by MP Miles
“Unless? Unless what?”
“Unless he flew.”
“He’s no money.”
“Or unless he got off the train before the Tanzanian border and went up the lake.”
Angel had been standing at the wall map at the time. He had seen the lake stretching long and thin from the very top of Zambia. He had followed it with his finger, knowing that it continued into the heart of Africa.
“Is that possible?” Angel had asked.
“There is a passenger vessel on Lake Tanganyika. It’s often broken down.”
David had laughed.
“Or there’s always Winston.”
“Who is Winston?”
“An old university friend. Bit of an oddball. Brilliant mind; could have run the economics of the country a lot better than KK’s current bunch but took himself off to captain a ship on the lake. Is this conversation recorded?” he’d asked. “Do not tell anyone I spoke ill of the President’s team.”
Angel had still had his finger on the map.
“But you know that if he gets to the top of the lake,” David had reminded him, “to get to Kenya he has to travel through…”
Angel had already seen the route and where it led.
“Yes. I know, David.”
Both had remained quiet, each lost in their thoughts, and the call had ended silently without goodbyes.
Angel wriggled his toes at curious tiny fish in the river. He knew he’d have to go to Kenya. There was nothing he could do from Pretoria. He wouldn’t tell Elanza about it. The chances were it would be a wasted mission.
Angel had already worked out Ralph’s likely route from the top of the lake to Nairobi. Ralph probably had no idea of the risk he was taking. The thought of where Ralph had to travel through made Angel shiver. He had to go through Uganda.
Fifteen
Azzurra’s pickup truck was white, United Nations white, with two long Italian words and then Medica in red writing on the door. The logo, also red, had three letters, one inside the other, made into concentric circles with a wide annulus and a big fat ‘Make way, I’m a doctor’ red cross right in the middle.
Azzurra had been driving fast while the road was good. Fast in Burundi seemed to be sixty kilometres an hour, a speed that allowed them to travel over bad patches of road which made the suspension snarl but didn’t break anything.
They were heading north and east out of Bujumbura, the late afternoon sun harsh on the side of Azzurra’s face so that she wore her wide-brimmed hat tilted, like an Anzac soldier. She wore long trousers and a full-sleeved shirt, olive green but not of any recognisable camouflage pattern. Ralph expected matching black boots. Instead she had brown canvas shoes with ridged rubber soles that gave grip without holding too much mud. Ralph considered that on most people the whole outfit would be practical, possibly vaguely military. On Azzurra it came straight from a Milan fashion house’s ‘tropical rainforest’ spring collection. She wore neither make-up, perfume nor jewellery. Some women had no need. A very few women knew they had no need. Her watch looked as if it had been free with her breakfast cereal but her sunglasses were smoky grey and gold-framed. Ralph pondered how many hours picking flowers in Burundi an accessory like that might be worth.
“What are these flowers?” he asked.
They had been driving under an hour, climbing through cultivated land, now approaching the small town of Bubanza. Rows of yellow and white flowers, like tall daisies, ran away at right angles to the road. Groups of women and children snaked in irregular lines down the fields, cutting the flower heads and throwing them over their shoulders into wicker baskets on their backs.
“They are chrysanthemums, for pyrethrum. It’s a natural insecticide, extracted from the flowers after they’ve been dried in the sun. It’s used for mosquito sprays and household insecticides to control cockroaches and ants.”
Ralph looked at the fields. They were the size of his father’s garden. Every year Mother would nag at him to dig over a small patch for summer vegetables. Eventually, as every year, he relented and spent crisp mornings in April turning the heavy Dorset clay to be planted with stick beans and marrow. They would stand, steaming cups of tea in their hands, planning what to grow, working together every year, their small garden just one of the many little links that happily bound them. Unlike the Burundians, they farmed their small field for fun.
“They are tiny little plots.”
Azzurra stopped her glasses from slipping forward as a dew of sweat formed on her nose.
“It’s small-scale production here, a cash crop for subsistence farmers with only a thousand square metres of land. Most of the pyrethrum is grown in Kenya, bigger fields, but still planted, tended and harvested by hand.”
Ralph watched the children working.
“They receive a fraction of what the extract is worth but for some it’s the only money they earn. From their small area they may pick a hundred kilograms of dried flowers. That’s equivalent to a hundred dollars, some of which will pay for school or medicine.”
Ralph looked at her. She’d pushed her hair behind one ear. He was curious to know how long it took before the tiny hole healed over where her earring usually went. A week? A day?
“A hundred dollars doesn’t sound very much. How long does it take them to pick a hundred kilograms?”
She shook her head and waved a beautiful Latin finger.
“To sell a hundred kilograms of dried flowers they have to pick four hundred kilograms of fresh flowers. A good worker can do twenty kilograms of fresh flowers a day.”
Ralph did the calculation but didn’t say anything. A hundred dollars for twenty days’ work. Five dollars a day.
“Production isn’t so good down here. The chrysanthemums like cooler temperatures at higher altitudes, two thousand metres or more, and free-draining volcanic soils. When it’s hot and dry you get lower yields and less pyrethrum in a flower.”
Ralph looked at the children in the fields, noticing something about the way they walked, the size of the baskets on their backs and the way they lifted them.
“They’re not children.”
She looked at him and sighed.
“No, Ralph. They’re not children. They’re Pygmies. Pygmy slaves.”
*
Ralph turned in his seat.
“Tell me about them.”
“In Burundi, and Rwanda, the Tutsi have been the feudal overlords for hundreds of years. The Hutu were the majority and they did all the work. At the bottom of the heap was a small population of Batwa Pygmies.”
Azzurra stopped talking while she drove. Once through Bubanza, the road, although surfaced, deteriorated. It wound around on itself in hairpin bends, climbing all the time.
“The Pygmies weren’t farmers. They were forest dwellers, hunting for wild animals and birds with nets and poison-tipped arrows. They would trade meat or honey with nearby farmers for cultivated foods. Today only a few still hunt. Most are forced to do manual labour in the villages. The Tutsi and Hutu call it a time-honoured tradition. It is slavery. They are paid with cigarettes, or used clothing, or often nothing at all. They have no choice. They have nowhere left to go. The tropical forests are cut for quick profit from the sale of hardwoods, or cleared for growing tea or pyrethrum. Governments have been funded to make nature reserves from which Pygmies are banned. Or they are evicted to make way for money-spinning big game trophy hunting.”
She looked at Ralph.
“Pygmies rely on the forest; as it disappears so do the Pygmies.”
Ralph put his arm out of the window to direct air onto his face. He felt nauseous from the winding road, the heat, and from somewhere behind him he smelt petrol fumes.
“So, what happens to them?” he asked.
“They are forced to live with no rights at all, abused by everyone. The social fabric of their small sem
i-nomadic groups breaks down. Alcoholism, domestic violence, high infant mortality – all are now common.”
Azzurra checked their progress on a map which she tried to open with one hand. Ralph held it for her as she traced a route with her fingernail, cut short but clear varnished like a table on an expensive yacht. It was an aviation chart and had very little detail, just a thin red line meandering out of a purple blob, which Ralph took to be a big town, leading to a small circle. Most of the chart was coloured shades of brown, with a slash of green running north to south which may have represented forested land. A large number in blue with a smaller figure beside it dominated each grid square. In the square they were travelling through it was ten with a smaller number four alongside. The road they were on didn’t even appear to be shown.
“They were the guardians of the rainforest. They would take what they needed and share it. Now individuals and big corporations are given exclusive rights to extract a resource, be it trees or minerals, and they keep taking it until all is gone. It’s in direct contrast to how the Pygmies care for the whole ecosystem. They have no access to traditional natural medicines made from forest plants, or to their sacred sites.”
She gave up on the map.
“Today they beg. They’ve no idea it is wrong. In their minds they are taking what others should be sharing.”
The road abruptly ended outside of a town called Ntambe, on the border of the Province of Cibitake. It was further from the capital than Bubanza Province and less visible, with a much smaller budget for roads.
A trail of brown dust now enveloped the pickup. In places, previous flooding had washed a bare hill, stripped of its trees, from one side of the road and put it at the other, the way ahead hidden underneath a moraine of mud and stone. The school at Masango, long and narrow with high windows like a chicken shed, paralleled the road. Free-range children, recently released, scratched in the dirt.
The dust lay on her face like a fine foundation.
“Commercial logging operations have put male labourers in camps close to Pygmy communities.”
She made a false laugh.
“Sexual exploitation is the worst.”
Azzurra looked at Ralph, and he saw a bead of moisture that wasn’t sweat running down her cheek.
“Pygmy women are now forced into prostitution.”
Ralph thought he should give her something to wipe her eyes. He had nothing. He spared her discomfort by looking ahead.
“Make it known. Surely then the government would have to do something. Tell people the truth.”
She wiped her eyes and smiled.
“There was a man from Torino, a little like Che Guevara. It made me smile when you talked about him at dinner. His name was Antonio Gramsci. He was the founder and first leader of the Italian Communist Party. He came from my city. He went to my university. He said, ‘To tell the truth is revolutionary’.”
She briefly squeezed Ralph’s hand.
“Sometimes telling the truth isn’t revolutionary enough.”
*
After Masango, still climbing, they travelled east along the top of a wooded ridge into the forest, the sun low and behind them.
Azzurra pulled off onto a rutted track that skirted a bulge of woodland and stopped in a clearing. They had made good time thanks to dry roads – just two hours to drive a hundred kilometres. Ralph stood exactly six thousand kilometres from the ocean at Cape Town, in the very heart of Africa.
“This is primary evergreen forest. Untouched. Just as it existed thousands of years ago.”
Ralph heard them before they emerged from the trees. They were singing. A yodelling sound would be answered by a chant as in a rugby club, and from further away a noise like an owl hooting.
Azzurra pointed to a backpack on the seat.
“Can you bring my medical bag? Leave your rucksack in the truck.”
She stood quietly by the door of the vehicle.
There were four of them – a hunting party. They arrived in close file with the point man stalking carefully, his bow and arrow at arm’s stretch ready to engage. Behind him a boy held an axe and another carried a bundle of net on his back, suspended from a wide strap around his forehead so that his arms remained free. A very old man with a wiry beard came behind carrying a wooden spear nearly two metres long, almost twice his height. He talked with hard clicks and then sang. He pointed at Azzurra and screeched and then sang again.
“Pygmies sing a lot. Not that they have much to be cheerful about.”
She touched the old man on his face with the back of her hand and spoke his name.
“San-ge.”
“Can you talk to them?” asked Ralph.
“No. They only have a small vocabulary. Most of their words deal with collecting honey.”
Azzurra pulled two twenty-litre oil cans from the back of the truck, both about half full, and gave one to each of the boys. The sun set below the treeline.
“We’ve got to go. There’s just thirty or forty minutes before it’s dark.”
She turned and followed the Pygmies. A game trail led through bamboo and banana plants at ground level, while tall red-barked hardwoods grew a round crown of huge wide-spaced branches, forming a closed canopy towering forty-five metres above their heads. Underneath, in the forest, it was already nearly dark.
The forest opened into a clearing with a huddled group of ten quickly built huts made from springy saplings bent over into the shape of an igloo and covered in dried banana leaves. Grey charcoals smouldered under a tripod of branches supporting some sort of meat wrapped in green leaves, slowly roasting.
Azzurra looked around.
“We’re going to stay the night.”
She wiped her hands on her trousers and tucked in her shirt.
“I’ve never done this before. You may have to smoke a pipe. Be polite.”
“Is this the whole village?”
“The camps are small. There are rarely more than fifty people in a group. When someone dies they bury them and move. Make a new camp.”
“Is San-ge the leader?”
“It depends what they’re doing. It’s a very egalitarian society. Whoever has the most experience or talent represents the rest. San-ge is a sort of spokesman when I visit. They don’t really have a leader.”
She took her medical bag from him.
“Western aid agencies hate it. They feel that if they aren’t talking to a head man their message won’t filter down to the rest of the community.”
A group of children with swollen bellies danced, the boys in reed skirts and headdresses.
Azzurra walked towards the children.
“I’m going to take a quick look at the kids.”
Ralph watched her work. She smiled and mimed for them to open their mouths. A child hung on to her leg so that she had to shuffle to inspect each set of teeth. While looking in their mouths she dusted ulcers on their arms and legs with cheap zinc and neomycin powder.
A woman opened the leaves over the fire, prodding an animal like a small deer, blackened and un-butchered. Ralph looked at the children’s swollen bellies. It wasn’t much protein for fifty people.
“I’ve seen what’s for dinner,” he told her. “But I’m not sure what they hunt around here.”
“They definitely do not hunt gorilla, no matter what people say. The only endangered species they may occasionally take are the great blue turaco bird and black and white colobus monkeys. Normally it’s common ground animals like shrews, or mice and rats. There are lots of different types.”
“Nice. Could be a large rat cooking, I suppose.”
She laughed.
“It’ll be an aardvark or a duiker. Try not to eat it. It won’t harm you but their need is greater. Kwashiorkor.”
Ralph nodded.
“Is that why they’re only a metre tall? I
s it just poor nutrition?”
“They are less than one and a half metres tall,” she corrected him. “It could be that the forest canopy reduces the UV levels. With low sunlight there is low vitamin D production and consequently low levels of calcium, leading to their small skeletal size. It’s just a theory.”
San-ge led them to sit by the fire where women danced in shuffling steps.
Azzurra stretched her legs out straight on the ground.
“The Egyptians knew about the Pygmies four thousand years ago. They called them ‘The Dancers of the Gods’.”
Men and women took turns with a bamboo tube pipe, smoking, watching and then dancing.
“What are they smoking?”
“It’s only hemp flower heads. It’s not narcotic. It may make your head spin but you won’t get high.”
San-ge brought Azzurra the pipe.
She sat cross-legged and held the pipe in her lap. Her head disappeared in a cloud of pungent sour smoke. When it cleared her eyes were closed.
Ralph took it from her.
“I thought you said it wasn’t narcotic.”
She lay back and stretched her arms and legs into a star, as if to make a snow angel in the African dust.
“Mmmmm.”
*
Ralph awoke in the dark, with rainforest noises very close. It had surprised him how noisy it was. By day there had been times when he’d needed to shout to make himself heard. At night it had changed into whooping sounds and clicks. In the predawn, as he lay on the ground and stirred with some stiffness, eyes still closed and with a heavy head, he listened hard to differentiate the source. There was a chattering high above in the treetops, crickets and frogs were everywhere, and then something hissed in his ear.
“Wake up. Time to go.”
Azzurra sat on a log, tying her shoelaces. Ralph watched her. She had a hairpin in her mouth. She twisted her hair into a messy ponytail, coiled it up and pinned it in a bun on the top of her head, crowning it with her bush hat. It was a very intimate, personal moment that he felt privileged to share. He would have been happy to stay forever with the Batwa, eating rat, watching Azzurra do her hair every morning.