African Silences (25 page)

All along, an enormous sound has resounded through the silence, and suddenly it transfixes one’s awareness. It is the fierce wing shriek of cicadas, each shriek as painful to the ear as a blade sharpened on stone, yet joining with thousands of others in electric song and smoothing out in a wild ringing from the canopy high overhead. The thickbodied, green cicadas are ventriloquial, Jonah says, and I wonder if this is not also true of those hidden forest birds whose beautiful voices seem impossible to trace. Most of the birds remain high in the canopy, but bird armies, or “ejaks,” of mixed species—leafloves, wattle-eyes, malimbes, greenbuls—come flitting through the understory, and if one stands still long enough one of the hidden singers will appear.

Late one afternoon the yellow-cheeked trogon, a shy, uncommon forest dweller with emerald mantle and crimson breast and yellow spots behind the bill, flew from the shadows and perched dead still on a limb over the path. Like a spirit of the forest, it remained motionless even when we walked beneath it, and it did not turn its head to watch us go.

The Ivindo River, which flows south from the border region of Cameroon and Congo, drops off the high plateaus below Makokou in a series of white waterfalls and rapids to join eventually with the great Ogooué, which flows west past Lambarene to the sea. Like the Sangha, the Ivindo is one of many Congo Basin tributaries that are larger than any river in East Africa, or any river on the Indian Ocean except the great Zambezi and possibly the Ruvuma, on the Tanzania-Mozambique border. Nevertheless our attempts to follow it on our southward journey are thwarted by low clouds that almost turn us back. “That wasn’t a good situation,” David Western mutters, after making a tight circle back and gaining altitude before resuming his course. “The ceiling got lower and lower as we neared those mountains, and before you know it the aircraft could have been trapped down in some valley between hills, unable to see where it might climb out.”

At the Ivindo’s confluence with the Ogooué, we head west, making a landing at the Lope airstrip, between the Ogooué and the brave new Trans-Gabonais railroad designed to open up Gabon’s unexploited interior to timber and mineral development. A few years ago, when the railroad up the Ogooué was being constructed, this Lope region was very hard hunted to provide meat for the crews. Today it is a wildlife reserve, and the animals are coming back, with buffalo and elephant now quite common. One day, perhaps, Lope-Okande, as it is known, will be a true national park, but for the moment it still issues timber leases. (Virtually the entire rain forest of Gabon, C.A.R., Congo, Cameroon, and much of Zaire has already been sold in logging units to European countries and the Japanese; already about one-fifth of Gabon’s foreign income comes from wood.) And since the nation’s oil, which financed
the new railroad, is drying up, and since Gabon’s mineral reserves are less extensive than was at first believed, the country’s small population and its low rate of increase may prove to be a blessing. Even so, the people are officially exhorted to produce more children and occupy the wilderness regions to the east. Whether foreign investors or the Gabonnais themselves will profit from this exploitation remains to be seen, but in view of the headlong scary rate at which the earth’s rain forests are disappearing, there seems no doubt that humanity will be the loser.

Richard Barnes, who has accompanied us from Makokou, has kindly made arrangements for our various visits in Gabon, and we are picked up at the airstrip by Lope’s warden. M. Sambouni drives us through the open savanna hills under Mount DeBrazza, named after the French explorer who discovered the Ogooué River and gave his name to the distinguished monkey as well as to Brazzaville, the present capital of Congo Republic. The extensive grassland in this region, in an odd pattern up and down the hills, seems to bear no relation to the ecological topography, and although M. Sambouni says that the savanna has always been here, he also says he must burn it each year to keep the forest from encroaching.

David Western is convinced that the savanna is “derived”—created, that is, by man’s impact; in fact, he disputes the widespread notion that the great wildlife savannas of East Africa are a natural ecosystem, mysteriously unaffected by the presence of pastoral man for three thousand years. Since it has never been forested in present memory, the grassland must have been established in earlier centuries of Bantu settlement, perhaps as early as the first migrating waves of Bantu peoples, who are thought to have followed the rivers south perhaps fifteen hundred years ago in response to long-term drought or overpopulation in the savannas. Throughout this region, the patchwork grassland is so widespread that settlement must have
been much more extensive than it is today, and only the depredations of the slave trade, and the fierce intertribal slaving wars that followed, seem to account for the great emptiness of this broken landscape.

In less than an hour, we arrive at the quarters of Dr. Caroline Tutin, a young British primatologist whose airy camp on a savanna hilltop overlooks the Lope-Okande forest. For a year and a half in the early seventies, Dr. Tutin, a small, trim young woman with green eyes and red hair, worked with Jane Goodall at Gombe Stream in Tanzania, after which, for a number of years, she pursued her own chimpanzee research at the Parc de Niokolo Koba, in Senegal. It was there that she first met her associate, Michel Fernandez, a genial French pilot, mechanic, and logistical expert who constructed and maintains their present camp. (Tutin and Fernandez remind me that we met in 1979, when I visited Niokolo Koba.) Dr. Tutin says that she finds field work in Gabon exciting not only because most of its forest is intact but because this high western region of the equatorial rain forest was a Pleistocene refugia, where a very large, complex, and diverse flora and fauna survived the widespread cooling and drying on this continent that occurred during the Ice Age, ten thousand years ago, when most of the rain forest disappeared. Little is known as yet about this fauna, and even less about the flora, and she suspects that new species may yet be found. She agrees with her colleague Dr. Gauthier that the
mbaya
is a distinct new species of cercopithecine, despite its very limited range of one hundred square kilometers across the Lolo River to the east.

At Lope, Dr. Tutin is studying the behavior of chimpanzee and lowland gorilla, both of which, she says, were first reported from Gabon by American missionaries. Though she is still partial to the chimp—“Everything in its
social organization encourages the development of high intelligence”—she is at present concentrating on the gorilla. In her first two years, she has located and censused five separate groups, not counting two or three lone males, but none of these animals are as yet habituated to human beings, and the big silverback males (the French also like this term, saying “seelvairebok moll”) are still given to roaring display charges that will cause even elephants to back up.

The great majority of gorilla threat displays stop well short of physical contact, but a year ago, on December 24 (“I remember the date well,” says the victim), a lone silverback rushed out of the thicket and bit Fernandez on the calf. The gorilla took him for another male, he thinks. “If he’d wished to kill me or seriously hurt me, he could have done so very easily,” Fernandez told me, a surprised expression on his face, “but he didn’t even bite me with full force.”

Since male gorillas are equipped with large, sharp canines, this gentle bite left holes in his leg, the scars of which are still impressive. Similar bitings have occurred at Dian Fossey’s camp at Karisoke, in Rwanda, and at Kahuzi-Biega, in eastern Zaire, where I observed gorillas a few years ago, but none have been fatal despite the huge strength and fearsome aspect of what all authorities regard as a gentle vegetarian creature. “Imagine one of these great hunters shooting down a silverback!” Caroline Tutin says with quiet indignation. “It’s hard to imagine a less sporting shot!”

The mountain gorilla of the Central Highlands, which is regularly shot by poachers for tourist “trophy heads” (the young are taken illegally for zoos, a process which usually involves shooting the adults), is now in serious danger, its population having been reduced to about four hundred, but, like the northern white rhino, it is regarded as a geographic race, not a true species, despite marked morphological differences in the two forms. (At present a third race is recognized—the eastern lowland gorilla, now reduced to a few small ranges in eastern Zaire. Between
twenty-five hundred and forty-five hundred of this largest of the three gorillas, which include the animals at Kahuzi-Biega, are thought to remain.) Worldwide alarms of gorilla extinction that were sounded a few years ago were based on rough estimates that the combined populations of the mountain and the lowland races did not exceed five to seven thousand animals, but in a recent development—quite the opposite of what we now anticipate for forest elephant—Dr. Tutin and other researchers have discovered an estimated thirty-five thousand gorilla in Gabon alone, and other healthy lowland populations as far west as Cameroon. (Richard Carroll’s more conservative figure is thirty thousand to fifty thousand western lowland gorilla in all five countries of the western Congo Basin—Cameroon, C.A.R., Gabon, Congo, and Equatorial Guinea.) As in the case of the northern white rhino, this raises the question of whether so much conservation effort should be spent on a remnant and perhaps doomed geographic race—the mountain gorilla—when the species as a whole is not in danger.

With Jonah, I accompany Dr. Tutin on an afternoon trek into her forest, which appears far more modified by elephants than the forest at Makokou. Because the gorillas are still shy, she thinks it unlikely that they will show themselves, and she turns out to be right, although we encounter a large number of fresh droppings. Dr. Tutin deftly collects one in a polyethylene bag for food analysis. “Some of these smell quite nice,” she says, and at this point she glances up at Dr. Western, aware that his wife, Dr. Strum, is a noted baboon authority. So gently that Jonah doesn’t notice he is being teased, she whispers with a shy sly smile, “Better than baboons’!” (Remarkably, the best known primate researchers—Goodall, Fossey, Biruti-Galdikas [the orangutan researcher in Borneo], and more recently Drs. Strum and Tutin—are women. The first three—known irreverently in primate circles as “the trimates”—were protégées of Louis Leakey, who felt that women had more patience for prolonged
study, but this does not fully account for the phenomenon, for which no behavioral theory has been advanced.)

On a forest ridge, our coming provokes a crashing flight through the dense undergrowth. “Large duiker,” Dr. Tutin whispers. “Yellow-backed, I should think.” We also startle a mustached monkey, one of three guenon species that share this forest with gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills, gray-cheeked mangabeys, and black colobus. Dr. Tutin says that primate species are even more numerous in south Cameroon, at the northern end of this Pleistocene refugia, which extends all the way down to the coast; she has seen gorillas on the seashore at Mayumba, in southwest Gabon.

The ridge opens out on one of the large rocks that jut up from the forest floor, and here we sit still for a little while, hoping to hear the chest thumping and other noises that might betray the whereabouts of the gorillas. What we hear instead is the strange “pant-hooting” of an approaching troop of chimpanzees, each animal’s harsh cries joining with others in a wild ululation that rings and wanders through the trees. “They’ve found something good to eat, or they’ve run into another subgroup, perhaps both,” Caroline murmurs, turning to listen with the same smile of unabashed wonder and approval that is so affecting in the hunting peoples. We cross the ridge to the far side, following the sound of the chimps feeding, but already the apes are falling quiet, all but hidden in the canopies of leaves. “They’re settling down now for the night,” Caroline says, smiling again. “I’ll be here the first thing in the morning.”