Along the River
Such are the hardships to be endured when discovering new lands in the manner we set about it!
—Bernal Diaz,
History of the Conquest of New Spain
AS WATERHOLES WENT, it wasn’t much. Bright-green reeds grew jaggedly around it, and the standing water was a less bright, oily green. Still, we could dip our canteens into it and purify its water with iodine pills or draw out a bucketful of it to wash with; and if you dropped a bottle of beer into it, it would eventually turn the beer coolish and soak off the bottle’s label that showed an elephant’s head printed on a red oval. Though it was only eight miles from our starting point in Ouanda Djallé, we had made a tardy beginning on this our first day’s walking (the caravaners’ “little start”), so we decided to pitch our camp beneath a large banyan tree near this waterhole called Mie Mai.
The ground was black with ashes in late January, the height of the dry burning season. As we all drifted across the bare earth under the midday sun to where we would make camp in the shade, it was impossible to calculate with any degree of certainty, counting professional or “white” hunters (one white, one very much black), trackers, gunbearers, water bearers, a cook, the cook’s helpers, porters carrying crates and bundles on their heads with long-accustomed ease, camel drivers leading four camels and four horses, and bewildered hunters on safari, what our exact number might be.
That morning back in Djallé—the phrase “back in Jolly” acquired the cachet of a punch line among us as we marched on, describing all manner of equipage, from extra shoes to spare eyeglasses to additional ammunition to laxatives, that to save weight we jettisoned, only to discover a crying need for farther on in the country—back in Jolly, at any rate, it had been entirely too confounding to take anything like an accurate tally. It had been hard enough, among the lime-washed headquarters buildings of the French safari company we were hunting with, just to organize the gear, animals, and hired men into the semblance of a unit a tad more cohesive than, say, a Chinese fire drill. Thirty souls, give or take, would not have been far off the mark.
Here in the northeast of the Central African Republic, the safari had initially called for a dozen camels, half-a-dozen horses, and two donkeys to transport our burdens. We were to strike off east into an unexplored portion of the safari company’s vast concession toward the border with Sudan, going afoot because motor vehicles had never been there and roads were nonexistent. No one knew if there was even any game to be found there, but it would nonetheless be the rarest of opportunities to be the first hunting party into an area where only Africans had been before and to conduct a safari along the antique principle of putting one foot deliberately in front of the other. It seemed, simply and anachronistically, the right thing to be doing even, or maybe especially, at the latter days of the shocking 20th century.
What we had not bargained for was a band of very important Saudi sportsmen sweeping in ahead of us and making off, to a well-appointed hunting camp on the small Koubo River 60 kilometers to the north, with most of the safari company’s stock of camels (for no better reason, I assume, than a certain maladie du pays, since they did all their traveling exclusively in vehicles). Claims of miscommunication were made, but obviously the fix had been put in somewhere. So because “money talks and all the rest walks,” we had to recruit porters, many of them at first refusing the offer of employment when the harebrained nature of our excursion became clear to them, then accepting with the utmost reluctance when it became equally clear that the manager of the safari company meant to take names and to remember them when future job opportunities arose. As we straggled in a quarter-mile file out of the village, past the adobe houses and fields of maize, porters running off to bid goodbye to their families, the first of numerous loads spilling from the humped backs of the green-mouthed, braying, balking, sad camels the Arabs had seen fit to bequeath us, and wound our way around the base of the tall naked rock, the djebel called Kaga Moumo that marked Ouanda Djallé’s position in the tropical geography, “plans” were jettisoned as readily as gear and we began to learn the invaluable art of living ad hoc.
The Central African Republic is in the language of the travel guides a lightly populated, landlocked, Texas-sized nation lying just above the equator. It is encased, beginning clockwise from the north, by the countries of Chad, Sudan, Zaire, the Republic of the Congo, and Cameroon. When it was part of French Equatorial Africa it was called Oubangi-Chari. It is bled by those two great river systems: the Oubangui in the south, draining on into the Congo of Stanley and Mr. Kurtz; and the Chad which is nourished by the many smaller rivers of the north before flowing on into Lake Chad.
Transitional in climate between the sub-Saharan and the equatorial, the C. A. R. is for the most part a 2,000-foot high rolling plateau, a “Guinea” savannah of tall grass and trees. It is the country, particularly in the northeast area known as Ouandjia-Vakaga, of the giant eland, equinoxial buffalo, the Western roan antelope, and the lion.
The riparian folk of the country’s south, the Ubangi, were once noted for their platter-lipped women who would purposely disfigure themselves by slitting their lips and inserting large wooden disks into them as an expedient against being selected for the harems of the Arab slaving sultans who raged unchecked across the territory for generations. In Ouandjia Vakaga the slavers exterminated many tribes, from the Bingas to the Challas to the Bongos to the Melas, in the conduct of their enterprise. Various sultans based in Ouanda Djallé carried on their grim commerce until by main force the French military put an end to it, though not until 1912. Independence was achieved on December 1, 1958, and with it came immediate native military rule. In the late 1970s the republic briefly attained imperial status when the infamous Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa had himself crowned emperor in what eyewitnesses categorized as a profoundly bizarre and fantastic ceremony. The emperor’s excesses escalated rapidly to legendary and deranged proportions, including a reported taste for human flesh, and he was relieved of his duties and permitted to scuttle off into comfortable exile in lieu of the firing squad. (Unaccountably, Bokassa chose to return some years later and now resides in prison, serving a sentence of life at hard labor [update: Mr. Bokassa—he dead, a good many years now, though not before declaring himself the 13th Apostle].)
The inhabitants of the C. A. R. who were working around us now, laying out our beds on the ground under the banyan tree and putting the white mosquito nets over them, cutting sticks to tie together into a crafty dining table with benches, rolling out their own sleeping mats, and building cooking fires, were for the most part of the Goula and Youlou peoples, while the camel drivers were Sudanese. Except for the Sudanese, they all shared the Sango trading language, the C. A. R.’s lingua franca. As I sat in the shade, one of the trackers, a suspected reprobate and retired poacher, approached the professional hunters and presented his bona fides—letters of recommendation from hunters in whose employ he had previously been. He was bare headed and had removed his shirt, and the stump of his left arm hung limp. He had lost the arm, it seemed, when his black-powder musket exploded on him a decade earlier, when he may or may not have been up to something. The truth, as is so often the case, varied with the teller.
Flopped in exhaustion in the dirt, one of the paying hunters, a largish American gentleman from parts unknown, let’s leave it at that, was already complaining bitterly and loudly about the pace we had set and the sorry state in which the new boots, that he hadn’t had the sense to break in before the safari, had left his feet. The professional hunters, the white one and the black one, tried to ignore him as they nodded cautiously over the tracker’s yellowed letters.
Contrary to rumor, the letters said the tracker was perfectly reliable, and for some reason I took to him at once. Impulsively I located a spare camouflaged cap I still had in my duffel and gave it to him. Putting it on at once, he smiled dazzlingly. Taking back his letters with a nod and tucking them under his stump, he shook hands all around. Bidding us �
�Hello” in English, he retired to his place among the other trackers. He was called Djouma, and his was the first tracker’s name I learned. The annoyed white hunter, wrapping himself in his Colonel Blimp persona, informed me then that one never gave a gift to the trackers until after the safari, for fear of its leading to insubordination.
The black white hunter, François, was of the Banda tribe and had hunted in Ouandjia-Vakaga for several years. Yet even he had never been in this neck of the bush before. A track star while in high school, known as la souconpe volante (“the flying saucer”), he had lit out one day, during one of the C. A. R.’s not infrequent periods of political upheaval [that have not abated, even now, over 30 years later, as this book goes to print], for the territories from the capital city of Bangui, where his father was then chef de police and he was a college philosophy major, to become a PH. He spoke English with effort (far better, of course, than I spoke either French or Sango), was a giggler, and showed no fear of any kind in the face of dangerous animals. He was also found to have an insatiable appetite for reggae.
The white white hunter, the W. W. H., was a short, round, bearded, blustery, British colonial whom, though I never came truly to dislike, I cannot say that I ever came to understand. My first guess was that he was in it only for the money, but there may have been a less cynical explanation for it, and him. I just never discovered it. He had arranged for the foot safari with the French company, even though he had never before hunted the C. A. R. after living and hunting most of his life in many other parts of Africa. At times he grew downright martial and would speak fondly of his war years in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, spent killing “gooks.”
The paying hunters included the Gentleman-from-Parts-Unknown and an Old Boy in the company of his wife. The Old Boy and his wife were in their late-50s but still unmistakably preppie, Ivy League, and Old Money. In their Willis & Geiger safari-wear and with their copy of Rowland Ward’s Records of Big Game, 18th Edition (Africa), tucked under the Old Boy’s arm, they cut the perfect figure of the Sporting Rich, though of the most unspoiled variety. The Old Boy’s wife, although an indefatigable walker, had lost her interest in hunting; but the Old Boy hadn’t and had seen more of it at the best of times than I knew I ever would, from Kodiak bear in the ’50s to polar bear off Kotzebue and shikars in the Madhya Pradesh in the ’60s to the big game of Tanzania, Namibia, and South Africa. The Old Boy’s family built steam cars, one of which Theodore Roosevelt got behind the wheel of, to become the first President to drive a car, and later heavy trucks. One night he mentioned to us in passing that his grandfather had died of blood poisoning after reaching out to shake his jockey’s hand in the winner’s circle and receiving a severe nip on the wrist from his own thoroughbred, while his father, notorious for driving too fast, was killed in an automobile crash in 1929.
Unlike the Old Boy’s, the Gentleman-from-Parts-Unknown’s grandfather, the Gent told us, had not died from the bite of his racehorse. And he, himself, had made his money in the coarsest of ways, and meant for no one ever to forget it. He had been to Zimbabwe to shoot once, for a week or two, but had no sense of Africa or of hunting either, at least as I comprehended them. I didn’t know what his reasons for being here were, and I don’t think he actually did either, except that to him the word “unexplored” held the promise of being able to kill bigger and less wary wild animals with which to populate his living room.
That left three others: my non-hunting friend—a Beverly Hills attorney—a Missionary-Photographer, and me.
My attorney friend had come with no romantic preconceptions about Africa. His only wish was to see someplace wild, someplace that was not a city; and the C. A. R. sounded as likely a choice as any. Thinking he needed to justify his presence, he concocted an outlandish story about being a cinematographer and went so far as to haul along an elaborate 16mm movie camera and hundreds of feet of film. But after exactly 30 seconds of trying to film the loading of the camels back in Jolly, he took one hard look at the device and packed it sensibly away in its padded aluminum carrying case, never to remove it again. He owned the only L.A. Dodgers cap in Ouandjia-Vakaga (until he presented it to our young camp helper Idris), dragged continually on a Marlboro, never complained, and was the all-around class clown. The Africans titled him Patron Sans Souci, the “carefree boss.”
The Missionary-Photographer came from missionary stock. He was a bilingual shooting parson, had been involved with the W. W. H. in organizing the foot safari, and had been invited by the French safari company to come along to act as the W. W. H.’s interpreter, take photos, and try for a giant eland. The blunt and brazen W. W. H. soon proved an arduous trial to him: After the hunt, both would behave extraordinarily unpleasantly toward each other, and for months afterward I would receive tedious letters from one attacking the character and behavior of the other, and vice versa. So the M. P. attached himself at once to François, engaging him in interminable conversations in the French language to the exclusion of the rest of us, and later describing him in a written encomium with the word “willowy.” He was far from unfriendly, though, during the safari and would never hunt on Sunday.
I, I fear, would hunt on Sunday or Christmas or the Fourth of July; and when I had heard that someone was going to walk across African savannah in a place where there was a chance of seeing giant eland, I made shameless inquiries and wrangled myself an invitation from the French safari company to come along. I outfitted myself with a 375 with a 1.5-6X scope, Dorst & Dandelot’s Collins Field Guide to the Larger Mammals of Africa that I’d picked up in Nairobi years before, Serle & Morel’s Les oiseaux de l’Ouest africain that I’d bought in Paris on the way over, Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s 400-year-old firsthand account of Hernan Cortes’s adventuring in Mexico, a Webster’s pocket dictionary, notebooks, pens, cameras, film, tins of Copenhagen snuff, a binocular, and a sturdy pair of well broken-in boots. Nevertheless, by the second day my feet went south, I let the gunbearer bear my gun, I drank enough water for three people each day, ate salt tablets by the fistful, and still sweat so much that I would never need to urinate on the trail and would often break out shivering in the sun from heat exhaustion. Yet after too many years of being out of Africa I was happier to be back than I could possibly explain to nearly anyone else’s satisfaction.
Our first night in Africa, following an afternoon of sighting in the rifles when the Gentleman-from-Parts-Unknown demonstrated an unsettling inability to make his shots find the target, ended with the W. W. H. sitting at the stick table in the blue light of the battery lanterns, drinking whiskey, and defaming (I now think primarily for our benefit) the French, both individually and as a race, for having only four sorry camels to grant us. The rest of us had already crawled into our beds when he at last got up and arranged himself in his with his 460 Magnum at his side. The air was startlingly cold and the full moon at zenith immense and round as a dollar. The W. W. H. lay with his head toward the lighted clearing of our camp. Never lie with your head toward the brush, he advised aloud, because that was where, in the “lion hour” between midnight and dawn, the lion came. Let him take you by the feet and you had at least the ghost of a chance of blowing his brains out before he dragged you off. I changed position.
No lions came that night. Leaving the other Africans behind to strike camp and pack the animals, we (with our weekly antimalarial chloroquine phosphate pills for Saturday breakfast) set off with our trackers, gunbearers, and waterbearers at dawn. We made 12½ miles that day to the Ouandjia River, seeing on the way only the fresh dung of small elephant (the size of the dung corresponding to body size, the coarseness of the dropping the elephant’s age—finer texture meaning better teeth and so a younger animal) and a troop of baboons lumbering away from us, displaying red rumps. The Ouandjia is one of the rivers which, flowing north into the Bahr Aouk, goes on to feed the Chari in Chad. When I hobbled down to it, I tugged off my boots and socks and stood in the cool water and decided never to move. It was clear and running, and after seeing the W.
W. H. dip up a tin cup and drink it, with the water spilling silvery over his beard and onto his chest, I took the cup from him and, disregarding the dire predictions of Boy Scout manuals the world over, drank the sweetest drink of my life (“For thirst,” said Bernal Diaz, “knows no laws”). And nothing befell me, mystifyingly enough.
As we lay on the sandy riverbank, the Africans went downstream to burn the tall grass to clear our campsite, and we could see swallows looping in the smoke of the wide fire, plucking insects rising out of the grass. Our food stocks were already so low that we were reduced to sardines for lunch. That afternoon, though, the Old Boy and François went out to look for game.
While they were gone, the W. W. H., the Gent, the Patron Sans Souci, and I found two square rock pools the size of small swimming pools in the river just above camp and went there to bathe. As we were all undressing beside one of them, the Gent started in on one of his reactionary political commentaries, which I had not yet learned to ignore; and I thought I might enjoy soaking in the other pool alone. As I was about to slip into the neck-deep water 100 feet from them, the W. W. H. made sure he called out to me, “Mind the crocs!” I remembered with some disquiet a photo I had once seen of the legs of a white man who had gone swimming in an African river he was convinced could not contain any crocodiles, a photo of just his legs in a cardboard box. I peered into the pool intently, then climbed in, staying in the water a long, somewhat uneasy time while a hadada ibis harangued us from the branches of a nearby ironwood tree.
As we limped back into camp in the evening, our feet still stinging from the New-Skin we had painted over our blisters, François and the Old Boy returned, packing an excellent Lelwel hartebeest on one of the gaunt horses. At dinner we were fiends for meat, eating long into the dark as the fire, which had jumped the other side of the river, continued to flare up. The camels lay placidly below us in the sand in full view of the flames. A few of the Africans crossed the river, and we could see one of them, backlit, climbing into a tree with a bundle of burning grass, directing the smoke at something. In a while they all crossed back, carrying combs heavy with wild honey.
Augusts in Africa Page 25