The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  In West and Central Africa, forest people have coexisted with gorillas for countless generations, revering them as clan totems or hunting the apes as a prized source of food and powerful fetish medicines. To the outside world, however, the gorilla remained a mystery for more than two thousand years after Hanno’s initial discovery. Stories filtered north to Europe through trade routes and early explorations, but even with the increase in African travel brought on by slavery, Westerners didn’t officially recognize the species until 1847, when a pair of Protestant missionaries in Gabon gathered the first skull samples and sent them back to England. Mountain gorillas lived in even greater obscurity, over a thousand miles east of their lowland cousins’ known range. They eluded scientists for another five decades, until an insignificant military expedition visited the Virunga Volcanoes at the turn of the century.

  In 1902, several years after Germany laid claim to modern-day Rwanda and Burundi as part of its East African territory, Captain Robert von Beringe led a small contingent of troops into his country’s newest protectorate. Meant as a show of force to intimidate the local rulers and impress border guards of the neighboring Belgian Congo, Beringe’s mission would make its most far-reaching impact in the realm of science. While encamped on the slopes of Mount Sabinyo, he shot at a group of black apes and managed to bring one specimen back to Germany. The skeleton created an immediate stir, confirming a long-standing rumor that large, thick-haired gorillas were living in the highlands of Central Africa. Taxonomists declared a new subspecies, the mountain gorilla, and honored Beringe as its discoverer. His journey’s political goals came to nothing when Germany lost Ruanda-Urundi to the Belgians after World War I, but Beringe’s name lives on, preserved in the scientific title of his simian quarry, Gorilla beringei beringei.*

  In the decades that followed, museums and zoos from around the world strove to add this rare new ape to their collections. Naturalists and sportsmen began mounting expeditions, and each year brought more safaris to the once-obscure Virunga Volcanoes. Most travelers entered the region through Uganda, where passable roads stretched inland as far as the British colonial outpost at Kabale, only a three- or four-day trek from the mountains. This route passed southeast of Bwindi, through a landscape of steep, rounded hillsides and tiny villages that European visitors soon dubbed “the Switzerland of Africa.” With the volcanoes looming over every turn in the path, and small eruptions from Nyamulagira lighting up the sky at night, the countryside gained quick fame for its almost-mythical beauty. American naturalist Mary Akeley described her 1926 journey with reverence:

  At sunset we had a wide and glorious view into deep, green valleys and blue lakes—beautiful Mugisha, Tshahafi and Bulera. We looked across a vista of hills under cultivation by the natives and over bamboo forests to the gilded pinnacles of the extinct volcanoes of Sebyinyo, Mugabura, and Mugahinga,† standing as outposts on the Uganda-Congo frontier. Again and again throughout the moonless night the lurid beacon fires of active Nyamlagira flared and fell, while the vast silences were broken by the faint and doleful throbbing of the drums. Surely this was not a night meant for sleep!

  Akeley’s husband, Carl, who died in the Virungas on that same expedition, is remembered as a pioneer in the world of gorilla conservation. His specimens for the American Museum of Natural History portrayed the apes in authentic poses, offering a realistic alternative to the violent image of gorillas popularized in folklore, travel literature, and the top-grossing film of 1933, King Kong. After his first collecting trip in 1921, Akeley helped convince the Belgian government to include their Congo colony’s portion of the Virunga Volcanoes as a permanent gorilla sanctuary in Parc National Albert, the first national park on the African continent.

  Today, the Virungas lie within protected areas in three countries: Parc des Virungas in Zaire, Parc des Volcans in Rwanda (both formerly part of Parc National Albert under the Belgians), and Uganda’s Mgahinga Gorilla National Park. The footpath from Kabale has been replaced by a ribbon of red-dirt road, but traveling to the Virungas is still a trip of staggering beauty. When Mgahinga’s wardens held a meeting to discuss their forthcoming multiple-use and tourism programs, I jumped at the chance to visit. Liz and I joined Philip Franks, director of CARE’s Development Through Conservation project, for the drive to Uganda’s southernmost corner.

  Solitary cumulus clouds crossed the blue sky like wind-filled sails as the afternoon stretched toward evening. The road climbed ridge after ridge and snaked through narrow valleys, lengthening our forty-mile trip into nearly three hours of undulating, picture-book vistas. Hillside shambas, the crimson bloom of flame trees, a herd of goats: every aspect of the landscape was amplified and sharp-edged, and colors leaped to the eye from great distance, as though the air had never been so clear. People walking the roadside flashed by my window in hairbreadth glimpses, their features crisp and strangely vibrant—an ancient face, a bright skirt, the teeth of a smile, or fingers tangling shyly in a shock of sable hair. Each image seemed unique and instantly familiar, as if everyone we passed had become suddenly famous.

  As with my first views of Bwindi forest or the Great Rift Valley, driving to the Virungas overwhelmed me with landscape. Hillsides rose all around us in an endless patchwork of steep, terraced fields, each its own shade of millet green and maize and fresh-turned earth, framed by the shadow of hedgerows. The volcanoes towered higher with every passing mile, their perfect gray-blue cones taking on subtle new dimensions as we closed the distance. A network of finger-thin valleys and dark ridges descended vertically from the peaks, tinged on the lower slopes with the faintest trace of emerald. Rich evening sunlight graced every vista with gold, and it seemed the whole scene was designed to inundate the eyes, to flood all sense and perception with image, image, image.

  As the last orange glow of sunset drained from the sky, we drove finally into Kisoro, a languid town of tiny shops and half-finished buildings, nestled in the triple shadow of Muhavura, Mgahinga, and Sabinyo. Like Kabale, Kisoro had suffered from the recent downturn in trade with its unstable neighbors, Zaire and war-torn Rwanda. The main street seemed deserted, and in fact, many businessmen had put their affairs on hold and returned to their family farms, waiting for an upswing in commerce. Phil pointed out the park office, a tidy-looking building on the edge of town, then took us straight to Kisoro’s most famous landmark, a small hotel known as the Travellers Rest.

  For more than forty years, gorilla seekers from around the world have launched their Virunga expeditions from this tiny hostel. George Schaller called it a “home away from home” during his seminal 1959 gorilla study, and Dian Fossey took refuge there when her first research site in Zaire was overrun by soldiers. The two scientists described a charming rustic inn surrounded by gardens and flowerbeds, where Walter Baumgärtel, the kindly German proprietor, helped arrange camping supplies, guides, and porters. Something of a gorilla expert himself, Baumgärtel maintained a seasonal camp high on the saddle between Mgahinga and Muhavura, helping pioneer research and tourism in the area. Fossey called him “one of the kindest and most endearing friends I had made in Africa,” or, as Schaller put it: “Walter…greeted us with outstretched arms, his eyes twinkling, a happy smile on his face; and we were content.”

  Phil pulled into the hotel’s dusty yard, and we began unloading the car, but the place looked as desolate as the rest of town, and no one came rushing out to welcome us. Baumgärtel had sold the Travellers Rest and left Uganda in 1969, disheartened by the country’s rapid decline under Milton Obote. From the dilapidated state of the buildings, it seemed he’d taken much of the hotel’s personality with him. We passed his car, a classic 1950s sedan, abandoned on a nearby side street. Wheels gone and body growing through with weeds, it was a true relic, a rusted reminder that for Westerners, the romantic age of travel in Africa had long since faded into memory.

  Legendary wilderness and a rich cultural heritage draw more visitors to the Dark Continent every year, but the modern African experience is taint
ed by a vague sense of desperation. One cannot pass through these landscapes, however magnificent, and not feel the accelerating strain on every system—natural, social, and political. Fueled by overcrowding and volatile leadership, most countries are like Uganda, caught in the struggle to leap from a society of subsistence to a westernized world of foreign religions, national governments, and market economies. A strange combination of hope and futility prevails, where every change or improvement is overshadowed by the knowledge of its own impermanence. In Kampala, I once watched several men pouring a new concrete sidewalk. They worked steadily, even cheerfully, all afternoon, but poor-quality cement and a bad mixture made the pavement split into a spiderweb of fine cracks as soon as it dried. Two days later, large chunks were already sloughing off into the roadway, a simple illustration of a much larger theme: striving for changes that begin to fall apart before the foundation ever has a chance to set.

  During the colonial period, muzungu travelers saw quite a different Africa. While the colonial governments were setting terrible precedents for the future—creating arbitrary political boundaries, exacerbating tribalism, and forging economies of dependence—they succeeded in erecting, however briefly, a working facade of Europe over an exotic tropical landscape. In Uganda and Kenya, white settlers and their visitors lived in a challenging but comfortable world, like rural England with better weather. Journalist and author Alan Moorehead described such a visit to Kabale in the 1950s:

  It possesses a delightful English inn set among lawns and terraced gardens. There is a well-kept golf course just outside the grounds, and within the immediate neighbourhood of the hotel itself one can play tennis, badminton, croquet, bowls, table tennis…. In the evening one drinks French wine at dinner, reads the magazines in the lounge, plays bridge and listens to the radio. Very rightly the European inhabitants of East Africa take their holidays in this cool green place, for it bears a striking resemblance to any of the lusher golfing resorts in southern England, Sunningdale perhaps.

  Expatriates shared a certain nostalgia for the old days, and even Ugandans sometimes longed for the colonial sense of order.

  “Everything worked!” Tom had told me once, sitting on his porch in Kajansi. He was a little drunk and making grand statements. “Bring the whites back; give the government to the British! Give the shops back to the Indians! Then it won’t cost two thousand shillings for a lift in a broken taxi!”

  I felt a bit wistful myself, checking into a cold room at the Travellers Rest, with its broken windows and paint-peeled walls. A dusty sink was all that remained of the plumbing, and electric bulbs dangled useless from the ceiling; the generator had ground to a halt years earlier from a lack of machine oil. But soon a friendly old man knocked at the door, bringing candles and a basin of warm water. I thanked him in Rukiga, and he shook his head, saying, “Eh, eh, eh,” and then taught me a proper greeting in Rufumbira, the local dialect. I washed my face and dried it on a bedsheet, musing on the hotel’s earnest, dilapidated charm. This is the appeal of traveling in modern Africa, an attraction I heard one tourist aptly call “entropic hospitality.”

  Echoes of the colonial period still survive in Uganda, coloring the attitudes of many expatriates and locals alike, but they seem increasingly out of place in the modern forum. I met someone who seemed to embody those anachronisms at our multiple-use meeting the following day. As the field director of a German-based gorilla project (funded by DTB and B&RD),* Klaus-Jürgen Sucker held the title of honorary warden in Mgahinga Park. A tall, gaunt man with shoulder-length gray hair and a brooding gaze, Klaus was an imposing figure who dominated the park’s Ugandan staff.

  “There can be no multiple use,” he interjected angrily for the fourth time. “There can be no people in the national park. They will only drive away the gorillas!”

  The debate focused on a CARE proposal to give local beekeepers access to the forest edge and allow the seasonal collection of young bamboo shoots for replanting outside the park. Public relations around Mgahinga had been in decline since a recent resettlement scheme removed more than 1,300 people whose farms had encroached deep inside the park boundary. CARE hoped that a multiple-use plan, coupled with a new community water source, would help ameliorate the ill feelings. From a biological standpoint, however, Klaus definitely had a point. In spite of the resettlement, Mgahinga still covered fewer than twenty-two square miles, by far the smallest park in the country. Gorillas and other wildlife were sometimes forced to migrate into neighboring parks in Rwanda and Zaire. The dangers of human use, from fires to disease transmission to overexploitation, increased dramatically in such a limited, fragile habitat.

  After hours of heated discussion, the other advisers and wardens overruled Klaus’s voice of dissent, approving an experimental bamboo harvest for the following month. Everyone agreed that letting public resentment fester unaddressed would set a bad precedent for the young park. In the past, conservation policies focused solely on preservation, often at the expense of local communities. Now, with population growth driving the demand for land and forest resources ever higher, parks couldn’t afford to alienate the populace. In a region as politically turbulent as Central Africa, government systems can change rapidly, or disappear altogether for a time, leaving local people as the ultimate stewards of the forest. Without some level of community support, efforts to protect areas like Bwindi and the Virungas run a serious risk of failing over the long term.

  An encouraging lesson can be learned from neighboring Rwanda, where the mountain gorillas and Parc des Volcans survived years of civil war and tribal massacres relatively unscathed. The conservation education and public outreach begun in the early 1980s had apparently helped both sides of the conflict recognize the importance of the national park, as well as the economic potential of gorilla tourism. Bwindi and Mgahinga hoped to emulate this apparent success, embracing a modern conservation strategy that utilized every possible tool, from traditional antipoaching patrols to more progressive ideas like ecotourism, multiple use, and revenue sharing. The newer concepts held great promise but no guarantees to placate a traditionalist like Klaus, who left the meeting in frowning silence. I could almost sense his longing for the past.

  The following morning, all of Africa seemed to drop away beneath us as we climbed the mountainside for a trip to the gorillas. Lakes Bunyonyi and Mutanda glinted up from their valleys like flattened silver coins, and the ridge-backed hills of Kigezi rose up around them in miniature, faded green in the distance, like the paint-and-plaster landscape of a scale-model train. The sky was exceptionally clear, but white clouds still clung like vapor trails to the crest of Mount Muhavura and brushed across Mgahinga’s low, flat-topped cone. Mount Sabinyo, “the old man’s teeth,” towered above us to the southwest, obscuring the Rwandan and Zairian Virungas behind its distinctive crown of five jagged peaks.

  Klaus led us up the slope in long, easy strides. The entire staff lined up to salute him at the park entrance, and a lanky young ranger immediately leaped forward to carry his backpack. I caught Liz rolling her eyes and smiling at his domineering style, but no one questioned Klaus’s accomplishments or his dedication to the gorillas. In the five years of his tenure at Mgahinga, the place had progressed from a neglected forest reserve to an organized national park, with more antipoaching rangers per square mile than any other protected area on the continent. He had led the struggle to evict the park’s encroachers, and we now witnessed the results: a full hour’s climb through the lumpy, uneven ground of abandoned millet fields and banana shambas. After watching the steady destruction of wooded patches around Bwindi, it was deeply satisfying to see a bit of farmland returning to the forest. A small victory perhaps, but Mgahinga might well have been the only place in Africa where gorilla habitat was actually expanding.

  “My uncle’s farm was here,” a ranger told me, gesturing toward an overgrown field indistinguishable from the rest of the hillside. I asked him how the family had felt about leaving, and he shrugged noncommittally. The
park compensated farmers for their land and lost crops, but resentment still ran high in the local villages, and Klaus bore the brunt of it. His conflicts with the community and increasing disagreements with other conservation groups cast doubt on the future of the German project in Mgahinga. Local leaders, government officials, and even projects like CARE were mounting pressure to cancel Klaus’s advisory contract with the park, paving the way for a more cooperative approach to management.

  We paused to rest at the edge of the bamboo zone, a tall, vertical tangle of reeds that ringed the mountains above 8,000 feet. Virunga gorillas craved the tender young shoots and migrated seasonally to take advantage of any new growth. Twenty-five miles to the north, Bwindi’s gorillas rarely even entered the bamboo and had never been recorded feeding on its shoots. The difference illustrates an important point about the two populations. Bwindi gorillas live in a montane rain forest, roaming from an elevation of roughly 5,000 feet to the highest reaches of the park, at more than 8,200. In the Virungas, however, all habitat lower than 7,000 feet has been gone for decades, if not centuries. Villages and farms press right up to the park boundaries at the bottom of the bamboo zone, and the gorillas’ range extends upward through mist-enshrouded Hagenia woodlands, and into alpine areas higher than 12,000 feet.

  This distinct difference in elevation and habitat accounts for the disparate diets and ecology of the two populations. Bwindi gorillas must range over a larger area, moving long distances between forest clearings to ensure a steady supply of lush vegetation. The dense shade of mature rain forest screens out many of the moist plants that gorillas rely on, but they do take advantage of its greater variety of fruits, leaves and tree bark. Wild figs (Ficus) and the pineapple-like omwifa (Myrianthus) are common meals for Bwindi gorillas but unavailable to their volcano counterparts. In the Virungas, gorilla habitat includes bamboo, alpine meadows, and a more open-canopied forest, with an abundance of wild celery and other herbaceous foods. The apes need not travel so far to forage, and their home ranges are correspondingly small. Physical variations separate the two groups as well. After three years in Rwanda and more than a year in Bwindi, Liz could recognize photographs from either population, pointing out the broad faces and noticeably longer hair of the Virunga apes.