The Ekare camp, in a glade on the ridge above the river, is hidden from the sky by the high canopy. There has been rain here. The huts are rotten but soon they are swept out, and transparent fire smoke drifts on the sunlit air. Everything is done swiftly and easily, yet these easygoing people are never idle even when sitting by the fire but are always working something with their hands.
In early afternoon, the Harts and Western arrive from Epulu with a new group of Mbuti led by Kenge. The people call Jonah Piloto and they call me Mangese, meaning Venerable One, as in Mangese ya Pori, the Ancients of the Forest. Though not yet sixty, I am an elder by African standards. I feel honored by my title and approximately as pleased as I was when a withered old Bandaka woman came out of her hut as we left Epulu, pointing at me and crying out, “Take care of him, for he is old like me!”
In the five-hour walk north from Epulu, Jonah reports, all they have seen are a few monkeys, high in the canopy. As an East African ecologist, Jonah is accustomed to large numbers of large mammals, readily studied; in the forest, as we have learned throughout this journey, large mammals are uncommon and elusive, and difficult to observe even when found. “I’m glad to have come to Central Africa, glad to have seen the rain forest,” he says, “because it’s one of the most neglected biomes, and one of the most important. But I could never work in forest. So much time is necessary to gather so little information!”
Jonah is particularly disheartened by the relative scarcity of elephant sign in an undamaged habitat where poaching has apparently been minimal: “We must assume, contrary to our hopes, that in large regions of the Congo Basin there are scarcely any.” The elephant’s decline must be partly attributable to hunting, but John Hart says there are few guns in the villages. As for the Mbuti, they take what they need in the way of food and medicines but affect the forest life scarcely at all.
More and more it seems apparent that unbroken rain forest is inhospitable habitat for large mammals. Except along the watercourses, or in clearings made by the fall of a giant tree, the available food is mostly in the canopy, far out of reach of okapi and gorilla as well as elephant. In the absence of elephants, which modify the forest by creating and perpetuating second growth, other animals are bound to be scarce as well. Jonah concludes that, while high human impact will impoverish the forest, moderate impact in the form of shifting cultivation—that is, slash and burn—creates a good deal of secondary forest that is accessible to animals, and that a patchwork of primary and secondary forest is the optimum condition for prosperity as well as diversity in animal populations. (“Low human population is essential if this is to work,” John Hart observes. “Higher populations assure impoverished forest no matter which farming technique is used.”)
Increasingly Jonah is fascinated by the impact of man on the environment, which in his view is not always destructive to its wildlife and can, in fact, be very beneficial. In the sixties, he says, European and American biologists turned to the African savannas as the last great natural bastion of primeval life, unchanged since the Pleistocene; they held to the traditional view that this stability, providing time for evolution, was a condition for speciation and diversity, which accounted for the great variety of savanna life. Jonah concludes that, on the contrary, the savanna is a patchwork of different habitats, and is always changing, having been modified for thousands of years not only by fires and elephants but by man. John Hart has learned that a layer of charcoal two thousand years old underlies much of this region—good evidence of a dry savanna period, and of fires set by human hunters. (In South America, there is evidence of fires twenty to thirty thousand years old, and comparable evidence may yet turn up in Africa. Dr. Jan Reitsma, the botanist who accompanied us to Wonga-Wongue, in Gabon, had pointed out that, structurally, tropical rain forests in South America and Africa are very similar, but that while undisturbed forest in South America is still plentiful, Africa has scarcely any. Not only man but the large herbivores have modified African forests, and the greatest modifier is the elephant.
In Dr. Western’s view, man has always had a profound impact on savanna systems, ever since he burned off the first grassland to improve hunting. “Remember that savanna woodland between Garamba and Bangassou? Hundreds of miles of what looked like wonderful wildlife habitat, without any sign of human impact—where were the animals? I very much doubt if the complete absence of wildlife was entirely attributable to overhunting. When man and his fires disappeared, the wildlife declined, too. One can’t say that man’s activities are ‘good’ for wildlife, but neither are they always bad, and this is particularly apparent in the forest.”
Tree burning restores minerals to the old soils for a few years, but it destroys the specialized fungi known as mycorrhizae that are critical to forest growth. Where large populations of primitive agriculturalists burn down the forests, as in the derived savannas seen in Gabon and western Zaire (and also throughout West Africa), the destruction must lead to flood, erosion, and degraded land on which only a few pest species can survive. (This is a necessary consequence, not of intense settlement but of poor land use; large populations have lived off certain Asian lands for thousands of years.)
But where humans are few, and the burning moderate, gorillas as well as elephants are drawn to second growth; abandoned clearings, which the elephants maintain, sustain many other birds and animals. Similarly, disruption and change through fires, floods, and landslides, the silting of deltas, the meanderings of rivers, even big trees crashing down and creating clearings—all these produce a patchwork of habitats that increases diversity of life, since it prevents dominance by a few species. This is why life in the open light of river margins, with thick growth accessible from the ground, is so much richer than in primary forests between rivers, which are almost empty.
The following day, while Rick and I go hunting with the Mbuti, Jonah accompanies the Harts on a reconnaissance of the Itoro River to the north, where elephant sign is more abundant and a good deal fresher, not only in secondary forest but along the drainage lines. But even here, “as far from humanity and habitat destruction as one could get,” poachers had left their slash marks in the undergrowth, and Kenge told him that the elephants were far less numerous than they were ten years ago. Even so, he does not feel that enough elephants remain here to create habitat that would support a larger population. If the Ituri may be taken as a rough gauge of elephant numbers in wilderness regions of Zaire, then, as in Gabon and C.A.R., that number cannot significantly exceed one animal every two square kilometers, in a rain forest already more reduced in size than we had anticipated. If anything, Douglas-Hamilton’s rough estimates of forest elephant numbers—the most conservative in general circulation, and the ones we expected to corroborate—are much too high.
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.