Authors: Stanley Johnson
Stephanie Verusio had visited Africa half a dozen times with her parents, and once they had spent a season camping out in the Serengeti. They had criss-crossed the park, following the huge herds of migrating animals: wildebeest, hartebeest, antelope, gazelle, impala, giraffe, elephant and lion — the plains seemed to overflow with an abundance of game. For a young impressionable woman it was an unforgettable time. The tropical sun sinking swiftly to the horizon; the sudden noise of the African night; the cries of the hunter and the hunted became part of her. She lived Africa; she breathed it; she dreamed about it. It was in her blood. She could not suppress her excitement as she prepared for her departure.
The serum arrived as planned towards the end of the week. Stephanie had a friend at the Institut Pasteur who asked no questions and expected no answers but was content to inoculate her as she requested. On the Friday night she flew from Paris to Nairobi. Less experienced travellers might have supposed that the best way to get to the Kugumba region of Eastern Zaire was to go to Kinshasha, the capital of Zaire and then to travel across country. Stephanie made enquiries of people she knew had first-hand knowledge of the area. She found out that, actually, the best way to the Kugumba region of the Eastern Congo was to cross Lake Tanganyika from Burundi, the tiny state which lies at the very heart of Africa, like a bull’s eye in a dart-board.
It was a long flight down from Paris to Nairobi and she didn’t sleep much. Her mind was full of the task which lay ahead of her. She had to find the tribe of green monkeys and then, however impossible it might seem, she had somehow to move them to safety before the armies of the night descended on them. How far should she try to move them? Fifty miles? A hundred? More? Was there a danger that they would return to their original haunts in the Kugumba region where they would run the risk of extermination? If so, how could she keep them guarded and for how long? And who would help her in all this?
There was also the risk of infection. Reuben had come through with the serum. Half a pint of his blood was now mingled with her own and the antibodies should already be racing in her blood stream. And he had promised, as an old friend, to tell nobody. But how long would the protection last? Two months? Six months? A year? Or for ever? She believed she had taken the most effective measures possible to protect herself against the Marburg virus. But she would have liked to have known for sure.
There was another reason why she did not sleep much on the flight down. The sun came up on the port wing of the plane around 5 a.m. when they were still over Southern Sudan. The day was cloudless and she soon shifted to a window seat so as to watch the continent unfold beneath her. For her, there was always something magical about this. First the desert, then the savannah, then the jungle, then once more the bush and finally the more populated landscape of village and field as the big jet came in over the Game Park to land at Nairobi airport.
She had checked her luggage through, so all she had to do was to change planes. Air Burundi ran a D.C.3 from Nairobi to Bujumbura — ran it, that was, whenever they had enough petrol for it to fly and enough maintenance staff to keep the sparking plugs clean. Today was one of the lucky days.
The last leg of Stephanie’s journey was a relatively short one. Shortly before noon, the old plane, which had probably been kicking about different parts of Africa since the Second World War, started its descent towards Bujumbura. She had her first glimpse of the massive geological feature called the Nile-Zaire ridge, running north to south through the country. She saw the stands of primeval forests on the very summit of the ridge, the great trees which seemed to reach up towards the undercarriage of the plane. Then, suddenly, they were over flatter ground. Beneath the starboard wing the Ruzizi river flowed through the plain into Lake Tanganyika. They were near enough to the surface of the water for her to see a couple of hippopotamuses wallowing in the mud. And across the lake, towering now above the plane as it came in to land, loomed the mountains of Eastern Zaire. Somewhere in those mountains she knew she would find what she was looking for.
Quite apart from the facts of geography, which made it preferable to approach the Eastern Congo via Burundi rather than making the long trek eastwards from Kinshasha, Stephanie had another compelling reason for making Bujumbura the launching pad for her African expedition. That reason was a tall, graceful member of the Tutsi tribe called Michel Ngenzi. Ngenzi was a long standing friend of her father’s and so of hers. He was also a one-time Professor of African Geography at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and a prince of the former royal house of Burundi. For Stephanie, contacting Ngenzi was a matter of supreme importance. With his assistance, she believed she had a chance of succeeding in her objective. Without it, she was not even sure she knew where to begin.
Bujumbura possessed a modest airport — and that was probably an understatement. Whereas in neighbouring Kenya the British had left an enduring legacy in the form of a police force which paraded in neatly pressed khaki shorts, the sole occupant of the custom post at Bujumbura airport had a French képi cocked to one side of his head, a pair of rumpled jeans and a shirt whose once colourful pattern had been bleached by several years’ exposure to the tropical sun.
He flipped through the pages of her passport in a desultory way.
“Vous êtes Américaine, hein?”
“Oui.” Stephanie thought it safer to stick to monosyllabic replies. The passport could speak for itself.
“Qu’est-ce que vous allez faire en Burundi?”
“Du tourisme.” Stephanie gave the classic response.
Safely through customs and immigration, Stephanie took a taxi from the airport into town. A twenty-minute drive along a hot bustling road brought her to Bujumbura’s one and only international hotel, known as the Source du Nil. (Burundi, along with half a dozen other countries, laid claim to the headwaters of the Nile and had demonstrated the seriousness of this claim by naming its hotel in an appropriate fashion.) The Source du Nil, at least partially, lived up to its name. It was a large modern place, reputedly built with airline money, set on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Guests could look north towards the Ruzizi or due west to the mountains opposite. The hotel had a swimming pool, a couple of bars and a nightclub — in fact all the modern conveniences which tended to be lacking elsewhere.
Stephanie checked in at the desk, filled in the registration card and surrendered her passport for inspection. One of the numerous youths who hung around the desk helped her to her room with her luggage.
When the boy had gone, she shut the door and went to the phone. It was a year since she had last spoken to Michel Ngenzi. She had called him on that occasion to tell him about her father’s death in the plane crash. The news had shaken him because Ngenzi had been Roger Verusio’s closest African associate. They had worked together, for over fifteen years, cataloguing the fauna and flora of Central and Southern Africa. The classic work,
Birds of Burundi
, had appeared only two years earlier under both their names.
After a couple of attempts, she heard the number ringing.
A voice answered in French: “Allo, oui.”
“Est-ce que c’est bien le Professeur Ngenzi? Ici c’est Stephanie Verusio à l’appareil.”
She heard a shout of joy at the other end. “Stephanie! Tu es ici à Bujumbura?”
“Bien sûr.”
“C’est incroyable!” Michel Ngenzi changed quickly to English, knowing Stephanie’s linguistic limitations. Several years’ residence in Paris had not yet produced, Stephanie was ashamed to admit it, total linguistic proficiency.
“This is incredible,” Ngenzi continued. “When can we meet? I have so much to tell you about the new book. I am carrying on your father’s work where he left off.”
“And I have much to tell you.”
“I shall send the car for you at 6 p.m.”
Stephanie replaced the instrument and went out onto the balcony of her room. Thank God she had been able to get hold of Michel. She had tried to contact him before leaving Paris; but it was almost impossible to get through to Burundi on the international lines. The one time she had succeeded in raising Michel Ngenzi’s house, she had been informed that the Professor was away and was not expected back for a few days.
She stood there gazing out. Down below, and slightly to the right, a string of race-horses grazed on the lush well-watered lawns of the Bujumbura Yacht Club, and there was someone waterskiing on the lake in front of the hotel.
What a strange country it was! On the one hand, desperate poverty; a
per capita
income as low as any in Africa. Yet, on the other, extreme concentrations of wealth in just a few hands. For those race-horses, she knew, were not owned by white expatriates, but mainly by members of the governing classes. And it was not a tourist waterskiing on the lake, but a young black man.
Out of interest, she went back into the room to unpack her binoculars from her luggage. Then she returned to the balcony again to focus on the scene below. The speedboat — with the name VICTOR painted on its bow — roared across the calm surface of the water, while the young man who followed in its wake performed all kinds of stunts. He slalomed from side to side, clearly enjoying himself hugely. Then, still careering along at well over twenty knots, he bent down and removed one ski. This he held under his arm while with his other arm he hung onto the tow. She watched fascinated. There was so much grace and power there; the muscles rippled beneath the skin. The young African had thrown his head back and was laughing through the spray.
Suddenly, she saw him bend down again to take off the second ski as well. Good God, Stephanie thought, you can’t water-ski without skis. You’ll fall on your face! But she was wrong, because the skier flattened his body backwards and raised the balls of his feet so that they took the shock of the water.
Stephanie watched with the binoculars until, about a mile out from shore, the boat slowed and the man on the rope splashed down into the lake. The boat curled round to pick him up.
A land of contrasts indeed; she picked up her interrupted train of thoughts. Great wealth, great poverty. A land where the tall, graceful Tutsis still reigned supreme, as they had for hundreds of years. And yet their hold on power was really paper-thin. Forming less than 10 per cent of the population, the Tutsis were, she knew, constantly threatened by the majority race of the Hutus.
At the beginning of the 1970s, the Hutus had risen up against their masters and had been ruthlessly crushed. At that time, hundreds of thousands had died on both sides in an outbreak of mass-savagery remarkable even for a continent where mass-savagery is the rule rather than the exception. Now, Stephanie had heard, the tension was once more building up. The Hutus had begun to recover from the beating they had taken and were looking for revenge.
Later that evening Michel Ngenzi had explained the situation to her.
They were on the veranda of the Professor’s house, a large brick-and-stucco building set back on a hill overlooking the lake. The gardens stretched half-way down the hill and as Michel Ngenzi and his guest sat with their drinks, looking to the distant hills, the Professor’s servants were busy watering the bougainvillaeas and the hibiscus. At the bottom of the garden, a pair of peacocks stretched their wings, and a donkey, ears laid back, munched contentedly in the shade of a flame-tree.
“The government is trying to keep the lid on, Stephanie,” Ngenzi said. “It’s sitting on the pot as hard as it can, but I tell you the cauldron is beginning to boil over.”
“Where do you stand in all this, Michel?” Stephanie was curious about Ngenzi’s personal position. “If the cauldron boils over, won’t you get scalded as well?”
Michel Ngenzi’s smile was a work of art in itself. It illuminated the characteristic aristocratic features of the Tutsi — narrow septum, and delicate bone structure — and flooded her with warmth.
“Stephanie, believe me I understand the situation here. Better than you think. I think the present government of President Mtaza is headed for trouble. They won’t be able to keep the lid on just by sitting on it. There must be reforms, genuine reforms. The Hutus must be given a greater share in power otherwise there will be an explosion.”
“You’re part of the élite. Why don’t you tell the President that?”
He smiled sadly. “President Mtaza used to be my best friend. We grew up together. We came from the same village. As boys we went to the famous missionary school — you’ve probably seen it set high up on the hill above the town — run by the White Fathers from Belgium. We were very close. I can remember the time when Albert Mtaza and I started work on the very first ever catalogue of the wildlife of Burundi, after I came back from Brussels. We used to go every weekend out to where the Ruzizi river flows into Lake Tanganyika and watch the hippopotamus and the crocodile. And the birds. My God, you should have seen the birds. I used many of the notes I made then in the book which your father and I eventually produced.”
“What happened?”
“To President Mtaza?”
“Yes.”
“Power went to his head. He couldn’t understand that if this nation is to survive, one tribe cannot rule another as the Tutsis today rule the Hutu. Nor will it survive if one day the situation is reversed and the Hutu rule the Tutsis. Burundi will only survive, Africa will only survive, if we can put an end to tribalism, if we can work together. I tried to tell Mtaza this, but he won’t listen. And now he doesn’t want to hear from me at all. He lets me get on with my work, but that is probably because of our old friendship. But I’m not really
persona grata
with the government.”
“And if there is another explosion, what will happen? The Hutus will take over?”
“Not just the Hutus. Today in Burundi we have the classic situation. The Communists are helping to foment tension. Look at the map of Africa today. Burundi is a tiny country, a pinprick on the map. Yet, think how crucial it is geopolitically. It straddles the main transport links. If you want to go north-south in Africa, you cannot avoid Lake Tanganyika. Burundi controls all traffic on the lake. More than that, Burundi straddles the east-west route as well. The Communists have both wings now, in Angola and Mozambique. They have great influence in Tanzania and Uganda. The only thing that stops the Communist-financed east-west highway being pushed through from Dar-Es-Salaam to Beira is the fact that we won’t let it through Burundi. But if we have a revolution here, if some spark ignites the conflagration, then God knows what will happen. If Burundi goes Communist the whole of Southern Africa will be encircled. By then of course it may already be too late for Zimbabwe. But South Africa will be doomed as well. And think what that would mean for all of us. We don’t need a Communist regime, any more than we want to be exploited by the Western powers. Here in Burundi we must be our own masters, and work things out our own way.” He paused, and then said with all the emphasis he could muster. “And President Mtaza’s way is not the right way. That I know. It will only lead to violence and bloodshed and a take-over by one faction or the other.”