“Ah-ah. Masta nevah go buy something?” Kristine quipped in flawless mimicry.
“Just a cappuccino,” I said and, after agreeing a time with Sammy, we retreated into the delicious cool of a nearby air-conditioned coffee bar next to the engagingly named Why Go Suffer pharmacy, where I learned about Kristine’s work at the primate rehabilitation centre.
Augustus’s optimism proved to be correct and the following morning, a dilapidated land rover that looked as if it had been part of the initial production line at the Coventry plant in the late 1940’s, ground to a halt outside the hotel. The driver, Amos, was a cheerful, garrulous Igbo who narrated a long and unlikely list of mishaps that had accounted for the delay, but I was too relieved to see him to care.
The road to the national park was relatively quiet and passed through gently undulating landscape with gradually thickening forest. Every now and again we would pass a small cluster of thatched mud huts fronted by roadside trading stalls selling bunches of okra, eggs, oranges and kola nuts. Women pounded cassava in wooden tubs and small boys played football barefoot in scrubby clearings.
An hour or so before we reached the park, the road began to deteriorate into a succession of jagged ruts and potholes forcing Joseph to undertake a series of bone jarring swerves to avoid them. It was like being in a cement mixture. Eventually, and predictably, whilst manoeuvring to avoid a crater size depression, the land rover skidded and slewed ending up on the verge of the road, facing back the way we had come. An alarming clonking noise was coming from somewhere deep inside the engine and then with a final convulsive shudder there was silence.
Amos jumped out, opened the bonnet and was immediately covered in a cloud of viscous, swirling steam. “Ah ‘dis be big Walhalla,” he said regarding the vehicle with a look of profound disbelief.’E get hot too much,” he pointed out in case I had missed the point. We stood for a moment contemplating the stricken engine. The immense silence of the bush lapped around us, punctuated by the sound of a piece of metal slowly detaching itself from the vehicle. The nearest service station was probably back in Calabar and I began to consider the options open to us. Any misgivings I had however were quickly dispelled. Like most West African truck drivers Amos was a master of improvisation and after half an hour of wrestling with camshafts, pistons and connecting rods we were on our way.
The Blue Parrot, where I had booked into for three nights, was a former government rest-house – a somewhat basic wooden building with a reception desk manned by a small, elderly bespectacled man who introduced himself as Brains, a large, echoing dining room and several twin-bedded bedrooms radiating off from a single main corridor. Apart from myself there was only one other guest, a taciturn and lavishly bearded Scotsman, a lepidopterist who retired promptly at seven-thirty every evening and was gone before first light in pursuit of his butterflies. Cross River State was reputed to have the highest diversity of butterflies in the world and I was looking forward to seeing some of them.
Damp and sweaty, I stripped off my clothes and turned on the shower, a malign contraption long past the first flush of youth that wheezed and gasped like something in a Frankenstein movie. For two long minutes during which time I jiggled with the fixed shower-head in frustration nothing happened. And then without warning I was hit by a wall of scalding water that catapulted me against the wall. It was to be the first of several similar experiences I was to have with this capricious and wildly erratic device over the next few days. One moment the water would be boiling hot and then in a micro-second change to icy cold. For some reason, it was hardly ever tepid and over time I came to learn that the shower’s sole predictable feature was that for long periods it failed to function at all. Its most exasperating trait however was a tendency to come to a sudden juddering, unbidden stop, typically when your head and armpits were lathered in shampoo. All attempts to make it operate in a normal functioning manner it seemed had failed, and the situation was neatly summed up by Brains who, with a sorrowful shake of his head, declared that, ‘its time done come.’
Afterwards, I walked down to a small lake and sat on a fallen tree trunk watching the sun go down – an event of unvarying calm and beauty in the African bush. Bars of rose, vermillion and molten gold lingered then faded almost imperceptibly into darkness. A solitary cormorant fled across the water to join its companions on the bleached branch of a partially submerged tree. There was a sudden, urgent cry of a monkey followed by silence.
Dinner that evening was a hymn to retro British cooking. First up was Windsor soup, followed by steak and kidney pie rounded off by a surprisingly rich, moist and mouth-watering Queen of Puddings. So far, I had paid no great attention to the name of Brains the receptionist when booking in earlier but surely, I told myself, I was mishearing when my waiter introduced himself as Onions and, a little later in response to my request for some cheese, informed me that Custard, the cook, had informed him it had gone missing. I sipped my coffee and reflected that Mrs Beeton had a lot to answer to.
Isabelle Mary Beeton was a 19th century writer whose name is indelibly associated with Victorian cooking, so much so that the Oxford English Dictionary states that by 1891 the term Mrs Beeton had become used as a generic name for “an authority on cooking and domestic subjects”. Remarkably, given her early, and at times vocal, critics, her main work, The Book of Household Management, published in 1861, has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has never once been out of print. Whilst primarily concerned with food and cooking, the book concerns itself with many of the basics of coping with life as a newly married young woman in the tropics. These included suggestions for the planning for dinner parties, what clothes to wear, bringing up children, first aid and how to manage servants. One can only imagine what a life-line her book must have seemed to all those young, newly married housewives who found themselves transplanted thousands of miles to Nigeria or Ghana from their homes in Eastbourne or Tunbridge Wells.
On their departure to England many of these government wives passed on Mr Beeton’s cookbook to their servants. Quite how much the recipes were used in African households is a matter of conjecture. What is beyond dispute however was the sudden outbreak, amounting almost to an epidemic, of African children who were christened with names of dishes, or ingredients, to be found in the book – Vanilla, Parsnip, Pumpkin, Dumpling, Treacle and Trifle. I shuddered. Africans are by nature highly traditional. Was it perhaps possible that somewhere out there were people still answering to the name of Plum Duff, Bubble and Squeak or, heaven forbid, Spotted Dick?
Later, bloated with a second helping of calorie-packed Queen’s Pudding, I retired to my room and listened to the scurrying and crepitations of the local fauna above me in the thatched roof who clearly regarded the area as their private fiefdom once night had fallen. Outside on the veranda fat sausage flies and other winged insects fluttered and hurled themselves frantically against the generator-powered light bulb, temporarily drowning out the minatory hum of mosquitoes. I lay under my capacious mosquito net reading about another remarkable Victorian, the redoubtable Mary Kinsley an English explorer and ecologist whose travels through West Africa and subsequent writings helped shape European perceptions of African culture and British imperialism.
Mary Kingsley landed in Sierra Leone on 17th August 1893 and from there travelled by foot and canoe to Luanda in Angola an incredible distance of some two and a half thousand miles. By all accounts, she made no sartorial concession to the tropics, as she strode through the dense, humid and largely uninhabited forests of West Africa wearing flannel petticoats, long black skirts and carrying an umbrella.
In marked contrast to the strict racial demarcations of those early colonial times, Kingsley lived alongside the local inhabitants from whom she learned the skills necessary to survive in the jungle. Although possessed by “an utter faith in God,” she identified strongly with traditional African beliefs and on several occasions crossed swords with Christian missionaries for encouraging Africans to abandon their
customs and culture without providing any meaningful alternatives. Living among them had taught her how African societies functioned and how prohibiting customs such as polygamy, regarded as abhorrent by the English, was detrimental to their way of life. It was all very well for the missionaries, she pointed out, to urge husbands to be monogamous but from experience she knew only too well how cripplingly overburdened the workload of African wives was and the fate that awaited those women and children who were now no longer part of a family.
What would Mary have made, I wondered, of a ‘secret and highly confidential’ Circular “A” Notice’ from Whitehall distributed in 1912 to all serving British government officials, which announced that severe disciplinary action would be taken against officers found to be ‘maintaining native women in a state of concubinage.’ The decree resulted in an outbreak of near mutiny throughout the service and a Secret Circular “B” hastily followed, stating that on further consideration disciplinary action in such cases would be inappropriate.” Somehow, I felt it would have appealed to her undoubted sense of humour that surfaces in the pages of her diaries.
Next morning over breakfast (porridge, scrambled egg, sausage, bacon, kidneys and baked beans were all on offer) I asked Jason Achibe, the park’s guide what our chances of seeing gorilla were. Jason was a tall, powerfully built Igbo with a lightly bronzed complexion and a quiet but confident manner. He was, I quickly discovered, a conservationist who believed implicitly that one of the most pressing considerations in preserving a species was to safeguard its habitat. It was a maxim that is all too often overlooked, or knowingly ignored.
“About as good as driving in Lagos without spending most of your time in traffic jams,” he replied with commendable frankness, spreading a generous portion of Robertson’s marmalade over his buttered toast, and I smiled in acknowledgement. Lagos with its eighteen hours a day sclerotic, bumper-to-bumper traffic was an omnipresent feature of Nigerian life and our quest for the gorillas, spread out over three thousand square miles, made it a fitting analogy. The Cross River Gorilla, gorilla, gorilla diehli. is one of two species of western lowland gorilla found inhabiting the montane forests on the border between Cameroon and Nigeria. Less than three hundred individuals were estimated to be living in this isolated and rugged terrain and sightings of them were comparatively rare.
“The last time I saw any was nearly three months ago,” he admitted. “It was something quite special because they were close to a small herd of forest elephants near one of the rivers. Something you don’t often get to see as most of the time the elephants remain deep inside the forest.”
“I didn’t know you got forest elephants here.”
Jason gave a wry smile. “There are so many different species people don’t know about in Cross River. Just as there are hundreds still undiscovered. That’s why the local people call it the no-one knows forest.”
I looked at him uncertainly, wondering if he was pulling my leg. The no-one knows forest. Whatever the case, I just loved it.
A mile or so after leaving the rest house, we turned off the rutted laterite track and Jason parked at the side of a massive three metre red-earth termite mound. From here we would walk.
It had been several years since I had last been in a rainforest in the north of Sierra Leone and I had forgotten the primal intensity of its riotous growth, the fecundity and richness of its vegetation and the intoxicating earthy smell of leaf mould, orchids and fruit. Massive trees – giant mahoganies, iroko and red ironwood – towered above us their giant buttressed roots entwined with parasitic creepers, plants and vividly coloured flowers. Competition between trees, plants and undergrowth for space and sunlight was unrelenting. Beneath the dense canopy of leaves, long stemmed lianas looped and coiled their way up the trees seeking the sun-lit summit of the forest canopy. At the base of several of the trees were clusters of yellow and purple orchids around which a cloud of vividly green, blue and tangerine butterflies fluttered and turned with the precision of a corps de ballet, probing the blooms with their long delicate proboscises. The metamorphosis of a butterfly from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis is, for me, one of the great wonders of creation and I watched engrossed as they hovered around the creamy white flowers.
A large butterfly with an emerald green band across its ebony black forewings settled on a clump of wild begonia close to where we were standing. “A Green Swallowtail, “Jason whispered and added almost as an afterthought: “The Latin name is Papilio nereus.” I was impressed. The only Latin name for a butterfly that I was familiar with was a Red Admiral, Vanessa atalantis, named after a mystic Greek goddess Phanessa and that was because it happened to be the name of my youngest daughter. Jason went on to say that there were nearly two thousand species of butterflies officially listed in Nigeria by the African Butterfly Research Institute in Nairobi . And that it was widely believed that the region round Calabar had the world’s highest concentration and diversity of butterflies.
I simply had no idea how many species of these beautiful rainbow creatures existed in the world and at once asked him.
“About twenty thousand species,” he replied.
“And Nigeria has the most of any country?”
Jason pulled a mock-regretful face. “Not by a long way. Peru, for example, has over four thousand.”
I thought about it and, not for the first time, was reminded of just how much I didn’t know about the world around me.
The sheer lavish profusion of this hushed green world teeming with mammals, birds, reptiles, arachnids, butterflies, insects, trees, plants and flowers was almost disorientating, a reminder that nearly seventy per cent of all land-based species on earth live in tropical forests and that over a quarter of all medicines available in the world today owe their existence to the plants found in them. In some places here, it rained an incredible ten metres in a year. Over ninety per cent of the rain that falls is generated by the forest itself. Rainforests are quite literally the lungs of the planet, providing oxygen upon which all living things depend for survival, and for their role in absorbing carbon dioxide.
We halted by a mahogany tree at the edge of a small sunlit glade close to the banks of the Cross River, where it cut a deep ravine through the foothills. From all sides came the incessant zithering of cicadas, the ratcheting of insects and screams of monkeys. There was a sudden explosion of wings from a nearby thicket and a jade green turaco with bright magenta wings took off, making me jump and catch my breath.
As often happens we heard the chimpanzees long before we saw them, heralded by an animated hooting from deep in the forest that began with a series of low key calls rising in volume to a chorus of higher pitched hoots. This rising crescendo of sound is one of the most electrifying sounds of the rainforest and reverberates in the mind long after it has finished. They vocalised in this manner, Jason explained, to communicate excitement at reuniting with members of their community or to draw attention to the whereabouts of an unusual food source. I sat there twisting and turning my head in all directions to locate them and then suddenly the forest was full of them.
There must have been thirty or forty of them. They were clearly aware of our presence but paid us no special attention. Some of them remained in the trees, others roamed around the far side of the glade, the adults foraging for termites, ants and the plump grubs that appeal to the chimp palate. Two females sat close together picking fleas out of an infant, several of the youngsters played games of tag, chasing each other around tree trunks and bushes. It was like a cover illustration from a long-ago children’s book on Africa.
A young chimp, clearly in the early stages of learning, was trying to catch termites with a twig. It would take him another five years or so, Jason told me, before he would be able to master the complexities of modifying the size and shape of a stick to access a specific hole. For the moment, however he was managing well enough judging by the number of the insects covering his twig.
Pan troglodytes, chimpanzees once roamed in their million
s through equatorial Africa from the Ivory Coast through the Congo and into Tanzania. Today however their range has been reduced to fragmented and isolated pockets in West and Central Africa. The giant logging companies have opened previously inaccessible swathes of the forest and the resultant tracks for their lorries have allowed bush meat hunters to penetrate habitat that were previously unreachable. The result for the chimpanzees has been a disaster leading to a massive population decline, and in some regions, their complete elimination. Whilst traditional subsistence hunting as a source of protein has been practised since earliest times there is now an escalating but quite unsustainable bush meat trade. Fifty years ago, there well over a million chimpanzees in Africa. Today they are extinct or severely endangered in over half of the twenty-two countries where they once existed with under two hundred thousand thought to be living in the wild.
A large male with formidable canines, whom I took to be a member of the top-ranking hierarchy, was busily engaged in picking leaves from a dun coloured plant. After careful inspection, he would roll the leaves around in his mouth before swallowing them whole. Studies by researchers in the field have shown that chimps deliberately ingest tough or hairy plants as an antibiotic for gastro-intestinal disorders and to rid themselves of intestinal parasites. The leaves pass through them pulling the parasites from the stomach wall like Velcro. Exactly how the chimpanzees know which plants to select and treat themselves accordingly, and how they recognise what is wrong in the first place, are questions still not fully understood. Many of the plants they consume are used in medicine and one creeper, Ancistrocladus korupensis, contains elements useful in the cure of some forms of cancer.
After half an hour, maybe longer, as if in response to some communal signal the chimps began to slowly amble in disjointed groups back into the forest. The silence seemed to emphasise their absence and I felt a momentary absurd sense of loss. It was not something however I had time to dwell on for Jason signalled me urgently. He was squatting by the side of a sandy track partially cloaked by ferns and low-growing plants and immediately pointed to a series of knuckle-like imprints clearly visible in the damp earth. They were enormous. Twice the size, I estimated, of a human hand.
Somewhere East of Eden Page 4