Wild Spirit

by Henderson, Annette

  chapter seven

  FRONTIER WOMAN

  The first six weeks in camp tested my mettle, both emotionally and in my job. Mario was only too pleased to pass on some of his tasks to me. The strain of the previous six months, during which he had managed the camp by himself, had begun to show, and he was often edgy and distracted. In the early stages, I had no concept of the sorts of problems he faced daily. By mid-August, my initiation would be complete.

  Not long after I started work, I accompanied him on a river trip to buy manioc.

  ‘That’s M’Vadhi up there, on the bluff.’ Mario pointed to a cluster of huts in a clearing, high on the southern bank of the Ivindo, as our pirogue rounded a bend in the river. We had travelled upstream for an hour through the still, cool morning. The surface of the water was like brown glass, the only ripple our gentle bow wave. I’d wanted to go to M’Vadhi ever since I’d first heard about it from Kruger and Peter Telfair. Now I had a good reason: Mario came here every Wednesday to buy supplies of manioc for the workforce. Since I would be supervising the distribution of rations, I decided it was important for me to know where the manioc came from and how we acquired it.

  It was now several weeks since Win and I had moved into camp, but the sense of wonder was still fresh, and being in the heart of Africa still had the power to overwhelm me. On the river, I had one of my ‘pinch me’ moments, not quite able to believe I was really there. Joy, wonder and awe all mingled together – and I felt too small to encompass them. I wanted to make these intense moments last, to carry them with me always, because nothing in my life before could compare with them.

  M’Vadhi was the furthest settlement on the river, close to the Congo border. We glided towards a wide bank of white sand, left exposed by the drop in water level during the dry season. A flotilla of small pirogues laden with bundles of manioc and bunches of plantains lay beached on the bank below the village. A crowd of women and children watched as we pulled in. Dressed in their brightly patterned cotton cloth and headscarves, the women could have been a cluster of vivid butterflies, forming a mosaic of colour against the white of the sand and the red ochre of the bluff.

  Mario greeted them with jokes and banter – they smiled shyly and giggled behind their hands while the children played and splashed at the water’s edge. I greeted them in French, and shook hands with a few of the nearest ones.

  I was eager to see what a traditional Gabonese village looked like, as the only one I had seen close up was Mayebut. I followed Mario up the steep dirt track. The bare, ochre ground had been swept clean of fallen leaves and debris. Pavilions with thatched roofs, open sides and bench seating formed the hub of the village; huts of puddled mud skirted the perimeter. Behind them vegetation rose in a green jumble of shapes. Several men were working in the open air, carving small objects and repairing traditional weapons. Small groups of older men sat in the sun, talking and smoking pipes. The view from there took in a panorama of river, a patch of savanna and distant mountains through a line of banana trees and palms.

  We moved through to the far end of the village, where a cluster of hemispherical leaf-thatched shelters housed families of Pygmies. The shelters were made from thin sapling frames curved over and crisscrossed, then covered with a thick layer of enormous leaves.

  ‘The Bakwélé here have taken the Pygmies as slaves,’ Mario said matter-of-factly. Pygmy families sat dejectedly in the dirt, framed by the curved doorways of the shelters. They appeared poorly nourished and lethargic. To me, it was a sight of profound pathos. I knew how they had lived traditionally, that they hunted and gathered in small family groups, that they possessed intimate knowledge of the forest and animals. Their lives in the deep forest had been a celebration of freedom and harmony. They had sung and danced in the euphoria of an elephant kill. Now all that had gone. I thought back to the story Kruger had told us, about Pygmy genitals being used as a cure for impotence by the Bantu, and I wondered whether the murdered Pygmy had been one of their relatives.

  I consciously steeled myself. I was powerless to change this situation, and hadn’t yet developed the emotional resources to cope with it easily. As each day passed, I became increasingly aware that the juxtaposition of the glorious with the desperately sad was the essence of Africa, and that I had better get used to it.

  On the way back to the riverbank we passed a woman with severe elephantiasis. Her lower leg was swollen to the size of a long fat vacuum cleaner bag. She couldn’t walk, and sat on a wooden bench staring vacantly into space. Elephantiasis was one of the extreme manifestations of filariasis. Village people had no access to expensive prophylactics, so the disease was endemic throughout the interior. I tried not to stare, but my thoughts turned dark: in Equatorial Africa, it seemed idyllic village life didn’t exist. There was always a dark underbelly of suffering.

  Back at the riverbank, the women had unloaded their produce from the pirogues and arranged it in heaps along the sand. Each woman sat behind her own bundle. Each bundle of ten bâtons of manioc sold for 250 CFAs or about US$1. Mario had a briefcase full of cash under his arm; as he moved slowly along the line, each woman stated how many bâtons she had for sale, and he paid her in notes. Some women had taro and plantains as well.

  ‘I always buy whatever they bring, as a mark of good faith,’ Mario explained. I thought of the mutual dependence that this riverbank commerce embodied: the women produced something the company needed, while in turn, the needs of our workforce afforded them the chance to make some money without leaving their villages.

  They loaded the bundles of manioc, taro and plantains into our pirogue until every spare inch of space was filled. Then Mario retrieved the lunch box that Étienne had prepared, and we sat down cross-legged on the sand looking out over the river to eat.

  In the warmth of midday, a torpor had fallen over everything. There were no sounds from the forest, and the women and children had moved back up to the shade of the village to rest before returning to their own villages. Where the river met the bank, the clean white sand showed clearly through the tea-brown water. A gentle sun had broken through the dry-season cloud, and bathed the sandbank in soft light. We sat in silence, absorbed in our own thoughts – Mario the experienced Africa hand, I the novice. I wondered how many other white women had been so far up the river. Carmen Roux must have, in the days of the gold workings at Camp Six, but that was decades before. And Annie Hion, the primatologist who’d studied the gorillas in the 1960s, might have come here. But there couldn’t have been many others. There were no missions, no trading posts, no reasons to come. I was convinced no other Australian woman had ever been here. That thought lodged in my mind as I ate the salami and tomato roll Étienne had made, and drank the cold Regab beer straight from the bottle. Could I ever have imagined myself in such a place as I grew up in suburban Brisbane in the 1950s? I hadn’t been out of Australia until I was twenty-seven, and now I was here. I pinched myself again.

  By the time we were ready to go, most of the women were preparing to leave too. I realised that these women were the linchpins of their families. They reared children, produced crops, collected water, carried heavy loads of firewood, cooked meals and transacted commerce, all in the most basic of conditions. And on these market days, they paddled their small, fully-laden pirogues with the grace and skill of elite athletes. All the way back I reflected on their lives of unremitting hard work, and was filled with admiration.

  Jacques Poussain, the French mechanic, arrived on the barge early in July, bringing a small car with orange plastic bodywork and a black vinyl soft-top. The badge on the side identified it as a Citroën Méhari. It looked like a Mini Moke.

  Jacques himself was dressed plainly in jungle boots, shorts and a short-sleeved cotton shirt. He looked to be in his late forties, tall, with light brown hair and fair skin. His reputation had preceded him. He was a first-class mechanic, an expert on Caterpillar earthworks machines, and a veteran of the camp’s previous epoch.

  During his long working
life in Gabon, Jacques had worked in the timber industry and at the manganese mine. He and Eamon were so close from their years at Belinga that they were like brothers. I shook his hand on the riverbank. ‘This is my husband, Win,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t speak much French yet.’

  ‘Et je ne parle pas anglais – rien du tout!’ he replied. The two shook hands. They were about the same age, and each had a depth of experience that put them on an equal footing. I hoped they would get on.

  With Jacques’ arrival, we now had eight expatriates in camp of four different nationalities – Italian, Australian, British and French. Two spoke no English and five spoke no French, leaving me as the only one who spoke both.

  Jacques moved into a room in the surveyors’ quarters. His wife and daughters would live in Makokou, and he would commute there at weekends. In the months ahead, Jacques would teach me much about the wildlife of the Gabonese forest. My first lesson came one night during dinner when a penetrating sound from the forest cut through our conversation. It began as a low insistent murmur, then quickly rose in pitch, volume and tempo, until finally it erupted in a prolonged piercing scream that made my flesh crawl. I put down my knife and fork to look across at Win: we had heard this sound once before while camped in a forest in Cameroon, and were convinced then that we had heard someone being murdered.

  I turned to Jacques, wide-eyed, hoping he could identify its source: ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est? What’s that?’ With his long experience, I felt sure he would know.

  ‘C’est un daman,’ he said calmly.

  ‘A daman? What do they look like?’ Jacques described a small, brown, tree-dwelling animal that resembled a guinea pig, hard to see during the day, but active at night, calling from the treetops. When I translated for Win, he recognised the description immediately: ‘Ah, a tree hyrax!’

  Jacques nodded vigorously: ‘Oui, oui, c’est ça!’ I marvelled that an animal of that modest size could make such a terrifying sound, but was relieved that at last I could put a name to it. That night was the first of many when the tree hyraxes punctuated our evenings with their screams. Months later, I realised that these vocal displays had ceased, and guessed that they had been a seasonal phenomenon connected with territories and mating.

  We shared the guesthouse with a family of geckoes that lived behind the sideboard and the framed photographs on the walls. Each night as we ate, they crawled out and positioned themselves to wait for insects that congregated near the lights. To me, the geckoes’ delicate translucent cream bodies and large chocolate-brown eyes were exquisite, and I never tired of watching them launch themselves at moths so big that their small mouths seemed barely able to hold them. When they had gobbled their prey whole, they retreated to lie in wait for more. I expected them to make the clicks and chirps that their Australian and Asian relatives do, but they were always silent.

  Jacques slotted back easily into the place and his work. I struggled to pick up the threads of my own job: I felt I was dealing with an iceberg. The part above the waterline was what I knew, but underneath was everything I needed to know and didn’t. There never seemed to be time for a proper briefing. Mario would explain a task, then be called away to deal with some urgent matter, leaving me with the words ‘but how …’ on my lips.

  I soon discovered there was no system in place to track orders for materials. There was no such thing as a ‘normal’ turnaround time between ordering and receiving goods, and I didn’t know who was responsible for what in the chain of command. Communication between the three company locations occurred in a kind of staccato pattern: people fired off requests, complaints and directives like pellets from a peashooter. From where I stood, things seemed to happen in a vacuum, with me in the middle. I gleaned snippets of information piecemeal, mainly on the run.

  I learned that our fleet of pirogues consisted of two small ones and two large. The large ones – grosses pirogues – were twelve metres long and over a metre wide in the middle. They could carry twelve 200-litre fuel drums at a time, or two tonnes of cement in bags, or several hundred sheets of aluminium roofing, or a large quantity of sawn timber. The two six-metre pirogues were used for lighter cargoes. We also had the barge, which could carry vehicles and large quantities of materials, but it was limited by the height of water in the river – fully laden it could run aground in the dry season, and there would be no way to free it until the rains came.

  The radio links gave me some of my most testing times. Win and Jacques were working to critical deadlines, and the timely receipt of supplies was vital. Some mornings they would stride into the guesthouse for the nine-thirty radio link sweaty, grimy, red-faced and pumped up with anger.

  ‘Ask Kruger where my load of timber is!’ Win would bark. ‘It should have been here last week.’

  ‘Where are my Land Rover parts?’ Jacques would shake his head in despair. ‘Tell him I can’t go any further till I get them.’ I would relay the queries to Kruger and sit back to wait for his terse replies. I could hear him bristling.

  ‘The orders have been placed, Madame ’Enderson. This is Africa. Nothing happens quickly.’

  Even worse for me were the occasions when Win and Jacques would hand me lists of things to order urgently, by radio, while they stood beside me flushed with frustration. Their enigmatic scribbles on scraps of dirty paper or pieces of plywood meant nothing to me. Jacques’ lists were in French, Win’s in English. I think they both overestimated my competence with technical French.

  Later, when I looked back on these episodes I could laugh, but at the time there was no humour in them.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re asking for!’ I’d glare at Win. ‘I’m not a bloody builder! Explain it slowly, and I’ll try and convey it to Jacques so he can tell me what it’s called.’ The three of us could have been characters in some comic play. Win would try to explain the function of each item, often with sound effects, or draw a diagram. In turn I would struggle to explain to Jacques so he could tell me the correct French word. Meanwhile, Kruger would be at the other end of the radio breathing hard.

  ‘It’s a nightmare!’ I complained to Doug after a few weeks of these exchanges. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I need some sort of reference book.’ He must have heard the desperation in my voice, because the next time he visited camp he handed me a technical dictionary in French and English, with drawings of tools and hardware, each one labelled in both languages. I kept it on the desk beside the radio, and it saved me much anguish in the months ahead.

  To monitor deliveries of supplies when they finally arrived, I needed to be available whenever trucks came in from the débarcadère to accompany them up to the warehouse. Deliveries always had to be attended to straightaway to eliminate the risk of pilfering. And they came in at all hours – during meals, at night and in the early morning. The work brought me into close contact with M’Poko Lucien, the magazinier or storeman. He was tiny – half a head shorter than I was – and spoke softly, with a gentleness of manner I liked immediately. He always wore a white hard hat and carried a clipboard.

  We would usually watch the truck drivers unload together: every item on the dockets had to be checked against the load to make sure nothing was missing. But if M’Poko had finished work for the day, I would check the goods into the warehouse myself and lock up afterwards. The loads were usually mixed – timber, cement, hardware, rations, hard hats, mattresses, drums of fuel, stocks of clothing for the économat and drugs for the infirmerie. The unpredictable delivery times meant that I never knew when my meals would be interrupted or my evening leisure time cut short. Living on site, glorious as it was, meant I was always accessible. It was just one of many pressures that would threaten to bring me down as I tried to adjust to life in camp.

  While we spent our days scurrying about, deadline-driven, rattled and frustrated at the chaos, the life of the forest continued around us in timeless rhythms. In the camp, thwarted human endeavours held sway; on its periphery, the peace and order of the natural world prevailed. I�
�d felt this dichotomy almost from the outset – the yin and yang, the interplay of opposites. While urgent tasks demanded my energies much of the time, whenever I walked outside I felt the pull of the forest, a yearning in my spirit to connect with the wildness.

  The awe and wonder I’d experienced during our first visit to the camp, when we’d watched the flock of brilliant blue touracos cavorting on the umbrella tree near the guesthouse, had never left me, and in the weeks since we’d moved into camp, an awareness of what lay just beyond the clearing permeated my thoughts night and day.

  Of all the wild creatures we would come to know, the giant yellow-casqued hornbills gave me some of my greatest bursts of joy. They were the most visible and dramatic of the birds we regularly saw, and they made me laugh with their raucous exuberant calls. Win and I had first seen them when we’d camped in a rainforest clearing in Cameroon. Initially we couldn’t work out what was making the swishing and whirring sound high above the canopy, which grew louder the nearer it approached to us. Then we saw them – three large black and white birds with massive down-curving beaks like toucans, and startling bony projections like centurions’ helmets on their heads and upper beaks. They flew in line, slowly, one behind the other, their powerful calls echoing through the forest. When I’d looked them up in our wildlife atlas I’d learned they often followed bands of monkeys as they travelled to feed. At Belinga, these giant hornbills with personalities to match were never far away, and for me the sight and sound of them became synonymous with Belinga. Often as I walked around camp, I would watch them flying from treetop to treetop, calling constantly, always moving in the same direction – west to east. The sound of their swishing wings lodged in my memory, elements in a soundscape whose meanings were growing clearer with each passing day.