After washing up in my own personal hessian sink full of warm water, I wandered over to the barman for my first G and T for the day. Sitting in the middle of our ‘lounge area’, we watched with amazement at the amount of activity around us. There must have been at least ten staff, all knowing exactly what to do and with a minimum of fuss. Then it was dinnertime. Mo, Curly and Larry would have loved it. Inside the large tent, four locals dressed in dinner suits shook our hands and pulled out our chairs for us. If we thought that was embarrassing, the rest of the night was more so. The service was impeccable. I began to feel like one of those poncy army officers in Guatemala, though we were much nicer to the staff. They were all great blokes and nothing was too much trouble.
The only too much was what we ate and drank. The amazing hors d’oeuvres were surpassed by the mild curry soup, which did not compromise our tastebuds for the perfectly barbecued steaks that came with every type of mustard and condiment that ever existed. The decision to serve ice cream with any number of toppings here in the Ugandan jungle was a masterstroke and a complete surprise, as was the huge choice of wine on offer. The port served with the cheese and biscuits was smooth as silk, though I do prefer my brie to be not quite so runny.
We waddled outside our dining tent and one of the immaculately dressed locals came up and asked what time in the morning we’d like our hot showers. This was as good as the Crillon. We decided on our shower times, then settled into our comfy chairs by the campfire. We were well and truly awash with port, so a palate-cleansing ale was a much-needed nightcap. Over our beers we discussed the plan of attack for the next day, which was how we’d bloody well better find pygmies or we’d be finding new jobs. The light Yothu Yindi story and the Sistine Chapel were all we had from this huge trip.
At 6.30 a.m. there was a knock on the flap of my tent. I was told there was fresh hot water in my sink and my shower would be ready in fifteen minutes. I wandered over to the loo, sans shovel and paper, and locked myself in the privacy of the drop toilet with the neatly arranged toilet seat and paper holder. My shower was the perfect temperature. Someone had heated a 44-gallon drum of water over a fire then gently poured it into another drum with a shower rose, just for my convenience. After an amazing breakfast of eggs benedict, we went pygmy hunting.
We finally we found them after a few hours of scouting the jungle. Thankfully, they weren’t six feet tall, but there was not a loincloth or spear in sight. In fact every one of the little people, from kids to dads, was wearing a grubby T-shirt. One read ‘New York Sux’, others, obviously freebies, had Coke or Nike all over them. They sure didn’t look like the protectors of The Ghost Who Walks.
But they looked very happy, and pretty soon we found out why. The number one bit of fun for this tribe was dope-smoking, and obviously it had been going on for generations. I don’t think the Phantom would have approved, in fact I’m positive he wouldn’t have. I figured now was not the time to ask if the pygmies could find me a skull cave, I’d wait till their heads were clearer and I knew them a bit better.
The chief pygmy, sporting a permanent smile, seemed like a really good bloke. He was alert and responded to our questions. Our interpreter told him we wanted to film a typical three or four days inside a pygmy village. Hunting, cooking, dancing, etc., and discuss his fear of losing his habitat to loggers. No probs, we were told, the chief and his tribe were ready to do anything for us. We figured hunting would be a great way to start the story so we asked the chief and a few of his mates what they hunted. There was a long dope-induced pause while they tried to figure out what they hunted. Then one of them cried out, ‘Monkey!’
The hunt would be a big part of the story, the part we didn’t want the facts to get in the way of, so we delicately asked if at least some of the hunters could maybe remove their Coke T-shirts and maybe replace the jeans with something a little more ‘comfortable’ (by which we meant primitive). Shorts, or even a loincloth like the one we had seen on an old man lying spaced out of his head under a tree. Again, no problems.
So monkey-hunting it was to be. But the pygmies had no weapons to hunt with. So our first sequence became the making of bows and poison arrows, which suggested it had been a long time since anyone had actually been hunting. They sure looked the part, each hunter choosing a good branch from a tree to create his own bow. I was worried their dope-addled brains might mean a few fingers could go missing during the arrow-creating, especially the dangerous pointy end, but all went well and they now had their armoury, and we had a great sequence.
So with a few half-naked pygmies, some (I kept out of shot) still in their T-shirts, we ventured into the jungle for the great monkey hunt. It was no Ernest Hemingway fearless adventurer after big game trophies. The poor little buggers had no idea. They tripped over each other, dropped their killing machines and giggled like schoolgirls. When we did see a monkey, the intrepid hunters pointed at it, screamed and yelled, then pointed at us, and before they could get an arrow anywhere near the string of their bow, the monkey was well and truly gone.
After a couple of hours we gave up. The hunters were exhausted. This working for a living was no fun. But I needed more footage, so I did the usual close-ups of feet walking through the jungle, eyes peering into trees, arrows being loaded into the bow, the firing off of arrows, whispering and pointing. All paragraph-one page-one of how to film a hunt. The pygmies loved every minute of it. Luckily I’d scored a few shots of monkeys off in the distance, which would at least show they were hunting something. It all looked great, made even better by the fact that our reporter, Richard Carleton, standing at 6 feet 3 inches, towered over our tiny hunters, so they looked even smaller.
Back in pygmy central, knowing full well their men would be returning empty-handed, the women were cooking yams and other unrecognisable stuff. The men couldn’t wait to get stuck into the dope. Just what you need after a hard day at the office. We were figuring out what to shoot next when I noticed a really, really, small pygmy heading towards the campfire. He was struggling to walk, and the reason he was struggling was that he’d probably only known how to for a few months. He couldn’t have been any more than eighteen months old, and in his tiny hand was a huge joint. He walked right up to the fire, put the joint into his mouth, leant into the flames and sucked hard. Then, still teetering dangerously close to the flames, like a true pro he withdrew the joint from his mouth, turned it round to check it was burning properly and, satisfied all was good, took a few more puffs and wandered back to sit beside mum. I should have been onto the local child protection agency in a flash, but I didn’t know their number so I filmed the kid instead.
Though we didn’t have a monkey kill, we decided we had a pretty good sequence and the makings of a good story. We thanked the pygmies for the day and headed back to Shangri-la and another amazing meal. After dinner, while enjoying our palate-cleansing coldies, we talked about what good people the pygmies were and how hilarious the monkey hunt had been.
Just as we were figuring out what to shoot the next day, we heard voices, and saw the chief pygmy and four of his mates emerging from the jungle. Boy, were they excited. Their smiles were more than just dope-induced. Frantically waving something in the air, the chief walked up to Richard and proudly presented him with a dead monkey. It was as if they’d found the missing link that had eluded Richard Leakey all these decades.
Then, totally amazed, they noticed our salubrious surroundings (which had also eluded Leakey for decades). Their interest in the monkey quickly disappeared when they set eyes on our beers, so we handed them one each. They, too, were into sharing, so out came the dope. The more we drank and smoked, the funnier the night became and the more keen we were to handle a dead monkey.
On closer inspection we noticed it was stiff as a board and had obviously been dead for days, maybe weeks. I’m not sure if the monkey presentation was to prove to us they could hunt, wiping out the embarrassment of the day’s lack of success, or if they thought all we really needed was a dead monke
y. I suspect the latter because the animal looked as if he’d died of natural causes. We thanked them profusely, praised their hunting skills and they left our camp feeling very pleased with themselves. If their skill was hunting, ours was film-making. We already had great footage of a hunt, and now we had the (very dead) hunted.
Next morning we explained to the chief and his fellow hunters that we wanted to re-enact their hunting of the monkey to show how and what they do after they find and kill one. Blank stares all round. They obviously thought they should never have given us any of their dope. It was as if we were trying to explain the connection between black holes and anti-matter, but they agreed to give it a go, whatever it was. They couldn’t understand why, if we already had the monkey, must they pretend to be hunting it. We talked the youngest and fittest hunter into climbing a tree to place the corpse on a branch. Our dead monkey was about half the size of the ones I’d managed to film during the previous day’s hunt, but film-making is not an exact science and sometimes your eyes can deceive you.
We told the hunters we’d film a few of them firing off arrows into the tree. The tree would then be shaken and when the monkey landed they should all run in and do whatever they normally do once a monkey hits the ground. The hunters started laughing uncontrollably at our instructions, as if it was all a bit of crazy fun before they got back to what they did best: smoking dope.
I focused on the dead monkey, the tree was shaken and I followed the monkey as it fell to the ground. Not too tight a shot, we didn’t want to reveal the rigor mortis. A swarm of pygmies that Cecil B. DeMille would have been proud of, raced in and relentlessly beat the poor bloody corpse to death with their bows, yelling and screaming as if they had just felled a buffalo. Once again they were very proud of themselves. And why not? No one asked for hair and makeup, or what their motivation was. They just did what we asked, even though they obviously thought we were crazy.
They took the corpse back to their village and the women whipped up a monkey stew. Luckily they boiled the shit out of it, so any killer bugs couldn’t have survived. And after their monkey meal, they put on a dance for us. It was magic. With fresh jungle leaves around their heads, necks and waists, they sang, chanted and danced round in circles for hours. Around they went, from the oldest to the youngest, the whole tribe loving every minute of it. They were all so happy and content.
I’ll work with pygmies any day. They’re wonderful people, but maybe not for long, because our world is moving in on them. I decided not to ask them to find me my own skull cave, my dream of 50 years ago. Their dream is for survival. Their habitat is rapidly disappearing for timber and agriculture. They have started to contract more and more diseases as ‘civilisation’ (and the odd film crew) enters their domain.
The reason for their height and size is still an anthropological debate. It may be from not getting enough protein, it may be that being small makes it easier to run through the dense jungle, or maybe in the tropical heat with less skin surface, heat stress is avoided. But we know they’ve been around a bloody long time. Hieroglyphic records show that five thousand years ago an Egyptian pharaoh captured a few of them for the entertainment of his court.
It would be a tragedy to see these people disappear altogether, though I don’t like their chances.
19
To Cull or Not to Kill
Bang! Down he goes. I could feel the ground shake. Cheers all round and shouts of ‘Great shot!’
Great shot? Are you kidding? How could he miss? His target was as big as an elephant. That’s because it was an elephant. Up go the arms of the proud killer.
‘Aim carefully ... Here he comes. Squeeze ...’ Bang! ‘Terrific shot!’
Now the ex-proud, ex-ferocious, toothless lion is dead. Up go the arms of hero number two. These big game hunters here in Africa are so tough.
All in the name of conservation, we are told. These men pay a massive amount of money to shoot something the size of a bus or something that’s struggling to walk. How hard can it be? Yet these big game hunters genuinely believe they are Hemingway or Huston as they proudly pose next to their kill.
I know it’s a form of culling, but this is not animal ‘hunting’, it’s animal murder. The elephant was an old bull, and the lion had had his day. I don’t get it—where is the skill in that? You can also murder rhinos, hippos, leopards, whatever tickles your fancy, and if you miss out on the great photo showing how skilful you are, there are specials. ‘No kill, no bill.’ How humane is that?
The lion and elephant kill was a tough shoot for me (shame the word ‘shooting’ covers what both hunters and cameramen love to do, because the results couldn’t be more different). I love wildlife shoots, but not the wild life of bored, angry, violent, pissed youths in London, Los Angeles or Melbourne. Any story on drug and alcohol-fuelled violence was always far more dangerous than Africa. I’ve had fists, glasses, rocks and insults thrown at me, not to mention dinner thrown up all over me. That’s the wild life I’d like to cull.
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Apart from the big game murders, all my other wildlife film shoots, from anacondas in the marshes of Venezuela, to zebras in Kenya, were a privilege to be part of. One of the great privileges, considered one of the ten natural wonders of the world, is the annual migration of wildebeest from the Serengeti in Tanzania to the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, or, as the locals say, ‘The Mara’.
Our five-star camp was only a few hundred metres from where the wildebeest cross the Mara River, and looking after our every whim were half a dozen tall, lean and very happy Masai tribesmen. They carried our equipment, kept our beers cold, cooked for us, organised dunnies and showers, and laughed at our concerns about wild animals. At night they guarded our individual tents against regular nocturnal visits from lions, rhinos, hippos and cheetahs.
Our first few days produced not a hint of wildebeest so we went looking for shots of anything and everything that lived in that vast wilderness. We couldn’t lose. Got the lot. Elephants, lions, hippos, rhinos, cheetahs, giraffes, antelopes, hyenas and zebras. It was fantastic ... and it was my birthday.
Suddenly our fearless Masai warriors turned into Jamie Olivers, and somehow, with none of your ‘bake at 180 degrees for 45 minutes’ rubbish, they made me an incredibly moist, fluffy, chocolate birthday cake, which they cooked in a metal ammo box on an open fire. They then sang me ‘Happy Birthday’ and we partied through the night.
Of course, the tens of thousands of reasons why we were there turned up the next day. Because I had a hangover. We raced to the riverbank and in the distance saw an enormous mob of wildebeest cantering towards the opposite bank. The ease and effortlessness of the gently meandering mob reminded me of the tens of thousands of breasts heading my way in Swaziland, but, unlike the breasts, these creatures got uglier the closer they came.
Wildebeests look like what they really are—gnus. It’s a strange look, as if designed by a Mother Nature with a killer sense of humour or one who failed miserably at design school. Gnu heads are huge, their bums tiny, they have a strange wispy beard, a mane like a horse, and their back legs are shorter than their front legs ( just like the table I made in high school woodwork). But these creations can balance. Not only balance but run, and run, and run. They are born to run. Constantly on the move to find greener pastures, one and a half million of them run from Tanzania to Kenya and back again annually. That is their life, year after year.
And every year to access those greener pastures, the migrators must cross a river chockers with hungry crocodiles. The experienced wildebeest and crocs have seen it all before. They eyeball each other. ‘An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language,’ the philosopher Martin Buber once said. But if I was a gnu I’d be saying, ‘No, no, not again, do we have to? We did this last year.’
I already had the camera rolling as scores of wildebeest shuffled to the water’s edge. Some ventured a few centimetres into the water as if testing the temperature, then retreated. Only metres from th
e front line, a half dozen crocs floated motionless but obvious. No gnu was willing to take the plunge. But the shoving from behind got harder to resist. In the end it was all too much, and some poor sucker took the leap. Without hesitating, thousands followed. Mayhem and water went everywhere. Our guide and wildebeest expert told us that the animals were all well aware of the danger but the urge was too great.
The river was now filled with panicky gnus scrambling all over the place. In that first mad dash, those on the outside, feeling terribly exposed, tried desperately to make their way into the middle. But those positions were already deftly taken by opportunistic zebras hoping not to be noticed.
As if. The crocs’ favourite meal is zebra. They might as well have had a sign painted on them saying, ‘Free lunch’. The crocodiles move in and start spreading the gnus. We’re eating today. It was a smorgasbord.
Now there was panic, fear, helplessness and bewilderment, and that was just in our eyes. The poor zebras, still trying to look gnu-like, had their eyes closed, but I think it was just pain, and fear. The crocs had amusement and determination in their eyes. With jaws wide open they thrashed their way to a stripy meal. Down went a couple of zebras. It was cruel, but it was culling, and lunch for the hungry crocs. The crocs ripped at the fur then hoed into their much-anticipated meal. In the resultant melee the chewing crocs scored some nasty kicks in the head from struggling, anxious wildebeests. The crocs, too busy attacking to care, didn’t even look up, but the gnus were now even more terrified and looking almost apologetic, as if to say, ‘Sorry, sorry, Mr Crocodile, I didn’t mean to kick you, it won’t happen again.’ And it certainly wouldn’t, as Mr Crocodile let go of his mangled zebra and pounced onto Mr Apology.
It really was hard to film. There was now total chaos. In the thrashing water, all we could see were legs, teeth, blood and shredded guts.
All This in 60 Minutes Page 28
