The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  We walked through town together, greeting acquaintances along the path behind the market. At the Entebbe road, Tom stopped beside his favorite duka, and the old proprietress brought out a stool.

  “The Ministry car pool will pick me from here,” he said, “but there are many taxis for Kampala.” He stepped to the edge of traffic and waved down a matatu for me, swinging his briefcase like a flag.

  I climbed aboard, thanking him for his hospitality and promising to visit again soon. As the van pulled away, I watched Tom wave good-bye, then turn to greet a coworker and take a seat in the shade to wait.

  Two months later, I saw Tom Ntale for the last time, dying in a crowded ward at Nsambya Hospital. I heard the news from Vincent, who spotted me on a busy Kampala side street.

  “Your friend Tom is very sick,” he said, shaking his head with concern. “Very sick. You should visit him soon.”

  I shared a ride to the hospital with Steve Ulewitz, a volunteer I’d trained with in Kajansi, and his homestay father, a close neighbor of Tom’s named Charles. As the taxi wove through traffic, they talked excitedly about African teams in the World Cup and the small television they’d bought to watch the finals. But we all grew quiet when the van dropped us at the crowded stop for Nsambya.

  The hospital covered several acres, and for half an hour we wandered along dusty paths from wing to wing, scanning the faces of the sick. My anxiety for Tom turned to angry frustration as the nurses shrugged off our questions. They kept no central registry, and the place seemed designed to confuse people, to make one lose hope of even finding your way, let alone being healed.

  Finally, Charles spotted someone he knew and hailed the man from across a weedy courtyard. We shook hands and made introductions before asking him which way to go.

  “Yes, yes. Tom is in the St. Gonzaga building,” he told us, pointing back from the way he’d come. “It is a very nice one,” he added, looking earnestly at me and Steve. “Bed number twenty-four.”

  We thanked him and walked on to a low, tile-roofed structure near the back of the compound. Simple cots lined the walls in rows of three, and the patients sat or lay prone quietly, with their families gathered around them. In Uganda, hospitals provide a bed and medicine, but leave food, bathing, and other nursing duties to the patient’s friends and relations.

  I tried to brace myself for the worst as we counted our way to the twenty-fourth bed, but nothing could have prepared me for Tom’s grim condition when we pulled back the curtain around him. I glanced at the emaciated body and thought we’d been misdirected, until I saw Susan on the floor nearby, knitting something from a skein of pink and green yarn.

  Tom lay on the cot as if collapsed by the weight of his blankets, eyes closed, a slowly breathing skeleton. Beyond gaunt, his face was almost unrecognizable, a sharp-edged skull stretched tight with pallid, unhealthy skin. The shaggy beard and most of his hair were gone, and it took careful scrutiny to make out an outline of the proud, laughing man I knew him to be.

  I watched his eyelids flutter as we greeted Susan, and she sat up to whisper something in his ear.

  “Jjuko,” he breathed in a voice like dry leaves. I leaned in close, and his eyes focused slowly on my face. “Why have you come to see me like this?”

  I had no words and only reached down to hold his bony hand. “I wanted to see you, Tom,” I managed at last, forcing a smile.

  He nodded but looked suddenly exhausted by the exchange. Susan helped him roll over, facing away from us to rest. I asked her about medicine and pressed a handful of bills into her palm as a new group of visitors edged around the drawn curtain.

  Aunt Florence, Elvis, and several neighbors smiled and whispered greetings to me, shaking hands over the foot of the bed. I had the feeling we were like archaeologists, gathered to view a famous hieroglyph or cave painting before it disappeared, fading slowly from exposure to the wind and the damp breath of our own voices.

  It was crowded now, and Charles raised his eyebrows, ready to leave. Tom appeared to be sleeping, but as I shook Susan’s hand good-bye, he called for me again.

  “We have lost a friend from the club,” he whispered as I bent toward him. His lips worked dryly over his teeth, and he looked bewildered for a moment before continuing. “You knew her. Annette.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear,” I answered.

  “Yes,” he said, turning away again and shutting his eyes, too weak to say anything more.

  Outside, the world seemed unnaturally bright; the scent of wood smoke and particles of dust hung suspended air as if trapped in amber. Particular sounds leaped out of the city noise in quick succession, normal but somehow chilling: a distant car horn, laughter, radio static, or the maniacal chatter of weaver birds. We hurried to the taxi stand without speaking.

  “It is very serious,” I commented finally.

  “Yes. He cannot recover from this.” Charles pronounced each word with grim certainty. His older brother had died the same way, as well as “too many neighbors to count.”

  Honking matatus pulled up to the curb in a steady stream, but the thought of crowding in with so many unknown bodies was suddenly repellent and overwhelming. I said goodbye to Steve and Charles and set out on foot, almost running, as if physical exhaustion might overpower my sadness.

  Head down, I walked quickly through the market toward Gaba Road and Liz’s distant city house, ignoring the stares of passersby and their constant calls and hoots: “Muzungu, where are you going?” “Muzungu, ssst!” “Muzungu, muzungu, muzungu!”

  One cannot live for any length of time in Uganda without losing friends to AIDS, but seeing Tom’s devastation, so ravaging and complete, left me numb with its implications. Susan was now at risk, and perhaps even the youngest children, Rita and John. With so many people infected, I wondered about the future of a town like Kajansi. “Everyone you see here is carrying the virus,” Tom had told me. I knew he exaggerated. I knew that people would survive, just as they had survived Amin, Obote, and twenty years of anarchy. But not without a long and intimate revisitation from sorrow, enough concentrated grief to taint the very ground.

  My headlong pace brought me finally to Kansanga, a large trading center where throngs of people milled through the marketplace and hawkers shouted for business outside the shops. The evening rush hour sped past in clouds of dust and diesel smoke, and I stopped to drink a cold soda. Two handwritten signs hung from eaves of my favorite local restaurant:

  “Fish Today” and “Fish—No Problem.”

  Ugandan menus once again featured tilapia and Nile perch, as the tide of corpses drifting into Lake Victoria slowly tapered off. But Rwanda’s flood of the dead had been replaced by a living exodus. Refugees poured into neighboring Tanzania and Zaire as millions of villagers fled their homes: Tutsis escaping the massacres and Hutus retreating before the victorious RPF army. Years would pass before the country was reunited, and some estimates put the loss of life at well over a million people.

  I pictured Tom on the hospital cot, whispering my name and struggling to raise his head. This is only one death, I thought bleakly, and the words followed me all the way home, a percussive echo for every heavy step: one death, one death, one death.

  The following week I sat on a rock under a low-slung acacia tree, watching the lightning strikes and gray cloud-streaks of a thunderstorm sweep across the plains of southern Sudan. For my first vacation from the Peace Corps, I joined two friends on a camping trip to Kidepo Valley, a remote savanna in the far northeast corner of Uganda. One guidebook called it “possibly the most unspoilt park in the world,” a tree-spotted grassland so broad you could feel the earth curving.

  The break couldn’t have come at a better time. I felt numbed by my visit with Tom, ready for a diversion, and a chance to be healed by landscape. My companions worked for a medical relief agency called Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). They saw AIDS patients all the time but had other sadness to escape from. Before coming to Uganda they had lived for y
ears in Rwanda, and now heard horrific tales from friends and colleagues displaced by the fighting. Their stories lent a personal touch to the tragedy—how one former coworker survived for weeks at the bottom of a fifteen-foot pit latrine, hiding under raw sewage from the probing flashlights of the militia and living on food dropped by a sympathetic neighbor; or how entrepreneurs sold live honeybees to Tutsis, who stung their own faces repeatedly, hoping the swelling would make them resemble their broad-nosed Hutu counterparts. Worse than the stories, however, was silence, the lack of any news whatsoever from the many friends who were lost.

  The journey north to Kidepo took our small chartered plane over a spreading geography lesson of Ugandan landmarks, illustrating the country’s unique position between the lush forest biome of Central Africa and the arid plains to the east. The Nile coiled away below us, glowing like hammered gold in the sunlight, and wide Lake Kyoga reflected every drifting cloud in a perfect imitation of sky. Its thousand bays and channels framed the shoreline with green, a shimmering band of shallow marshes and Moses grass. We crossed slowly into the savanna region, where the land faded to shades of dun and amber. After more than two hours, the pilot pointed ahead meaningfully and began our descent. Kidepo filled the horizon, so wide it would hardly seem a valley but for the distant hills, a horseshoe framework of mountains worn smooth by time and darkened by patches of dry forest. Circling to drive buffalo from the grassy runway, we saw two park vehicles racing out to meet us.

  “You are welcome in Kidepo!” a ranger shouted over the engine noise, helping us unload the gear. Two smiling wardens arrived to shake hands and escort us to the park office, where we signed the guest book and learned the reason for their excitement. Isolated from the rest of Uganda by more than two hundred miles of unpaved, bandit-ridden roads, Kidepo had received fewer than fifty visitors all year. We’d brought two jerricans of fuel, and for a small fee the park agreed to loan us a battered Land Rover pickup truck. After setting up camp, we climbed into the back of the truck and headed out to explore the valley, bouncing and jarring over the park’s rutted roads and game tracks.

  Our lanky guide wore a colorful beaded necklace and wristband, common adornments for the local Karamajong, a tribe famous in Uganda for shunning the trappings of modern society. They herded cattle over much of their historical domain, following the pastoral lifestyle set down by their ancestors with only one small twentieth-century addition: AK-47 assault rifles. Stolen from an army base during Obote’s reign, the guns had replaced spears and arrows as the tribe’s favored weapon during cattle raids against rival clans or the Turkana tribe in neighboring Kenya. While they scorned most Western customs, the Karamajong felt no compunction about improving their armaments in the constant struggle for cattle. They held to a local belief that in the beginning, God bestowed them with ownership of every cow in the world, from the Sudan to South Dakota. Machine guns were important in the struggle to get them back.

  Our escort assured us his gun was for defense against poachers, still a daily threat in outlying areas of the park. Kidepo’s wildlife suffered terribly during the turbulent 1970s and early ’80s. Populations of elephant and buffalo fell from thousands to a few hundred each, and some species nearly disappeared. We found one such remnant in an open woodland of scrubby, yellow-barked thorn trees: four Rothschild’s giraffe, the park’s full contingent, stood like russet shadows among the tree trunks, stretching their impossible necks upward to browse in the canopy.

  “We must watch these giraffe every day,” the guide murmured. “Many local people want to eat them.”

  Rarest of the three East African subspecies, the Rothschild’s are more ponderous and heavy looking, but they fed with nimble grace, snaking their long pink tongues through the thorny branches to pluck at tufts of foliage. Behind the giraffes, two waterbuck cows detached themselves from the undergrowth, and we followed them out into an open field, green with short grass, as if freshly mowed.

  “You see that people have burned even here.”

  Setting fire to the tall dry-season fields helped poachers attract prey to their favorite hunting grounds. Zebra, spiral-horned kudu, oribi, and a small herd of buffalo joined the waterbuck, grazing contentedly on the new growth. Our driver killed the engine, and we watched the animals forage, listening to the antelopes’ occasional snorts and the barking whinny of zebras. Overhead, a gathering of griffon vultures circled high on the thermals, aimless, like winged seeds cast down from the clear blue sky.

  I spent most of the following day at our hilltop campground, reading in the shade while a herd of thirty elephants made their stately progression across the plains below, map ears waving to cool themselves in the afternoon heat. After life in the depths of the rain forest, Kidepo’s sky seemed endless, wrapping around me like a vast celestial stage, spotted with birds and hints of weather. That night, a living wilderness radio play filled the air with sounds of Africa: elephants rumbling in the distance, a hyena’s whooping laugh, nervous zebras, and the coughs of a lion pride on the hunt.

  In the morning, we rattled to the base of our hill in the back of the pick-up, and found the lions pacing like gold wraiths in the pale grass. They surrounded their night’s work, a half-eaten zebra, and the male lunged toward us with bared teeth, defending his rights to the kill. Our guide pounded on the cab of the truck, and the driver promptly stalled the engine. For a heart-stopping instant, the only sounds were wind noise and the ominous, subterranean growl of the approaching lion. Finally, the motor caught and we lurched away, gladly leaving the huge cats to their meal.

  Near the park office, we passed a group of rangers returning from patrol with great news: an unknown giraffe had wandered into the park near the Sudanese border.

  “It is a female,” the warden told me later. “And very pregnant.”

  The rangers followed her tracks for a full day but lost her when she returned to the Sudan side, heading toward an area notorious for heavy poaching. On our flight home we ventured a few minutes north, scanning the ground fruitlessly for any sign of giraffe. The park patrolled the area for days and finally picked up a fresh trail, but it was spotted with traces of blood. Sudanese hunters often followed a wounded animal into Uganda to finish the kill, but when the rangers scanned the ground they found no human tracks. The blood disappeared after a few hundred yards, and then they noticed something else: the faint double-toed prints of a newborn scampering alongside its mother as they made their way up a sandy gulch, deep into the safety of the park.

  In spite of my visit to Kidepo, I returned to Bwindi haunted by Tom’s passing, and by the enormity of the situation in Rwanda. Somehow, the loss of a friend, however unrelated, brought an immediacy to the Rwandan crisis that had been missing in the months before. While Rwanda lay less than thirty miles away on a map, the difficulties of rural transportation stretched that landscape into something far larger. To most Ugandans, distance was an aspect of time: three hours to village X, two days to the capital. People rarely traveled without good cause; the process was expensive, inconvenient, and intensely uncomfortable. Most locals had never been farther than a day’s walk in any direction, making life in a place like Bwindi seem deceptively isolated. My village neighbors viewed the Rwandan crisis as something remote and intangible. Although mortar fire was audible from the hilltops, everyone knew that the conflict was days away, in a strange place they’d never seen. We listened to the BBC on shortwave radios to find out what was happening just down the road.

  Arriving depressed and dusty from the journey, I found more bad news waiting for me at the park office. Distraught over the cancellation of his contract at Mgahinga, German conservationist Klaus-Jürgen Sucker had hanged himself from the rafters of his Kisoro home. It was as if tragedy were seasonal and this was the month for death.

  “He was a very tall man, and it’s such a small house,” a high-ranking CARE official mused later. “He must have gone to a lot of trouble.”

  Too much trouble, in the eyes of his German employers. B
&RD sent an investigative team to Uganda, accusing CARE of conspiring with locals to plot Klaus’s murder. Their case was high in passion but seemed short on reason. Klaus had been visibly depressed for weeks as his departure neared, and he tried several times to contact a priest in the days before his death. While Klaus had enemies in the community, what murderer would have waited five years, only to kill him as he was literally packing his belongings to leave? The B&RD investigators got one thing right, however. The intense political wrangling over Mgahinga’s future surely contributed to Klaus’s stressed mental state, and for that all parties bore some portion of the blame.

  For many months, two opposing expatriate camps had been lobbying for influence in Mgahinga. CARE and IGCP spoke with the power of American and British aid programs behind them, while DTB and B&RD used the weight of the German embassy. Each side promised better management and greater financial support, and Uganda National Parks vacillated between them. But the murder accusations set off a new firestorm of controversy, resulting in high-level meetings and diplomatic sparring between the ambassadors. Eventually, the Ugandan government awarded the management contract to the American and British agencies.

  During all of this, the park and the gorillas went with no support at all. While foreigners argued and jockeyed for the rights to future funding, Mgahinga’s rangers worked for months without pay, food, or equipment. The common goal of preserving mountain gorillas became lost in the politics of conservation, a theme that carries into other aspects of international aid: relief agencies in Rwanda competing to serve the most refugees, at the largest camps; development groups fighting over big-budget projects; or whole governments struggling to expand their spheres of influence with no thought to the ramifications at a local level.

  On the day of Klaus’s funeral, I received good news from the world of gorillas, as if to counterbalance the recent waves of human tragedy.

  “Mubare group has produced!” Phenny told me excitedly. That afternoon, the trackers had noticed one of Ruhondeza’s six females cradling a tiny infant, still wet from the womb. It was the first new gorilla in over two years, a positive sign that any stress from habituation was no longer impacting their breeding success.