Wild Spirit Page 5

  The drive into town led past supply depots for companies, hardware yards and prefabricated huts, sprawling behind high wire fences on dusty, featureless land. Closer to town, we started passing decaying colonial residences set back from the road behind clumps of palms and bougainvillea, their painted shutters warped and peeling.

  Makokou was the main town in the province of Ogooué-Ivindo – a vast, largely uninhabited region drained by the Ivindo River and its tributaries. The town felt like a frontier outpost, and the presence of the priest and religious sisters reminded me that missions, along with trading posts, had been the earliest white institutions to penetrate the interior.

  I thought again of Mary Kingsley, who had lodged at missions on her expeditions through the country. Makokou seemed little changed from that time one hundred years earlier, except for the aircraft and motor vehicles.

  The car turned into the driveway of one of the old residences and pulled up beside the kitchen door. The house was built of concrete, painted dark maroon, with shuttered windows set in Spanish-style arches. Clumps of taro and other native plants grew wild in a long-neglected garden.

  The chauffeur led the way inside, suggesting we make ourselves comfortable in some well-worn cane chairs. Within the hour, Kruger arrived with our bags, explaining that the house was known as the Roux house – SOMIFER used it as a guesthouse. In the dim interior, the flagstone floor shone with the patina of years. Kruger introduced the African domestic staff – Roger the cook and Boniface the housekeeper, then gave us a tour of the house. A massive refectory table dominated the dining room. In the bedrooms, a musty smell hung in the air, and the ancient double bed sagged deeply in the middle. The legs wobbled when we sat on the edge; strange cylindrical pillows that stretched the full width of the bed promised certain discomfort. Before he left, Kruger invited us to his home for an aperitif: the chauffeur would collect us. As I moved from room to room taking in every detail, I felt I was stepping back in time, as if traces of those who had gone before lingered in the still air. Despite its decay and neglect, the house set my imagination alight and I felt excited to be there.

  Two hours later, the chauffeur pulled up outside the kitchen door in a dusty Peugeot. A few minutes later, we swung into a driveway beside a large sign that read, ‘Concession SOMIFER’. Kruger’s house lay in the middle of the company’s spacious compound, set high on a hill overlooking a bend in the Ivindo River, and surrounded by a high chain-wire fence. Kruger met us at the door and led us to his living room, motioning to two large armchairs.

  The room resembled a museum. On tomato-red walls hung a startling collection of masks, statuettes, bronze castings and well-worn traditional African drums. I turned slowly in a full circle, taking in every detail. Back in London, I had spent many lunch hours poring over artefacts from Central America, the South Pacific and Africa at the Museum of Mankind in Old Burlington Street, just three blocks from where I worked. But this was different. Kruger’s collection proclaimed a long life spent in remote Africa, an expatriate world of meaning that was now all he knew.

  My eye was drawn to a tall, elegant wooden mask with faces on all four sides, exquisitely carved, and painted black and white. ‘What’s that, Monsieur Kruger?’

  Kruger’s face registered no change of expression. ‘That? That’s a Bakota dance mask from a village out on the road to Okondja.’

  ‘And that walking stick?’

  ‘Ebony.’ His laconic answers somehow matched the surroundings perfectly. I dropped into one of the roomy armchairs and Win settled into another, while Kruger poured three glasses of Ricard, the cloudy white drink the French often sip at sundown.

  I wondered if he would be more forthcoming about the Roux house. ‘Who were the Roux?’

  Kruger raised tired-looking eyes from his glass and focused on some point beyond the ceiling. As he spoke little English, he answered in French.

  ‘Old Roux was a prospector. Came in after the gold. He was a young man then. Came to Africa to seek his fortune.’

  ‘Was there much gold around here?’

  ‘Not here. Up the river.’ He inclined his head towards the Ivindo. ‘He struck it rich – alluvial gold. Went panning for it up on the Nouna River near the Congo border, and around Camp Six. Made a fortune, they did.’

  ‘Who are “they”?’

  ‘He and Carmen.’

  ‘Carmen?’

  ‘His wife.’

  ‘Where did she fit in?’ His brief responses gave little away, but I sensed a good tale.

  ‘Carmen? Well, there’s a story! What a woman! Beautiful! Still is.’

  ‘Go on.’ Getting him to elaborate was like pulling teeth.

  ‘Roux had been here a few years on his own. She was back in France. It was all arranged that she would come out and marry him. But he got leprosy. So he wrote to her, breaking the news and telling her not to come, that he was dying.’

  ‘And still she did?’

  ‘Couldn’t stop her. Said she’d agreed to marry him and marry him she would. Came out here, a young girl. They got married, and in the end he was cured by Albert Schweitzer. She worked with him in the business – remarkable woman. Learnt all the dialects, knew the Gabonese by name, handled the money. Old Roux died a millionaire. She’s back in France, but she comes here sometimes for a visit. It’s her house you’ll be sleeping in tonight. We rent it from her, but it’s old now …’

  Before we’d planned our African trip I had never heard of Gabon, but I had heard of its most famous historical figure, Albert Schweitzer, at primary school. Schweitzer’s mythological status in western civilisation, as a musician, doctor, theologian and philosopher who had sacrificed his comfortable European life for a struggle with tropical diseases in the swamps of Lambarene, had been unassailable for decades. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1952. In later life, he had had his critics as colonialism met its demise, but the fact that his leprosy hospital at Lambarene still operated impressed me as a heroic achievement. Listening to Kruger, I had the sense, just as I’d had at the Roux house, that we were being drawn into a time warp where little had changed in decades. Kruger lived alone. ‘How long have you been in Africa, Monsieur Kruger?’

  ‘Thirty-four years. I’m one of the old hands.’ He spoke in a monotone, barely moving a muscle of his heavily veined face.

  ‘What did you do in the beginning, before you came up here to SOMIFER?’

  ‘I was in the timber camps. There was only timber in those days – Gaboon wood, okoumé – it was big business, till the bottom fell out of it.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Oh, I knocked around.’ He must have been getting fed up with my questions.

  ‘How long have you been in Makokou?’

  ‘Six years now. Too long.’ There it was – his confession of boredom and frustration. This was the man who would be our link with the outside world once we moved to Belinga. I wondered how that would go.

  Win was only following snatches of the conversation. I tried translating, but it proved clumsy and ruined the flow of the stories. He told me not to worry, he’d try and get the gist his own way.

  Even though I didn’t particularly like the aniseed taste of Ricard, I accepted a second glass: I wanted to prolong the encounter. Kruger had a repertoire of anecdotes of African life, and once he realised I had an insatiable appetite for them, he loosened up.

  ‘What about traditional beliefs and practices, Monsieur Kruger? Does much of that survive today?’

  His face twisted into a wry grimace and he told me another story. There was a Gabonese army officer who had three wives, a man of some ability who had prospered under the French command and risen to a senior rank. But he had one major problem – he was impotent. Notwithstanding his western education and professional position, the officer consulted the local witchdoctor, who counselled him to eat the genitals of a Pygmy. Accordingly, he ordered the secret killing of a Pygmy and went through with the ritual.

  I couldn’t comprehend that such be
liefs had survived into the present, but that was only my naivety. It turned out that the officer’s crime had been discovered and he was ‘rotting in Makokou jail’ (as Kruger put it) as we spoke.

  ‘And where did this happen?’ I asked.

  Kruger’s face remained impassive. ‘Just one hour up river from where you will be living.’

  If he was trying to shock me, he had succeeded. So that was the environment we were going into – a place where superstition and witchcraft still held people in their thrall. More and more it seemed, as I listened, that little had changed since Mary Kingsley’s time.

  Kruger grasped a solid bronze object from a shelf and handed it to me. ‘Here, feel this.’ I took it and almost dropped it because of the weight.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’re called slave bracelets. The women used to be forced to wear them around their ankles to stop them from escaping.’ The bracelet was a broken circle with a bulbous knob on each end. I estimated its weight at three kilos. When I put it on my wrist, my arm dropped like a stone and I could barely lift it.

  ‘Do the people around here still make traditional artefacts?’

  ‘Not much. Not like the old days. The missions stopped most of that, as far as they could. When they came, they collected all the objects linked with tribal religion and witchcraft and buried great piles of them in the forest, then set about trying to convert the people. The missionaries were the only ones who knew where the things were buried. The story goes that years later, traders from the Middle East came through and paid off the missions to sell them the stuff, then quietly smuggled it out. That’s Africa, Madame ’Enderson!’

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly eight o’clock. ‘We must be going,’ I said, edging out of the armchair. ‘What are the arrangements for tomorrow?’

  ‘You will leave at nine-thirty: I’ll send the chauffeur around to collect you. The pirogue will be ready and you’ll each have a life jacket. You can ask Roger and Boniface to prepare you a picnic lunch. It’ll be a long ride because the river’s low, so you’ll get hungry. I’ll see you down at the débarcadère – the landing stage. There’ll be bread and fresh food for the camp to go up with you.’

  Kruger got up and walked us to the car. As we rounded the corner of the house, an outside light was burning. He stopped, bent down and picked something up, cursing. Straightening up, he held out his hand to reveal a black rhinocerous beetle the size of a small bird. Screwing up his face, he hurled the beetle at the concrete wall and it fell stunned to the ground. Then he picked it up and threw it into a plastic bucket to join dozens of its deceased relatives.

  Back at the Roux house, Roger had prepared soup, steak and salad, followed by cheese and fruit. After dinner, we explored the sanitary facilities. There were two showers and two toilets. Running water and handbasins had been installed, but Boniface had forgotten to light the fire under the triangular flat-iron hot-water tank – and there was little firewood anyway – so we settled for a cold wash and crawled into the sagging double bed.

  Mosquitoes whined around our heads, and muffled singing and shouting reached our ears from somewhere in the town. I finally dropped off to sleep thinking about Carmen Roux, leprosy and rhinoceros beetles.

  Next morning, slits of pale grey light showed through the gaps in the bedroom shutters, and the rise and fall of African voices passing under the window brought us to full consciousness. It was just after eight o’clock and out in the street, groups of people had gathered to talk. Given the noises we had heard the night before, I wondered when these people ever slept! After breakfast, we left Roger and Boniface to prepare our lunch while we went to look for Kruger.

  From the verandah of Kruger’s house we looked out on the bend of the Ivindo River: Makokou lay on its western bank. It was still early morning, and a leaden sky blocked out any warmth from the sun. The river lay brown, glassy and deserted. Along the banks the forest stretched, forming a green corridor. Wisps of morning fog hung in the air, filmy wraith-like patches, low over the water and drifting through the branches. Kruger wasn’t at home.

  The débarcadère was a steep clearing on the riverbank, where a group of pirogues bobbed in the shallow water. A rusty iron barge lay beached nearby in the mud. Part-way up the slope, a corrugated-iron shed with a padlock and chain on the doors provided storage space for outboard motors and fuel.

  Gabonese men ran in all directions, people were shouting orders, but no-one listened because everybody spoke at once. Children bathed and played in the shallows. Women washed clothes in the river. Flies buzzed. Men in white hard hats loaded lengths of timber into a twelve-metre pirogue, along with drums of outboard fuel, spare motors, and bundles of local food wrapped in banana leaves. All the company’s Gabonese staff wore hard hats with SOMIFER printed across the front. They came up in turn to greet us. Their calloused hands felt like old rope as they gripped mine.

  Kruger stood astride a petrol drum, amidships in the pirogue. He appeared to be having a rough time of it, and I sensed that now was not the moment for small talk. He came ashore, shook hands briefly, and after barking a few more orders in the direction of the boatmen, disappeared to keep a radio liaison with Belinga back at the office.

  We returned to the house and settled down to wait for the chauffeur. Instead, about ten o’clock, Kruger himself pulled in near the kitchen door, red-faced and agitated. He loaded our bags hastily into the car and announced that we’d be sharing the pirogue with the sous-préfêt (the deputy district governor) and a trade union representative, who were making a routine trip to Belinga. When we climbed in, he reversed out into the street and gunned the accelerator, sending clouds of red dust into the air.

  At the riverbank, the frenzy had abated. Our luggage and the iceboxes of fresh food were stowed, then there was a last-minute flurry to find enough life jackets and folding chairs for all of us, and position them in a line down the middle. Finally, everything was ready. We climbed in and took our places, the sous-préfêt at the front. The huge black pirogue slid quietly backwards into mid-stream. At the stern, the pinnassier, the boatman, sat grave-faced with his hand on the tiller. At the bow, the navigator peered intently into the water. Then the outboard shuddered into life, and with a last-minute warning from Kruger not to make any sudden movements or we could tip over, we were off, sliding through the tea-brown water and watching the hill of Makokou grow smaller and smaller behind us.

  For the first hour no-one spoke, and the only sounds were the thudding of the outboard and the swish of the bow wave past the gunwales. We were seated one behind the other on the folding chairs, with no room to move in any direction. A long corrugated-aluminium canopy stretched over our heads almost the full length of the canoe. We might have been a set of the carved ebony figurines sold in the markets, sitting motionless and bolt upright in their carved ebony boats.

  The great forest slid by on either side, massive walls of jungle that were reflected back in the water, so that it was hard to tell where the forest ended and the reflections began. Here and there, clearings with small groups of mud huts dotted the riverbank. A tiny pirogue occasionally emerged from one of these, under the shadows of overhanging vines. I breathed in the sights and silence, conscious of a profound peace settling into my mind. I thought again of Mary Kingsley and how she had travelled up the mighty Ogooué River in a pirogue nearly a century before. Now I was here.

  Around midday, we opened the lunch boxes and had cold beer, crusty French rolls filled with garlic salami and tomato, and fruit and biscuits.

  The sous-préfêt and the trade union representative had made no effort at conversation during the morning and still kept to themselves. The sous-préfêt was evidently a keen hunter, judging by the shotgun slung across his knees. I had noticed his request to sit in the front seat, where the canopy just stopped short of the bow. In the early afternoon, when we were becoming drowsy, he said something fast in dialect to the pinnassier, who immediately cut the motor. We drifted silently and
the sous-préfêt stood up in the bow, sighting his barrel at the forest. I spotted his prey just before he fired – a colobus monkey, distinctive against the solid green of the forest with its long black hair, white-ringed face and striking white dorsal ‘cloak’. In the silence the shot cracked out deafeningly, and the monkey’s contorted body plummeted from the branch into the depths of the understorey. The sous-préfêt turned to flash a triumphant smile in our direction, his chest visibly bulging, but I wasn’t about to acknowledge him. I struggled to hide my disgust, and stared fixedly at my feet.

  I wouldn’t have minded if he had needed to kill it for food, but to me this was barbarism. No-one spoke. I sensed Win tighten, but there was nothing to say. This was my first intimation of what might lie ahead for us as we entered the world of African hunters.

  Towards two o’clock, the outboard suddenly spluttered and stopped, and the pinnassier retrieved a large wooden paddle from the bottom of the pirogue and slowly steered us towards the riverbank. When the bow was securely settled on the mud, everyone climbed out and sat on the bank while the pinnassier tinkered with the motor. It would have been easy to fall asleep. We were nowhere near any village, and I wondered idly what would happen if the motor could not be coaxed into life. Finally he decided to give up on that motor and fit the spare one. With everyone back on board, we moved out again into the middle of the river.

  We watched, half-mesmerised, as the reflected images of jungle slid past. Ahead, the river stretched as far as we could see. I had begun to doze off when the pinnassier’s low voice roused me: ‘Madame! Madame!’ I jerked upright. He pointed dead ahead and upwards to the east. ‘Belinga!’ he said, nodding vigorously and smiling. It took me a few moments to realise what he meant and to focus on the distant point he was indicating. Then I saw it – far on the horizon, a long blue-green hump of mountain that rose above the intervening ridges like some giant slumbering beast. ‘Belinga! Belinga!’ he kept repeating. Excited, I twisted around to look at Win: ‘That’s it, sweetheart! Can you see it?’ His whole face had lit up, his eyes fixed on the horizon as he nodded acknowledgement. I tried to focus on the hazy image as it hung there, high and distant. From the river, it looked utterly inaccessible. A burst of adrenalin coursed through my veins. Up there our new life awaited.