo’s local Civil Rights Movement and to participate in one of its protest marches. As a result of his support for the Civil Rights Movement, Mathew had been disappointed to sense how he had been, to a degree, socially ostracised by some of the university’s more hard-line students, who still considered that socially enforced segregation of African-Americans from other races should continue.

It had been at Scaife University that Mathew had studied under a renowned Professor of Psychology and Animal Behavior, Professor Ralph Candland, and on the completion of his BA he had been awarded the highly coveted Emerson D. Miller Prize for Academic Achievement in Animal Behavior. As a
result of this success, Mathew decided to go directly into a PhD programme and due to his academic prowess, was readily accepted by the Zoology Department at Emory University, Georgia. It had been at Emory that he had been able to carry out his doctorate studies with some of his coursework being directly involved with the captive gorilla population at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, which had its main research building located on a 25-acre tract of land on the Emory University campus. The Yerkes Center was one of the world’s oldest scientific institutes for the study of primates; in 1929 its founders Robert and Ada Yerkes had published
The Great Apes
, in which they brought together all available knowledge about the gorilla and other apes.

During Mathew’s initial behavioural research on the centre’s gorilla population, he had worked within the department overseen by Professor W.C. Osman Hill, the Associate Director. It had been the professor who had guided Mathew in his selection of a specific dissertation topic and had advised him that his future academic studies should have as their main tenet to carry out comparative work between captive and wild populations of gorillas. Also, on behalf of Emory University, Osman Hill as a ‘major professor’ had agreed to be responsible overall for the supervision of Mathew’s academic programme, and it was decided that once Mathew had completed his initial studies at the Yerkes Center, he would be given the opportunity to go to Africa to study gorillas in the wild. With this in mind, Mathew took the opportunity to read as much as possible about the African travels of some of the great nineteenth-century explorers. These included books by David Livingstone, Samuel Baker, Richard Burton, John Speke, Henry Morton Stanley and Paul du Chaillu, all of whom had provided him with a longing to travel to Africa at the earliest opportunity. For, as far as his academic work was concerned, he could not help feeling that the natural social interactions of captive gorillas would be significantly different from those living in the wild state.

Through the Yerkes Research Center’s many contacts and, in one particular case, as a result of Emory University’s support for a specific
in situ
conservation programme, Osman Hill was confident that he would be able to arrange for Mathew to go to Zaire to spend several months studying the social interactions of a habituated group of eastern lowland gorillas on the western shores of Lake Kivu, as the university had been a significant donor to the conservation work being carried out at the newly created Kahuzi-Biega National Park. So it had been this much-desired goal that had provided Mathew with an additional stimulus to concentrate the first year of his studies on the captive population at the primate centre, as well making some comparative observations on the gorillas at the Atlanta Zoo.

Prior to flying to Zaire, Mathew had completed the initial writing-up of his research work, which Osman Hill had been most complimentary about. Now that Mathew had arrived in Africa, he could not have been more delighted to leave behind the intense clamour of Atlanta’s traffic-congested streets and the jostle of overcrowded pavements, to have escaped the overall claustrophobic effect of city life. In spite of Mathew’s concern about the attitudes towards racial segregation he had witnessed from some of his peers at Scaife University, he had found the majority of his time in the Deep South to be most stimulating and enjoyable. However, there could hardly be more of a contrast between the environment of an American metropolis and that of Bukavu in Central Africa – a contrast that appealed greatly to Mathew’s curiosity for the unknown. He would soon be embarking upon the challenges involved with his field research work in furthering the methodology he had been working on at Yerkes; studies which he hoped would usefully contribute by more clearly defining the cognitive skills of the gorilla kingdom and their relevance to human communication.

Osman Hill had provided Mathew with a letter of
introduction to Adrien Deschryver, Director of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, who had agreed to cooperate with Mathew and to allow him to study his habituated group of eastern lowland gorillas,
Gorilla g. graueri
. Such assistance had resulted from the sizeable grant that Emory University had made in support of Deschryver’s long-term conservation activities in the park, as well supporting their anti-poaching patrols.

So it had been soon after breakfast on the day after his arrival in Bukavu that Mathew, armed with his professor’s letter of introduction, had with the enthusiasm of a young man-about-town about to meet a debutante on a first date, taken a taxi to the National Park’s headquarters.

‘Oh! So pleased to meet you – do come in,’ said the strikingly attractive girl who answered the door of the small whitewashed bungalow. ‘My name is Lucienne Luzembo. I’m afraid the
Conservateur
, Adrien Deschryver, will be away from Bukavu for the next four days – his plane has developed some mechanical problems that need to be fixed in Nairobi. He’s very sorry not to be here but I can tell you more about our work. Can I get you a cup of coffee?’

‘I must say that would be very welcome, yes please,’ replied Mathew, disappointed that he would not be meeting Adrien Deschryver that morning but eagerly looking forward to making Lucienne’s aquaintance.

‘I came to Bukavu from Lubumbashi with a Belgian-based television crew,’ explained Lucienne over a cup of locally-grown Kivu coffee. ‘We were filming Adrien with his habituated group of eastern lowland gorillas in Kahuzi-Biega. I was the crew’s translator.’

‘That sounds interesting . . . What led you into that line of work?’ asked Mathew, keen to find out everything he could about Lucienne. ‘Well, I majored in French and English at the University of Congo in Lubumbashi and also speak Bemba, the local tribal language, so when the film company approached
the university to ask if they could suggest anyone to translate, they put my name forward. It was luck, really, as these things often are. But as we were filming, I realised that what I was really interested in was the gorillas – I wanted to learn about their environment, their conservation, everything about them. I suppose because Adrien could see how much it meant to me, how much I shared his enthusiasm for the future welfare of the gorillas, he offered me a job here as his office manager, with scope to act as a translator in the future for tourists. So here I am!’

Mathew was quick to observe that Lucienne possessed the self-assured poise and body of a model and whenever she spoke in her French-accented English about the park’s gorillas, her dark brown eyes flashed with excitement. Her profile was further enhanced by the attractiveness of the dimples in her cheeks and the twitching of her button-sized nose, which all blended perfectly with the smoothness of her caramel-coloured complexion. However, although Mathew was quick to recognise that Lucienne’s appearance would be sure to set any male pulse racing, he knew only too well that in this particular situation his priority was to retain his usual degree of British formality and decorum.

Keen to carry on the conversation, Mathew delved further into Lucienne’s background. ‘Was Lubumbashi your home-town?’

‘I was born in Katanga, twelve years before the Congo’s independence from Belgium in 1960. My parents chose to privately educate me at the Mission de Sacré Coeur at Ankoro, a small town on the Lualaba River to the north of Lubumbashi. My father was African, Dr Gaston Luzembo – my mother Karen was European. She was a nurse . . . they married while he was studying medicine in Antwerp. The difference in their cultures never seemed to bother them, they have always been very close.’

On the strength of the letter of introduction from Osman
Hill, and Lucienne having recalled the correspondence with Mathew and the financial aid that had come from Emory University, she promised to make radio contact with Deschryver that same evening. ‘You must have the
Conservateur
’s permission for your first visit to the park, as he can’t be here himself. I should have his reply by tomorrow morning – why don’t you come back then? Let me give you a lift back to the hotel for now, it will be much quicker than a taxi.’ They jumped into the Park Department’s open mud-encrusted Brazilian-manufactured jeep and continued an animated conversation until Lucienne dropped Mathew at the doors of the Hotel Metropole.

From the literature that Lucienne had given Mathew about the history of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, which included the background of Adrien Deschryver’s involvement with the conservation of its gorillas, he noted that it had been given its park status in 1970, only one year previously. Prior to this, since 1937, Mount Kahuzi had been classified as a Zoological and Forest Reserve and during the colonial days of the Belgian Congo, Deschryver’s family had owned extensive tea and coffee plantations on the twin mountains of Kahuzi and Biega. As Deschryver had been brought up in the region, he knew the mountainous environments extremely well and, when he had been old enough to carry a gun, he had hunted antelope, wild pig and even elephants in the surrounding forests. However, during the mid 1960s the area had suffered from serious depredations; many trees had been cut down on land cleared for cultivation and a great deal of hunting had taken place. What had made this particularly deplorable was that the eastern lowland gorillas had been among the chief victims.

It had been in 1965 when Deschryver had first reported that the gorillas were being hunted systematically by the
Pygmies with the aid of dogs, nets and spears. He had also recorded how old silverback males had tried to defend their families but had been massacred with spears. Females that had taken flight became entangled in nets, while the sub-adults and juveniles that had climbed into the trees for safety became a fine target for the poachers’ poisoned arrows. Due to such an uncontrolled onslaught on this remnant population of the eastern lowland gorilla species, it was not long before almost all the young gorillas of Kahuzi had been exterminated, and the remaining adults had become fragmented, aggressive and uncharacteristically dangerous. It was as a result of such carnage that Deschryver had made it his personal crusade to do as much as possible to preserve this isolated wild population, as well as to conserve the mountains’ important ecosystems on the south-west shores of Lake Kivu.

As ex-poachers frequently made the best gamekeepers, Deschryver first set about converting the Pygmies from poachers into guides. Once the national park had been established, some of the gorillas that he had managed to habituate began to realise that not all members of the human race represented danger and a number of paying visitors were permitted to see gorillas in the wild for the first time. Even more rewarding for Deschryver, it had not taken too long before nature had started to make amends and the population of gorillas had started to increase.

That evening, Mathew received a call from Lucienne. ‘I hope you’re not disappointed, Mathew – Adrien would like you to wait as he considers it essential to introduce you personally to his family of gorillas. Also, he would like to take you to the area that he considers would be best for your behavioural studies and to show you from the start the type of contact that he would happy for you to have.’

‘No, I’m not disappointed, Lucienne. That makes perfect
sense. I’m happy to wait for Adrien – I would hate to offend him unintentionally.’

‘When I arrived in Bukavu with the Belgian television crew, Adrien was initially rather wary about our presence, he was worried about taking newcomers to Kahuzi-Biega and allowing them to interact with and film his precious gorillas. When you meet him for the first time, tread carefully . . . it’s a bit like being interviewed by a university entry board and being assessed thoroughly in the process. It might help if you show as much enthusiasm as you can about the science that could result from your behavioural studies and the financial benefits that could well result from future funding sources for the park. One more thing – it would be a good idea to tell Adrien how fortunate you consider yourself to be in having such a wonderful opportunity to study the endangered eastern lowland gorilla and that you recognise fully that this is only possible thanks to him – the
Conservateur
– having spent so much time in habituating them to the presence of human beings.’