Wild Spirit

by Henderson, Annette

  It struck me then that the project timetable seemed out of kilter: the surveyors’ arrival should have been put off until things were ready for them. But I had a lot to learn about remote Africa.

  Before bed, Mario had some exciting news: ‘We have a distinguished visitor arriving tomorrow – Peter Telfair, the managing geologist from the old days. He’ll stay overnight.’ I looked forward to meeting him. It would give me an opportunity to learn some more of the camp’s history.

  Win had parked the Kombi near the old sample shed, close by the guesthouse, where we could use the bathroom. In the morning, we erected the canvas annexe to give ourselves some privacy and somewhere to dress and undress standing up.

  After breakfast we had the camp to ourselves. Mario was at the débarcadère waiting to meet Peter from the morning pirogue, and the labourers were out in the forest cutting survey lines – narrow swathes through the underbrush to give the surveyors straight lines of sight for their measurements. The lull in activity gave us a perfect opportunity to explore the parts of the camp we hadn’t seen before.

  The day was hot and steamy with little cloud. We set off on foot, taking the dirt road past the surveyors’ quarters and beyond, to the site of the old expatriate houses. The area had been cleared in the 1960s, but the vegetation had since grown back, and shoulder-high grass covered much of the ground. We pushed our way through it and came to the remains of the houses – bamboo structures rotting in the sun. The thatched roofs had partially collapsed, and chinks of sunlight glinted through the perished slats on the walls. The abandoned gardens had been smothered by wild flowers and vines, but mature avocado trees still stood tall, laden with ripe fruit. Brilliant butterflies danced through the air and lighted on blossoming vines. We didn’t speak, reluctant to break what felt like a spell. I could almost feel the spirits of the people who had lived, suffered and toiled there.

  Nearby, a stand of bright pink waxy flowers, each as large as a human hand, stood stiffly on tall straight stems that reached over my head. The blooms looked like giant waratahs, except that the petals were glossy and hard as china. I stood on tiptoes to smell them, but they had no fragrance. I ran my fingers over the stiff petals. They seemed like a creation of science fiction, out of place in the forest. It turned out I was partly right: I learned much later that they were roses de porcelaines, natives of Martinique, Costa Rica and other Caribbean countries, but Gabon had adopted them as its national flower.

  We skirted the porcelain roses and came to a cracked cement floor and waist-high concrete and tile benches that must have been part of the old geology laboratory. At our approach, a black-and-yellow-striped snake sunning itself on the benchtop moved lazily away. Flocks of rainbow bee-eaters whirled and called overhead.

  But for the bird calls and the insects’ drumming, everything was still – the place lay in a kind of sleep. I thought to myself that once this new exploration project was complete and everyone had left, the forest would do the same thing again – grow over it all as if it had never existed.

  Mario arrived back with Peter Telfair just before lunch. I was washing clothes in a plastic basin when a Hemingway-esque figure in cream stovepipe denims and matching jacket climbed out of the Toyota, nursing two bottles of Scotch. He looked about sixty, with sparse grey hair and a weather-beaten face.

  ‘What’s this? A white lady! How long’ve you been here?’ The accent was American, east coast.

  ‘G’day, I’m Annette. We got here yesterday.’

  ‘Peter Telfair. Glad to know you! Come on in for a drink.’ He walked into the guesthouse, stood by the empty fireplace and scanned the room, taking in every detail. His gaze lifted to encompass the view through the louvres out over the blue-green expanse of forest. I watched the emotions play across his face. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, swallowed hard and strode towards the kitchen.

  ‘Étienne! Bernard! Bonjour! Comment ça va?’

  ‘Patron!’ they gasped. ‘C’est bien vous?’ As he shook their hands, tears sprang to their eyes. Shared history had bound them together, but it was almost a decade since they had last met.

  Over lunch, conversation ranged across many topics, but one practical matter dominated. Mario said, ‘We’ve got a major problem with the water supply. The pressure’s suddenly dropped to half. I’ve tried to find a diagram of the old system in the files, but there doesn’t seem to be one.’

  ‘How about I take a look at it?’ Peter offered. ‘I can still remember how it works.’ Later we learned that he was the person who had designed it.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Win offered. ‘One of us should be familiar with it.’

  I decided to tag along as well, out of curiosity. Accordingly, after lunch the three of us trudged up the hill beyond the edge of the camp to where a concrete cistern about four metres square had been built into the hillside. A galvanised-iron pipeline laid in a narrow V-shaped gully fed it from a spring further up. We scrambled up the gully to the top, looking for the water take-up point.

  ‘This is it,’ Peter said. A small concrete drain fed the water from the spring into a 200-litre metal drum via a pattern of holes in the lid, which filtered out leaves and stones. On the downhill side of the drum the pipeline led to the cistern, having deposited any sediment at the bottom of the drum. The system was brilliantly simple, but the drum needed to be cleaned out regularly – a point neither Mario nor Doug had realised.

  Leaf litter had built up on the lid: Peter raked it clean then lifted the lid off. Inside, the drum was choked with silt. He rolled up a sleeve and grinned at Win. ‘How long’s your arm?’ They knelt down, one each side, and plunged their arms into the water up to the shoulder, hauling out fistfuls of mud. I watched for twenty minutes as they flung the mud out into the forest, until finally they could feel the bottom of the drum.

  ‘That should do it.’ Peter replaced the lid and stood up. We walked back a different way, following another pipeline from the cistern to the surveyors’ quarters. About halfway along, we found water seeping from a joint in the pipe into a deep puddle.

  ‘There’s your other problem,’ Peter said. ‘Mario will need to get on to that. In the old days someone used to check the water lines every day.’

  After dinner, Mario and the surveyors retired early, leaving Win and me by the fire with Peter. It was the opportunity I had hoped for to ask him about the history of the camp.

  ‘How was iron ore discovered here?’

  Peter drew an old map from his bag and smoothed it out on the coffee table. ‘An old French piste militaire – an army track – used to run between these two villages here – Mekambo to the east, near the Congo border, and M’Vadhi on the banks of the Ivindo, about an hour’s journey upstream from here. In the 1890s, a French soldier walking the track came across a group of people using forged iron spearheads. It was such an important discovery that he made a report to the colonial government. When systematic geological exploration started around here in the 1950s, we used their old records.’

  ‘So what does “Belinga” mean?’

  ‘It’s the local Bakota word for iron.’

  ‘And how did this camp start?’ As I asked the question I could see he was reliving it all, his mind snapping back as if it were just a week ago.

  ‘We sited and established it in the late 1950s. I was the managing geologist, responsible for everything. Over the years, we employed more than 300 Gabonese workers on the exploration program. We blasted tunnels into the mountainsides to sample the ore and cut eighty kilometres of tracks through the forest.’

  I told him we had seen the old split bamboo houses that morning.

  ‘Ah yes, they worked well on the whole, but they were so open that a leopard wandered into someone’s living room one night.’

  ‘Was anyone hurt?’

  ‘No, not that time, but people here can tell you stories of leopards taking their relatives from inside a house. Just ask Étienne.’

  ‘What about the research scientists
who worked here?’

  ‘We had lots of people working in different fields – birds, bats, monkeys and so on – but mainly with the western lowland gorillas. There was a French primatologist, Annie Hion, who hand-reared eight of them here. One of them was called Arthur; he was like a member of the family. When we used to sit around having a drink at the end of the day, Arthur would be there with us, sitting on a chair, drinking beer out of a glass. He was included in all our social gatherings.’

  I sat transported, trying to imagine how that must have been.

  Peter’s face softened and he smiled. ‘People used to carry Arthur around on their backs while they worked. And one of his favourite pastimes was friendly wrestling. Some of the men used to wrestle him while everyone else watched. He loved it.’

  My knowledge of gorillas was minimal, but these stories of Arthur fascinated me. We talked until almost midnight, by which time the fire had burnt down to a pile of ashes and we were all ready for sleep.

  To Mario’s relief, the water pressure had returned to normal in the morning. I shook Peter’s hand as he prepared to leave for Makokou after breakfast.

  ‘It’s been a joy talking with you,’ I said. ‘I won’t forget.’

  ‘You’re a strong woman, Annette. Make the most of your time here. You won’t find another place like this.’

  I watched him climb into the Toyota with Mario and drive off for the débarcadère, and thought about what he had said. I had already fallen under Belinga’s spell just as he had all those years ago.

  Our night encounter with the leopard came just days after Peter had left. As I recounted the episode to the surveyors over breakfast the following morning, I thought of Peter telling me a leopard had come into one of the old bamboo houses in the early days. Little had changed in the intervening fifteen years. Belinga was still a place where people and animals met in an uneasy relationship.

  During that first week, I took every opportunity I could to learn from Mario about how the camp operated and who made up our workforce. The camp and the whole project had captured my imagination, as they had Win’s. With everything I did, I had to know the detail – a general impression was never enough. In addition, I was determined to be accepted as a useful member of the camp team, not simply a young wife along for the ride, and that meant fitting into a man’s world. So I asked endless questions, and I wrote up my diary every evening.

  The company employed fifty-seven men from three different tribal groups – the Bakota and Bakwélé formed the majority, and there were a small group of Fang and two Pygmies. They all spoke French, but it was a distinctively African form of French, with sounds and speech rhythms unfamiliar to me.

  The names of mountains in the SOMIFER exploration area had been officially recorded when the first geological surveys were carried out. The peaks surrounding the camp were called Bakota North, Bakota South, Mombo and Bakwélé. The whaleback ridge we had seen while travelling up the river was Babiel, which was the Bakota word for eagle. Babiel North and South contained the main body of iron ore.

  Some of the old survey points had names, too. The crest of a steep rock escarpment close behind camp was Grand Crête Un or Belvédère (Great Crest 1 or Viewpoint), so called because it afforded a view right out over the forest into the Congo. I decided that one day, when the old tracks had been cleared, Win and I would drive up there so we could see that view for ourselves. Everywhere the forest had been cleared for roads or buildings, the red laterite soil was exposed. The texture varied from gravel in some areas to fine red dust in others, the product of countless aeons of weathering of the underlying ironstone rock.

  Work at the camp was based on a six-day week, Monday to Saturday, and workdays began with appel – rollcall. The men assembled outside the guesthouse to have their hours of work for the previous day recorded, and to be allocated tasks for the new day. Work began at seven. The workforce consisted mostly of labourers, with a small number of carpenters, plumbers, electricians and masons – more men would be recruited as soon as sufficient houses had been built. Jacques Poussain, a French mechanic, was due to arrive in several weeks’ time with a team of Gabonese mechanics. The conditions of employment were regulated by the government, under an agreement which bound all mining companies, specifying classifications of workers and their pay levels. Labourers earned the equivalent of US$140 a month for a forty-hour week; specialists received more than double that. Mario calculated the wages, and the men were paid monthly in cash by Mbunda Fidèle, a small, serious man employed as bookkeeper and payroll clerk who also managed the économat.

  A basic clinic, known as the infirmerie, occupied a rough plywood hut opposite the surveyors’ quarters. There a male Gabonese nurse attended to a constant stream of women and children, and dispensed medications sent up by the French doctor in Makokou.

  Every second Friday was ration day, when each family received an allocation of dried salt fish, processed manioc, block soap, salt, paraffin and palm oil, according to government regulations. Preparing for ration day was a complex exercise that took all morning. Bulk supplies of all the items were issued from the warehouse early in the morning and delivered to the ration shed, a long concrete-floored pavilion with a tin roof. The 200-litre drum of palm oil had to be heated over a fire to melt it, the block soap had to be chopped into portions with machetes, and the drum of paraffin had to be fitted with a hand pump.

  The manioc came in cylindrical portions about thirty centimetres long called bâtons, encased in banana leaves and bound with vines – each weighed a kilogram. Mario travelled up the river every Wednesday to buy the manioc from the local villages. It was prepared from the roots of the cassava plant, which were pounded to a powder then soaked in water for a week to leach out the cyanide.

  The company aimed to provide every man with twenty bâtons of manioc a week, but this depended on the availability of supplies: when local stocks were short, rations were supplemented with rice.

  On ration days, there was a fixed routine. The women walked in a long line up the hill from the village to the shed, balancing large enamel dishes on their heads. They sat on the floor in a semicircle, with their dishes, empty bottles and flagons in front of them, facing fifty-seven identical piles of rations set out along the floor. Mbunda Fidèle presided. When he called out each worker’s name, the man’s wife came forward to collect her pile of salt fish, soap, manioc and salt, then took her empty bottles to be filled with paraffin and palm oil. As each woman completed her round, Mbunda marked off her husband’s name in an exercise book. The first time I witnessed this fortnightly ritual, I realised just how difficult it was for families to leave their home villages and come to an unfamiliar place where they had no direct access to their normal means of survival.

  Their diet wasn’t all manioc and salt fish, of course: SOMIFER also employed two local hunters to provide fresh game meat for the workforce daily. There was an established routine for this as well. Early each morning, Mario issued them with shotgun shells – cartouches – from a locked cupboard in the guesthouse. They hunted all day in the forest, and presented the carcasses outside the guesthouse for weighing in the late afternoon. If their kill was too heavy to carry, Mario sent the Toyota out to bring it in. Mostly they shot monkeys, and duikers – small antelopes – and sometimes they took wild pigs. Mario weighed the meat on a set of rusty scales and noted each man’s daily total in a book. They were paid by the kilogram at the end of the month.

  Because the weigh-in took place just metres from our annexe, I often watched. Most times, the sight of slaughtered animals did not distress me, as I knew that this diet replicated what people ate in villages, and generally the animals the hunters took were plentiful. But one day was different. They had shot two great apes. They’d hacked off the limbs and left the heads and bodies in the forest. I stared at the hands, the long powerful fingers curled in death, the calloused feet, the thick black hair. I wasn’t sure whether they were chimpanzees or gorillas, but the same horror filled me as wh
en I had watched the sous-préfêt on his shooting spree. Gorillas were protected animals. Killing them was illegal. I decided at that moment that I couldn’t stand by and allow their slaughter. Somehow I would try to bring some influence to bear, though I wasn’t sure how yet.

  I often sat in the guesthouse listening in while Mario conducted the morning and afternoon radio links. It gave me an added insight into how the camp was run and what issues were current. Sometimes the static was so bad it drowned out the voice on the other end in a sea of hiss and crackle, forcing Mario to guess the bits he missed or reschedule the session to a later time. When he saw how interested I was, he showed me how to operate it.

  ‘There’ll be times when I can’t be here,’ he explained in French, ‘and it’d help enormously if you could cover for me and take any messages.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I grinned, ‘but I’ve never done anything like this before.’ As he demonstrated the steps of switching on, calling up Makokou or Libreville, and ending each burst of speech with à vous or ‘over to you’, the remoteness and romance of our situation at Belinga bore in on me yet again. This bulky khaki metal box with the hand-held receiver on a hook at the side embodied that remoteness. I had only ever seen such devices in war films, yet here I was learning how to operate one. The wellbeing of everyone in camp depended in large measure on the communication that passed across the airwaves each day. The radio was a lifeline, and, in a strange sense, proof that a world existed outside the camp. I could not have guessed how soon my nascent radio-operating skills would prove vital.