Sand rivers (2 page)

PETER MATTHIESSEN

Arnold had previously mentioned to me that Nicholson had read a book I had written on East Africa: "Seems to know something about Africa," he had muttered, in what Tom diplomatically assured me was high praise. Yet his apparent views on race and politics did not seem to accord with those expressed in The Tree Where Man Was Born. On our way out to the University of Dar-es-Salaam the following day to talk with one of Nicholson's old colleagues, an expert on the ecology of the Selous, he did not hide his disapproval of the way that Africans were managing here in the city; of the epidemic idleness and inefficiency, brought about, in his opinion, by a "system that maintained people in jobs because they were black, not because they were qualified"; of the weeds and chickens in what had been the gardens of his house out at Oyster Bay; of the chronic failures of the telephone, electricity, and even hot water for his tea in what was supposed to be the best hotel in Tanzania (the news that the cash register had broken down made him laugh, the first laugh that he ever emitted in my presence, and not a heart-warming sound in any way). I decided not to ask him his opinion of the notices the hotel had posted in the rooms, under the heading useful hints, which cautioned the traveler to avoid the waterfront and harbor area, especially after dark, and made the following suggestions:

Be wary about "hard-luck" stories from tricksters hanging around, with their smooth talk and friendly persuasion. If at all a taxi is required, use one from a reputable firm. Ornaments are very tempting for local snatchers.

For those who knew which of the motley taxis might represent a reputable firm, such hints were useful, unlike the notice seen by Hugo van Lawick, posted by the local commissioner next to the telephone in the Kigoma airport: "It has come to my attention that use of this telephone is absolutely disgusting."

On 21 August we flew inland over the cloud shadows and small settlements of the coastal bush, entering the northeast corner of the Selous at a point not more than seventy miles southwest of the capital. The plain beneath had been turned hard black by recent burning, and I asked Brian, seated in front next to the pilot, Godfrey Mwela, if he thought the fires had been set by Game Department people to generate new growth. He shook his head. "Poachers, I should think. Always had a problem with them in the north because here the villages come up so close to the boundaries. I've seen snares strung through here for almost fifteen miles, and dead animals rotting all along the way."

Off to the west rose the hills of the central African plateau, and soon the plane was crossing the new swamps created between 1971 and 1974 by the Rufiji River, which had left its ancient course as sandbanks built up in the main channel and overflowed onto this eastward plain below Stiegler's Gorge. It was now mid-afternoon, and large groups of elephant and buffalo were moving peacefully toward the shining water. Headless palms turned like strange sentinels under the shadow of the plane; most of the trees had been killed by the villagers, who lop off the crowns, then convert the rising sap into "palm wine". Here and there stood the delicate tall stalk of a giraffe, the first and last giraffe we were to see in the Selous.

For reasons not well understood, the giraffe of eastern Tanzania does not occur south of the Rufiji although the same species reappears beyond the Zambezi River, more than six hundred miles further south; and the

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white-bearded gnu is replaced below the Rufiji by a distinct morphological race, the Nyasa wildebeest, which lacks the white beard but has a striking white chevron on the forehead. It has been suggested' that the course of the Rufiji represents an ancient fault line, connected to the Rift, that was once too deep and dangerous to cross and served as a true geographical barrier which permitted the separation of the wildebeest into two subspecies. But this theory of the "Rufiji barrier" does not explain why the giraffe and a number of smaller creatures have failed to extend their range now that those hypothetical deep canyons have silted in, nor why the two races of wildebeest should remain distinct, with no trace of intermediate forms, when all that separates them for half the year are broad sand bars and the shallow channel of a river that waterbuck as well as elephant and buffalo cross without difficulty.

Under the hills the plane banked toward the north, following the small Behobeho tributary. In an open plain of game trails and scattered trees stood the white concrete rectangle, inset with a marble plaque, that marks the grave of Frederick Courtenay Selous, naturalist, elephant hunter, and explorer, after whom the Reserve was named in 1922. Selous, who was once "white hunter" for Theodore Roosevelt, was a captain in the 25th Royal Fusiliers, "the Legion of Frontiersmen" - "bush types, mostly," according to Nicholson - part of a far superior British force tied up for years by guerrilla troops under the command of the remarkable Count von Lettow-Vorbeck, in a useless battle to control the bundu or bush of this wild country. The elusive German and Selous, far out on the uttermost frontier of the Great War, had the time and perspective to deal with each other as gentlemen, and von Lettow, in his memoirs, makes the claim that he once had Selous in his rifle sights but let him go. A common soldier, it appears, was less impeccable, and Selous died of a wound received at Zogoware, not far from this place, in the course of the British advance to the Rufiji in 1917.

The Germans had established a game reserve in this region as early as 1905, and the several reserves established by 1912 were known collectively to the Africans as Shamba ya Bibi, or "Wife's Land" - the Kaiser Wilhelm, on a romantic impulse, having made it a huge and shaggy present to his wife. No Germans inhabited the region (their forts were nearer the coast, at Utete and Liwale) although in 1916-17 they set up gun emplacements along the Rufiji and the Behobeho rivers, where old horseshoes, cartridge cases, and the like may still be found. They also hauled an enormous steam engine all the way inland from Kilwa, using hundreds of unfortunate Africans as draft animals, to grind millet to make bread for their black soldiery; the abandoned steam engine still serves to commemorate the Second Reich in the Selous Game Reserve, as the collected reserves were named in 1922 by the Game Department established that year by the British. In those days the Reserve was confined to a tract of approximately one thousand square miles, and not

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until a decade later, with the advent of an inspired young game ranger named C. J. P. lonides, did it begin to assume the imposing shape that it has today.

lonides - or "Iodine", as he came to be known throughout East Africa - has been called "the father of the Selous" by no less an authority than Brian Nicholson. A former British Army officer turned ivory hunter, he was briefly a white hunter working out of Arusha in 1930, then joined the Game Department in southeastern Tanganyika in 1933. Although he continued in his avid hunting, collecting rare species as far away as the Sudan and Abyssinia, lonides was a precocious conservationist. Very early in his career he began to envisage a great and self-perpetuating bastion of African wilderness, a complete ecosystem (as it is known today) where animals might wander in merciful ignorance of human beings. During a tenure of more than twenty years, he devoted his formidable energies to advancing this concept from a political point of view, exploring the region to map out some sensible boundaries and discouraging the activities of its scattered tribesmen, wherever possible by removing them entirely. **

As game ranger lonides was responsible for reducing the troublesome elephant populations of the Kilwa and Liwale districts, which were causing serious damage to the isolated shambas and small villages. With his limited staff, effective control of the wide-ranging animals was impossible, and eventually he got permission from the colonial administration to deny crop protection except to those Africans who moved to certain designated settlements. The British authorities agreed to this plan because it simplified tax collection and other administrative duties, but their support of it was only intermittent, and lonides, who had already trekked extensively over the country, suggested in 1935 that all of the western Liwale region be made a game reserve in which human settlement would be discouraged, thereby returning this wilderness, with its poor soils and abundant tsetse fly, to the wild animals for which it was best suited. In 1936 this proposal was accepted, mostly because of an outbreak of sleeping sickness in the affected area: consolidating the isolated inhabitants into communities with medical facilities, in which bush-clearing and eradication of wild animals might control "fly", made excellent sense. In the next three years, as the disease persisted, lonides kept right on walking, mapping out the proposed extensions of a vast new elephant reserve in western Liwale that would extend northward to the existing Selous Game Reserve. But when these new boundaries were laid out, in 1940, a small number of people remained inside them, and the colonial administration balked at the actual eviction of the inhabitants, lonides persisted in his policy of denying all protection to outlying shambas in western Liwale, and after three more years of severe damage the last of the Ngindo tribesmen in the southern region gave up and moved to settlements outside the Reserve. Once they were gone the

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territory was declared an elephant reserve, so that they were legally prohibited from moving back. As it turned out, all these settlements were located so far outside the boundaries that to this day, in the southern region, the country all around is virtually as uninhabited as the Selous itself.

Meanwhile the epidemic had spread north and west, leading finally to a forced evacuation of the Africans that was complete by 1947. The main outlines of the modern Selous were established by law in 1951, although important additions were subsequently made by Brian Nicholson. From start to finish, as Nicholson has written, the expansion of the Selous was resisted by the administration. "This was largely due to the fact that the people evacuated during 1946 and 1947 did not believe that they were moved because of sleeping sickness, and since most of the area became Game Reserve, the idea grew that the real reason was to facilitate the creation of this Reserve ... To the present day the Game Division is treated with considerable reserve by the people in Kilwa, Liwale, Rufiji and other Districts bordering on the Selous."

As in the case of so many great wildlife sanctuaries of Africa, the nominal factor in the final creation of the Selous Game Reserve was the tsetse fly. It has recently been argued^ that tsetse epidemics causing trypanosomiasis or "sleeping sickness" in human beings are not natural events but are brought about by the white man's interference, specifically the disruption caused by colonial policies of stock raising and land management, which upset the delicate, unknown balances between pastoral Africans and the domestic and wild animals. But the bush-loving Ngindo in the Selous had no domestic animals and were apparently content to live with tsetse; and in any case the epidemic died out almost as rapidly as it had appeared, to judge from the fact that in the 1950s and 1960s not one of the hundreds of Game Department staff who inhabited the Selous for long periods was ever to come down with the dread disease. When I asked him about this, Nicholson grinned. "That sleeping sickness wasn't quite so serious as old Iodine had the authorities believe. But he saw the great chance to accomplish what he knew was best, and he just took it." He shook his head over the boldness of the man, and 1 did too. Before lonides was finished, Shamba ya Bibi had been enlarged nearly twenty times from the original tract of approximately one thousand square miles, and its dramatic expansion was the direct result of the organized depopulation of vast areas of southeast Tanzania.

A number of people I have come across in Africa had been friendly with this extraordinary man, who died in 1967. Several books based on interviews with lonides were put together in his lifetime, since he was exceptionally colorful as well as single-minded; and he himself wrote interesting papers for the Tanganyika Notes and Records. Yet one is led by his own statements to suspect that, like most so-called "eccentrics", lonides was more presentable in books than he was in person, at least in

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any acquaintanceship at close quarters. Born in 1901 of a rich Greek family well-established in southern England, he found himself snubbed and isolated at the snobbish Rugby School because of his "foreign" origins and appearance and his sickliness, which were held accountable, no doubt, for his equally suspicious interest in wild creatures; eventually he was driven out of Rugby under unjust circumstances that seem to have embittered him for the rest of his life. Even at school his physical courage and stoicism when beaten were legendary, yet in order to prove himself he won a commission in the Army (where his nickname was "Greek"). But from the start he was a non-conformist, and very early in a promising career he retired from the Army, taking up solitary hunting expeditions that eventually led to his self-isolation in this most remote region of the East African bush.

From boyhood, lonides's hero - by all accounts, the only one he ever had besides Genghis Khan - was another old Rugby boy of an earlier era, an inspired amateur naturalist and "the greatest hunter of them all",'' Frederick Courtenay Selous, whose book A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa had much impressed him, and whose death in 1917 he considered a "personal loss". Though the flinty lonides would never have confessed to such sentimentality, his identification with Selous might well have affected his efforts on behalf of the Reserves.

On the ridge above Selous's grave stood Behobeho Camp, once a hunting lodge owned and operated by Ker &. Downey, who sold it to the Oyster Bay Hotel in Dar-es-Salaam in 1970. There are two other tented camps for tourists in this northeastern corner of the Selous, on the Rufiji flood plain, and there is also a temporary settlement on the Rufiji River inhabited by Norwegians who are building a bridge dam over the river at the upper end of Stiegler's Gorge. Designed to be finished about 1990, the dam will create a lake that, in the rainy season, will be about 650 square miles in extent. In itself, the lake will do little harm to wildlife, since unlike these great animal plains the region of the upper Rufiji that will be flooded is relatively barren; but the predicted influx of fishing people, and the shifting agriculture that is bound to occur along the access roads, may make it difficult to enforce the present status of what is today the largest tract in Africa in which no human being has rights of settlement or even entry. While the dam will regulate the flow of water to the rich agricultural flood plains below Stiegler's Gorge, it may also threaten the estuarine fishery of this largest river in East Africa and perhaps even the offshore fishery for prawns, and is therefore regarded with misgiving by ecologists. Meanwhile, the new road across the dam may increase the pressure for development by opening up the eastern part of the Selous.