Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  When the river had taken me halfway across the continent to Stanleyville, I continued by road north and east through other parts of the centre of Africa, a spread of more than 900,000 square miles that was colonised by the Belgians. It is eighty times the size of Belgium itself – indeed, the whole of Western Europe could be contained within its borders. Almost the whole of the Congo River basin belongs in it, the Mountains of the Moon, many thousands of miles of tropical rain forest, and beyond the forest, rich copper, diamond and other mineral deposits. Men and animals extinct or unheard-of anywhere else still live in the Equatorial jungle, and the uranium for the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasake came from the mine at a tiny place called Shinkolobwe in the savannah.

  Vive l’indépendance. There was no mud hut so isolated, no road so lost in this wilderness that the message of that scribble on the river barge had not reached it. On the way north, in a country hotel on a lonely road where men carry bows and arrows just as we carry umbrellas and newspapers, and pygmy women run like shy deer twenty yards into the forest before they turn to pause and look at you looking at them, a huge yellow American car brought a couple of party politicians to put up for the night in the room next to mine. They were urbane young black men, and after drinking French wine with their dinner, they set off to address a meeting in the village. The people round about were the Mangbetu, whose artistic sense has led them to the elegant distortion of their own skulls; they have artificially elongated heads as a result of the custom of binding them in babyhood, and the taut skins of their brows give both men and women the look of women who have had a face-lift.

  I had seen one of their beautifully decorated courthouses that day. Its mud walls were covered, inside and out, with abstract designs incorporating the figures of animals and weapons in terracotta, black and white. The court was in session and a group of women were listening to the drone of somebody’s grievances and passing silently among themselves a bamboo water pipe, also decorated. They were unsmiling women who wore the negbwe, a concave bark shield, on their behinds, and little else. But their near-nakedness wore the forbidding expression that my limited experience is familiar with only on faces. Among them, I had the curious impression that I was not there.

  Early next morning I passed the open door of my neighbours’ room and saw the two politicians, in shirtsleeves and bow ties, sitting on their beds counting a great pile of currency contributed to party funds by the Mangbetu, who had attended in full force at the meeting the night before.

  And there was no part of the country, however remote, where you might not be startled by the sudden appearance of a group of ragged children, yelling at the car as it passed. Speed whipped the cry away; but it was always recognisable as the same one: ‘ ’dépendance!’ Perhaps, deep in the forest they had never left, they did not realise that they had got it; perhaps only when the cotton crop was gathered, and there was no one to buy it, and they were hungry, would they realise the change had come.

  Once my companions and I met with an older form of African confidence, and one that belonged to a different kind of independence – a kind safe from disillusion. We had stopped to quench our thirst on warm soda water on a road that led through a neglected palm grove, old and taken over by the jungle. A Congolese with a demijohn of palm wine came over the rise towards us, his wavering progress given a push by gravity. A lot of the wine was inside him instead of the demijohn, and when he drew level with the car, he stopped, greeted us and then stood a minute, watching us with a fuddled amiability that presently turned to amused patronage. He pointed to the soda water. ‘That’s your drink,’ he said. Then he lifted the demijohn. ‘This’s ours.’

  For years travel maps have shown the continent of Africa populated apparently exclusively by lions and elephants, but these maps are out of date now, and will have to be replaced with something ethnographic as well as zoogeographic. For the people have come back; they are no longer discounted by the world as they were for so long. The people have come back into their own, no matter how strife-torn they may be; and the animals have not gone yet. This, if he can dodge between riots and avoid the crash of toppling governments, is a fascinating combination of circumstances for a traveller.

  Gangala-na-Bodio – the hill of Chief Bodio – is high up in the Uele district, the north-east corner of the Congo, out of the Equatorial forest and lost in the bush near the Sudan border. On the hill, in the middle of the home of the last great herds of African elephants, was the only African elephant-training station in the world. I write ‘was’ because I must have been one of the last visitors to go there, and in a matter of weeks after that, all news from this remote corner of the Congo ceased. The few white people in the district fled to the Sudan, and I imagine that the Belgian commander of the station – the only white man there – must have been among them. It is doubtful if the Congolese – even those who treated their elephant charges with such loving care – will be able to look upon elephants as anything but potential food, now, with the country’s economy in a state of collapse, and hunger general.

  I arrived at Gangala-na-Bodio two weeks after the capture of two wild young elephants. Each was attended by a pair of monitor elephants, old, wise and immensely patient, who hustled them gently but firmly through the routine of the day; but there was a nightly crisis when they were led off to be bedded down in their stockades. On my first afternoon at the station I was charged by Sophie, the wilder of the two. I was standing with a couple of other visitors, watching her being eased into her stockade by the trunks and tusks of her monitors and the shouts and prods of cornacs – trainers – armed with pronged forks. Suddenly she broke through the legs of one of her monitors and hurtled straight for me, her eyes mean with infant rage, her trunk raised for battle and her ears flaring. I lost my head and ran – the wrong way, right among the immense columns of the monitors’ legs. They trumpeted, but though the sound was alarming, it was, in a manner of speaking, a mere tut-tutting – a mature deprecation of Sophie’s behaviour and mine. I scrambled up into a fodder cart, quite safe.

  The majestic charm of elephants creates a wonderful atmosphere to live in. In the morning, their great shapes constantly detached themselves from and merged with the heat-hazy shapes of the bush, where they were out to pasture, or they would appear, with the pausing momentum of their gait, suddenly blocking the bright end of a leafy path at the station. Harnessed to clumsy carts, they did all the hard work of the camp. At four in the afternoon all thirty-one of them were led to the river for their daily bath. Each day I watched them career slowly past me down the riverbank and into the brown water. Some had cornacs on their backs, and they were careful not to dunk them; the men scrubbed luxuriously behind the beasts’ ears with handfuls of grass. Some linked trunks and played well out in the river, and rolled each other over with a whoosh that sent four great stubby feet waving in the air. As they came out, in strolling twos and threes, they plastered their foreheads with sand from a pile dumped there specially for them. The cornacs shouted, the laggards broke into a heavy trot to catch up, and the whole procession (wild Sophie with her tail a stiffly held aerial of alarm) trailed home through the trees while the cornacs broke raggedly, then more surely, into ‘Alalise’ or ‘Dina Dina,’ two Hindi elephant songs the Indian mahouts left behind them long ago.

  From Gangala-na-Bodio I went out into the bush on one of the station elephants. A cornac in a smart trooper’s hat was up in front, and I sat behind on a hard little seat strapped to the elephant’s back. We were accompanied by another elephant and his cornac. The cornacs and I had no common language (they belonged to one of the Sudanese tribes of the north-east Congo) but they seemed to have one in common with the elephants, and as we swayed regularly through the early-morning air, first wading across the river (our elephant filled his mouth as he went, like a car taking petrol), my cornac kept up a nagging, reproachful, urging monologue in the elephant’s enormous ear. A family of giraffe crossed our path, and though I admire them, from the vantage point of an
elephant’s back I felt less impressed than usual by their loftiness. Then we stopped within a few yards of a herd of bushpigs, who showed no sign of wanting to run, and passed before the serene eyes of a Thomas’s Cob – a lovely antelope – without startling him.

  We saw a herd of elephant in the distance to the east, and slowly swung off towards them through the trees. I held my breath as our two elephants moved right up to mingle on the fringe of the herd of five cows, three calves and a monumental bull. But the wild elephants seemed unaware of the two who bore men on their backs, and the tame elephants showed no remembrance of the freedom from which they once came. I have often seen the wild animals of Africa from a car, or even on foot, in game reserves, but I have never expected or felt myself to be anything but an intruder among them. On elephant-back, they accepted me as one of themselves; it was a kind of release from the natural pariahdom of man in the world of the beasts – an hour, for me, that early morning, which was the reverse of that hour at midnight on Christmas Eve when it is said that beasts can speak like men.

  From Stanleyville, at the end of the thousand-mile main navigable stretch of the Congo River, a road follows the old slave and ivory caravan trail through the Ituri Forest, the primeval jungle through which Stanley walked for 160 days, almost without seeing the light.

  The life of the forest is an internecine existence; completely enclosed, each step, each minute sealed off from the next by a conspiracy of leaves, lianas and deadening mosses. The trees are host to all sorts of other living forms. Some are held by lianas in a deadly embrace that eventually hugs them out of existence, so that only the lianas remain, locked soaring upright; through them you can see the space where the tree used to be. Shell-shaped wasp nests stand like platforms on the tree trunks. Bunches of swordfern and fungus are stuffed in every crevice. On the floor of the forest, stiff waxy lilies are hatched out by the ancient humus.

  The forest creaks like an enormous house. In the silence of the day, showers of small leaves fall from so high up you cannot see where. But most of the things that lie fallen are tremendous; pods from the beanstalk Jack might have climbed, huge silky seed cases, green on one side, silvery fur on the other.

  At night the forest is as noisy as a city. Among the barks, grunts and cries there was one Greek and immortal in its desperate passion, gathering up echoes from all the private wailing walls of the human soul. It turned out that it came from an outsize guinea pig of a creature called a tree hyrax; I saw one in captivity in one of the villages where, like parrots, monkeys and pythons, they are popular pets of the few white inhabitants.

  Most of the animals of the forest do not show themselves, but on the Epulu River, deep in the jungle, I visited a trapping and breeding station where I had a chance to see the rarest and most timid, the okapi, the forest giraffe. The station was simply a part of the forest enclosed, and I came upon the okapi in the cathedral light for which their being has evolved. They were the most luxurious-looking animals imaginable, as big as horses, with legs striped waveringly in clear black and white as if they were standing in rippling water, and a rich sable sheen on the rump shading into glowing auburn that changed in movement, like a woman’s hair tinted different colours at different levels.

  The pygmies, who belong to the forest just as the okapis do, venture out of it hardly more. They are the only autochthonous people of the forest, and in parts they live a nomadic life, hunting, and are at home wherever they twist together the few branches and leaves that provide shelter for a short time. (These huts are not much more elaborate than the gorilla nest I saw later on an extinct volcano.) But many pygmy groups have attached themselves to other African communities, who live where the forest has been cleared for cultivation, and these have adopted a more permanent way of life and live in the villages. Pygmies have interbred, too, with full-size people, and in many villages there is a confusing variety of sizes that don’t necessarily correspond with ages. A boy of seven can be as big as his grandfather, and what looks like a man’s small daughter turns out to be one of his wives.

  Driving along a road one morning where the forest had been pulled down to make way for coffee and banana plantations, we heard drums in one of these villages. A child had just been born; a small tam-tam and biggish beer-drink were in progress as a celebration. Two fine young men stood at long drums suspended over smouldering logs to keep the skins taut. Around them a company of men, women and children shuffled and sang. There were several gnomes of men with the huge eyes that pygmies have, like the eyes of some harmless night-prowling creature.

  There was a tall man, small-featured and handsome, who wore at an angle, in drunken parody of his own natural dignity, a straw and parrot-feather toque exactly like the one in a sketch that Stanley reproduced, as an example of dress in the region, in one of his Congo exploration books. There were people with filed teeth and others with tattooed navels. Young girls and old crones who wore only small aprons of beaten bark were the most enthusiastic dancers, the crones inspired by drink, the girls perhaps by the wonderful intricacy of their coiffures – corrugated, helmeted, deeply furrowed as if the very cranium had been cleaved in two.

  Pygmies and other forest Congolese use the road to walk on, but there is no feeling that it connects them to anything. They are complete, in and of the forest. The women peer from under the forehead band that supports a huge, papoose-shaped basket filled with bananas, wood or palm nuts; often a baby sits on top of it. The men carry their bows and arrows, pangas and hunting spears, and the great bark-fibre nets with which they trap animals. Sometimes they have with them the little Basenji dogs that look like mongrel fox terriers with wide pointed ears, and cannot bark. Often there are people playing musical instruments as they walk; harps with resonators of stiff buckskin, and the likembe, a small box with metal tongues that is heard, plaintively plangent, all over Africa.

  The landmarks here are giant red sandcastles of ant heaps, carefully covered with palm leaves over a stick frame; the cover prevents the winged grubs inside from flying off, by suggesting a night which ends only when the Africans open the heap to eat them. Cars that falter on the way provide, for a while, other landmarks; the hulks of recent American and Continental models lie abandoned here and there, the creeping plants beginning to cover them within a year or two of their announcement as an innovation in motoring. Soon they disappear under the green.

  Stanley almost gave up hope of emerging from the forest into the light, but after five months the day came. ‘Instead of crawling like mighty bipeds in the twilight, thirty fathoms below the level of the white light of the day, compelled to recognise our littleness, by comparison with the giant columns and tall pillar-like shafts that rose by millions around us, we now stood on the crest of a cleared mount.’ The end of the forest is just as dramatic today, from the road that leads east. Perhaps more dramatic, for you can drive in one day from the Equatorial forest to the sight of snow.

  At four in the afternoon, the trees fell away before us, the green land fell away beyond that, and a great blue ghost of a mountain hung across the horizon. It was an infinity; a palm or two stood up clear in the foreground against swimming blue. Then the cloud at the top of the blue shape shifted a little, the outline neared and hardened; we saw the white glitter, the soft contour of snow on the jagged peaks of a whole range. It was the Ruwenzori – Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon. And we came upon them, remote as the moon, from out of the close warm forest and the pygmies burrowing there.

  Across the Semliki Plain we drove towards the mountains through elephant grass, spiked acacias and companies of royal palms. There were banana and paw-paw plantations, too, down where we were; and, up there, the alps. At the foot of the mountains there was a hotel that seemed to float in the radiance that came up from the plain. A water garden of three swimming lakes held, upside down, the snow flash of the mountains’ highest peak, 16,795-foot Margherita; and between hotel and peak there was a five-day climb, for the hardy, through every type of vegetation from Equator
ial to alpine.

  This part of the Congo – the Kivu province – and the neighbouring territory of Ruanda-Urundi (still under Belgian trusteeship), is unlike any other part, not only of the Congo but of all Africa. From the Mountains of the Moon driving three days to Lake Tanganyika, the car seemed to be pulled from side to side by mountains and lakes that reduced most famous drives to the stature and duration of a scenic railway in the painted canvas of a fairground.

  Tourist pamphlets, with their passion for making everywhere sound like somewhere else, used to call this the Switzerland of Africa, and no doubt will again when the country is once more open to pleasure travel, but it is not much like Switzerland, and if it were, who would bother to seek in Africa what is so handy in Europe? It is unlike the rest of Africa because it is the high reservoir – watershed of both the Congo River and the Nile – of a continent, seared through by the Equator, which is largely baked dry where there is any altitude to speak of, and steaming wet where there is none. It is unlike Switzerland because many of its green mountains are volcanoes (two are still active); its strange pale lakes have floors of lava; its cattle (my first sight of a cow in all the Congo) are long-horned beasts like the cow-god Hathor in Egyptian tomb paintings; and on the roads behind the villas that the Belgians built on Lake Kivu you see brown giants and pygmies. The giants are the Hamitic Watusi of Ruanda-Urundi, and the pygmies, not the pure forest breed, are the Batwa.

  In the middle of this mountain and lake-land, enclosing three-quarters of the shores of Lake Edward (Lake Rutanzige) and reaching to Lake Kivu, is Albert Park, a wonderful game preserve on the floor of the Great Rift Valley. I drove straight through it, for I was on my way over the border of the Congo into Uganda – the frontier runs over the Mountains of the Moon, through Lake Edward and over three volcanoes – because of an animal that can only be seen outside a game preserve – the mountain gorilla. There are many on the Congo side of the volcanoes that cross the Great Rift Valley from West to East, but, under Belgian administration at least, no one was allowed to go up after them. At the Uganda frontier post of Kisoro, there is a tiny country hotel whose proprietor had permission, and himself provided the guide, to take people up the side of the extinct volcano, Muhavura, where gorillas live.