by Norman Lewis
‘Greetings Uncle,’ Dominguín said. ‘How far do we have to go to get into deep water again?’
‘Deep water?’ the mulatto said. ‘There isn’t any. From this point on upstream it’s nothing but pools and rapids. It beats me what makes people like you try to get up this river when there’s no water in it, in whaling ships the size of that. I’m always being dragged away from whatever I’m doing to give someone a hand. Where are you going anyway? There’s nothing but a few million trees up there.’
‘This man’s looking for an Indian village,’ Dominguín said.
‘There’s an Indian village, all right,’ the mulatto said, ‘but you’ll never get to it in that boat. You’d better leave that deep sea vessel with me and wade upstream if you want to go. You’ll probably find the Indians fishing on the other side of the rapids. Maybe they’ll take you up in their canoes.’
This seemed the only solution to our problem. We dragged the cayuco across to the bank under the mulatto’s shack and tied it up.
‘Who are you voting for?’ Dominguín asked the mulatto.
The mulatto’s angry laugh turned into a cough. ‘Who’m I voting for? Why, I’m voting for the only chap who’s ever done anything for me. Myself.’
‘You should vote,’ Dominguín said coldly. ‘This is your chance to show your sense of civic responsibility.’
‘Listen to me,’ the mulatto said. ‘I don’t throw my vote away. If they want to do the right thing by me, all well and good. Last time I only got a half a sack of rice out of it. They’ll have to do better than that. They offered to send a boat to pick me up. But I told them, I said it’s got to be something substantial this time. We never know where our next mouthful is coming from.’
We left enough of our food with this man to hold back the frontiers of hunger for another few hours. He was a colonist of a forgotten world; limited by his depleted store of energy to burning off a few square yards of jungle a year, thereafter depending on the meagre return of seeds sown in uncultivated soil, left to themselves. He and his like – and there were millions of them – were condemned by malaria, semi-starvation, and by civilisation’s total neglect, to an endless servitude of years spent lying in a hammock by the waters of such rivers. His cash income, on average, would hardly be more than fifty dollars a year.
We began to splash on upstream again. ‘They haven’t much civic feeling,’ Dominguín said. ‘The Chocos are like that, too. You can’t get hold of them to make them vote. The Cunas vote because it’s easy to round them up on the islands, and set up polling stations.’ He began to reminisce happily. ‘Last election, I was working as an agent for Don Fulano’ (he mentioned the name of a presidential candidate). ‘He was interested in buying the votes of the Cuna Indians in bulk, so we went down there to fix up a deal with their cacique. Well, we figured it was no use telling these people about the improved drains we were going to put in in Panama City, so we told the cacique we were fixing up a rainmaking ceremony and we would like to have his people’s help. The cacique was pretty flattered to have us come to him with a proposition like that. They’re nice people, the Cunas. They like to help. We gave the cacique an outboard engine and he saw to it that we got every Cuna Indian vote.’ Dominguín made a face. ‘The way things went, it didn’t do Don Fulano any good. The opposition got to hear about it. They hijacked the boat taking the ballot papers back to Colon, and threw them into the sea.’
Fortified by the opium of his memories, Dominguín struggled on philosophically. By now we would certainly be unrecognisable as the men who had left the urbane precincts of the Panama Hilton hotel only four hours earlier. Our clothes were wet, shapeless and bedraggled, and smeared in places with the blood from minor abrasions suffered when we had slipped and fallen among half-submerged boulders. All the exposed parts of my skin were brilliant with sunburn. At this stage of our journey, we experienced a single dramatic moment when we saw a long thin pink snake swimming vigorously towards us. Our Indian, alerted by Dominguín’s yelp of horror, reached under the surface, found a large stone and with what seemed to me incredible marksmanship hit the small agitated target represented by the snake’s head fairly and squarely at a distance of perhaps twenty-five feet. The snake, seemingly stunned, lay still on the surface for a few seconds, and then began to wriggle towards us again, whereupon the Indian coolly repeated his feat. This time the snake gave up and turned back. Dominguín said that he recognised it as the most deadly of all snakes, an aggressive monster known in Spanish as quatro narices whose bite produces infallible and agonising death in ten minutes. The Indian, on the other hand, said that it was quite harmless.
This whiff of Kemp’s high adventure reminded me of the other extraordinary animal life his leaflet had promised.
‘Do you have any jaguars in these parts?’ I asked the Indian.
‘No. We have small cats. No jaguars.’
‘Tapirs, then?’
‘What are tapirs?’
I described one, modelling the form of its pygmy trunk with my hands.
‘There is no such animal. They do not exist.’
I didn’t want to argue about it. ‘Deer?’ I asked.
‘There are no deer.’
‘There must be some animals,’ I said. ‘What animals are there?’
He thought for a few seconds. ‘Rats,’ he said. ‘There are many rats. And iguanas. We eat the iguanas.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘They taste like chicken.’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Much better than chicken.’
This conversation was going on sporadically while we were bypassing the rapids, forcing our way through the vegetation along the river bank. Many thorny bushes and saw-edged reeds blocked our advance. These left the Indian unscathed but Dominguín’s hands and my own were soon bleeding freely, and rents began to appear in our clothing.
Fortunately, as the mulatto had promised, two Indians were fishing just above the rapids. Our Cuna spoke to the two Chocos in some Indian lingua franca, and they agreed to lend us their canoes. The Cuna was to take me in one canoe, and Dominguín was to go with one of the Chocos in the other. This Choco was taller and slimmer than our Cuna. He had the face of an Eskimo, a polished helmet of black hair, and wore cotton shorts. I found a pair of ordinary skin-diver’s goggles in his canoe along with his spear, and his morning’s catch of two tiny fish. Dominguín asked him why he did not paint his body, and the Choco said that he did not have the time.
Our progress, although faster now, was still laborious. The river had become a series of pebbly shallows, separated by fairly deep pools. We paddled through the shallows where the water was just deep enough to float the empty canoes, and when we came to a pool the Indians ferried us across. It must have been midday before we reached a steep path leading up to what was described as the Choco village. When we got there we found a single house surrounded by the usual meagre, weed-infested fields, and half-charred tree trunks. The house was in reality an open-walled platform, made of branches roped together and thatched with reeds. As we came up the steep path, the Choco Indian shouted, and the house was suddenly full of running people who were either completely or nearly naked. I soon realised that they were rushing for their clothes. Skirts were hastily going on and blouses being pulled over heads. Only a row of children with enormously distended stomachs, who stood peering down at us, were not involved in this excitement.
Presently a young woman carrying a baby came down the ladder. She was dressed shapelessly in a kind of shift made from a sack that had contained fertiliser, and she wore gypsy earrings of city manufacture and several necklaces of bright, crude beads. Her face was completely devoid of expression. The Choco who had brought us conferred at length with her, and then turned to me and announced in pidgin Spanish that she and the other members of the household agreed to be photographed with their clothes off for four dollars.
Dominguín was able to throw some light on this proposition. He discovered that several months previously a camera-armed party
of tourists had been here, and through these the Chocos had learned that their normal state of nudity had become a marketable asset.
And were their bodies in fact painted in the geometrical designs one had heard about? I asked.
No, they were not it seemed. These were civilised Chocos who had learned to despise barbarism of that kind. They lived by growing a little grain and fruit – principally bananas, for the market, and while they waited for the maize to come up and the bananas to ripen they had nothing much to do but keep alive. Recreation? The Choco’s face was incapable of amazement, but he clearly didn’t know what I was talking about. Music? – Surely the young men still piped tunes on their primitive flutes? He shook his head. They’d had an old gramophone once, but it was broken now. Dominguín became impatient of my naivety. ‘What do they do? Why, they sleep, of course.’
A powerful, heavy-faced matriarch now appeared. She was the cacique’s wife. The cacique was away voting. With some pride she admitted that his vote had cost a pair of trousers and a vest.
‘But the village?’ I asked. ‘Where are the other houses?’
‘They’ve fallen down,’ the woman said. ‘There used to be many houses but the people all died or went away. Now what’s left of us live in the one house. The cacique forbids the young men to go and work in the town, but they go all the same, and leave the women and children to look after themselves.’ This year alone a woman had died in childbirth and the fever had carried off two children. Doctors? Unemotionally, the cacique’s wife continued her saga of neglect. ‘Two years ago a doctor came here and stuck a needle into everybody’s arm. Why, I couldn’t tell you. We haven’t seen one since. The uncivilised jungle people have a medicine for fever, but it takes two days to get there, and the Shaman expects something like a pig in return. They’re supposed to be Indians like us, but they’re just as bad as the townspeople the way they take advantage of us.’
My eyes went back to the primitive shelter, only one degree removed as human habitation from the cave. Around us for a distance of twenty or thirty yards, the earth was scattered with stinking debris. Pygmy diseased-looking pigs squealed and rooted among the rubbish. ‘Why do you live here?’ I asked.
‘This is our home,’ the woman said. ‘We’re civilised people. Planters. We believe in God. We grow bananas, and sell them in the town. The only trouble is they see you coming when you’re an Indian. If it’s a load of bananas you’ve got to sell, they’ll tell you they’re the wrong kind, or they’re past the season. Supposing you offer them a monkey you’ve caught in a trap, they’ll tell you it’s going to die. It’s a question of half price, take it or leave it. We’re Indians. We have to take whatever they like to offer us. They know we can’t argue with them.’
A shadow fell across us. I looked up. The sun had just fallen out of a last enclave of blue sky into curdling clouds. Thunder came galloping to meet us over the tree tops, and raindrops began to spatter all round. We said goodbye to the Chocos, scampered back down the path to the canoes, and began the journey back. Now I knew what the real high adventure of Kemp’s tour was to be. It was to be an adventure of rain.
When the rain started in real earnest, it seemed to close in on us until we were in a prison-cell of water. At first the trees were still visible, lightly sketched in by a Chinese artist behind the curtains of rain. Then the rain washed out all the landscape. Dominguín’s canoe, only a few yards ahead, had vanished. We slid forward over a vapour of pulverised water. Lightning glared all round us in prismatic colours, but a soundproof wall of rain held back the roar of thunder. Huge severed leaves came flapping down and fell in my face and on my lap. I found it helped to hold a hand over my nostrils to avoid breathing water. Presently I felt the canoe’s bottom scrape on the shingle. We got out and began to grope our way ahead, repeating the laborious procedure of the upstream journey, alternately hauling the canoes along and then dragging ourselves into it to ride a few yards as soon as the water deepened.
Suddenly the sky had emptied itself. The clouds overhead were torn apart, and sunshine poured through. Dominguín and the Choco took shape in a brilliant mist, standing knee-deep beside their canoe. There was a faerie-like quality in this scene that transformed them into the creatures of some watery Celtic legend. It seemed that we had reached the head of the rapids, and the Choco had a suggestion to put. It would save time, he said, as well as being a perfectly safe and reasonable thing to do if we shot the rapids. The Chocos themselves, he said, did it as a matter of course, and without a second thought, every time they went down the river. He would go first to show us the channel to take, and all we had to do was to follow him.
We set off and headed for the waters prancing and leaping between the high banks ahead. Somehow the rapids had taken on a fiercer vitality than they had possessed when we had passed them going up stream. Our plan of action instantly collapsed when the Cuna, instead of remaining behind the Choco, shot into the lead. I was startled at the speed we were travelling at, and tried hard to comfort myself with the thought that the Cunas were an island people, miraculous watermen, who passed nine-tenths of their lives in boats. The canoe sat so low in the water under our weight that it only had about three inches of freeboard, and among the rocks, the races and the whirlpools of the rapids, small agitated wavelets broke continually over the side. With growing disillusionment and concern, I watched the water in the canoe’s bottom deepen. It would have been impossible to bale because the slightest movement on my part would have upset us. Black rocks crested with flying water hurtled past on each side. The six inches of water in the bottom implacably deepened to a foot. The Cuna, who had been inclined to show signs of amusement since the beginning of this difficult passage, was now laughing outright. This chilling sight prepared me for the inevitable. Indian impassivity is rarely disturbed by anything short of catastrophe. I remembered agonisingly the last Indians that I had seen laughing in this way had been the survivors of a bus crash in Guatemala.
Water poured over the gunwale now. Our weight slowed us and I saw the Choco with Dominguín bearing down. The Choco, too, was convulsed with laughter. He waved his paddle in what was perhaps a farewell gesture as our canoe sunk under me, and I found myself being carried away at such a speed that it was impossible even to influence my direction by trying to swim. A moment later I was bumping on shingle. For another twenty yards I scrambled, slipped and struggled in the water trying to find my feet before I landed on a sandbank. The current tugged like wrestlers’ hands at my ankles. Only when the water was less than knee-deep could I stand upright. Dominguín and the Choco had passed but were clearly in extremis. As I watched, Dominguín still seated bolt upright, and strangely spruce and dignified in this moment of truth, appeared to be lowered gently below the surface. An instant later water, too, cancelled out the Choco’s happy grin. Fortunately for Dominguín, who couldn’t swim, he was carried straight on to a small island, where he squatted rather miserably, until he could be rescued. Both Indians were washed up a hundred yards or so away, and came clambering back over the rocks to recover their canoes. They were in high spirits.
Perhaps an hour later we reached the mulatto’s shack. By this time our clothing had dried on us. We found the mulatto waiting for us. ‘I’ve been thinking about doing something about voting after all,’ he told Dominguín. ‘Any chance of your finding anyone who can do better than a half sack of rice, if I come along with you?’
Dominguín with his connections in the city thought he might be able to do something.
We took our seats in Kemp’s commodious launch and the mulatto excused himself. He came back carrying something like one of those straw capes which Japanese peasants are depicted as wearing in the old colour prints. This he fastened round his shoulders.
‘Going to rain in a minute again,’ he said. ‘And it won’t be a shower this time either, like the last one.’
I looked up. The sky was turning into porridge.
‘Another couple of hours,’ Dominguín said, ‘and w
e’ll be home.’
Norman Lewis Fund for Tribal Peoples
Norman Lewis’s extended article Genocide, included in this anthology, was written originally for Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine. In it he describes the horrors he had seen South American Indians facing at the hands of those who wanted their lands. The article sparked an outcry that led to the founding of the world’s foremost organisation for tribal peoples’ rights, Survival International.
Survival is now the worldwide voice for tribal peoples, helping them to defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own future.
Norman called it the most important achievement of his professional life; ‘a tremendous triumph – something I would not have believed possible to achieve’. He regarded the article and subsequent creation of Survival ‘as the most worthwhile of all my endeavours’, and wrote that he had ‘reason to believe that it at least saved some lives, and probably even benefited the long-term prospects of the Amerindians’.
Survival administers the Norman Lewis Fund for Tribal Peoples which supports the publication and dissemination of hard-hitting writing on the way tribes are treated throughout the world.
Through this, the flame of Norman’s indefatigable and courageous exposure of extreme injustice continues to shine a light on to crimes against humanity – crimes in remote places which would otherwise pass unnoticed. As Survival has shown time after time, exposing these crimes is the most effective way to prevent them being repeated.