In the late afternoons, Mario, Jacques, Win and I often sat on the porch with a cold beer or a whisky, and allowed the peace of the closing day to enfold us. Sometimes bands of colobus monkeys would appear, playing on loops of vine at the edge of the clearing, leaping and swinging like acrobats on a trapeze. The tufts of fluffy white hair on their faces, backs and tails stood out against the grey of ancient tree trunks and the tangle of foliage. Watching these wild primates cavorting as though we weren’t there, I felt hugely privileged – a spectator on a secret world – and I marvelled at the bizarre events that had brought us to this place.
chapter eight
FÊTE FEVER
In mid-July, our supply chain from the coast suddenly collapsed. Air cargo destined for the camp failed to arrive in Makokou, and our fresh food was off-loaded in Libreville several times.
‘What the hell’s going on down there?’ I yelled over the radio to Doug one morning. ‘Hardware we can wait for, but food we need now.’
‘It’s this confounded fête, Nettie. We’ve got no control over government requisitions on cargo space. If it doesn’t improve, I’ll charter a plane to get your food up there.’ At times I wondered if the Libreville staff really understood how it felt for us being at the end of the line, at the mercy of every glitch in the transport system.
‘We’ll hold you to that,’ I replied tersely. I’d had complaints from all the expatriates about the lack of fresh vegetables for dinner and mail from home.
All the supply problems stemmed from the fact that festivities for la fête – the anniversary of independence, celebrated annually on 17 August – would focus on Makokou that year. The preparations for it would distort commerce and transport in our region for a month.
On the radio one morning, Kruger explained the details. An accelerated building program was underway in Makokou to complete several major projects, including a multistorey hotel, a television station, a sports stadium, paved roads and the town’s first street lighting. Every square metre of air-cargo space out of Libreville had been officially requisitioned, and planeloads of materials, labourers, colour televisions and luxury furniture were arriving in Makokou at the rate of three per day. Against this backdrop, the cargo destined for Belinga had been assigned a low priority.
There was another problem, too. As part of the celebrations, the new road through to Belinga was to be officially opened. Doug came on the radio one morning to tell Mario we could expect a visit from President Bongo by helicopter on the day of the opening. I watched Mario’s face as the implications hit him. He lit three cigarettes in quick succession and paced around the room, his eyes wild with panic. We’d need a helipad, but we had no earthworks machines to create one. A flat area of ground opposite the warehouse would have to be cleared of forest with chainsaws and machetes, and an approach path created adjacent to the guesthouse.
He set teams of labourers to work immediately felling trees and clearing secondary growth. It would be slow work and time was short. I watched from the doorway as the first of the forest giants crashed to the ground.
On the second day of clearing, I was alone in the office. Win and Mario were at the débarcadère; the labourers were working nearby, unsupervised. I heard the high-pitched whine of a chainsaw, followed by the ripping of branches and vines as a tree plunged down through the forest, then a thunderous crash as it hit the earth. All the lights went out in the guesthouse, and the fridge and freezer motors fell silent. There was a moment of absolute silence, then a burst of riotous laughter from the labourers as they realised the tree had fallen on the powerlines.
I strode outside, furious, to find them still doubled up at what they regarded as a huge joke. I stood rigidly facing them, and tried to make myself look as authoritative as I could. ‘This is a big problem for us,’ I shouted. ‘All the meat in our deep freezer could go bad, and now the radio won’t work!’ The men stopped laughing and stood silently in their hard hats, staring at me blankly. Electrical power and freezers meant nothing to them.
I marched up the hill to the mechanics’ workshop and broke the news to Jacques. ‘Merde!’ he muttered, wiping his greasy hands on a lump of rag. It would be his job to repair the lines, and he had more than enough to do already. I walked back down to find the men planning their next move. The massive tree in their sights was perilously close to the guesthouse. If they felled it to the left, it would take out the washing line, the stores shed, and possibly our annexe. To the right, it would completely block the road into camp. I had to do something.
I breathed deeply, braced myself, and yelled, ‘Stop! No more!’ They froze, looking at me, then at one another, with wide staring eyes. They must have thought me mad. They were only following Mario’s instructions. What was I on about? But they stopped. When Mario and Win returned, the men had been standing idle for an hour, Jacques had inspected the damaged cable, and Étienne and Bernard were preparing lunch. Next day, Win took over supervision of the tree felling, but still disaster never seemed far away. An even bigger tree narrowly missed the kitchen roof and two of the labourers on its way down. I had given up watching. I hated the destruction, and I had no stomach for the potential disasters involved.
It was just a week after the helipad had been completed, and we had celebrated this milestone, that we received the news: the president wouldn’t be coming after all. The opening ceremony would take place at a location out on the new road.
At that moment, I felt for the first time that we were locked into some endless farce, powerless to mitigate the chaos engulfing us. Mario grew more disaffected as the days went by, blaming the management for many of our problems. I watched as his normally buoyant manner disappeared little by little and was replaced by a moody cynicism. Then one day he told us outright, ‘I’m planning to resign. I’ll stay for the fête, but no longer.’ No-one was surprised. We all understood what had driven him to the decision. Still, none of us could imagine how the camp would run once he had gone.
The pressure-cooker atmosphere was further heightened by the dry-season shortage of bushmeat for the workforce. The hunters found it more and more difficult to locate the usual prey animals, as they gravitated towards the river during the dry. Many of the men complained of ‘meat hunger’, rubbing their bellies and assuming a pained expression when they saw any one of us. In response, we increased the issue of dried salt fish on ration days, but they regarded this as a poor substitute. As each day passed, I felt increasingly under siege, and I began to lose sleep.
In the midst of all this, there was one positive development: the combinée arrived at last, heralding a new and streamlined phase in the building program. Win could barely contain his joy.
We had been there a month when Dr Werner Krol, the ninth member of our expatriate team, arrived. It was the end of July and we were battling the pre-fête chaos. I hadn’t known what to expect of this Bavarian geologist. Perhaps he would be aloof and self-important, I had speculated. He had a PhD, and I had only met one other person with such a high qualification. What would he think of our basic facilities? Would they be too down-market for him?
I need not have worried. The fair-skinned young man who stepped out of the Toyota walked towards us smiling, his hand outstretched. ‘Hello, I’m Rodo.’ He spoke perfect English. He had a scholarly face, but a ready sense of humour shone from the blue eyes behind his spectacles. His bald crown was fringed with light-brown hair.
‘Hello, I’m Nettie.’ I shook hands and beamed back. ‘Welcome to Belinga! How was the trip up?’
‘Well, it was a little slow, but that’s okay.’ He had a deep voice, made gravelly by cigarettes. I knew he was new to Africa and unmarried, so I had prepared a welcome pack for him with soap, a towel, a box of tissues and a few personal items. I wanted him to feel at home, as his contract was for two years and he had come straight from university.
‘This is for you,’ I said, handing over the parcel.
He blushed bright pink. ‘Oh, thanks – that’s very kind!’ A h
int of German accent coloured his English, and gave a musical rise and fall to his intonation.
For me, Rodo’s arrival marked a new and welcome phase. He spoke four languages – German, English, French and Spanish – so I was no longer the only one with English and French. More than that, I had a colleague to share the daily crises with, someone new to Africa like I was, and the same age. Win came down from the workshop, covered in sawdust, to greet him, and I sensed he too felt relief that there was another English-speaker in camp.
I thought Rodo looked too vulnerable to be in remote Africa, though. He seemed too gentle, too shy, and I hoped that the pre-fête frenzy would not be too brutal an introduction for him.
‘Your room is ready down in the cas de passage,’ I said. ‘You’ll be near Jacques Poussain, our French mechanic. It’s pretty basic, but it’s all we have for the moment.’ Mario had renamed the surveyors’ quarters the cas de passage – vistors’ lodge – since it now had a suite of single bedrooms as well as toilets and showers. It would accommodate visiting staff and contractors, as well as house all the new staff until their mini-apartments could be built.
‘That’s okay,’ he assured me. ‘It will be fine.’ On that first day, I could not have guessed how closely future events would bind Rodo, Win and me together. All I saw was a sensitive, cultured young man, and I looked forward to working with him.
By the second week of August all of us were under pressure, and the crises had piled up as the fête drew closer. Our fresh food had been off-loaded in Libreville twice running. Kruger had moved out of his house in Makokou into a cottage and was supervising conversion of his old place into a guesthouse for the fête. Jacques needed to wire the camp for 240-volt power but couldn’t get cables. Win had a deadline to meet for completion of the surveyors’ office, but couldn’t get timber. One of his labourers suffered from epilepsy and could no longer safely operate a concrete mixer, so had to be allocated other tasks. Mario had suffered a black eye and broken spectacles in an altercation with a militant Bakwélé man he had had to dismiss. When he called in the commandant of the Brigade de Gendarmerie at Makokou to quieten down the Bakwélé, the commandant threatened to burn their villages if they didn’t settle down.
Teams of carpenters, masons and labourers worked noisily outside the guesthouse all day, and Étienne and Bernard complained daily that they wanted their wives to be brought up from Makokou. The surveyors’ gear still had not been cleared through customs, so all they could do was cut brush and clear vegetation from around the old trig stations. Everyone’s morale was at rock bottom.
In the midst of all this, the company was vigorously recruiting labour. More tradesmen and labourers were urgently needed to keep pace with expanding work schedules. New recruits arrived in twos and threes on every pirogue, and each man had to be issued with a basic kit of rations on arrival. This task fell to me, but in most instances, I had no warning. Usually, the first I knew was when the men presented themselves at the guesthouse door expecting to receive their woollen blanket, dried fish, rice, palm oil and paraffin.
Many of the new recruits were unaccustomed to frontier life, and expected that the consumer comforts they enjoyed in town – electricity, filter-tip cigarettes, record players and football boots – would be available in camp. My feeling of being under siege grew stronger each time a worker bailed me up outside the guesthouse with some new demand.
Our supply situation worsened daily as the fête approached. Stocks of hardware, timber and vehicle parts from retailers in Makokou were long since exhausted. The supply of manioc had also dried up, because all the manioc from every village in the region had been officially requisitioned to feed the influx of people in Makokou. We issued rice in its place, but this did nothing to appease the men’s discontent. The whole camp seemed primed for an explosion.
During dinner each night, work problems dominated the conversation. Each person’s tension fed on everyone else’s, so the atmosphere around the table grew increasingly poisonous. After several weeks, Mario reached the limit of his endurance. One night we sat down to dinner to find an empty tin can on the table with a hole punched in the top.
‘That’s the fine tin,’ he announced. ‘Anyone who mentions work during a meal incurs a fine of 1000 CFAs.’ It proved to be an inspiration. Dinners became occasions for riotous laughter when people momentarily forgot the rule and everyone else pounced on them and forced them to pay up.
Still, by day I struggled with my role and tried to suppress a growing sense of despair – but I had no privacy, nowhere to go to escape. Our Kombi and the annexe were in the most public area outside the guesthouse, surrounded by noise and activity day and night. When I needed to cry – something that happened more and more often – there was no refuge. I felt like a caged animal. One day the tears welled up in the middle of the morning. I didn’t want anyone to see that I was unravelling – I had too much pride for that – so I left the desk strewn with papers and headed up the hill to a cleared area behind the generator shed. I sank to the ground, leaned back against the corrugated-iron wall, and let wracking sobs take over.
I was discovering exactly what Doug had warned me about. ‘It’ll be pretty rough up there for a while,’ he’d said. I doubted even he could have known how rough it would become. But I didn’t regret our decision to come here. I just had to work my way through the bad patch and hope things improved.
Win could see I was struggling, as I slept poorly and was emotionally brittle. He wanted to help, but there was little he could do, and he had his own battles to fight. I made up my mind I wasn’t going to give in. This was the biggest test of my life, and I had no intention of failing it.
My confidence received a boost on 11 August, when I conducted an entire radio link on my own for the first time, without Mario hovering in the background. I had won my six-week battle with French idiom, unfamiliar procedures, bad reception and unrecognisable French voices coming from the Libreville office. It was not a moment too soon – Mario’s departure was only days away.
In the village, the week before the fête passed in a haze of palm wine. Kruger sent up dozens of cartons of the government’s commemorative cloth, printed with President Bongo’s portrait and proclaiming the fifteenth anniversary of independence, and overnight, everyone in the village seemed to be wearing a dress or a shirt made from it. A small contingent of our workforce was going to Makokou to take part in the formal celebrations, but even this became contentious. Every man felt he should be one of the ones to go. The verbal battle between Mario and the men over who would be chosen lasted for days. The men also lobbied for extra spending money, extra days off, whisky and free beer. Fête madness gripped the whole village, to the point where hardly anyone wanted to work. The government evidently expected trouble in Makokou, too, as a convoy of military vehicles was mounted from Libreville, carrying 600 gendarmes to keep order in the town during the festivities.
The government had set Saturday 16 August as the date for the official opening of the new road. A pavilion would be erected near the Makokou end of the route, and representatives of SOMIFER’s shareholders would assemble there to await the arrival of government dignitaries by helicopter. The only problem was that the road was not yet finished at the Belinga end. Eamon and his men were still out in the forest on Friday the fifteenth, working on the final section.
We had expected Eamon and the men to arrive in camp that morning. When there was no sign of them by mid-afternoon, the suspense got the better of Mario. ‘Let’s go out and find them!’ he cried.
Jacques, Rodo and I climbed into the Méhari with Mario at the wheel, and headed out along the ridge of Bakota South, where the old track from the 1960s had been partly cleared. Branches of giant trees overhung the route. Loops of thick liana straddled the spaces, and families of monkeys leapt screaming and chattering through the canopy. I had only come this way once before.
About twenty minutes out, we came on three of Eamon’s men walking along the track with their shotg
uns, framed by the massive bulk of a Caterpillar grader in the background. Eamon wasn’t far away, they said. We left them to their hunting and soon reached a fork in the track. One of the paths was freshly cut. A stack of chainsaws and jerry cans littered the ground at the junction. We followed the new track to the bottom of a steep incline: a massive tree, newly felled, lay across it.
Mario cut the engine. ‘Listen!’ he whispered. The low rumble of heavy machinery sounded through the forest. We climbed out and followed the direction of the sound. Fallen trees strewed the ground. Oozing mud sucked at our boots. As we breasted the next rise, the rumble became a roar. Below us, a gully sloped sharply, and we caught sight of the huge bulldozer halfway down, moving ponderously on its tracks back and forth on the hillside, Eamon sitting stiffly at the controls.
When he changed direction, he suddenly caught sight of us. He inched the dozer up the incline, drew level with us, and stopped with the engine still running. The noise of the engine made conversation impossible, but he climbed part way down the machine, and one by one we reached up and shook his hand. His gaunt body was streaked with sweat and mud. The sinews in his legs and arms stood out against the bones. Under the hard hat, his face was haggard and his skin the colour of putty; he managed an exhausted smile before excusing himself. The final bend in the route, just 150 metres long, had to be shaped before nightfall. As we watched him move off again, I wondered how long a sixty-year-old could punish his body and mind to that extent, and what drove him. Still, on the way back to camp, we all felt the euphoria of his achievement, fortunate to have been there to witness that final push.
The day of the official road opening began quietly in camp. No formal celebrations were planned for Belinga, but at the morning radio session Kruger informed us that some of the dignitaries wanted to come on to Belinga after the ceremony. That meant providing accommodation, meals and hospitality, but we had no specific information. As the opening ceremony was scheduled for early afternoon, we calculated we would have most of the day to prepare for their visit.
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