African Silences (32 page)

The Mbuti were once famous elephant hunters, popularly supposed to run under an elephant and drive spears into it from beneath. “They had to work close, using jabbing spears, but I doubt if they did that very often,” John Hart says. “They’re the ultimate opportunists; they would bring it down any way they could.” Elephant hunting died out in the early seventies, with the decline of the elephant itself, and the only Mbuti who go after them today are those who serve poachers as gun bearers and trackers. (“We hunt neither elephant nor okapi,” Kenge says, trying not to laugh, “because that is against the law.” However, an okapi slowed down by the nets would almost certainly be killed and eaten. “Very good, too,” says Terry Hart, with a charming smile.)

The hunters return in late afternoon with four blue duiker, not enough to feed our growing camp. There are twenty-six huts at Ekare, most of them occupied; there must be sixty people here in all. Sibani the Leper, one of several Pygmies more yellow in skin color than brown, can no longer tend his net due to sore feet, but he has a big bright yellow-green-and-black monitor lizard that he shot with his bow and arrow. With glee, he describes the fury of the finish: “I jumped right into the water with my pants on!” At supper I accept his offer of fresh lizard meat, only to be told, once I had started, that I could not have antelope as well, since mixing the two might jinx tomorrow’s hunt.

Toward dark, Omudi makes a lengthy speech about how the people have come back to Ekare thanks to John Hart. “We’re here in the forest to be happy!” he cries. “No anger! We’re here to be happy! Anybody who has a bad spirit, keep it in town!” And the people seem happy, even those who had wished to linger at the Bougpa camp.

Slowly, as the evening passes, the men begin to sing, keeping time with fire-hardened sticks and an old plastic oil container as a drum. The simple harmonies, rising and falling away like strong quiet fire, are intensified by choruses
and clapping and the counterpoint of solo voices, in an effect intensely subtle and sophisticated, despite the repetition of the simple lyrics. “Let us all sing this song”—or, better, put ourselves into this song, be one with this song. Or “I didn’t eat; other people ate.” Or “The food we put out for the Ancestors got eaten by the dogs.” For often there is humorous intent, especially in the love songs: “If you can’t climb the buo tree [a tall, straight-trunked relative of the elms without lower limbs], forget my daughter.” There are also hunting songs, and honey songs and dances, especially in August, when the brachystegia trees come into blossom and honey becomes the most sought-after item of diet. “Go out with your lover and spend the day beneath the honey tree” is a song of explicit and joyful sexuality, with vivid gestures of a honeyed arm thrusting in and out of the hive.

All songs are implicitly sacred. “The forest gives us this song,” the people say, meaning, “The forest
is
this song.”

Another night, a man named Gabi dances slowly with a bow, tapping the bowstring with a stick, using his mouth at one end of the string to achieve resonance. Later he dances as Dekoude the Trickster, a masked green figure bound head to toe in leaves who gets people lost in the deep forest. Soon the girls and women rise to dance, in an intricate pattern in and out of a half hoop of stiff liana that one of their number, seated on the ground, raises and lowers on the waves of music. Before each culminating leap, each woman holds her hand out over the ground and sings, “Before I am given another child, this one must be as tall as this!” Each time this is said, the women laugh loudly at the men.

The best dancer and best singer in the camp is Atoka’s sister Musilanji, who is lighthearted and bursting with life. According to John, she is much in demand among the truckers and other Bantu in the villages, and, not being possessed of a grudging character that might permit her to
say no, she has contracted syphilis along the way. As a strong and beautiful solo voice in both the women’s group and men’s, Musilanji sings with all her heart, and later, after everyone has crawled into their huts, she laughs with the same all-out spirit at the dirty jokes of old Sibani, laughing until she rolls upon the ground, gasping for breath, laughing until she hurts and squeals for mercy, her passionate abandon so infectious that, stretched out in our leaf hut across the circle, unable to understand a single word, I laugh hard, too.

Before daybreak, the cries of forest animals awake the camp, and the din intensifies, with staccato arm claps, as the men make ready to set off on the hunt. Over the breakfast fire, Kenge says, “It is all joy, it is making the
mangese
of the forest happy,” and his sister-in-law Asha nods agreement. Kenge, a handsome, serious man, now gives a speech, reminding the hunters that they must no longer kill okapi or elephant, that any outsider found in the forest with a snare must be arrested, that nets are all right because the People come and go and do not harm the forest life.

There is something chastened about Kenge, who is no longer the lighthearted young hunter to whom Colin Turnbull’s book was dedicated a quarter century ago. He is now an elder, and he takes himself seriously, and is taken seriously, for everyone knows that his picture appeared in a book. In camp, though he laughs at us with all the others, he sits in a chair with his arms folded, talking mostly to Asha, who cooks for the whites, and keeping himself subtly aloof, as if, at ease in neither world, he was fated to mediate between the groups. “Kenge knows he is somebody,” says John Hart sympathetically, “but he doesn’t quite know who.”

Atoka is all nerved up for the hunt. With great finesse and delicacy, and sounds to match, he mimes the approach,
the rush at the net, the finish of the big yellow-backed duiker he intends to kill. His arms and pointed fingers dart in imitation of the antelope’s quick legs and sharp hooves, he claps his arm with a loud hollow report to alert the others that his duiker has been netted, he squats, he leaps, grabbing one leg of the animal and twisting it over on its back, screeching in triumph even as he demonstrates how the others will come running with their spears.

Dodging driver ants, Rick Peterson and I cross the Ekare on a dead tree and follow the path into the forest, where we come upon a small unattended fire that one of the hunters had gone out earlier to prepare. Here Atoka drops his net and summons the Ancestors to witness this offering of precious fire to the forest and the purification of the hunters in its smoke; if the forest is contented, all will go well in the hunt. One by one the hunters come, squat down, let the smoke bathe them. Tambo holds a leaf over the smoke, then rubs his chest with it. The men smoke
bangi
, “to give them strength and get them ready,” says Atoka. We rise and go.

Moving off the path into the forest, the hunters are quiet and keep signals to a minimum; in the thick cover, each man seems to know just where to go. Already some are stringing out their nets, unwinding the long coils from their shoulders as they run deftly through the understory, then returning along the line to raise the net and hang it firmly on shrub branches and saplings, taking pains to see that the bottom edge is firm against the earth. Atoka’s net, overlapping others at each end, is three to four feet high, seventy-five yards long, and by no means the longest. With twelve hunters, the entire set will be a half kilometer around, enclosing about twenty acres in a semicircle.

Atoka’s net overlaps that of Asumani, who nods as we go by.
“Merci”
is a word he has learned to say, and he tries it out quietly in greeting. Already the women are appearing, following around outside the nets to the narrow entrance.
A signal comes, they enter and fan out, whooping and calling, each one headed for her husband’s sector.

We wait just inside the net, on a log that overlooks a forest gorge. It is Atoka’s turn for a poor spot, close to one end; he does not expect much. We listen to a great blue turaco, green pigeons, an unknown cuckoo; a scrub robin flits briefly into view, cocking its head in the thrush manner. Off in the distance, a great tree topples of its own accord—a crack of thunder and an avalanche of matter as a hundred and fifty feet of timber, dragging down vines and lianas, snapping limbs and saplings, tears a long slash in the canopy and thumps the waiting earth. A wave of silence follows, like a forest echo.

The silence is broken by a loud arm clap, for game has been seen near the nets. From the shouts that follow, Atoka learns that a big red duiker,
nge
, has pierced Gabi’s net.

Quickly we rise and make another set, not far away. This time an
nge
is entangled. There comes a wild yell from the west, two nets away, and we follow Atoka on a dead run through the trees toward the strange sheeplike bleats of this forest antelope that the hunters imitate so skillfully. The men there ahead of us at Mayai’s net have seized the legs of what turns out to be a Peter’s red duiker, a species I have never seen. The mesh is freed roughly from its long head and neck as it flops and thrashes, staring up at us with strange blue-filmed night eyes. Without ceremony, Asumani hacks its throat, and at the rush of blood, everyone laughs. Though the forest has given them this food, the hunters are no more reverent toward it than they are to their camp dogs; this irreverence, rare among traditional peoples, seems curious in the light of the earlier propitiation of the forest.
“Ekoki,”
they say to us, and
“malamu.”
Both words mean “good.”

Returning to fetch Atoka’s net, we pass the deaf man, Poos-Poos, who has the narrow shoulders of a woman and often wears his
kikwembe
tied around his neck, the way a
Pygmy woman wears it near the road. Poos-Poos is grieving. A
seke
—a white-bellied duiker—approached his net, then ran away. But later, when the men have gathered after an unsuccessful set, Poos-Poos cheers everyone with a very comic imitation of his drunken self leaving the truck-stop bar, trying to find his way back to the forest, putting twigs in his eyes, butting his head into the tree trunks. The hunters laugh, and laugh still harder when they see that Rick and I are laughing, too. They feel protective about Poos-Poos, who cannot articulate, and often emits weird hoots, shrill cackles; Mayai accounts for him by tapping his ear and then his temple, to indicate why Poos-Poos is incomplete, and when he does this, Poos-Poos, his soft brown eyes wide and round as a lemur’s, smiles an enchanted smile, as if blessing us all.

Yet Poos-Poos, able in every chore, has his own net and spear and travels as an equal with the hunters except in rainstorms, when he loses his bearings and has to be led by the hand. He is very kind and popular with the small children, and he is alert, as he has to be, to keep up with the rest in an existence so dependent on good hearing. Poos-Poos is chronically in a high state of tension, and his strange face, slightly askew, is scarred by grievous marks of concentration, pinching his forehead, that are lacking in his lighthearted companions. Perhaps he is not retarded as I had imagined, but on the contrary, atremble with trapped intelligence, wild with frustration.

Slipping through the forest, the hunters see bees moving back and forth, and the hunt is suspended while they search without success for the hive. We cross a pretty tributary brook known as Ekare’s Daughter. An elephant has crossed ahead of us, and okapi sign is everywhere. Then the set is made, we wait again, watching a bird party of leafloves and greenbuls that glean the understory foliage, in shafts of
sun. Another
nge
and also a blue duiker,
mboloko
, are taken, to great whoops of triumph that drown out the hoots and yelling of the beaters.

In the next set, a blue duiker escapes, nothing is caught. Rain comes. The Mbuti seek out a big tree with heavy lianas, which thicken the canopy above with their own leaves, providing shelter. With his hands idle, Atoka is restless. “This is the work of the Forest,” he says. “We hunt, we wait, we get up and go again.” So far today he has caught nothing, but he knows that in the partition of the antelopes his family will be given meat. “The first thing we learn is
kosalisa
—to take care of others. We Mbuti do no one any harm. If I sleep hungry, you sleep hungry; if I get something from the forest, you will have it, too.”