On a sun-broiled morning in central Mozambique, we headed eighteen miles into the bush, our destination a shrinking stretch of soupy pool, one of the last remaining catchments in the drought-withered river, where the hippos had hunkered down during the wasting days of a dry season that refused to end. Afterward we would be choppering to other sites—remote wonders, unique to the area—although my attention had drifted when the itinerary was explained. The limestone gorge, perhaps, where the East African Rift Valley arrived at its southern terminus? The lacy cascade of waterfalls off the westward escarpment? The cathedral-size grottoes housing countless hordes of whispering bats? Not that it mattered—bad luck, you could say, since we would never get farther than the hippos.
Because of the heat, and I guess for the breezy fun of it, Segren, the young pilot up from South Africa, unhinged the front doors off the R44, a Bell-manufactured helicopter aviators call a “little bird,” and we strapped in, the four of us, and ascended skyward from the small grass airstrip at Chitengo, the headquarters of Gorongosa National Park, once considered among Africa’s premier game preserves until it was destroyed by decades of unimaginably brutal war and savage lawlessness, its infrastructure blasted to rubble, its bountiful population of animals slaughtered, eaten, reduced to gnawed bones and wistful memory.
In the copilot seat, with the panoramic sweep of the continent expanding out my open door—loaves of mountains on several horizons rising like a time-lapse video of Creation day, the veldt ironed out into a haze of coastal plains spread east toward the Indian Ocean—I adjusted the mic on my headset and joined the conversational squawk behind me, Greg Carr and Vasco Galante stuffed into the rear seats, already sweaty between doors that could not be removed, although they were dressed much more sensibly than I was for the tropics, or what would have been sensible if the word malarial were not so lethally affixed to Mozambique’s ecology.
Greg and Vasco, it was becoming clear to me, were fearless, a matching set of muzungus, white guys, with a true affinity for the bush. Like Greg Carr, the American philanthropist who had committed his time, wealth, and considerable energy to the restoration of Gorongosa, Galante too was a successful business entrepreneur who slammed the brakes on the life he was living, threw away his map of old assumptions and foregone conclusions, made a U-turn, and went to Africa.
Many of their sentences began, During the rainy season, and I would be directed toward something in the landscape that was not as it should be this deep into December—the evaporated Lake Urema, shrunk from seventy-seven square miles to four; a wilting Gorongosa massif and its deplenished watershed; the raku-cracked and burning floodplains of the savanna. What now expressed itself as terra firma would require boating skills during the Southern Hemisphere’s approaching summer when the park’s bottomlands swelled with watery overabundance. Awed and exhilarated, I leaned out into the rush of air watching the scatter of antelope below.
At Greg’s instruction, Segren eyed a safari track to navigate out toward where the platinum thread of the Urema River emptied from the traumatized lake into the dusty jungle. The pilot dipped the helicopter down into the river’s high-banked channel and we roared along its downstream course at treetop level, my companions remarking upon the bed’s sorry condition—black patches of dampness embroidered with a fringe of hoofprints, scum puddles churned by expiring catfish, and, increasingly, weed-clogged runs where the absent flow had encouraged a vibrant bloom of flora, the greenest thing in sight.
Last year, when CBS’s 60 Minutes came to Mozambique to produce a feature on Carr and Gorongosa, the hottest conservation story in Africa, they had filmed the river from the air as scores of Nile crocodiles flipped one after another off the banks into its robust current. Maybe there were some crocs down there now, nestled in the mucky overgrowth, but we couldn’t see them. Reedbucks and occasional impala bolted across the bed’s golden sand into the cover of the jungle, but it was Africa’s flamboyant birds who owned the desiccated river. Egyptian geese, grotesque marabou storks showcasing the ass-bald head and plucked neck of carrion eaters, graceful herons and lanky crowned cranes, majestic fish eagles. Then we were hovering over the upstream edge of the pool, the squiggle of crocodiles visible in the khaki-colored water, and Greg pointed to a grassy bar about three hundred yards back where he wanted to put down.
On the ground, Segren announced he would stay with the aircraft and keep the engine running and we climbed out with the rotors thumping over our heads and began walking through the high grass at the base of the steep bank towering above us.
This was my first time in Africa, but even before Vasco’s warning, I realized we were in elephant country, their rampant footprints post-holed shin deep in the hardening cake of fertile soil, an ankle-twisting hazard. I had also registered Vasco’s sudden intensity of manner, the heightened alertness, his head rotating as he scrutinized our surroundings. “Okay,” he said, trying to sound lighthearted, “this is a place where elephants come. If you see an elephant coming from the north, you go south. Turn and go.”
Although more people are killed by hippos than any other wild animal in Africa, the elephants—the remaining elephants—of Gorongosa were unforgiving. For generations now they had been engaged in a kill-or-be-killed war with humans, the once prolific herd decimated by rebel soldiers harvesting ivory to finance their insurgency or gathering a windfall of meat for their starving cadres or just gunning down the giants for the wicked hell of it. By the end of Mozambique’s civil war in 1992, only three hundred of an elephant population ten times larger were left alive, and those three hundred, according to National Geographic cameraman Bob Poole, who had been filming in the park for a year, were “skittish and aggressive.” If you were on foot, as we were, walking into an elephant’s range of smell or sight could be justifiably categorized as suicidal.
But as we approached the pool, crocodiles underfoot in the soggy weeds, or a land-foraging hippo spooked by the sudden appearance of humans between it and the water, were a more immediate and tangible concern. Greg and Vasco traversed the bankside, climbing higher for a better vantage point to scout downriver and, I suspected, to be better positioned in case of a charge.
In the wild, the pittance of what’s left of it, the ancient primal verities still apply. (Extreme) caution and (mild) anxiety translate as ingrained virtues, rational responses toward the perilous unknown, yet once Greg and Vasco trained their binoculars on the water, I could feel the tension in the air undergo a euphoric meltdown. Hippos! Exactly where they should be, according to their birthright, at peace in their own habitat . . . after being wiped out completely, thirty-five hundred of them, during the endless war.
As my companions dialed the aquatic spectacle into focus, I began to share the joy, unpuzzling the strange visual logic of what I could see, a rippling logjam of glistening tubs of chocolate flesh, googly-eyed and agitated, clustering down below in the muddy water, choreographed by paranoid shifts and rearrangements that never really changed the tight composition of the jam until a bull slide-paddled forward to calculate the threat of our presence. Saucer-size nostrils flared and exhaled spray, a wet snort like the release of hydraulic brakes in the fragrant stillness, now absent the distant background thrum of rotor blades.
The pilot, for a reason known only to him, had shut down the engine. Occupied by the marvel of the half-submerged pod, we simply noticed an improvement in the depth of the silence around us and made no mention of it. There we stood, spellbound and revering, allowed by the moment to believe in an Edenic world so harmoniously, benevolently perfect, one forgets to remember that the most readily available dish on the menu might very well be you.
The glory of the hippopotamus seems shaped by bizarre hallucinogenic juxtapositions—the utility of its rounded amphibious design packaged in the exaggerated ugliness only seen elsewhere in cartoons; its blob-like massiveness adorned with undersized squirrel ears and stubby legs akin to a wiener dog’s, bullfrog eyes that are nevertheless beady, pinkish peg-toothed jaws like a steam shovel’s attached to the compressed porcine features of its face. We were enthralled, flies on the wall of hippo heaven. Then we withdrew as gently as shadows, back to the helicopter, which maybe had a problem. But dreamy and high with hippo love, we didn’t much care.
We climbed in, Segren muttered something about weak batteries, we climbed out. “I don’t think I’d let my mom ride in this helicopter,” said Greg. He and I walked upriver and sat cross-legged across from baboons collecting on the far bank, remarking on what we could figure out about the tribe’s hierarchy and habits, occasionally extrapolating our insights into opinions about the monkeyshines of the primates half a world away on Wall Street, the two of us content and carefree. Then Vasco walked down the bank to tell us what we had already suspected—the helicopter, with a dead starter, wasn’t going to get us out of here—and even then we greeted our predicament as a frivolous interruption to an otherwise magnificent day.
But we were in no-man’s-land, the great bloodthirsty Darwinian free-for-all, probably twenty klicks beyond the Chitengo compound’s cell phone range, the VHF radio on the little bird was of no use, and we had to guess our chances of being rescued before tomorrow were zero, since no one knew of the fix we were in, let alone where, exactly, to come looking.
There was a boyish brightness in Greg’s eyes when he suggested we go for the full unadulterated experience, seize the rare opportunity to traipse (illicitly) in the park, cross the river and hump all day through the forge-like heat of the primordial jungle into the happy zone of cell phone reception, and text message the cavalry.
“So what do you guys think?” Greg said as we stood on the wrong bank of the croc-infested river. “Wanna walk?” Vasco and I looked at each other and shrugged. We were not bound to see much indecisiveness from Carr, a man whose permanent optimism was exceeded only by his irrepressible, well-aimed, and sometimes kooky enthusiasm (like plopping down on a restaurant floor to do push-ups). Anything could happen tramping around in the jungle, but we faced one certainty: It was not yet noon and we had to be safely back to civilization by sundown, the predatory commencement of people-eating time.
“I was hoping to show you a lion tonight,” Greg Carr told me the night before, the first thing he ever said to me, yet I had arrived too late at Gorongosa to enter the locked preserve. The lion Greg had in mind, however, had roared throughout the evening, and early this morning, before commandeering the helicopter, we had driven out into the bush looking for it but found only vultures convened at the skeleton of its kill. Now, less than twenty-four hours later, Greg’s desire to hook me up with a lion was quickly losing all of its appeal.
I asked if either one of them had the foresight to bring along a sidearm . . . you know, just in case. Greg said no, and Vasco said, Yes, this is my pistol, showing me the miniature penknife he carried in his pocket. I was the only one with gear, a shoulder bag crammed with nothing useful except our water bottles, and to lighten the load I removed a book, William Finnegan’s chronicle of Mozambique’s civil war, and tried to give it to Segren, who had chosen to remain behind, but the pilot did not want it. What else have you got to do? I said, frowning. Regardless of his schoolboy’s distaste for reading, the book was staying.
For several miles we hiked upstream along a game trail flattened through the grass, the riverbed still glazed with stagnant water beneath a lush carpet of weeds, an ideal habitat for lurking crocodiles as advertised by the warthog carcass we hurried past, its hindquarters shorn off as it had tried to flee. Farther on the channel’s vegetation began to get mangy, exposing islands of muddy skin, their crusty appearance more to our liking as we walked ahead, the bed drying out until Greg had convinced himself conditions were favorable for a clean and effortless crossing. Let’s try it, said Greg, and I watched in horror as he and Vasco took six steps out into what I assumed was quicksand, their legs disappearing in a steady downward suck. I responded in the manner most typical of twenty-first-century Americans, grabbing my camera to record the flailing of their last astonished moments.
It seems implausible that some lives might ever intersect, separated by every divide destiny can thrust between two people, yet should their story lines somehow twist together, they form a single braid of near-mystical affirmation for unlimited possibility. Say, for example, an African warrior—Beca Jofrisse—and an American tycoon—Greg Carr: the unlikely pair of administrators who occupy the summit of Gorongosa’s organizational chart. One a former Marxist-Leninist freedom fighter, the other a capitalist swashbuckler who made his fortune developing information technology.
A genuine introduction to Lieutenant Colonel Beca Jofrisse’s country begins with the unsettling sight of an AK-47 assault rifle emblazoned on its national flag, and the story of modern Mozambique—its tyrannies and bloody struggles and ideological promiscuities, its surprising transformation from the planet’s biggest nightmare (in the early ’90s Mozambique was the poorest country on earth) into one of sub-Saharan Africa’s very few nations where hope, peace, and stability are not delusions—can be found contained in the proud generation of woefully scarred and stoically victorious people like Jofrisse, a gentle statuesque man whose frozen stare into the whirlwind of the past is regularly broken by embracing smiles.
In 1968 at the age of nineteen, Beca Jofrisse began his long walk north across the length of Mozambique to the border with Tanzania to join the luta armada—the armed struggle for independence from Portugal, which had inflicted a five-hundred-year-long battering of the mainland’s indigenous populations since 1498, the year Vasco da Gama rounded Cape Horn and landed at Ilha de Mozambique, claiming the shoreline he sailed past for the Portuguese crown. The white man’s ravenous enterprise had many appetites—in the seventeenth century gold, in the eighteenth century ivory, in the nineteenth century slaves—and in 1891, during the European powers’s “Scramble for Africa,” Portugal established formal control over three colonies—Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau—which seventy years later would erupt in open rebellion.
The battle for Beca Jofrisse’s country was waged by Frelimo—the Mozambique Liberation Front—from its headquarters in Dar es Salaam. When Beca finally crossed into Tanzania to enlist in Frelimo’s revolutionary army, he could scarcely have imagined that more than twenty years later he would be fighting on, his country still a raging war zone, his enemies his own misguided people.
In Tanzania, the literate Beca excelled as a student of military basics, which earned him a trip to the Soviet Union for more advanced training and an indoctrination into the tenets of communism. Returning to Tanzania, he was deployed back across the border into the fray and in 1972, ordered to cross the Zambezi River, his unit battled their way south to spread the war into the province of Sofala, the home of Gorongosa National Park, forced to close in 1973, engulfed in combat and the scorched earth campaign of the colonial military.
By 1974, Portugal’s trifecta of wars in Africa had proved to be a losing ticket, and in July of that year a new government quickly agreed to hand over Mozambique to Frelimo. The independent Republic of Mozambique was proclaimed the following year. Overnight the Portuguese, 250,000 of them, pulled out of the demolished country in an orgy of sabotage and vandalism, leaving behind an infant nation with too little infrastructure and too many guns.
Out of this maelstrom of “peace” and economic chaos another monster was born, the Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo), a disorganized but homicidal insurgency assembled by its sponsors—first white-ruled Rhodesia and then apartheid South Africa—to ensure that black majority rule in Africa became synonymous with disaster. Renamo’s objective was to sow havoc, wreck everything, and paralyze the country, and it would bathe Mozambique in blood for the next sixteen years.
Central Mozambique absorbed the brunt of these atrocities, and Gorongosa itself became a shooting gallery, a shifting headquarters for both armies, the area swarmed by destitute refugees, the footpaths throughout the countryside rigged with land mines, its animals serving as a type of ATM machine to fund and supply the combatants. Protected as a private hunting reserve since 1921 and designated as a national park in 1960, known romantically by tourists as the place where Noah left his ark, Gorongosa’s 1,455 square miles once hosted more predators than South Africa’s Kruger, denser herds of elephants and buffalo than the Serengeti, and thousands upon thousands of plains animals. By the end of the civil war, the body count was numbing—the elephants decimated; hippos exterminated; the largest lion population in all of Africa reduced from five hundred to a few dozen; thirty-five hundred zebras gone; two thousand impala gone; rhinos, gone; forty buffalo left from a herd of fourteen thousand; a herd of seven hundred sable antelope reduced to zero; three remaining wildebeests from a herd of fifty-five hundred; 129 waterbuck from a herd of 3,500; the ubiquitous warthogs nowhere in sight. Cheetahs, wild dogs, hyenas, and jackals apparently exterminated. Leopards, no one could say.
When the civil war blazed into existence in 1976, Beca Jofrisse underwent a metamorphosis from jungle guerrilla fighter to an elite member of the newborn nation’s high command, stationed in Maputo, the cosmopolitan capital. By the early 1990s, Frelimo, disavowing its Marxist ideology, signed a peace agreement with Renamo. The catastrophic decades of hostility and ruination were over. Beca, like the soldiers on both sides, had lost scores of friends in a conflict that had left more than a million Mozambicans dead and millions more wounded or maimed. He retired from the army, pursued an engineering degree, and dedicated himself to the reconstruction of what had been lost.
As the new century rolled out, the nation’s hatred and mistrust slowly exhausted itself and Mozambique was alive again, though not by any measure discharged from the intensive care ward of the underdeveloped world. But for the first time in memory, the country seemed to be sitting up and smiling. Its near-death experience imbued Mozambicans with a laid-back joie de vivre balanced by a sustaining sense of civility, the correct antidote to fratricidal madness. About the same time that Greg Carr parachuted onto the scene in 2004, Beca realized the war had left behind in him an unrequited love—a passion for nature and the forests of central Mozambique, the beauty of the thousand-year-old baobabs, the surreal haunted groves of yellow fever trees in the provinces where he had fought as a young warrior to liberate his country.
Lieutenant Colonel Jofrisse’s friends in the Frelimo government encouraged him to consummate this old but dormant romance and sent him to study natural resource protection at the Southern African Wildlife College. Then in April 2008, at a signing ceremony between the president of Mozambique and Greg Carr, formalizing the nonprofit Carr Foundation’s forty million dollar, twenty-year agreement to resurrect the national park, Jofrisse, representing the government of Mozambique, and Carr together became Gorongosa’s pair of overseers, partners in a pas de deux quite unlike any heretofore performed in the continent’s jungles.
High in a tree in Africa a desperate woman clutches a baby, her feet submerged in floodwaters of biblical proportion. For Greg Carr, like most people watching CNN’s footage of the devastation caused by Cyclone Eline when it slammed into Mozambique in 2000, this wretched image blipped the obscure southern African nation onto the screen of their awareness, however momentarily, and even then, like Carr, many of those viewers would be hard-pressed to articulate a single fact about the country beyond a general pronouncement on its condition: hell on earth.
Later that same year in New York City, a mutual friend introduced Carr to Mozambique’s ambassador to the United Nations, a congenial diplomat who asked, Why don’t you think about helping us out? It was a question Carr had come to expect from well-intended strangers. What else really would you ask a philanthropist sitting atop a stack of money, in this case 200 million dollars, an amount that for Carr served as the answer to a question few masters of the universe ever bothered to ask: How much wealth is finally enough? Carr deferred, telling the ambassador he would think about Mozambique, but his hands were tied with other projects.
In the mid-’80s, by the age of twenty-seven, Carr had already morphed into an über-capitalist, turning away from a path into academia. A history major at Utah State, he left his hometown in Idaho Falls, Idaho, exchanging the mountains of the west for the ivory towers of Cambridge, enrolling in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which he saw as a springboard for earning a PhD in linguistics. While finishing up his master’s degree at the Kennedy School, he began an intensive study of the breakup of AT&T’s monopoly on telecommunications, smelling opportunity in its divestitures.
He convinced a friend, Scott Jones, a twenty-five-year-old scientist at an MIT lab, to go into business with him, maxing out their credit cards for start-up funds. In 1986, their new company, Boston Technology, democratized voice mail services, marketing the system to the emerging Baby Bells. Four years later, Boston Technology was the top voice mail provider in the nation. By the mid-’90s, Carr was CEO of both Boston Technology and a second technology venture, Prodigy, an Internet service pioneer. Then in 1998, a very rich man with, he says, “a pretty bad case of attention deficit disorder,” he walked away from it all to create the Carr Foundation, its charter targeted on three areas of philanthropic pursuits: human rights, the arts, and conservation.
Visionaries resist typecasting, though with a pince-nez and roughrider garb Greg Carr could pass, in stoutness of physique as well as spirit, for a younger Teddy Roosevelt. To explain how he thinks or to illuminate his moral universe, he quotes Buddhist philosophers, Nelson Mandela, and David Foster Wallace, and he cites the authors—Darwin, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson—he considers seminal to his swooning love of nature. Were Carr a more conventional businessman, when he took a powder from his fortune-making enterprises at the age of thirty-eight, the temptation to describe his action as a midlife crisis would have been irresistible, yet for Carr it was a long-awaited chance to shift gears.
Behind the change was a lifelong conviction that the span of a career should contain separate but interlocking halves, a yin/yang of profit and nonprofit, an exuberance for making money married to a passion for giving it away to support causes dearest to one’s heart. Passively giving back, just checkmarking the do-gooder box, wasn’t the point. The point was unleashing happiness, animating your value system with injections of old-fashioned fun, which is precisely what he thinks rich guys without a sense of largesse are missing out on. Darting an elephant to replace the batteries in its radio collar ranks high on Carr’s list of Fun Things to Do After Breakfast.
On a deeper level, though, he saw capitalism without a conscience as a socioeconomic steroid, proving itself no more useful to humanity and its huddled masses than other abused ideologies. Rise alone, fall together. The selfish detachment of cowboy capitalism from the welfare of a community created mayhem, a danger not only to itself but to the planet, plundering the resources of an ecology with the same rapacity of soldiers pillaging a national park.
Ideally, making a busload of money allowed you to cut to the front of the line as an agent of meaningful change, and by 2000, Carr was inundated with projects: turning the former headquarters of the Aryan Nations into a peace park in Sandpoint, Idaho, constructing cultural monuments in Boise. He built the Market Theater in Harvard Square, then donated eighteen million dollars to establish Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He produced a movie, then started a radio station in Afghanistan. He was conducting a marching band of altruism, on fire with intellectual stimulation yet yearning for something more visceral, adventurous. The recipe had to include “a little vision to it, some mystery, some romance, some difficult problems to solve,” and satisfy his lust for immersion—“Do theater to understand theater and do conservation to understand conservation. Don’t just read a book. Combine ideas and action. Exist in physical reality.”
Intrigued by the ambassador’s invitation, he began to systematically research conservation projects in the southern African nation and traveled to Mozambique for the first time in 2002. Two years later he returned to climb aboard a helicopter with government officials to tour six potential sites Carr had identified that fit both his personal goals and the political mandate—to weld environmental restoration with human development into a sustainable business model based on tourism and agri-industry, thereby enabling absolutely marginalized communities to have a future. The second stop was Gorongosa, the park in shambles, long forgotten as a destination, a lost cause. Nothing there anymore worth bothering with, Carr heard often, a sentiment that collided with his intolerance for cynicism. But when he first set foot on Gorongosa, “it was, boom, Let’s go!” Returning home to pace around the house and think about it would have been antithetical to the tally-ho style of his decision making.
What Carr saw at Gorongosa, with a historian’s perspective, was Yellowstone, the park he had grown up with as his neighbor in eastern Idaho. Yellowstone made it easy for Carr to conceptualize the Gorongosa project. “When Yellowstone was made a national park in 1872,” says Carr, “the animals had been extirpated. It wasn’t this pristine thing and the government said, ‘Oh, we better protect it.’ No, no, no. It had been hunted out. The bison, the elk, the bears were gone or mostly gone. The point of Yellowstone Park was to recover it, and a hundred years later it’s back. I look at Gorongosa that way. This was the first national park in the Portuguese-speaking world. Both parks are the flagships of their respective nations. Both of them have big charismatic fauna, including carnivores. Both are dangerous places.” The parallels struck him as personal and beckoning.
For the next two years, he consulted with aid professionals, searched for suitable experts to bring into the project (more difficult than he imagined), and negotiated with the Mozambican government (in Portuguese, a language he did not speak), “just trying to sign a piece of paper and get started.” That contract, a Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2004, essentially stated, said Carr, “Look, this is one day at a time, toss me out whenever you want, and let’s just get to know each other.” He wasn’t buying the park, or leasing it, or taking it over as a concession, but instead agreeing to manage Gorongosa on a provisional basis. It was by any account an unusual arrangement, an auspicious foreigner assuming control over an iconic sovereign asset, and Carr hoped it would provide a template for saving stressed-out national parks throughout the developing world.
Gorongosa’s business manager, Joao Viseu, calls Carr’s approach “the new philanthropy—not just giving but doing,” a paradigm splitting the difference between two more recognizable patterns—the Paul Farmers of the world, who start with nothing but a calling and gradually accumulate resources because people believe in them, and “the rich guy who has his billion dollars and then says, There you go.”
At age forty, with piles of money on hand, Carr rode the elevator to the ground floor, the place where everything looked and felt different—where Carr looked and felt different. “I didn’t sit in Washington, D.C., and mail checks. I came here and said I’m going to be here for twenty years, and I’m going to wear these silly cutoff shorts. To make things work in rural Africa you’ve got to be hands-on, and you run a real risk of making things worse if you intervene from a distance.”
One night at dinner—grilled prawns, gin and tonics—I listened as Greg and Beca, Gorongosa’s two lordly patriarchs, got to know each other better, discussing an issue of vital importance: the forthcoming annual soccer game between management and staff. Carr suggested that, as co-administrators of the park, he and Beca should be the goalkeepers. Or, given their age, the two of them together would make one goalkeeper.
“Maybe,” said Beca doubtfully. “I’m not good.”
“Or maybe we should be somewhere else,” said Carr, who had never played soccer, and the two of them leaned into each other like brothers, laughing.
“But we can,” insisted Beca.
“Sim, podemos,” Carr agreed. Yes, we can. The game, with Carr and Beca on the field against the youthful staff, would end in a crowd-cheering tie.
From where we sat in Chitengo’s soaring new open-air rondavel-style restaurant, gazing out into the beast-filled wilds just a minute’s walk away, I found it difficult to imagine the devastation Carr had encountered here three and a half years earlier. When he first drove in with his new multidisciplinary team (scientists, engineers, business managers, economic advisers, tourism developers), there was no water, no electricity, the few walls left standing in the rubble were riddled with bullet holes, bomb casings were lying around. They were embedded within the miserable heat of a hazardous jungle surrounded by crippling poverty and the vestigial tensions of civil war. He hired a labor force from the local communities, former Frelimo soldiers and Renamo rebels who required occasional stern lectures on the rewards of playing nice. Slowly Chitengo’s infrastructure—tourist chalets, reception center, meeting hall, staff housing, mechanic’s shop—began to rise from the ashes, its reincarnation adorned with Internet satellite dishes. Until he moved into a spacious campaign tent, Carr slept outside in the back of a pickup truck, high enough off the ground to keep safe from snakes and (he hoped) lions, a star gazer’s preference that landed him in the hospital, semi-comatose with the first of three bouts of malaria.
An intrepid hiker back home in Idaho, Carr, with an entourage of biologists and local guides, quickly became an obsessive explorer of the park and its environs, gleefully “discovering” thermal springs, waterfalls, caves, unknown species. The animals were not entirely gone, as he had been led to believe, but hiding, what was left of them, still harried by rampant poaching. A revitalized team of rangers, many of them former poachers themselves, began to patrol throughout Gorongosa, its dry season plagued by wildfires set by illegal hunters to drive game into snares or harvest the large rodents that burrowed on the savanna. By 2006, with the completion of a fenced sanctuary, the park had begun to reintroduce large numbers of grazers—wildebeest and buffalo—back into the overgrown grasslands, and supplement the antelope populations with breeds that hadn’t been seen in years. Last year more hippos and elephants were trucked in, but the zebras Carr hoped to import remained unavailable behind Zimbabwe’s nearby border, trapped by political turmoil.
Tourists trickled back to the park, thirty or so camping out the first year, fewer than a thousand in 2005, eight thousand (a mix of tourists and other visitors) in 2008, compared to twenty thousand in Gorongosa’s golden years in the sixties, when the park’s original restaurant, now rebuilt in soaring rondavel style, often served four hundred meals a day. From day one, Carr understood that the long-term fate of Gorongosa depended on ecotourism, a tricky proposition for an unfamiliar destination so distant from the world’s centers of dwindling affluence. In ten years, the project believes it will be able to easily accommodate one hundred thousand tourists a year, an egalitarian mix of self-drive campers and luxury-addicted adventuristas, and even at four times that capacity Gorongosa would still maintain the same “tourism density level” as Kruger National Park in South Africa without damaging the character of its wilderness. Right now, the top-quality safaris Gorongosa offers use only 75 miles (of a potential 620 miles) of game-drive roads.
Yet before tourists could be seduced back to Gorongosa, the project’s near- and long-term success depended on its ability to cultivate the support of the 250,000 villagers living in the park’s buffer zone and surrounding district, the overwhelming majority of them subsistence farmers living in a sprawl of mud-and-thatch villages and scattered homesteads, vulnerable to disease and famine, too poor even to generate garbage, which explains the remarkable litter-free cleanliness of the countryside’s roads and footpaths.
Humans and the environment invariably compete with each other, yet without synchronicity between the two, Carr believed, both were doomed. The Gorongosa project, dedicated to floating both boats simultaneously, put itself at the center of a controversy in conservation science, positioned between a movement called “back to the barriers,” basically turning the natural resource into an off-limits fortress, and a more decentralized and porous community-based management approach toward environmental stewardship.
Across the planet loss of habitat, an apocalyptic problem approaching critical mass, requires increasingly radical change in human behavior, yet barricading Gorongosa from its swaddle of communities, Carr told me, was both infeasible and perhaps morally arrogant, an artificial separation between integrated ecosystems (an astonishing fifty-four distinct ecosystems) and social patterns that would have minimal effect on the three practices that most endanger the park’s well-being—slash-and-burn agriculture on the watershed, charcoal production in the buffer zone, and hunting—and offered no incentive to lure people away from these traditional activities. And Carr believed fervently that a dense, rich, and age-old culture, better attuned to contemporary realities, was no more or less worthy of preservation than a rain forest or wildlife population. The key to all of this, of course, was to enable self-sufficiency by galvanizing everyone with a financial stake in conservation.
The first priority was an educated, healthy workforce. The day after our jungle march, we waded hip-deep across the Pungue River to visit Vinho, the community closest to the park’s headquarters. As we scrambled out of the flow, I mentioned that Gorongosa’s head safari guide, Adolfo Macadono, had told me that a week earlier, a villager had been eaten by a crocodile while fishing at the same spot where we were standing on the bank. “I think about it as getting hit by a car in Harvard Square,” Greg said. “It happens.” Need I say I found no comfort in this analogy. Drying off as we toured Carr’s work in Vinho—a brick-and-mortar school with a Wi-Fi computer lab, a clinic and nurses’ residence, a bore well drawing potable water—Greg told me he had promised to construct a hundred additional schools and twenty-five more clinics throughout the district. By 2009, Gorongosa employed six hundred newly trained locals, an additional five thousand people benefiting from their paychecks.
When Carr reached out to the villages dotted across the buffer zone and the Gorongosa massif, many peasants had rarely, if ever, seen a muzungu, and certainly not one bearing swag— cloth, wine, tobacco—to appease the resident spirits. Near Nhatsoco, a settlement on the mountain, Carr was rebuffed by the area’s curandeiro (spiritual leader, witch doctor—take your choice) when he sought the priest’s alliance in his effort to stop people from clear-cutting in the rain forest. His team had arrived in a flurry of bad juju—their helicopter was a sinister red color, a village chief wore inappropriate clothes, an unhappy ancestor—a snake—chose to make an appearance. Sent away as a rude meddler, Carr, an innately humble man, apologized but persisted, eventually gaining the priest’s blessing. By 2006, locals were being paid to guide tourists up the sacred peak, build tree nurseries, and begin replanting hardwoods across the slopes.
Everywhere Carr goes in the district these days, he is treated inevitably like a rock star distributing goodwill and golden eggs. In return Carr asks the villagers to stop setting fires in the park, give up poaching, forgo hacking down trees. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the bad habits carry on, at least for the time being, though a shift in attitudes is palpable. Carr, with no illusions, says, “It starts somewhere”—a more felicitous life, a less destructive way of doing things—but by the time he hands back Gorongosa to the Mozambican government twenty years from now, no one doubts that its human and ecological landscapes will have undergone a mind-boggling transformation. The project’s staff, 98.5 percent Mozambican, already light up with the feeling that that future, with its attendant sense of triumph in their remaking of a war-torn country, has pulled into the station.
For the record, the only foreigner on Gorongosa’s team of managers is Carr’s wry-humored communications director, my slimed and foot-sore companion Vasco Galante, a tall, balding, solid-bodied former basketball player for Portugal’s national team.
It wasn’t quicksand after all but a bog of liquefied silt. Greg and Vasco bottomed out crotch-deep and eventually extracted themselves from the goop and we continued our march upriver, though in a matter of minutes, Greg, undaunted, had plunged into another bog. This time as he struggled free he began to notice that wherever a plant with tiny yellow flowers grew, the bed would support his weight, and farther on we came to a place where the flowering zigzagged across the channel. Heedless to my admonitions, Greg racewalked toward the far shore as if he were trying to beat oncoming traffic. Perhaps he worried about crocodiles hidden in the weeds, although I had begun to learn that Greg’s momentum was an indomitable force, at times imprudent, and uninhibited by ambivalence. Certain now that what we were doing was a variation of crazy, I looked across the river at the opposite bank, the feral tangle of thicket, vine, and scrub palmetto roasting in the feeble shade of blanched trees and spiked ilala palms, and resigned myself to the crossing.
We scrambled up a natural drainage chute carved into the bank, found the seldom-used safari track we had hoped was there, and followed it back downstream for two miles, a stretch where several days later Vasco and I would find elephants coming up off the river, and a hippo cow and calf napping in the bush not thirty feet from where we now walked. Then the track turned away from the river into the windless, stifling heart of the jungle, and we were soon inhaling intense fumes of the unforgettable leathery piss odor of wild Africa.
For the first half mile the trees were stripped, smashed, toppled over, leaf-eating pachyderms passing through like a tornado, and we became instant students of their mounded dung, studying the color and relative dryness to determine the herd’s proximity. “Just keep talking,” Greg said hopefully, and whenever our conversation flagged, I would loudly announce to the jungle that we were, in fact, still talking.
We walked with relentless determination, which is how one walks when Greg Carr sets the pace and you intend to keep up with him. With the sun overhead there was little shade on the track, the sauna-like ferocity of the heat as threatening as the thought of lunging carnivores or slithering black mambas, and after an hour it was evident that we lacked sufficient water to stay hydrated. Magically my shoulder bag filled with rocks and we began to share the punishment of lugging it. Sweating profusely in jeans and leather boots, I envied my companions’ bwana shorts and minimalist footwear—Jesus sandals for Vasco, preppy sockless boat shoes for Greg—the current muzungu styles for a jaunt through the goddamn jungle.
The second hour, Vasco and I began to drag our feet ever so slightly, the monotonous slog of the trek contradicting its urgency. Greg, on the other hand, was having a terrific time, supernaturally energized to be shipwrecked in the middle of nowhere, an opportunity flush with the thrill of rule breaking, and by the third hour, as my need for two-minute breaks became more frequent, he would shuffle restlessly, unable to stand still as Vasco and I squatted in the shade, parched and mindless. Our slowdown finally summoned Greg’s inner (antsy) child and he suggested we stay put while he went on alone searching for the elusive cell phone signal. No way, Vasco and I protested. Our pride would not allow it, and we stuck together for another mile until, on the verge of heatstroke, it became painfully obvious that our pride wasn’t quite the virtue we had imagined.
We shook hands, wished Greg Godspeed, and watched his blithe disappearance around a bend in the track, wondering what body parts he might be missing if we ever saw him again. The late afternoon sun had begun to splinter into golden beams, planting shadows in the jungle, and, unable to depend on the success of Greg’s solo mission, we began walking again, our pace marginally faster than zombies. After a ways Vasco snatched up a long stick. What’s that for? I asked a bit dubiously. Just in case, he said. For animals. Minutes passed in silence and I kept thinking I should pocket one of the occasional rocks I saw in the track. Vasco, I said, what kind of animals are you going to hit with that stick? You never know, he said, and we both laughed at this absurdity. He told a safari joke that ends with a hapless fellow preventing an attack by throwing shit at a lion, which he scoops out of the deposit in his own pants.
By four o’clock we arrived at a landmark that Vasco, for the past hour, had expected to see any minute now—an old concrete bridge spanning a dry wash. This is it, said Vasco, removing his shirt and collapsing flat on his back. I pulled off my boots and socks, rolled up my pants, unbuttoned my shirt, and laid down as well, dazed and blistered and generally indifferent to what might happen next. We had walked ten miles from the near side of the river, plus another three or four trying to find a crossing. It was unlikely yet that Greg would be in cell phone range, four and a half miles farther on, and so we were puzzled when we heard a search plane overhead, flying out toward the hippo pool, unaware that our failure to return in the early afternoon had set off an alarm with Beca that had now reached the highest levels of the federal government, or that a large herd of elephants was nosing around the disabled helicopter while Segren, engrossed in Finnegan’s book, read the first eight chapters.
Barking signaled the approach of baboons, challenging our right to recline on their bridge. The jungle dimmed toward twilight, its harshness replaced by a counterintuitive sense of abiding peace. I closed my eyes, remembering the quizzical eyes of the antelope—oribi, waterbuck, nyala—we had seen throughout the day, poised to flee but not in any rush as we passed by in quiet admiration of their elegance and beauty. What a shame, I dared to think, that we had not seen a pride of lions or trumpeting elephants. A sun-stricken fantasy, akin to a death wish. When Vasco asked what time it was, I told him four thirty. They’ll come for us by five, he predicted, and, as night fell upon Gorongosa, they did.
We found Greg blissed out, up to his sunburned neck in the cool blue water of Chitengo’s new swimming pool, eating a bowl of fresh fruit cocktail, a full moon rising behind the happiest philanthropist on the face of the earth. The safari guides would call us damn fools for our reckless misadventure. Fair enough, and we would have to live with the mischievous glow of that assessment, persuaded that our bad luck—an outlandish privilege, a backhanded gift—might never again play out with such serendipity, marching across Africa in league with just the sort of heaven-sent fool a better world could thrive on. A world, I would expect, where standing around waiting to be rescued is not an option.
(2010)