Already much of the recent harvest was coming from the smaller forest elephant, whose straight tusks are composed of a harder, whiter ivory that is easily detected in the shipments. Ian Parker, a wildlife entrepreneur based in Nairobi and a student of the world ivory trade, was maintaining that about sixty percent of the ivory turning up in Hong Kong and Japan, much of it illegal ivory being exported through Burundi, came from the forest elephant. Yet Parker, a longtime participant in the trade, was also claiming that elephants were still so numerous that tusks harvested from natural mortality alone would adequately support the ivory commerce, which handled an annual average of seven hundred and fifty tons in the ten years between 1975 and 1985; except locally, he said, there was no such thing as an elephant crisis, since at least three million elephants were still at large in Africa. Douglas-Hamilton, on the other hand, had estimated a population of 1.3 million, and was convinced that Loxodonta africana was already endangered as a species.
Dr. Western believes that even the smaller figure may be too high; the most recent analyses of ivory-trade records indicated that elephant numbers can no longer exceed one million, far less three. Between 1979 and the present, he says, the average weight of marketed tusks declined by one half, which meant that roughly twice the number of animals had to be killed to maintain that 750-ton harvest. It also meant that more than half the slaughtered animals were females, which in the old days were rarely shot at all. Analysis of ivory exports indicates that the average tusk weight is about three kilos, in an animal that formerly produced tusks of thirty-seven kilos each; computer analysis has shown that once average tusk weight falls below five kilos, a collapse of the entire population is at hand. The main source of these little tusks are juvenile males between five and ten years old—well below the age of reproduction—and mature females, twenty to twenty-five years old. Not a single tusk came from an animal over thirty-five years old, in a species which may attain four times that age. If there really were three million elephants, as Parker claimed, why was no one shooting mature males? And why did the tonnage drop off drastically in 1985 to four hundred and eighty tons, despite dedicated killing by ivory hunters all across Africa?
By using an arbitrary equation that correlates elephant density with average rainfall, Ian Parker concludes that very large numbers of forest elephant—about two per square kilometer—are hidden by the forest canopy, a figure higher than the highest density found anywhere in the savanna. Dr. Western, whose own data Parker borrowed to construct his estimates, reminds me that elephants may eat three hundred pounds of fodder in a day, and defecate fifteen to eighteen times in the same period. “If you think of Parker’s density figures in terms of a dung fight,” he says wryly, “I can only say that you would never be out of reach of ammunition.”
As Western had written to me in September, “The discrepancy hinges on the different estimates of forest elephants in Zaire, and to a lesser extent in Congo Republic and Gabon. There is very little disagreement elsewhere.” If densities in primary forest are as low as he believes, then the African elephant as a species is in serious trouble.
The main hope of this expedition is to resolve that discrepancy once and for all. It is not that we are anxious to prove that the forest elephant is an uncommon animal—how much more exciting it would be to prove the reverse!—but that this proof, by dispelling self-serving data and wishful thinking, might lay the groundwork for a new era of responsible elephant conservation.
Bangassou, on the Mbomou River, described as a center of cotton, coffee, oil palm, lumber, and diamond production, is the only town in eastern C.A.R. (which together with Chad was known as Ubangi-Shari after their great rivers, in the days when both were still a part of French Equatorial Africa). We put down quickly to refuel at the Bangassou airstrip—we have no clearance—then take off again and continue west across savanna and forest to our next landmark, the Ubangi River. Below the Kouimba rapids, the Ubangi makes a great loop north. We do not follow it but maintain our course, crossing the river and flying three hundred miles over the jungles of northern Zaire in order to meet the Ubangi once again where it sweeps south on its last descent to the Zaire River. On this leg of the journey, like the one before it, there is scarcely a sign of human presence—no tracks, no huts, no smoke, near or far—though an artificial city has been built for Zaire’s billionaire president somewhere off there to the south, at Gbadolite. Nor are there tracks of animals, nor visible life of any kind except huge black hornbills with broad white patches on their wings, flapping and sailing over the forest canopy and slow green rivers. Then the forest opens out on the great Ubangi, where a few pirogues hold more human beings than we have seen in the eight hundred miles since we left Garamba.
The river slides south to a great bend, and here rocks part it into rapids presided over by Bangui (the Rapids), the small capital of the erstwhile Empire of Central Africa. According to my trusty map, this pretty town inset in small steep hills lies just upriver from two villages, Bimbo and Zongo.
A French trading post established in 1889, Bangui, with its fine river prospect, is a typical colonial town turned capital city in the new Africa. Its decrepit villas, European cars, and more or less modern commercial buildings housing the remnants of colonial enterprises are set off by potholed red-earth streets, fragrant markets, head cargoes, traditional peasant dress, radio music and impromptu dancing, flowers and colors, and, everywhere, a restless proud humanity in bright clean clothes, streaming along under the trees to quarters that, for more people than not, will be tin-roofed shacks without electricity or plumbing.
The capital is set about with triumphal arches erected in his own honor some years ago by Emperor Bokassa, for whom the imperial boulevard into the city from the grandiose and empty airport was also named. It is now called the Avenue des Martyres, after the two hundred schoolchildren who were slaughtered on imperial whim, with the emperor’s own wholehearted participation. Because Bokassa was a “charismatic” Francophile (he once presented a gift of diamonds to French premier Valerie Giscard d’Estaing), this by no means isolated episode disappointed his many French admirers, who for investment reasons had supported him long after his bloodthirsty predilections became known. When the schoolroom adventure drew international attention, the emperor and most of his country’s money were hurried off to La Belle France, where he was living in the greatest comfort and “was very popular,” or so we were told by his bewildered countrymen. (In October 1986, of his own accord, Bokassa returned to C.A.R., where he was tried for arthropophagy as well as multiple assassinations. The following June he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, apparently in the basement of the presidential palace, where he lives today.)
At Bangui, where we spent two days conferring with wildlife officials, we resided at the Hotel Minerva, a more modest establishment than the Rock Hotel (which boasts a bar called “Scotch Club du Rock”), yet very lively, especially at noon when the offices close, most of them for the remainder of the day. The bar just inside the front door fairly swarms with elegant poules de luxe with high heels, long legs, liberated breasts, and sumptuous steatopygia, waving hard-puffed cigarettes in long cool hands. One young woman affects jeans and a T-shirt inscribed CHICAGO COSMIC, but most are attired in wide-open blouses and transparent skirts. The colorful ladies are well known to the colons and sullen-faced paratroopers in harsh haircuts who represent France’s small “military presence” in its “special relationship” with its former colonies in Africa. These men squeeze the ladies’ hands as they enter the bar—Ça va bien! Et toi?—and meanwhile the women are boisterously admired by their tattered young compatriots, who await the rare tourists outside in the street. The young men sell ethnic wood stools, dried forest butterflies, and bows and arrows said to come from the Babinga Pygmies in the south. My fren? My fren? You wish a bow, a arrow?
Perhaps in frustration, a young peddler teases a beer-bellied colon as he leaves the bar, and the big man whirls with a th
reatening gesture, causing the boy to back away. The white man waves contemptuously at the youth’s wares, his poverty, his whole African being. “You think you are a somebody, is that it?” Offended, the other Africans crowd forward and the man retreats, slamming his car door—Ça non, messieurs! The youth appreciates my disgusted reaction, though his face is sad. “Champion fistique,” he explains. “He does not know how to laugh.”
Our main business in Bangui is to urge the creation of a national forest park and promise the New York Zoological Society’s cooperation to Raymond Mbitikon, minister of waters and forests, fishing and hunting, who asks us to prepare a survey and recommendation while we are down in the Bayanga region. The park was originally proposed last year by Richard Carroll, a former Peace Corps volunteer in C.A.R., now a doctoral student doing his thesis on lowland gorillas. Monsieur Mbitikon kindly dispatches a ministry vehicle for Bayanga with a week’s provisions and drums of aviation fuel. The journey is about five hundred miles and fourteen hours over a rough road, and the truck will meet us there tomorrow.
To venture very far outside Bangui, according to a brochure of travel in these parts prepared some years ago by Air Afrique, “it is necessary to equip oneself seriously and be prepared for rather long delays.” Since we are flying out tomorrow to Bayanga, in the far southern corner of C.A.R., we have seriously equipped ourselves with traveler’s checks, to pay not only for provisions but for aviation fuel, for fuel comes very high indeed in what people living here believe to be the most expensive city in the world. We have lunch on the Ubangi River with the kind and helpful ambassador and officers of the American embassy, and the ambassador’s wife, Katia de Jarnette, escorts me to a Peace Corps clinic, where my mongoose bites are thoroughly cleansed and a tetanus shot administered by a cheerful nurse appropriately christened Kandi Christian.
We are also “prepared for rather long delays,” and a good thing, too. At the airport next morning we find that the compressor on the gas pump has broken down, and that gasoline in drums that cost three dollars a gallon yesterday will, for unmysterious reasons, cost five dollars today. We protest this piracy, and wait, and eventually the compressor is resuscitated. Before the plane can be refueled, however, a general failure of airport electricity knocks out the gas pump for a few more hours, and not until three-thirty in the afternoon, after flight clearance from the airport tower, customs, and immigration, do we clear the ground. We are accompanied on this flight by the British elephant biologist Richard Barnes, who made all the arrangements for us here in Bangui, and also by Gustave Doungoubey, director of management of wildlife, who is kindly escorting us to Bayanga.
Immediately southwest of Bangui, the plane crosses a huge palm-oil plantation and heads out across the rain forests of the Congo Basin. There is no savanna anymore, the rare patches of swamp are small, the scarce red tracks are narrow, shrouded by trees. Except for the rivers, which are not always in view, there is no place to come down in one piece. Some years ago in eastern Zaire I flew over this Congo Basin forest in a light plane, from Bukavu to Obaye, then north to Goma, and the sight of its monotone expanse of green, undulating in all directions to the green horizon, is just as disturbing now as it was then.
Even so, the rolling foliage is magnificent. Forest green and gray-green, jade, emerald, and turquoise, pond green, pea green—all the greens of the world unroll below our wings, set off by bright fire red leaves of the azobe (or bois de fer or “ironwood”). Here and there in the wet sloughs is a strand of raffia palms, said to be a favored haunt of pygmy elephants. Just once in the whole flight between the Ubangi and the Sangha do I see a sign of human habitation, two poor huts in a clearing near a forest stream.
The first glimpse of the Sangha River is a silver sliver among darkening hills in the late afternoon light. The plane swings south over slow rapids, the trees of the river islands mirrored in the silted water, and then the river opens out onto broad sandbars that in the dry season appear in front of the Bantu village called Bayanga.
Bayanga lies in the Lobaye Forest, in the farthest southern territory of C.A.R., surrounded by forests of the Congo Republic and Cameroon. Originally our plan had been to swing well east over the Congo Republic and count the elephants along the swamps and rivers, but M. Doungoubey received word this morning that Congo soldiers were crossing into C.A.R. in a border dispute, and might shoot at a small circling airplane, not realizing that elephants and not themselves were being studied. (Later we learn that the Congolese soldiers have withdrawn to their own border post, down the Sangha River, which flows due southward through that country to its confluence with the Zaire. “They put up their flag in our territory and we take it down again,” said a C.A.R. soldier.)
Bayanga is named for the Sangha or Yanga fishing people (“Ba”—“Wa” in East Africa—is a Bantu prefix signifying plural man or “people”) attracted here by Slovenia Bois, a Yugoslav lumber concession whose mill lies at the south end of the settlement, and whose acting manager, Janez Mikuz, is kind enough to meet us at the airstrip and refresh us with cold beer at the company mess overlooking the river before installing us at a comfortable guest house in the compound. But to our embarrassment our friend Gustave Doungoubey and his cousin, Monsieur Babisse, who has arrived with a soldier-driver in the truck, are installed separately in lesser quarters. Gustave, a bright, equable fellow who permits nothing so small as this to trouble him, seems not to mind; he has many friends here, all of whom come to embrace him. Next morning at breakfast, there is more discomfort when Monsieur Babisse and the local forestry official polish off a half bottle each of Slovenia Bois’s good Côtes du Rhône white wine, pouring it into man-sized tumblers and drinking it straight off like spring water. Our friends show no effects of their glad refreshment, then or later, but the Yugoslavs, who do not seem fond of Africans (Jonah remarks that this tends to be true of most Eastern Europeans), are irritated, plainly regretting that the natives of this country must be permitted at their European mess. However, they are civil to the Africans, and kind and hospitable to the whites throughout our stay.
From the settlement a bright red road runs southwest through the forest, crossing a bridge in a big thicket of bamboo and climbing a steep hill to a forest ridge. Manioc and long papaya fend for themselves in the thick weeds grown up around the unbranched columns of black skeletal trees a hundred and fifty feet in height. Like all forest Bantu, the Yanga practice the primitive slash-and-burn agriculture that has already destroyed most of the rain forest of West Africa. Often a forest garden is abandoned and a new one started even before the poor soil is depleted, since slashing and burning is easier than keeping up with the fierce weeds. In regions of dense population, such as West Africa, primitive agriculture leads inevitably to total degradation of the forest together with the disappearance of the animals, but in Central Africa, where the human population is so low, the random agriculture, by encouraging second growth, makes forage more accessible, and, where not intense, may actually increase wildlife populations.
The dust of the road is broken by the shifting soil prints of thick vipers, and the snake patterns are interspersed with tiny human prints of Babinga Pygmies (sometimes called Ba-Aka, after their Aka language). Lost in the weeds between road and field are the Pygmies’ low leaf-thatched huts, which are woven of a strong latticework of saplings stuck into the earth to form the walls, then bent over and lashed together as the roof, giving great tensile strength to a light structure while obtaining the maximum space of a rounded dwelling. (Huts constructed on this principle are also made by the Turkana and Masai and are in fact found all over the earth. Even the Inuit igloo is quite similar, including the long tubular entrance on one side, and so are the modern tents we carry with us.) Though the huts are scarcely four feet high, the tiny sleeping platforms of bamboo are often set one above another, in order to keep more people clear of the earth floor.
The middle-size descendants of those Babinga who have interbred with their Bantu neighbors have inherited few of the
fine points of either race, seeming neither as handsome and husky as the Bantu nor as alert and merry as the forest people. By our rather narrow Western standards, most Babinga are unprepossessing, seeming stunted and bent rather than small, with scared, uncomprehending faces and the slightly averted gaze of uneasy animals. At a roadside camp, three naked little boys, feeling behind them with their hands, withdraw into the foliage in the slow way of wild things not wishing to be seen, and one drops to all fours before disappearing into the leaves, peering back at the huge white men over his shoulder.
Last night after dark we listened to Babinga drums, and this morning near the airstrip we hear raised voices, a simple wistful three-note descending chorus, dee-do-do, like a human echo of the sad sweet song of an emerald green bird, Klaas’s cuckoo, which I watched this morning at the forest edge. According to the Bayanga people, the Babinga come here only in the dry season, to take advantage of old manioc plantations and perhaps work in the lumber mill. They erect their leaf huts outside the mill and the Yanga village. They are thought of as forest demons, not quite human, by the Bayanga. Like most Pygmy groups, they have a certain interdependence with their Bantu neighbors, who live mostly in rectangular wattle-and-daub huts, with tin roofs brought in by the lumber company, and are served by makeshift shops and a small bar. (Outside the Bar Patience is a decrepit jitney bus on which is painted SANGHA EAGLE. As a parting shot to those left in its dust, a message painted on the rear end reads GOOD WILL NEVER! It has been quite a while since the Sangha Eagle traveled anywhere. How it got here or where it used to go has been forgotten.)
Early in our visit to Bayanga, I accompany Drs. Barnes and Western on a reconnaissance flight across the “Dzanga-Sangha Reserve” proposed by Richard Carroll, which would include an area of twenty-seven hundred square kilometers. We hope to persuade M. Mbitikon to enlarge Carroll’s proposed reserve with the idea that in the future, when the timber leases have run out, it might be given the fully protected status of a national park.