by Thor Hanson
“He had a triple bypass last March,” his wife confided to me behind her hand.
“Ah,” I answered, and shouted up to the trackers: “Turuhuka, baSsebo!”—“We rest!”
In Bwindi, I learned that determination can overcome almost any exhaustion. Tourists rarely turned back without reaching the gorillas, but since we didn’t carry defibrillation paddles in our first aid kit, it was a great relief when the trackers stopped climbing and veered south, descending into a shady side valley.
We made good time using an old poachers’ trail through the forest. These faint paths crisscrossed the hillside like a network of secret highways, and the trackers knew them well. Before working for the park, many of our staff had found other employment in the forest, hunting duiker and bushpig or cutting mahogany. By hiring poachers and loggers, we not only gained the best woodsmen in the area, we cut down on illegal activities by providing them with a good economic alternative.
Using old trails also minimized our impact on the rain forest. The trackers avoided cutting anything unnecessarily, but following a gorilla group’s wandering route would have been impossible without a sharp panga. Luckily, gorillas preferred thickets and clearings where the vegetation grew back quickly, erasing the signs of their passage and ours within a few short weeks.
The valley narrowed into a rocky cleft, and we clambered over wet stones before the trail bore upward again through the green-dark shade. Thunder drummed across the hidden sky, and rain drifted down around us in a cool, enveloping mist, as if the very trees were steaming.
Suddenly, the trackers stopped short, their pangas in midswing. I heard a faint rustling somewhere ahead of us, and Prunari stared intently into the shadows, listening. “Enkima,” he whispered finally, and a troop of L’Hoest’s monkeys appeared, quietly crossing the path in front of us. Silvery gray, with chestnut backs and narrow white-bearded faces, they moved like quick ghosts, disappearing back into the undergrowth without a sound. Also known as the mountain guenon, L’Hoest’s were the rarest of Bwindi’s five monkey species, their range limited to a handful of high-altitude forests in the Central African region. The tourists whispered excitedly among themselves, scanning the foliage for another glimpse of the monkeys, and we continued on in hushed silence, with a newfound sense of expectation.
Soon after, the trackers found fresh gorilla sign, and we turned to climb a familiar slope. Katendegyere group ranged over twenty-two square kilometers of jungle, but long habits took them to a series of predictable foraging grounds. Before we even heard the cough-bark and pig grunts of a feeding dispute, we knew the apes had gathered around their favorite termite-ridden log. We stopped several hundred yards away to let the tourists prepare their cameras, then left the extra gear behind with the porters, advancing slowly in the smallest possible group.
Prunari led us in a wide circle, bringing the gorillas into view directly below, gathered loosely around the bleached crown of a huge old windfall. The snag had blown down across the slope, and lay in three long sections, slowly decomposing into the leaf-and-twig litter of the forest floor. I counted six gorillas feeding on the termites. Karema sat to one side, peering intently at a strip of orange bark she’d torn from the tree, and nibbling the helpless insects as they crawled out into the light. Kacupira and Katome were busy ripping their own meals from the stump of a wide limb, while Mugurusi lay sideways with his head completely out of sight beneath the fallen trunk, audibly gnawing at the rotten wood to reach the white ants below.
Unlike chimpanzees, gorillas have never been observed using tools in the wild. Where the smaller apes craft particular twigs to fish for termites, gorillas use brute strength to break apart the insects’ chambered mounds or rotten wooden homes. As the more arboreal species, chimps have developed greater dexterity, enabling them to balance and feed simultaneously, high in the forest canopy. Gorillas spend most of their time on the ground and haven’t learned to manipulate tools. Most researchers regard them as equally intelligent, however, with a greater capacity for patience and imagination in their problem-solving techniques. Both species have been able to master sign language in captivity, communicating to one another and their human observers with vocabularies of more than four hundred words and phrases. Chimpanzees have even learned to teach these signs to their offspring. In human terms, the intellect of great apes is often equated to that of a three- or four-year-old child.
Mugurusi’s three-year-old, however, still had a lot to learn about the fine art of termite hunting. I watched Kasigazi climb up his father’s broad back to perch near his shoulders, gazing curiously under the log where the old silverback was feeding. Mugurusi grunted and shifted himself into a better position, knocking the young ape to the ground. Kasigazi scampered over to his mother and stood behind her, hooting plaintively with a piteous expression that communicated clearly in any primate language: “Give me some ants. Give me some ants.” But Nyabutono ignored him completely, picking termites from a deep furrow in the log and chewing them individually with great relish.
Watching this peaceful scene, I had nearly forgotten the missing pair of gorillas until a sudden commotion erupted somewhere up the slope. Screams and pig grunts resounded through foliage as Makale and Mutesi squared off over some imagined quarrel. The two had been inseparable for months, moving on the periphery of the group. I expected one or both of them to be the first males to emigrate from Mugurusi’s bachelor band, but so far they had been satisfied showing their independence by mock-charging, and carrying on against each other. I trained my binoculars up the hill and watched their conflict unfold, a shadow play of indistinct images in the undergrowth.
When aggression between gorillas reaches the boiling point, the steam often looks for the closest, easiest outlet. So I wasn’t surprised when, after several minutes of fierce vocalizations, Makale and Mutesi charged rapidly downhill, directly toward the smallest primates in the immediate area. We gathered the tourists into a tight group and crouched down, as the gorillas crashed through the intervening vegetation.
Suddenly, Kacupira appeared, sprinting up the slope to place himself between us and the advancing apes. With his maimed hand, he couldn’t hope to challenge two healthy males and immediately assumed a submissive posture, holding his hindquarters high in the air. Makale and Mutesi screamed indignantly, but Kacupira had diverted their attention long enough for us to back slowly out of the vicinity. After several tense minutes, he rose and rejoined the rest of the group. Makale and Mutesi seemed mollified by this humble display and calmly followed him down the hill without so much as a glance in our direction.
I looked at the trackers in mute wonder, and they shrugged back with smiles of amazement. Later, when we stopped for lunch, one of the tourists replayed the incident on his video camera, and I watched Kacupira defend us again and again. I had never seen a gorilla behave that way, not only acknowledging our presence, but reacting to it as if we were members of the group. Usually, maintaining our distance minimized any behavioral impact on the gorillas, but today we had clearly influenced their social dynamics, and for Kacupira, perhaps even his thoughts and perceptions.
Researchers and zookeepers have known for decades that gorillas can recognize individual people. Captive apes clearly remember their favorite observers and trainers, even after years of separation. In wild populations, habituators learned that the gorillas should be exposed to a mixture of light- and dark-skinned people. Otherwise, the process suffers a serious setback when the gorillas react with fright to the sudden appearance of muzungu scientists or tourists among their daily visitors. In Katendegyere group, the apes always noticed when Prunari, Charles, or Mishana went on leave. We would often recruit one of the antipoaching rangers as a fill-in tracker, but it soon became difficult to find volunteers. Twice in a row, Makale circled around the rest of us to charge directly at the new guy, as if testing his mettle for habituation work. Once, he even reached out and laid his hand on the cowering ranger’s shoulder before turning to stalk smugly back i
nto the undergrowth.
“The gorillas have finally accepted me as one of their own!” I joked in a letter home, describing the encounter with Kacupira. But as our knowledge of individual apes grew more intimate, I wondered how much impact they were having on my own behavior and that of the trackers. We knew to tread lightly around Makale, and we knew that Mugurusi was shy. Now we felt closer to Kacupira, referring to him with affectionate Rukiga terms like munwani waawe, “our friend.” As the gorillas became more comfortable with us, we went through our own set of subtle changes, leading inevitably to the puzzling question: who was habituating whom?
14
Last Rites
When he was here
We joked and laughed together
And no fleeting shadow of a ghost
Ever crossed our paths.
—Laban Erapu, Ugandan poet
from An Elegy
In the late spring of 1994, Uganda’s commercial fishing industry collapsed. Throughout the country, restaurant and hotel owners erased Nile perch and tilapia from their menus, and the busy lakefront markets grew quiet.
“No fish,” I observed, rattling along in a crowded bus toward Kampala. Along the roadside, dozens of small wooden stalls stood empty where fishmongers normally hawked their wares.
“Who would buy it?” asked my seat mate. “You could be eating a neighbor or a relative.”
He referred to a new, unthinkable component in the Lake Victoria food chain. For over a month, bloated human bodies had been floating down the Kagera River, drifting into the lake, and washing ashore on Ugandan beaches at the rate of fifty or a hundred every hour. The army, aided by relief agencies, set up wide nets along the delta, and patrolled the river in boats, but thousands of corpses still slipped by, victims of the civil war and genocide raging across neighboring Rwanda.
When extremists in the Hutu-led government shot down the plane of their own president, Juvénal Habyarimana, they derailed his fragile peace negotiations with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group dominated by the minority Tutsi tribe. The assassination rekindled a three-year-old civil war, and as RPF forces advanced in the countryside, the government retaliated savagely, orchestrating the systematic slaughter of more than five hundred thousand innocent Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians. Some estimates put the death toll at over a million. Carried out by neighborhood militias and retreating Hutu soldiers, these massacres marked the worst killing in a struggle dating back more than forty years, rooted in ancient tribal animosities and the legacy of colonial rule.
A tall, pastoral people of Nilotic origins, the Tutsis migrated into Rwanda hundreds of years ago, bringing their cows and a governing system of local chiefs ruled by a monarch of godlike stature. They soon dominated the area’s resident Hutus, who are shorter, Bantu-descendant agriculturalists. The social hierarchy that developed has been compared to a feudal system, where the Hutus provided farm goods in exchange for the military protection of their Tutsi lords. Ethnic lines became blurred, however, by extensive intermarriage and mobility between the classes. The tribal distinction almost became one of occupation as much as race. A rich Hutu who bought many cows might then be considered a Tutsi. Similarly, any Tutsis who lost their herds and took to farming would lose social status, and become known colloquially as Hutus.
After Belgium took control of Rwanda in 1916, tension between the groups changed quickly from a class struggle to one based strictly on race. Choosing to rule through the Tutsi aristocracy, the colonial government issued tribal identity cards, dividing the population along clear and uncompromising ethnic lines. Similar to South Africa’s infamous apartheid system, the Belgian method reserved specific privileges for each race. Education, political power, and economic opportunity became the exclusive domain of card-carrying Tutsis, who made up less than 15 percent of the populace. In the decades that followed, tension turned to violence as Hutus struggled for equal treatment and the Tutsis fought to maintain control.
The first major uprising in 1959 overthrew the Tutsi monarch and sent thousands of his tribe members into exile. Since independence, Hutus have controlled the government, violently suppressing the occasional Tutsi insurrection. The latest rebel movement, the RPF, involved numerous expatriates who had never even lived in their home country. Many had grown up in Uganda, where they received military training and tacit support from the Musevini government. Political cartoons in Kampala played upon stories that Musevini’s mother was of Tutsi descent, and editorials criticized him for fighting a “secret war.” People said he was repaying a debt to the Tutsis, who were rumored to have helped his own rise to power in 1986. But most Ugandans regarded the atrocities in Rwanda with a kind of knowing sympathy, mixed with relief that in this decade at least, civil war and racial slaughter were no longer on their side of the border.
We reached Kampala in the dusty heat of evening, with the sun hung like a lurid Christmas bulb over the western hills. Once described as a picturesque town of neat gardens and tree-lined avenues, Uganda’s capital now bore the scars of its turbulent post-colonial history. Architecturally, the downtown area was a disorganized jumble of colonial-style buildings mixed together with towers and apartments from the midtwentieth-century “cement shoe box” school of design. Bullet holes and years of neglect still marred many structures, and the roadside flowerbeds were littered with barbed wire and heaps of rubble, or planted with clumps of yams. But ten years of political stability, combined with the continent’s fastest-growing local economy, had stretched a new feeling of vitality across the city’s worn facade. Half-finished construction projects, abandoned for decades, now hummed with activity, and fresh blacktop smoothed the potholes of every major street. The population had swelled to nearly a million, as people from the countryside arrived to fill the suddenly booming job market.
I walked uphill from the bus park through a rushing crowd of commuters, past street vendors who spread their merchandise out before them on the dusty pavement: soap, pens, batteries, bread, radios, foam mattresses, underwear, eggs, and bags of milk. As the daylight faded they would light tiny oil lamps, transforming the street markets into glittering constellations, like an urban version of starlight. At the corner of Kampala Road, the sidewalk changed suddenly to shiny white tile, and I looked up—what had been a derelict building months before was now a newly remodeled international bank, gleaming with marble and tinted windows. Kampala was changing so quickly, it seemed like a different city every time I came in from the forest. Only a year before, walking through downtown after dark was an eerie experience of deserted, ghost-quiet streets. But with the addition of lighted sidewalks, three major hotels, and dozens of new restaurants, the town had quickly developed a thriving nightlife. Perhaps the most telling evidence of change dangled above the busy intersection of the Entebbe and Kampala roads: the city’s first stoplight. No one paid any attention to it, of course, but there it remained, gamely encouraging the traffic with flashes of green, yellow, and red like a constant reminder of things to come.
Heading toward the post office, I heard a familiar name shouted over the traffic noise.
“Jjuko!”
Turning toward the voice, I spotted DK making his way through the crowd of pedestrians. This was another feature of my trips to Kampala: I always ran into a friend of Tom’s who knew me from Annette’s place.
He shook my hand excitedly and asked when I was coming back to Kajansi.
“Tonight,” I told him. “I only have these few things to do in town.”
Thirty minutes later I boarded a matatu and sped through the suburbs toward my old neighborhood. DK had gone on ahead, so I knew that Tom would be expecting me at the club. I reached Kajansi under the fading port-stain glow of a dry season sunset, and ducked into the warren of back alleys, tracing my way to Annette’s. The courtyard erupted with a chorus of “Jjuko!” and everyone stood up to shake hands, but surprisingly, Tom wasn’t among them.
“We will go to his,” said DK. “It is no problem.”
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br /> Annette poured two small jerricans of munanasi, and we left in a group, singing the Luganda favorite “I’m So Very Happy” in loud, boisterous voices. Tom heard us coming and threw open the door of the house.
“My son!” he cried, hugging me with one arm as he ushered everyone into the sitting room. Sam appeared with a tray full of glasses, and Tom began pouring the wine. I noticed immediately that something had changed about him; he’d lost weight, perhaps twenty pounds. In the States, I would have complimented him on getting in shape, but for Ugandans, weight loss carried a different set of connotations. To be fat signified financial prosperity and good health. People lost weight only if they were sick or going hungry, and I knew Tom was getting enough to eat.
“To muzungus in Kajansi!” He made the toast grandly, and we all raised our glasses. “This year I will host two volunteers, or even three!”
We drank wine until late into the evening, and I passed around photographs of Bwindi—my house, the forest, the gorillas. Everyone laughed that a muzungu would travel so far to live in such a hut and chase wild animals in the jungle. When the munanasi was gone, people rose to leave, but Vincent had “gotten a little excited” and slowly slipped out of his chair onto the floor. Tom and I bid the others good night, rolled Vincent onto a spare mattress, and joined Susan in the next room for dinner. As Sam knelt to rinse my hands, I saw Tom carefully shaking pills from a small paper envelope.
“I have had malaria,” he confessed. “And now typhoid. This is my second treatment, but I’m still a bit weak.”
He assured me that his health was improving, but at breakfast the next morning he looked haggard, as if he’d hardly slept.
“Pah,” he said, pushing away his plate of yams in disgust. “No appetite.”