The Impenetrable Forest

by Thor Hanson

  “We didn’t know they cursed the baby too,” Phenny would tell me later, wooden with grief. “We didn’t know.”

  I pulled into the yard, and Hope stepped carefully down from the vehicle, bundling the child against her shoulder. Amanda’s head looked too large and heavy for her thin little body, lolling loosely backward as Hope hurried inside.

  Phenny and I drove back to the market. He bought enough food for a long stay, but the visit turned out to be brief; Amanda died while we were shopping.

  At the funeral, Karen and I mingled with hundreds of guests. Everyone in the village seemed to be there, milling through the compound, talking quietly, and singing atonal hymns by the grave site. As patriarch, Phenny’s father, Tibesigwa, presided over the service, and we paid our respects to him before stopping to sit awhile with Hope. Phenny drifted through the crowd alone, hollow-eyed, shaking hands and greeting people with a mechanical smile.

  The atmosphere was solemn but social, and I saw most of the guides and trackers. Betunga William joined me for a walk through the banana shamba to the burial plot, a small family cemetery on the Gongos’ hillside farm. Amanda’s grave was a low mound of freshly turned earth strewn with colored flowers. We said nothing, but I knew William mourned for the child. He and Phenny were neighbors and inseparable friends. Without a family of his own, William often took meals with the Gongos and treated Amanda as a favorite niece or sister. I remembered him holding her naked on his lap, bouncing to the music from his Walkman radio. “Maybe she will shit,” he’d said happily, grinning a hopeful smile. “If a baby shits on you, it means you will have many children of your own!”

  Nearing thirty and still single, William’s lack of a wife and children was anomalous in the village. As a rule, Bakiga men married in their late teens or as soon as they could afford to. They looked upon raising a family as something fundamental, a quantitative measure for the success of their adult lives. In the largely static economy of the village, children represented a certain wealth: help on the farm and security in old age, as well as the economic potential of a son or daughter finding good work in the city. But the motivation for large families ran far deeper, to the very roots of local culture.

  “People pray to their ancestors,” Enos Komunda once told me, explaining how traditional religions revolved around consultation with the dead. The power of individual spirits related directly to the size of their family clan and the length of time they’d been deceased. “For a small thing, you might pray to a grandparent. But for larger problems, people had to look further back.” Ancient spirits held sway over a vast genealogy of the dead and living, the same way village elders supervised their clans and families. This influence increased with age until those beyond memory finally merged with God, the ancestor to all.

  Culturally, children represented the link between future and past, a legacy of primary importance. In this passage from his journey in 1862, explorer Samuel Baker describes a conversation with Commoro, chief of the Lakoota tribe in southern Sudan. Baker tries to explain the Christian concept of afterlife, and Commoro replies afterward with an elegant summary of the African perspective:

  Some corn had been taken out of a sack for the horses, and a few grains lay scattered on the ground; I tried the beautiful metaphor of St. Paul as an example of a future state. Making a small hole with my finger in the ground, I placed a grain within it: “That,” I said, “represents you when you die.” Covering it with earth, I continued: “that grain will decay, but from it will rise the plant that will produce a reappearance of the original form.”

  Commoro: “Exactly so; that I understand. But the original grain does not rise again; it rots like the dead man and is ended; the fruit produced is not the same grain that we buried, but the production of that grain. So it is with man—I die, and decay and am ended; but my children grow up like the fruit of the grain. Some men have no children, and some grains perish without fruit; then all are ended.”

  Without children, then, people feel an acute sense of impermanence, and no connection to the spiritual continuity of their forefathers. To die in such a state is to be unremembered, with no link to the history of one’s family and clan.

  In an era of improving public health, this cultural imperative leads naturally to population growth, and the number of people in southwestern Uganda is expected to double over the next fifteen to twenty years. More subtly, however, it can also contribute to the spread of disease. A person who tests HIV positive might not choose to abstain from sex. In fact, he or she might try even harder to reproduce, desperate to leave children behind as a connection to the world of the living.

  William and I stood together in silence beside Amanda’s tiny grave. I looked for a flower to add to those scattered over the mound, but the bougainvillea was already stripped bare.

  That evening, I met the ranger patrol returning from Katendegyere group. They told me they’d left the gorillas feeding in the Muzabajiro Valley, just over the hill from my house. On impulse, I set off up the trail, crossing into the forest through the notch above Dominico’s place. The trees dripped from an afternoon rain squall, and I could hear the faint drumming of the creek, still swollen with runoff. My path led along the side of the narrow valley, a ledge carved into the hillside and lined with wild impatiens. I walked slowly, listening to the day’s last birdcalls: tinkerbirds, a tchagra, and two cinnamon-chested bee-eaters, rasping their three-note whistle and darting over the treetops like jade swallows.

  I heard familiar grunts as I approached the gorillas and coughed lightly to make my presence known. They were bedding down just above the trail, in a steep, shrubby clearing laced with white blossoms. I climbed a few meters toward them and sat quietly in a patch of wet grass. Thick bracken blocked the apes from view, but I heard the snap of branches as they settled in for the night, weaving their nests around them. The three close together would be Mugurusi, Nyabutono, and Kasigazi, with Katome somewhere nearby. Higher up the slope I heard the others—Karema, probably, and Kacupira, who lived more and more on the periphery these days, probably on the lookout for Makale and Mutesi.

  Reluctant to leave them, I lay back against the hillside and felt the cool earth dampen my shirt. A soft belch from up the hill, followed by rustling leaves as someone turned in a nest. And then silence, a damp hush that swelled with chirring cicadas as daylight faded quickly from the sky.

  19

  Visitors

  One morning I was sitting near William a short way up the mountain above camp when a boat arrived with some visitors from Kigoma…. I should of course have gone down to say hello, but I had become so attuned to William that I almost felt myself the chimps’ instinctive distrust of strangers. When William moved down toward the tents, I followed him; when he sat in the bushes opposite my camp, I sat beside him. Together we watched the visitors…. I wondered what they would have thought if they had known I was sitting there with William, peering at them as though they had been alien creatures from an unknown world.

  —Jane Goodall

  from In the Shadow of Man, 1971

  I placed my feet between the roots and clumps of foliage, inching silently up the muddy path. Overhead, soft grunts murmured through the canopy like a distant conversation, and I heard fruit pith dropping through the leaves all around me. I headed toward the closest gap in the forest, where a wind-blown tree had opened narrow views into the tangle of branches above. Looking up, furtive movements drew my attention to the topmost layer of green, a sprawling limb of the giant fig tree I could see from my backyard. Between the emerald leaves I glimpsed a face peering back at me, shiny and black, its wide mouth frozen in a Cheshire leer.

  I stood absolutely still, bracing myself for an ear-splitting scream, but the chimp held its peace. It stared at me for a calculating moment, then continued feeding with exaggerated nonchalance, as if deciding that one lone muzungu wasn’t much of a threat after all. Progress, I thought, and fumbled for my binoculars.

  On closer inspection I recogniz
ed the chimp—a large male I’d come to think of as perhaps the most dominant in the group. With a flat, protruding brow and a bald patch stretching back over the top of his head, he looked like an old monk wrapped in thick, hairy robes. I watched as he leaned out precariously and snatched a cluster of sun-ripe figs from the highest reaches of the tree. He held them close against his chest and squatted on the branch, thumbing the green, plum-size fruits into his mouth and chewing sloppily. Soon he had packed his lower lip with pith and began sucking juice between his teeth. This feeding method, known as “wadging,” gives the chimps a perpetual, clownish smile, like children playing ape with slices of orange.

  Over the past two weeks I’d grown used to the sight and to the chimps’ excited hoots and shouting as they arrived at the tree each morning. Living in scattered subgroups throughout their home territory, chimpanzee troops keep in contact with a range of loud vocalizations. In this case, the message of their shrieks was unmistakable: “Fruit! Yahoo!! FRUIT!!” These figs, a favorite food source, drew chimps from a wide area and made them unusually bold. Instead of taking flight at the first sight or sound of people, they risked feeding in open view of my house, and even let me approach to the base of the tree. My job description didn’t include habituating Bwindi’s chimp population, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to observe the apes up close.

  Theoretically, chimpanzees and gorillas diverged from a common ancestor at roughly the same time they split from humanity, between four and ten million years ago. We all share more than 98 percent of the same genes, but that small remainder accounts for significant differences between the species. Behavioral scientists debate the merits of each, noting the chimpanzees’ complex and dynamic social structure, their problem-solving skills, and a talent for tool making. In contrast, gorillas live in comparatively stable families and show a great capacity for imagination, memory, and patience. Any gathering of primatologists divides quickly into the chimp people and the gorilla people. The chimp lovers dismiss gorillas as indolent, boring apes that soil their own beds every night, while the gorilla fans accuse chimpanzees of guile and violence, with their organized monkey hunts and attacks on neighboring troops. Where chimps are excitable, gorillas tend toward calmness, but individual personalities vary dramatically in both species, as much as they do in their human observers.

  Leaves rustled above and a younger chimp appeared, scooting out the branch toward the male. It had the pale bronze skin and white-tufted rump of a juvenile, and held its face in a loose-lipped grin, as if contemplating something funny. The joke turned sour when it spied me gazing up from below, and it screamed suddenly in fear and surprise. The noise, an ascending soprano whoop, brought a loud response from the crown of the tree, and the juvenile leaped back into the greenery, followed by the old male. Several nights earlier, the same shrieks had transfixed me on my way to the latrine, when light from my lantern disturbed a group sleeping in the yard. In the darkness, their voices had been eerily disembodied, but now I saw chimps everywhere, dropping out of the tree like paratroopers. They fled in complete disarray, a deluge of tumbling shadows silhouetted briefly against the understory’s dim mosaic of vines, saplings, and specks of daylight.

  I held my breath as they melted away into the forest. Then I eased closer to the tree, sensing an unnatural silence overhead. Sometimes, when chimps try to be quiet, they create a conspicuous absence of sound; their lack of activity is almost a noise in itself. After a few minutes, fruit pith began dropping again, then the steady patter of urine. Five chimps remained in the tree, feeding on the bounty of figs left behind by their more nervous comrades. I found a comfortable seat out of range and settled in to watch and listen.

  An iridescent flash caught my eye, and I followed the flight of an olive-bellied sunbird to its nest. The tiny husk of dried grass hung suspended like woven fruit from a natural marling of twigs and blue-flowered vines. I watched the bird enter briefly and take wing again, three times in the span of five minutes. Like the hummingbirds of temperate climes, African sunbirds are nectar feeders, with long curving beaks and a lightning-fast metabolism. They rarely perch for longer than a few seconds, constantly flitting through the undergrowth in an endless, frantic search for blossoming plants. Thinking of the recent pace of my life in Buhoma, I could relate.

  With tourism booming and the end of my Peace Corps service in sight, I dashed from one project to the next, struggling to wrap things up. Both Katendegyere and Mubare groups were fully booked now, and extra people still turned up at the office every morning, adding their names to a standby list that sometimes grew to forty people or more. Travel agents in Kampala competed hotly for our limited tracking permits, as film crews, journalists, backpackers, and tour groups from Europe, Australia, Japan, Canada, and the United States all vied for a chance to see the gorillas. The park planned to habituate a third and final gorilla group for tourism, so I hired extra trackers and began training new guides, swelling the staff at Buhoma to more than thirty people. The new warden of tourism helped manage our daily tourist shuffle, and I spent more time working at home, compiling a guide training handbook; writing trail pamphlets and fact sheets; coordinating supplies, schedules, and accounts, and fixing cups of milky tea for a seemingly endless stream of visitors.

  Even now I could hear voices at my house, a hundred yards away across the ravine. I found a view through the intervening foliage and saw Ephraim, patiently pointing out the chimp tree to a group of curious tourists. Every day, dozens of people climbed the hill to my place for a visit, from tour leaders to park staff, travelers, friends from the village, or strangers come to meet the Buhoma muzungu. “Welcome to the teahouse,” Liz used to say on busy days, but now, our “tea shop” had more business than a mall food court at the height of the Christmas rush.

  With so much work left to do and the promise of new gorillas to habituate, Liz, Karen, and the wardens had all encouraged me to stay on in Bwindi. In certain cases, the Peace Corps allowed volunteers to extend for a third year, the way John Dubois had stayed to finish Buhoma’s community campground project. Sitting in a patch of sun-flecked shade beneath the fig tree, with chimpanzees feeding calmly above, the prospect of another year looked incredibly appealing. But another reality awaited me outside the forest—the subtle but mounting strains of life as a village muzungu.

  I joined the Peace Corps hoping to find a sense of place in a foreign community and felt I’d reached that point in Buhoma. But my place was a little strange. Outside the close circle of my friends and coworkers, people still regarded me as a kind of bizarre addition to the village landscape. When explorer Richard Francis Burton first penetrated the East African hinterlands, he found that a host of mythical expectations preceded him:

  They [muzungus] had one eye each and four arms; they were full of “knowledge,” which in these lands meant magic; they caused rain to fall in advance and left droughts in their rear; they cooked watermelons and threw away the seeds, thereby generating small-pox; they heated and hardened milk, thus breeding a murrain among cattle; and their wire, cloth, and beads caused a variety of misfortunes….

  I hoped that I hadn’t advanced any of these theories, but knew I would always be an outsider to most people, the object of curiosity and constant scrutiny. Peace Corps literature described this effect as “life in the fishbowl,” and it led to a sometimes comical lack of privacy. I often carried on conversations with people who stood outside the shower stall while I bathed, chatting about crops, weather, or the health of their families.

  Over time, this unyielding attention took its toll on any visitor. In Burton’s early journals, he reacts with bemusement:

  …every settlement turned out its swarm of gazers, men and women, boys and girls, some of whom would follow us for miles with explosions of “Hi-i-i!,” screams of laughter and cries of excitement.

  Halfway into the two-year march, however, he sounds on the verge of a breakdown:

  We felt like baited bears: we were mobbed in a moment, and sc
rutinized from every point of view…. Their eyes, “glaring lightning-like out of their heads,” as old Homer hath it, seemed to devour us…

  I hadn’t noticed any Homeric lightning bolts yet, but there were certainly days where I longed for anonymity.

  I had also begun reaching the limits that culture placed on my relationships with friends. While I’d formed close bonds with Hope and Phenny, William, Alfred, Ephraim, and many others, the sheer disparity between our backgrounds often prevented a deeper connection. We worked and laughed together every day but found our conversations at an impasse where cultures diverged. At these times the friendships became instinctive: we still felt close, knowing how much better we’d communicate if only we’d grown up in the same world.

  “Ah, Tour, we will be missing you,” Alfred said sadly, when I told him I’d be leaving at the end of two years. “You should get a wife and one small banana shamba in the village, and just stay here.”

  “No, no. Not a shamba,” I replied. “I will open a new tonto bar, with discos and video shows every night!”

  I joked to cover my discomfort about the decision. It was an Ugandan trait, levity as counterweight to sorrow. But in spite of my ambivalence, I knew that departure was the right choice. I’d met several volunteers and expatriates who tainted their whole experience by staying abroad too long, by letting life in the fishbowl turn cultural stress to bitterness. I wanted to leave Uganda on a positive note, when it would still be hard to go.

  A chest beat rang out through the mist, haunting and urgent, like a three-tone message drummed on hollow wood blocks. Formed by the cupped palms of a silverback rapidly striking his body, the noise of chest beats can travel more than a mile, but this one was close, rising out of the trees just across the clearing. It came again, a staccato challenge that hung in the air until someone from Katendegyere group pounded out a response.

  Poc-thud-poc-thud: the rhythm sounded strangely offbeat. It’s Kacupira, I realized with affection. His broken wrist had healed long ago, but its sharp backward angle prevented the left hand from striking palm-side down. The resulting syncopation identified him as surely as a fingerprint.