by Thor Hanson
He turned away up the hill. “You should greet my father,” he said in a toneless voice, and led me through the lingering mass of guests. Tibesigwa Gongo sat with two of his brothers and a group of elders from the village, playing cards in the shade of a jackfruit tree. I joined them, and Phenny moved off, talking quietly with several cousins from Butagota.
Tibesigwa slapped down cards with concentration, playing matatu, a game I remembered from my days in Kajansi. “You know John Dubois was here when my wife died,” he said without looking up. “Now you can stay the night for Hope’s vigil. To remember.”
Bright yellow weaver birds chattered and dove through the branches above us, and I thanked Gongo for the invitation. “I only wish you didn’t have to have so many burials,” I told him, and he smiled wanly, saying nothing.
Later, a brief cloudburst drove all of us inside. We stood shoulder to shoulder under the eaves, watching huge drops bounce like hail off the benches and hard-packed earth in the yard. Water hammered the metal roof like a timpani, and no one bothered trying to speak as the sky faded slowly to streaks of gray and twilight. I closed my eyes, breathing smoke from the cookhouse and the smell of damp bodies all around me.
People drifted away after the rain until only family and close neighbors remained, but we still numbered more than fifty, and Gongo had to cook a whole goat for the feast. We ate in shifts, the women gathering inside while the men sat around a huge bonfire, drinking hard and telling stories. Jug after jug of tonto appeared, and the atmosphere grew strangely festive as the night wore on—more like a stag party than a wake. I found myself at a long table playing cards with Phenny, Betunga William, Agaba Philman, and others.
“Tour is the ‘Asshole!’ ” they all shouted as I lost another hand. I laughed with them and shuffled the cards, silently cursing whatever tourist had taught them such an irritating card game.
All night long I kept an eye on Phenny, who flitted from group to group, as jovial as the host of a game show, socializing, laughing, and serving beer. His gregarious act was disconcerting but an integral part of the Bakiga mourning process: celebration in the face of tragedy, a kind of ritualized group antidote for grief. No one mentioned Hope at all, and I wouldn’t learn the details of her death until the following day, when I talked to Karen and Liz.
They told me how she had turned suddenly worse and decided to seek treatment at Mulago, the best hospital in the country. Karen helped her and Phenny reach Kampala, navigating the transportation challenge as Hope’s health turned quickly from bad to worse. They spent a sleepless night at Liz’s house before catching a ride to the hospital. In the car, Hope complained of pain and numbness, first in her feet, and then in her legs and stomach. She lay in the backseat with her head on Phenny’s lap, and as her vision started to fade, she raised her hands weakly and waved. “Bye, Phenny,” she called out as she died. “Bye, Phenny, bye.” He cried and they sped through traffic, but it was too late and Hope was gone. Phenny held her eyes shut all the way to Mulago.
The vigil dragged on and I kept myself awake, sitting by the fire and listening to the stories and laughter. As the tonto jugs slowly emptied, men started dropping off to sleep, curling up under benches or finding room on the crowded floor of the house. Phenny never seemed to tire, but finally, in the hour before dawn, I talked to him alone and his face fell, aging twenty years in an instant.
“I am living in a hell on earth,” he told me, his voice small and haunted. “Nothing in this life can bring me happiness again.”
Most Bakiga people collect several names during their lifetime, family titles or clan slang, some with inexplicable meanings. In the forest, I worked with trackers like Tibamanya—“they don’t know,” and Bayenda—“they want.” Even Phenny and Hope chose appellations with double meaning; Amanda’s middle name had been Najebale, “and thank you.” As patriarch, Tibesigwa had final say over all the names of his family, and in Phenny he showed a sad talent for prophecy. Since early childhood, he had referred to his son as Vuma, “the suffering one.”
“Tour…you…friend.” Ephraim was a little drunk. He and Philman, and a few members of the trail crew sat with me on the lawn in front of my house, watching mist spiral up from the forest and sipping banana beer, the leftovers from my farewell party. Over the past few days I had made speeches, said countless good-byes, and held graduation ceremonies for the guides-in-training. The wardens thanked me with a party and a T-shirt, hand-painted with a simple epigraph: “We loved you in Bwindi Park.”
As my time in Buhoma shrank from days into hours, the poignancy of departure tainted every action with a sense of finality and significance. Familiar faces, conversations, or walks in the forest took on a distant aspect, like old newsreel footage gone gray with memory. The last trip to Butagota market; the last day with the gorillas; the last time safari ants attacked me in my sleep. I felt detached, my sadness at leaving Uganda mixed with a paradoxical relief, and the strong desire to see my home and family.
On the last morning, I hiked to the waterfalls alone, reading farewells in every birdcall and the reverent hush of the forest. Crossing Munyaga River, I felt the bridge beneath me, some poles firm and some gone loose with rot. I remembered lifting the span into place and how the trail crew laughed when we dropped a corner on Stanley’s foot. “Guma, guma!” they chanted for strength as they hoisted the timbers again, and he soaked his foot for an hour in the cold, clear water. That was years ago, I thought, and moved on.
My bags packed and my house empty, I loaded everything in Liz’s truck. It was a day like any other when I stopped by the office, with tourists visiting both gorilla groups, and several guides out leading forest walks. Phenny and William were there, and they walked me up to the road. I shook hands with William, and he wished me well, promising to write. Then Phenny was left.
“I hope you will come back sometime,” he said hollowly, looking at the ground. “But I don’t think I will still be alive.”
“Ah, Phenny…” I was at a loss. After Amanda’s death, and then Hope’s, we never spoke of AIDS. But I always knew it, and so did he.
“I am weak,” he blurted, sobbing suddenly and moving away. “I am already weak.”
I ran a few steps after him and held his shoulders. “I’ll see you again, Phenny,” I said fiercely, to myself as much as to him. “I’ll see you again.”
He wept and walked off without answering, and I crouched down in the road, swallowing tears. Behind me, I heard Liz start the truck’s engine and switch on some music. My last glimpse of the forest was a blur of green as I turned, climbed into the cab, and drove away.
Fishermen waded like tall storks through the shallows, casting their cinch nets with practiced ease and pulling them in hand over hand, faint ripples in blue water. Farther out, I watched a group of women gathering seaweed from the reef and chasing schools of silver minnows toward the bamboo poles of a fish trap. In the evening, muezzin cries drifted out from a dozen mosques, like mad auctioneers calling the faithful to prayer. Under a sunset sky of liquid orange, I wandered through Zanzibar’s fabled port district, Stone Town, one of the oldest cities in East Africa. Ancient whitewashed walls rose up around me, and narrow alleys branched in every direction, a labyrinth of shady courtyards, fish markets, and spice shops. Occasional motor scooters careened past, and I could hear traffic on the main streets, but much of the town hadn’t changed in centuries, a tranquil, Arabic place where cats lounged in elaborate doorways of hand-carved wood studded with polished brass. Zanzibar took me to another Africa, far from my world in Bwindi, an exotic pause between the chaos of departure and the shock of going home.
I traveled east across the island through a countryside redolent with spices: clove trees, cardamom, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Combined with the trade in slaves and ivory, these crops gave Zanzibar an age-old link to the Middle East and India. Huge wooden dhows plied the trade routes for centuries, giving rise to Swahili, the distinctive culture of Africa’s eastern coast. Blending local customs
with the lifestyles of India and the Arabian Peninsula, Swahili people lived in a cosmopolitan world long before traders and explorers penetrated inland. The Portuguese added a European influence in the sixteenth century, but lost hold of the region to the powerful sultan of Oman, who eventually moved his capital to Zanzibar. When Europeans returned in the mid-1800s, they found a thriving island city that served as the starting and end points for countless African journeys, from the time of Speke and Stanley well into the twentieth century.
For me, Zanzibar was a refuge. The conclusion of my time in Uganda left me with a strange mixture of release and regret, complicated by the tragedy of Hope’s death and the wrenching stress of parting with friends. I needed a transitional landscape, a foreign, anonymous place where I could restore myself before moving back home. After a lifetime of travel and exploration, Henry Morton Stanley described the subtle disappointment of a journey’s end:
When a man returns home and finds for the moment nothing to struggle against, the vast resolve, which has sustained him through a long and difficult enterprise, dies away, burning as it sinks in the heart; and thus the greatest successes are often accompanied by a peculiar melancholy.
When I left the Impenetrable Forest, my years there became instantly distinct, a finite memory. I felt Stanley’s “peculiar melancholy” but only briefly. It faded with my weariness as the weeks passed on Zanzibar, and I found a new sense of purpose, another challenge to struggle against.
In the village of Bweju, there was a small shop selling school supplies: cheap ballpoint pens and undersize notebooks decorated with cartoon dinosaurs and Arabic script. I bought one of each and returned to my favorite stretch of sand by the ocean. Overhead, lilac-breasted rollers screeched and fluttered in the dry fronds of a palm tree, and two sooty gulls soared on the trade winds, their wings curved backward like twin parentheses over the blue-green waves of the reef. Picturing Bwindi, and my last day with Katendegyere group, I uncapped the pen, opened the book, and began to write….
We hiked through a heavy gray downpour, up over Rushura and across the border into Zaire. Water pooled brown in our boot prints as we crossed a fresh-turned field, the dark earth heaped in mounds for sweet potato and yams. I walked in front with Charles, and he chose a path leading sharply down through dense thickets, to a patch of forest outside the park. The gorillas had been in this area for several days, making small raids in a neighboring banana plantation.
We found them quickly, hunkered down in a bower of shrubs to avoid the rain. I saw a shoulder, and part of a broad back that might have been Karema, but leaves and mist obscured the rest. After nearly an hour, the storm began to lift, and heavy sunbeams fell down through the breaking clouds. I listened to a sharp cough-grunt as Mugurusi came to life, then the snapping branches of movement. We followed slowly, but the undergrowth thickened, and I thought I would have to leave Bwindi without another clear sight of the group.
Suddenly, the forest gave way to open space, a new field, recently cleared and burned for millet. All of Katendegyere group were there, black shadows moving cautiously through the damp ash. Kasigazi followed close behind his mother, while Katome, Karema, and Kacupira brought up the rear, pausing to tear wet leaves from a tree at the edge of the forest. Mugurusi turned back toward us and stopped. His long hair was matted with rain, and it shone like dull pewter down the length of his back. He stood there for several minutes, regarding us calmly while his family crossed the blackened field behind him and disappeared, one by one, into a wall of green.
Epilogue
Tourism is not a panacea for conservation and development, but the results of this study show that under the right circumstances, it can deliver genuine benefits for local people and biodiversity.
—Christopher Guy Sandbrook, PhD
from Tourism, Conservation and Livelihoods:
The Impacts of Gorilla Tracking at Bwindi
Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, 2006
The bus groaned into a lower gear and lurched uphill, tires throwing out waves of red mud against the deep greens of tea, millet, and banana. I rode by the open window, ignoring the downpour as long-remembered scenery blurred past—Butagota, Rugando, Kanyashande. Beside me sat Betunga William, older now, with a slight paunch and his hair cut short in the city style. Recently graduated from Makerere University, he lived in Kampala and had helped me navigate from the airport to the new bus park with its daily service all the way to Bwindi. As we neared the forest, he leaned over, shouting above the engine noise and pointing out other new developments: primary schools, a secondary school, a health clinic, brick houses with metal roofs. We shuddered to a stop in Buhoma center, and I spied Tibesigwa Gongo taking shelter under the eaves of a shop.
“Gongo,” I called to him. “Agandi, ssebo!”
He squinted up through the rain, and I could see he was a little grayer, a little stooped. Then his eyes went wide. “Tour!” he shouted, and dashed out into the deluge, jumping toward the window to grab my hands. I leaned out, and suddenly Phenny was there too, and my twelve-year absence seemed to wash away in the rain, the shouts, and the laughter.
As I settled briefly back into life at Bwindi, the nostalgia of return mixed with constant surprise at all the new developments. Days still began with a chorus of birdsong and the growl of colobus monkeys rising up from the forest, but gone was the sleepy village and the remote, underequipped park. Curio shops now lined the road, along with tourist lodges, tented camps, and an active trading center serving the growing population of guides, drivers, rangers, camp workers, and soldiers. My house beside the forest had been pulled down and replaced with an army encampment, and there was a guarded gate separating the park from the village. Where the sound of a vehicle used to bring us outside for a look, minivans, pickups, Land Rovers, and boda boda motorcycle taxis now vied for space on the narrow road, and a trumpeting horn announced the evening arrival and predawn departure of the daily Kampala bus. Locals and tourists alike surfed the Internet via satellite at the Buhoma Telecenter and gathered around “the stump,” a dedicated bench near the park entrance with the only clear cellular reception in town.
Inside the forest, familiar footpaths still wound through wet green and shadow, but the years had brought changes to the gorilla community as well. Soon after my departure, Katendegyere group had begun to fall apart. Katome and Karema dispersed to live alone and old Mugurusi had finally died, leaving Kacupira as the lead silverback. He traveled with Nyabutono and Kasigazi, but they ranged widely, making tracking and viewing difficult. When they passed into the remnant forest and surrounding shambas in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), a new warden forbade the trackers from following them across the border. Unaccompanied, they were vulnerable to poachers or to farmers angered by their crop raiding. On one such occasion, the gorillas never returned.
“We stayed for days and days searching the border,” Phenny told me sadly, “but there were no trails. We never found their trails again.”
The poaching incident was never investigated, but for those of us who knew Kacupira, Nyabutono, and Kasigazi, their deaths were not unmourned.
While part of me missed the older, quieter Buhoma I’d known, I couldn’t begrudge anyone in the village the new opportunities tourism had brought. I spent days walking the area, visiting friends and seeing how people had taken advantage of their expanding options for education and employment. With his university degree completed, William had just founded a Kampala-based tour company and was gathering funds to pursue a masters degree. Phenny’s canteen had expanded into a full-service tourist camp, and Alfred Twinomujuni was now the most sought-after birding guide in all of Uganda. Enos Komunda had finished seminary and risen quickly through the church hierarchy to become dean of the district cathedral at Kanungu; many people expected him to be appointed the next bishop. Magezi Richard managed the new health clinic and operated a lodge catering to drivers and budget tourists. Levi Rwahamuhanda, Medad Tumugabirwe, Caleb Tusiime, and Stephen M
ugisha led the park’s growing ranger-guide staff and Agaba Philman headed the new porters’ guild. Ephraim Akampurira was an antipoaching ranger at nearby Mgahinga National Park, and even muzee Dominico had found employment, tending the landscaping and garden plots at the new health clinic. Of my old park colleagues, only warden Ignatius Achoka and stalwart Katendegyere tracker Mishana James had passed away; everyone else seemed to be thriving.
One night I sat up late with Phenny, drinking cups of waragi by lamplight in the covered banda beside his canteen. I met his two young children, his wife, and a second wife he had married in the Bakiga fashion. All were healthy, and Phenny told me he traveled regularly to Kampala for medical treatment. “These new medicines,” he said in a quiet voice. “They might have made a difference for the late Hope.” Eventually, our conversation came around to another tragedy, one that nearly spelled the end of tourism in Bwindi.
On a night in March 1999, Phenny had slept with a loaded park rifle tucked under his bed. Earlier that day he and other park rangers had helped repel a cross-border raid on nearby Butagota by the Interahamwe, a Rwandan Hutu militia living in exile in Zaire. But that attack had only been a feint, and he awoke the next morning to the sound of gunfire as the militiamen descended on Buhoma, their true target. Grabbing the gun, Phenny ran out into the early light and began shooting to protect the park, to protect his home, to protect his new family.
Already the campground was in flames and deafening grenade explosions announced the end of several park vehicles and tourist vans. Phenny saw dozens of ragged gunmen descending the path from Rushura Hill and emptied his rifle in their direction. He watched one man fall before throwing down the gun and fleeing into the forest, the bullets of their return fire hissing through the vegetation around him.