Seen from the air west of Cape Verde, at the westernmost point of Africa, in Senegal, the ocean sunrise, clear red-blue, turns an ominous yellow, and the sun itself is shrouded, ghostly, in this dust of the northeast trade wind of the dry season, known as the harmattan, that blows across the great Sahara desert. White birds and wave crests fleck a gray-blue sea, and the lean black pirogues of fishermen are very small off the rocky islets called Les Iles de la Madeleine. On the bare ground of the high cliffs stand the white mosques at Yoff, and beyond, low hills of Africa rise like shadows in hot winds that tilt the ragged wings of kites and scatter the dead paper of the world across Dakar.
Arriving in Dakar on a Sunday morning after a long night of no sleep, we are unable to find any office open, or anyone willing to rent us a vehicle that is up to the rough tracks of the interior; it is not until midday, after several hours of haggling in the great heat, that we come to terms with Mr. Baba Sow, a tall and august Muslim of the Ouolof tribe, who is putting himself and his small Peugeot at our disposal. We depart in the heat of afternoon, proceeding south and east through the litter of small factories in the red-earth wastes of Dakar’s suburbs, along fringes of the thin eucalyptus trees that have been introduced all over Africa to replace cleared forests and combat the vast erosion that threatens to blow this whole continent away. On this silent Sunday afternoon, kites, pied crows, goats, and vultures rule the dusty streets, as dark figures in Muslim dress cross from one shade to another.
Even in late afternoon, the heat is terrific; the land shimmers in the hot breath of the harmattan. Senegal is the western borderland between the desert and the Guinea forests, and this region between desert and savanna, called the Sahel, is an arid country of poor soils, hundreds of miles wide, that stretches all the way east to the Sudan, and its parched thornbush of baobab and scrub acacia, red termite hills, starlings and hornbills, is very similar in aspect to the nyika of East Africa; when a ring-necked dove crosses the road, I know I am in Africa again. As the road moves south and east, this thornbush rapidly gives way to an open woodland and long-grass savanna, known to ecologists as the West Sudan or Sudanian Zone, that separates the Sahel and the equatorial forest for four thousand miles, all the way east across Africa to the Nile. In the savanna, small villages of thatched huts, the thatched huts clustered in green islands of banyan, tamarind, and mango, take refuge from the heat and the bright wind.
This journey is a preliminary inquiry into what remains of the wildlife of West Africa, undertaken by Dr. Gilbert Boese of Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo; Dr. Boese, who based his doctoral thesis on the Guinea baboons of Senegal, has invited me along as an observer. I have never been to West Africa before and am eager to see how its people, wildlife, and landscapes differ from those in East Africa and South. Our first destination, some 350 miles inland, is Niokolo Koba, in the southeast corner of the country near the borders with Mali and Guinea-Bissau, the first national park ever established in West Africa (1954) and the logical place to begin our survey.
Mr. Baba Sow says that Niokolo Koba, which he claims to have visited last year, is no more than three hours from Dakar, but apparently he is a dreadful judge of distance; when three hours have passed, we are not far beyond Kaolack, at least six hours from our destination, with some two hundred kilometers of rough red track between here and the next large town at Tambacounda. Baba Sow seeks to minimize this discrepancy with a speed excessive for this rough piste, so that we see little of the countryside besides red dust and blue sky. He is a good driver, with a keen eye for bumps and potholes, but his skill is repaid with a traffic ticket issued by two foot police who flag him down as he bores through an Ouolof village like a conqueror, scattering man and beast in all directions.
Though the ceremonial expostulation on both sides adds a half hour to our journey, it provides an opportunity to inspect these compact villages of square huts, mostly daub and wattle with looped thatching bound into a topknot at the center of the roof, each family cluster separated from the others by a fencing of upright split logs that support walls of raffia-palm matting. The Ouolof here grow cabbages and melons, maize and a few tomatoes, as well as the main crop of Senegal-Gambia and the foundation of its economy, the groundnut or common peanut, imported from South America in the sixteenth century by the Portuguese, who arrived in Senegal in about 1450—the first European contact with any part of Africa south of the Sahara. Near the road in every village stands an archaic red machine that separates groundnuts from their vine debris. The debris provides good fodder for the stock in this season of drought, when the high, pale, stalky grass is being burned and the earth is black. Goats, sheep, donkeys, longhorned cattle, and even a few horses must be fed, for here as elsewhere throughout Africa, ownership is the foundation of prestige. The donkeys and horses serve mainly to draw the colorful small two-wheeled carts that junket everywhere throughout the villages, which are also provided with wayside benches painted in bright reds and yellows.
By late afternoon the trees in the savanna country include such familiar East African forms as Terminalia, the white-trunked Sterculia, and the dark, majestic winterthorn acacia. Even so, the landscape is a strange one. The variety of vegetation, not only in the savanna country but in what is left of the dry woodland, seems much greater than in East Africa, and many more species remain green in the dry season; that gray fierce aspect of the bush is missing. On the other hand, there is no sign of animals—a striped ground squirrel is the only mammal seen. Though bird species are few, the huge Abyssinian ground hornbill is abundant, which suggests an absence of large predators, as well as veneration by the tribesmen, for one is struck by the abundance of human beings. Even after dark, two hundred miles inland, where the square huts of the Ouolof are replaced by round huts of Malinke and Fulani, there are few trees between one small village and another.
At nine in the evening we reach Tambacounda, one thousand feet above sea level on the vast plateau of Africa; from here, in wagons-lit of the Chemin de Fer de Senegal, which had a certain elegance in other times, one traveled east as far as Bamako, in that part of French West Africa now known as Mali, and from there by one means or another to Timbuktu and Niamey, on the Upper Niger.
From Tambacounda, early in the morning, we head south to the Parc National de Niokolo Koba, which at the time of its establishment, after centuries of remorseless slaughter in the region, had scarcely any wild animals left. In 1920, the last damalisk (the western topi) in Senegal had disappeared, and both giraffe and elephant were near extinction. A solitary elephant killed in 1917 was the last one in the Cape Verde region, and since there are no recent records for Mauritania, the elephants in Niokolo Koba are probably the last in northwest Africa. With protection, they showed good signs of recovery, and their number may now exceed three hundred, but in recent years the plague of poaching that has done such damage to East Africa’s parks has set in here, with special attention to elephant and crocodile, and so despite the efforts of two-hundred-odd askaris who patrol on foot, bicycle, and by pirogue, the elephants are declining once again. Meanwhile, in the 1960s, the giraffe became extinct, and an effort to reintroduce it from Nigeria came to naught when a cargo of groundnut waste intended to feed the captive group was sent back by mistake, so that the creatures perished in their cages.
Niokolo Koba—which presently includes more than eight hundred thousand hectares—is the last stronghold of large animals in Senegal. The relict creatures of the region were spared by the park’s remote location in the southeast corner of the country, in unsettled tsetse woods well south of the main trade routes. Watered by the upper reaches of the Gambia River, Niokolo Koba includes typical Sudanian savanna as well as the high forest typical of Guinea, which lies just over its south border. Therefore it can claim the only population of wild chimpanzees in Senegal. It also gives shelter to several hundred Derby eland, largest of all African antelopes, as well as the statuesque roan antelope for which the park is named: Niokolo Koba means “Place of the Roan Antelope.” Otherwise, its large mammalian fauna is—or was—quite typical of the Sudanian region, all across West Africa: buffalo, hippopotamus, warthog and bush pig, and such antelope as the western kob, the large western hartebeest, Defassa waterbuck, bushbuck or “harnessed antelope,” Bohor reedbuck, oribi, and a few species of duiker. Officially, at least, all the large predators are here (although the status of the cheetah is obscure). For many of its species, if not most, Niokolo Koba can claim the most northerly as well as westerly populations on the African continent.
In outlying areas accessible to poachers, Niokolo Koba’s animals are few; one sees instead the round clay cylinders of the dead villages whose lands were taken as the park enlarged its boundaries. Then troops of Papio papio appear—the thickset, reddish nominate race called the “Guinea baboon.” (Because European scientists came here early, many of the original descriptions of African fauna and flora derive from Senegal; hence the prevalence of the specific name Senegalensis for such widespread creatures as the Senegal cuckoo, which I first saw in Botswana, thousands of miles to the southeast, and renewed acquaintance with this morning in the dump behind the Estekebe Hotel in Tambacounda. And since most of the early naturalists were French, the common names are mostly French, as well; the hartebeest is le bubale, the buffalo le buffle, and the kob is called kob de Buffon, after the eminent taxonomist of the eighteenth century. We see a white-tailed mongoose, a patas monkey, vervets, then the red-flanked duiker, stamping black feet and flicking its tail straight up and down as it regards us: like all duikers, it has short horns and short forelegs and holds its head low to the ground—adaptive characters for quick escape in the dense bush or forest that duikers prefer. This colorful species is common here and very tame—indeed, the tamest of these shy, small, woodland antelopes I have ever come across.
In the rainy season, from May through October, Mare Sita N’di, a shallow lake or pan in the north part of the park, will overflow its banks as the greater part of Niokolo Koba becomes flooded, but in mid-March it is nearly dry and sparsely covered in a haze of green that attracts large groups of animals and a mixed company of birds. Beyond the Mare Sita N’di, and loosely named for it, is the Sementi Lodge, near the park headquarters, which overlooks a lovely stretch of the upper Gambia. The slow river of the dry season is clear and green, reflecting the soaring fan palms or borassus; this high dark gallery forest by the river is a riverine extension of the Guinea forests to the south. Here in the heat of midafternoon the elephants come down to water, and hippos may be seen not far upriver. The shy, small forest buffles have been here, too, to judge from the bovine dung along the way.
In the dead heat that persists into the dusk, the kob and waterbuck lie down on the dry mud of Sita N’di (the western kob seems to ignore the hottest sun) but the bushbuck and warthog have retreated to the shade of the hot dry woodland all around. Here and there, the woodland floor is white with silk-cotton from the Ceiba pods, which are eaten by baboons as well as vervets and thereby scattered in the time of seeding. Bamboo the brown color of burning white paper sprouts from a crust of lateritic stone, and the common Pterocarpus tree is coming into pretty yellow blossom, as if in anticipation of the rains, but over the white woods hangs a ghostly stillness, intensified by hot wafts of the harmattan in the dry fans of raffia and borassus.
In a grove of fig trees, by a dark creek of stagnant water green with algae, a company of beasts has gathered in the heavy shade. A big roan buck leads a band of hartebeest out of the woods to join a rabble of baboons and vervets, a pair of bushbuck, and a pair of reedbuck, pale and delicate. Not far away is a red-flanked duiker and two oribi, the color of brown grass. In East Africa, the oribi are reddish, and thus these brown ones seem to be an exception to a general tendency toward erythrism (prevalence of red pigmentation) that characterizes a number of West African forms. At Niokolo Koba, for example, the bush pig, bushbuck, buffalo, and baboon are all markedly more red than their counterparts in East and South Africa, and so is the pygmy hippopotamus of the river forests of Liberia and Ivory Coast. Why this should be so is quite mysterious; the conspicuous color would seem to be an evolutionary disadvantage. One theory holds that because, in early times, the forests were much more extensive than they are today, most or all of these “red” animals inhabited the forest, where animal colors tend to be brighter than on the savanna, perhaps for purposes of communication and display in a dim light.
Farther south, another roan crosses the track, then a long-tailed parakeet, bright emerald in color; as with many birds of the savanna, its range extends across the continent into northern Kenya, but as it happens, I have never seen it. The parakeet flickers rapidly through the dry air, alighting at last among white flowers of a Vernonia bush, at the edge of marshes. Not far away, by the wet sump of a dry pan, an extraordinary conference of birds has gathered, as if reconciled by drought to their great differences—speckled pigeons, laughing and vinaceous doves, the red-billed wood dove, black magpies and gray hornbills, the long-tailed and the purple glossy starlings, cattle egrets, squacco herons, and, on reed stalks, the Abyssinian and blue-bellied rollers. All of these birds or their close congeners may be found somewhere in East Africa; it is the makeup of the group that seems extraordinary.
Although this is the tourist season, the Sementi Lodge at evening is all but empty, and its gracious patron, Monsieur Patrice, supposes aloud that Americans “do not like West Africa.” One problem, of course, is the French language, and anyway, West Africa is less well known and does not advertise, whereas East Africa is now an industry. Many visitors have told Monsieur Patrice that they prefer West African parks because the animals here are less predictable, they cannot be taken for granted, things are more sportif; ici, Monsieur, il y a toujours plus des animaux que des touristes! One hears this a good deal in West Africa. Alas, the animals are far fewer than in East Africa, not only in species but in numbers. Even the “common” species are elusive. To see chimpanzees or giant eland on a brief visit would be too much to expect, and as to predators, we had to be satisfied with some big lion pug marks on the road, but buffles are not supposed to be so shy. Of the twenty-five hundred buffles that are said to be here, we saw neither hide nor hair of even one, only buffle manure in great abundance.
From the Tambacounda road, we follow a narrow track across the back country toward Gouloumbo, in order to strike the main dirt road south and west to Velingara; our destination is the Parc National de Casamance, in the Guinea forest at the coast. The track wanders through small villages, in a fresh open countryside of light and silence, grassland and gigantic figs, rollers and helmet shrikes, long-tailed parakeets and speckled pigeons. This is a country of the Tukulor Fulani, who are agriculturalists as well as herders. As early as A.D. 700, the Tukulor maintained a powerful state that extended north through the Senegal Valley into present-day Mauritania, which had not yet been overtaken by the desert. In the fourteenth century they retreated south before the Berbers, who were fleeing in their turn before the Arabs. Apparently the Tukulor were the first people of this region to accept Islam, which they helped to spread among the Ouolof people on the coast. Meanwhile, nomad Berber groups pressed southward, occupying the drier tracts of the savanna and forming an economic liaison with this tribe, until gradually the two peoples intermingled. In this farming country, the Tukulor are Negroid in appearance, whereas the pastoral “Berber” populations, the Peulh or Fula or Fulani who followed the savanna eastward all the way to Cameroon, are much paler and more narrow in the face—hence the curious name “Tukulor,” which is thought to be of recent derivation, from the English “Two Colors,” or the French “tout-couleur,” or even “Tacurol,” an old name for the country. The Tukulor maintained a separate state almost continuously until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the French subdued them on the way to the establishment of French West Africa.
This land is not nearly so dry as the Niokolo Koba country to the east, and yet the air is parched for lack of rain. Man’s thirstless goats, which have helped to spread the deserts of North Africa, pay heat no mind, but the thin sheep press themselves to the clay walls, seeking thin shadow, and the cattle must be brought each day to the village wells. Pumped by draft animals walked in a circle, the well is the center of activity in each village, which here in the backland is no more than a cluster of daub huts.
In these settlements southwest of Missira, we are struck by the utter friendliness of everyone we see. Even a group of newly circumcised young boys who are living now outside their village, dressed in a uniform of ceremonial sacking, rush to greet us, smiling and waving, eager to be of help. Because the rough and narrow track has frequent forks—and because when giving directions for Gouloumbo, the tribesman, knowing nothing of vehicles, is apt to point eagerly to a fork that later narrows to a footpath—we stop and backtrack many times, and invariably our return is welcomed with glad smiles that whites don’t see much anymore in Africa, smiles that make one happy and also a bit sad, like the last sight of a rare, vanishing bird. While the men laugh, consulting on directions, young children seated in the shade clean silver barbels from a lake not far away; women pause to lean on their big pestles, and girls wave prettily from the well, the water sparkling on round brown breasts.
These simple places far from the din of modern times reflect an order and well-being that seem missing in the villages by the main road, where noisy vehicles and the hard winds of change stir up the country folk and make them restless. The log mortar and big pestle like a hollowed stump, the three-stone hearth, a few bales of fresh raffia thatching, a few gourds drying on the roof—there is no excess and no waste, no debris or litter of any kind. The yards look swept. Outside each village, the people have piled the few metal containers that have found their way into these hinterlands, and the pile is neat. A sense of order underlies the harmonious tone of the whole countryside. Perhaps order is quite natural to rural Africans, perhaps the littered habitations of most African towns is a sad symptom of the loss of the old rhythms, of the overcrowding, poverty, and low morale that has come about through enforced exposure to the white man’s way.
It is midday, very hot. We head west on the red dusty road to Velingara, in a landscape desiccated by the desert winds.
At Kolda, near the Guinea-Bissau border, the road enters a green tropic of banana groves, oil-palm plantations, and rice paddies like bright green glades among the huge boles of the gallery forest. Here the villages are prospering and the road is surfaced, and Baba Sow is driving hard again, one hand perched upon the horn. Repeatedly we ask him to slow down; there are too many goats and cattle on the road to drive so fast. But very soon he regains his speed, turning his head incessantly to address his passengers, and eventually a steer jumps out in front of him. Gil Boese yells a warning, and he swerves, brakes shrieking—BOOM!—a hateful jolt of metal upon flesh, a sprinkling of breaking glass as the heavy carcass looms, cracking the windshield, then spins, still kicking, into the ditch, its head wide-eyed on the road shoulder.
The car stops and its door creaks loudly as Baba Sow gets out; he inspects his car, ignoring the dying steer. A startled man in yellow rags—is he the herder?—had dropped his handful of long pods and now, without a glance at Baba Sow, far less the steer, he stoops over straight-legged to pick them slowly one by one off the hot pavement, continuing this for minute after minute in the dead silence as if unwilling to raise his eyes to the kicking animal, to us, to the silent folk hurrying this way from the nearby village.
Baba Sow in his green woolen cap is glaring at his shattered headlight, dented fender, the manure streaks down the side of his white car. “Ils sont fous, ces bêtes! Et ces gens”—he indicates the people—“Ils sont comme leurs bêtes! Ils sont stupides!” Baba Sow is very upset, but he does not bother to upbraid the herder, saving his energy for the owner of the steer or the village headman. For want of a better way to help, Boese and I are kicking glass shards off the road. We eye the approaching villagers, feeling white as milk; incredibly, a slow tom-tom has started up behind the trees.
By the time the villagers arrive, the steer is still. A stern old man yanks the steer’s head up, lets it fall. Now he straightens, glares at Baba Sow; he looks at the whites not even once in the whole episode. The people steal glances but do not giggle or comment; for an African crowd, they seem ominously silent.
Baba Sow’s nerves give way first; he mutters something. I expect an angry retort from the old man, but his answer is quiet. I do not know what dialect is spoken, but the sense is apparent even to the whites: Baba Sow is told that he drives his car too fast, that he must pay, and Baba Sow answers that peasants should learn to keep their animals off the highway. Both are correct: drivers in the new Africa go too fast, and life in the old Africa moves too slowly. A paved road has no place in medieval landscapes.
There is nothing to be done. Both sides wait politely in the glowing dusk, ceremonious, unhappy. The discussion is finished but abrupt parting would be rude. The village has lost a fine young steer, Baba Sow’s new car has sustained grievous bodily harm, damage that in this inflated economy may cost much more than the steer is worth. There is only silence as we get back into the car and drive away without good-byes to Ziguinchor.
In the morning we cross a tidal river on the ferry and drive mile upon mile to the south and west across the salt marshes of Casamance. In the Palearctic, it is nearly spring, and the African marshes are peppered with migrating shorebirds bound for Europe—mostly ruffs and whimbrel, marsh sandpipers and stints.
Nearing the coast, the road enters a romantic region of old oil-palm plantations and high forest, old weathered gates of colonial times and old stone walls. Small Diola settlements crouch at the edge of jungle. Diola houses are larger than the huts seen inland, rectangular with high-peaked pyramidal roofs and a space that permits air circulation between wall and the low-hanging eave, but this improvement on the hut of his own Ouolof tribe does not impress our lordly Baba Sow, who jerks his chin impatiently at these paysans, these animistes. He discourses at length on the slowness of these forest people, these “people of the south,” so markedly in contrast to the mental agility of northerners—“le Ouolof, par exemple.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Sont des vrais Africains, ceux-la,” Baba Sow concludes, and not in praise. Since they are animistes, not Muslims, the Diola happily eat pork, and pigs are common here; perhaps these pigs came with the Portuguese, or perhaps, here at the jungle edge, they are relicts of the old pig cultures uprooted by Islam all across North Africa.
Near the Guinea-Bissau frontier, a track turns off toward the sea and the Parc National de Casamance, a coastal rain forest dominated by big dark Kaya trees and figs and palms. Gratefully we walk about on foot, leaving Baba Sow to take his ease in his small, hot machine. Though the day is warm, the sea forest remains cool, its deep shade thinly filtered by the sun. We find the print of a small antelope, hear the telltale puff of what might be a nervous buffle back in the forest, but here as at Niokolo Koba, the buffle eludes us. The only mammals seen, in fact, are squirrels and monkeys—green vervets and the guenon or mona monkey, that handsome red-and-black relation of the blue monkeys of Central and East Africa. The rare western red colobus remains hidden—this is the species I most wish to see. The paths are strewn with tamba, the small brown monkey-apple, which is relished in these parts by every anthropoid, from these small circopithecines to Homo sapiens.
Where the forest subsides into red mangrove estuaries behind the coast, an observer with more time than ourselves might see a clawless otter or the swamp antelope called sitatunga. Here palm-nut vultures have convened in the most seaward of the trees—striking white birds that have mostly abandoned the vulturine habits of their kin and subsist largely on nuts of the oil palm, in the vicinity of which they are usually encountered. Therefore I am surprised, a little later, to see one alight on mud along the estuary and waddle about among the mangrove stilts in pursuit of fiddler crabs and perhaps mudskippers, both of which abound on the tidal rivers. Perhaps this is a well-known habit of this species, but I shall record it here in case it’s not.
At Ziguinchor is an “artisan’s market” where a few old masks and carvings may be found amidst the heaps of that shiny, mass-produced art folklorique that finds its way into unsuspecting homes around the world. The artisans’ traditional bird-head adzes, with their sets of hand-forged blades for finer work, are far superior in style and manufacture to their “art,” and though these carvers were distressed at first that these rough implements and not their wares were what we wanted, they soon got used to the idea, and old adzes came at us from all directions—“le vrai hâche de mon grand-père!” one fellow shouted, an inspired lie that was taken up instantly by all the others. But we were satisfied with just one each, and so innumerable “true grandfather’s adzes” remained behind in Ziguinchor—the nucleus, I fear, of a whole new industry.
Outside the market, workers stacked enormous sacks of peanuts on a truck. Two men on the ground would heave the heavy sack onto the truck bed, where two more would seize it up to waist level, then slam it down again, stooping quickly as they did so to make the most of an infinitesimal bounce, then hiking it high above their shoulders, where it was plucked from their outstretched arms by yet two more atop the cargo. The feat was funny and exciting, and the workers were merry in the pride of strength and timing, strutting a little for the girls and tossing stray peanuts to admiring young kids. Every little while, the kids were scattered by a scrawny Muslim clerk in a blue djellabah, but the clerk did not dare to admonish the workers, and the kids would soon drift in again to snatch wild peanuts from the air. On a warm mountain of unsacked peanuts, a yellow wagtail walked about, as if seeking a way to adjust millennia of insectivorous habit to such plenty.
At dusk, small bats replaced the swallows that dip in the blue water of the hotel piscine, and from the darkness of the town came the sound of tom-toms. We followed the pounding noise a mile or more through the soft night, arriving at last in unlit streets at the edge of town. In an open yard beneath a giant fig, tom-toms were struck in a blur of speed by three musicians, and within a circle of several hundred Africans, under dim light, a kind of tournament was taking place in which a young dancer, spry as a cockerel, would leap and rail at someone in the crowd to come out dancing; those who accepted were fierce dancers, too, and the shouts of the crowd were the best clue to which had won. Dancers came and went, the townsfolk milled in pleasure and excitement, and meanwhile the three tom-tom players never faltered, filling the night with the beat of their swift hands. Standing there half-hypnotized, content, I recalled a group of young Senegalese drummers and dancers who played years ago at a small Parisian boîte called La Vieille Rose Rouge. At first their faces had been wild and wary, but as the months passed, cigarettes appeared, and modish trousers protruded from beneath their kikois, and the fierce tom-toms were reduced to backup rhythms for bad fire-eating acts and self-conscious recitations of the poetry of Léopold Senghor, now president of Senegal.
Sang noir … sang d’Afrique …
In this crowd of several hundred, there were no white people, not even one. Instinctively we kept moving, staying back a bit, out of the light, never remaining in one spot long enough to gather attention. Yet there arose an accumulating awareness of our presence, a kind of murmur, more curious than hostile: who are these whites, how did they get here? And after a while, we withdrew into the pitch darkness of the unlit streets and returned toward the hotel, as the fading drums gave way to the growing shrill of tree frogs in the big trees all around.
The people of Senegal—near the coast, at least—were given a kind of civil status as early as 1848, and their feelings toward France were so equable that for a time they resisted the idea of independence. Even in the larger towns of Senegal, there seems to be little of the brooding touchiness and half-repressed hostility that one meets in the cities of East Africa. I wondered if following music down long dark African streets was something I would do these days in Arusha or Nairobi; I think not.
Early next day we cross the Casamance River by small ferry and, on a rough road across the airy coastal plain, drive north into Gambia, which lies enclosed by Senegal, like a narrow throat coming inland from the sea. Just beyond the border is the village of Seleti, where Gil Boese began his baboon studies in 1971, and, seeing baboons crossing the road, he sits forward in excitement, directing Baba Sow into a cow path. We continue on foot along a tongue of gallery forest that follows a dry streambed across the fields to a shaded place of boulders and damp sand—a rainy-season pool where animals can still dig down for water—and have scarcely arrived when a troop of western red colobus bursts forth in reckless aerial display from the high treetops, scolding and barking, hurling themselves down from rebounding limbs and swinging and crashing into the dry bushes as if intent on tearing down the forest. Boese is delighted that the red colobus are still here, despite the forest clearing on all sides that has confined them to this narrow tongue of trees; and I am delighted that my first sight of this spectacular species—they are black above, rich chestnut-red below—should occur in the African countryside. Even in East Africa there are few places anymore where one may see such animals outside the parks.
The red colobus will not be there very long. Less than a mile beyond Seleti, the people are burning down the forest; a huge crackling flame riding the wind roars through a copse of high trees near the road. The fire is attended by European kestrels, Abyssinian rollers, cattle egrets: the egrets stalk about in the flame’s path, intent upon the spearing of small fugitives, while the rollers and pale orange falcons hover and dart like spirits through the smoke, the harsh racket of the rollers lost in the violent crackling of the blaze.
One does not travel many miles in Gambia before one sees that too much forest has been burned—even more so, it appears, than in Senegal—and that the inevitable and fatal end to the destruction of the land is now in sight. “The Gambia,” as it is known here, was formerly a British colony, and its dense population is a fatal consequence of that sensible administration on which the British pride themselves, whether or not it made sense for “the native.” At any rate, its English-speaking citizens have no wish to join with Senegal, where they would become an unpopular minority. “The Gambia” is little more than a narrow enclave in that country, a strip of territory on both sides of the river, some two hundred miles long and in places no more than thirteen miles in width.
Gambia is a huge thorn in the side of Senegal, separating all Casamance from the rest of the country, and controlling a natural trade route—navigable by ocean vessels for 150 miles inland—that could serve eastern Senegal and even Mali. Because it is overpopulated, even by the standards of West Africa, such wildlife as remains in Gambia is largely confined to three small reserves and a southward extension of an international park that is to be shared with Senegal.
The credit for Gambia’s reserves must be given to a dedicated British forester named Edward Brewer, who was mentor and friend to Dr. Boese in his days among baboons and who welcomes us to the Abuko Nature Reserve at Yumdum, not far south of the capital at Banjul. Though only 180 acres, this relict tract of gallery forest was the first of Gambia’s reserves and remains the most significant, at least in terms of public education.
Set aside in 1916 as the Abuko Water Catchment Area, it was later fenced to keep out hunters and domestic stock as well as would-be farmers. But local people made holes under the fencing to introduce their pigs for random foraging, and hunters managed to get in, as well, and both groups were indignant when, in the 1960s, a leopard took up residence in the small forest, making too free with the pigs as well as frightening the hunters. Brewer, asked to shoot the leopard, became enchanted instead by the potential of Abuko, which at his behest was set aside as a nature reserve in 1968. Two years later, the leopard departed from Abuko, perhaps disconsolate over the expulsion of the pigs, but other native animals have been introduced, joining the few small mammals already in residence. In the 1.5-mile footpath through the forest, one may encounter a variety of birds, several duikers and the bushbuck, the serval cat, civet and genets, mongooses and porcupines, four species of monkeys, crocodiles, and pythons, as well as cobras, puff adders, and mambas.
“We’re on our way here now, with any sort of luck,” says Eddie Brewer, who is sunburned, husky, and unassuming, with fierce beetling brows and a gentle smile. He is delighted that Gambia’s president has issued a “Banjul Declaration” in support of wildlife; that a high government official noticed a loophole in the game-protection laws and moved to close it; that children who once killed anything that moved are now bringing small animals into Abuko. As in Kenya, where the Wildlife Clubs have set an example for the rest of Africa, the education of this new generation is the only hope for the wild creatures.
On the coast, we find accommodations at a Swedish inn, and I revel in my first swim in West African surf. Feverish local rumor has it that the Swedes come here for sexual safaris, like the Germans on the Malindi coast in Kenya, and perhaps it is moral disapproval of Gambian Christians that makes our haughty Muslim Baba Sow question the hospitality offered him by the reception clerk; these English-speakers, his sour look implies, might make a stranger sit up all night in a chair. Though he complains to me in French, the clerk intuits what he says, and responds with considerable dignity to Baba Sow, who understands more English than he will acknowledge. “I am not rich,” says the clerk. “I am black, like you. But if I offer you a bed, I do not mean that you shall sit up in a chair. And if you do not like my home, you may go elsewhere.” To Baba Sow’s credit, he confesses next day that he passed a restful night among the infidels.
At daybreak, we skirt an enormous processing plant for the groundnut, on which Gambia, like Senegal, has based its economy. Beyond this monument to the congenial peanut lies Banjul, formerly Bathurst, where we shall embark on yet another ferry, crossing the Gambia River and continuing northward into Senegal.
At the waterfront, in a cool dawn, the patient blacks, the fish smell, chicken baskets, fruit and sheep, the carrion birds and blowing trash, sweet smells, sweet voices, urine tang, and over the silent broad brown flood the white Caspian terns in from the sea are all familiar; how often in life, without ever having come to Gambia, I have arrived at this old river.
Over the passenger gate is a fair warning:
CARGO AND DECK LIVESTOCK RECEIVED HANDED [sic]
STOWED CARRIED KEPT AND DISCHARGED AT SHIPPERS
RISK AND THE GOVERNMENT SHALL NOT BE LIABLE
FOR LOSS THEREOF OR DAMAGE THERETO EVEN
THOUGH RESULTING FROM UNSEA-WORTHINESS OF THE
CRAFT OR FROM THE NEGLIGENCE OF THE
GOVERNMENT OR ITS SERVANTS.
The ferry to Kung is crowded with vehicles and folk of all descriptions, so tightly packed that a beautiful big woman cannot pass her majestic rump between Baba Sow’s front fender and the car adjoining. Though one speaks in a sort of English and the other in French, the big woman and Baba Sow rail, hoot, and banter over this joyous natural phenomenon. Baba Sow, all dressed up in his white kanzu, with three boxes of bonbons to present to his children upon arrival in Dakar, is very disapproving of this ancient ferry that accepts chickens as passengers and depends on a narrow ramp at Kung, on the farther side. “C’est mal organisé, tout ça,” he frets, annoyed at the delay. “Tout ça, c’est vieux, ce n’est pas bon!” And, detecting a clear space, he quits the ferry and heads north with a dangerous turn of speed, so anxious is he to put Gambia behind him.
Crossing the Senegal frontier, the road passes along the Parc National de Delta du Saloum—the international park to be shared with Gambia, not yet fully opened to the public—which shelters the manatees and river dolphins of the Saloum River as well as the most northerly tract of mangrove left on the West African coast. Once again we have entered the dry woods of the savanna, but soon this vegetation changes to the acacia thornbush that marks the near-desert of the Sahel. At Kaolack, the Saloum is crossed, we strike the bitumened road again, Dakar is no more than two hours away.
André Dupuy, the director of Senegal’s national parks, to whom we went for some advice that afternoon, is a short, florid man with a big voice, much given to oratorical declarations. His self-confidence is quite remarkable, and his energy and enthusiasm most impressive. He dismissed the Parc de Waza (our proposed destination in north Cameroon) as a “lesson in what not to do,” since it tries, says he, to combine too many different habitats. As an ecological unit, it was not to be compared with the six estimable parks of Senegal. Even the tiny Parc des Iles de la Madeleine—the group of islets off Dakar where the beautiful red-billed tropic bird comes to nest—was a precious ecosystem of coastal rocks, the only such in all West Africa! “These are our cathedrals, M’sieu Booze,” he bellows, refusing to get Dr. Bo-zee’s name right. It was not as in other lands of Africa, where parks were mostly tsetse wastelands for which man could find no better use; in Senegal, the parks were areas selected to preserve representative habitats, “un réseau des parcs complémentaires!” Besides, Cameroon was part of Central Africa. As for the remainder of West Africa, the chances were that any choice would be the wrong one. Mali, of course, had a wild reserve near the Senegal border that might be thought of as a parc complémentaire to Niokolo Koba, and then there were the so-called “Parcs du W” in Benin, Upper Volta, Niger. But access to such “parks” was very difficult, travel inside of them impossible, so how could one say what might be left in the way of animals? Dupuy’s shrug suggested that M’sieu Booze would be well advised to take a closer look at Senegal. Failing that, the next best thing was the Parc de la Komoé in Ivory Coast, since that was where Dupuy’s own former adjutant was warden. For want of better information, we took Monsieur Dupuy’s advice and arranged to leave next day for Ivory Coast.
On the flight next day to Ivory Coast, the carry-on baggage of one Senegalese lady consisted of three large and springy fish; the tails of these whoppers refused to fold down neatly, and kept flipping up the wings of their cardboard carton. For lunch we were served “bush meat”—in this case, small and cold dead birds with gloomy sizzled heads, smeared with what we dearly hoped was pâté. Otherwise the flight southeast over the Guinea forests was uneventful until, circling wide over the sea on the approach to Abidjan, there came into view the reddish beach and long, unbroken line of surf that spared this “Windward Coast” (now Liberia and Ivory Coast, which lay to windward of the slave ports of the Gold Coast—modern Ghana) from the worst depredations of the slavers. In the 1770s there was heavy slaving activity at the mouth of the Bandama River, in the region to the west at Grand Lahou, but the absence of a port (and therefore of a European shore station) made the commerce erratic, and until the race for colonies occurred, in the late nineteenth century, few white men cared what lay behind the thick green jungle walls of this “Bad People’s Coast,” later renamed for the precious ivory of its elephants. Before 1950, when a channel through the barrier beach was stabilized, and a harbor constructed in the vast Ebrie Lagoon, Ivory Coast was no rival to Senegal in trade and benefits from Europe; now oil has been discovered here to augment a prosperous lumber industry and coffee, rubber, and oil-palm plantations, and Abidjan is a boom town of new buildings and new cars. Like Senegal, this country has maintained strong trade relations with the Western World, and today the two are far more prosperous than all other states of former French West Africa combined.
Because prosperity has come too fast, Abidjan is a European city that on this fetid, humid coast retains all the dirt, smells, and decrepitude of the old slave ports. Incompetence is masked with sullenness and the price of sullen service is exorbitant—not an unusual combination on this continent, yet more acceptable in those parts of Africa that are still “African.” Except for a remarkably rude customs, all offices were closed pour le weekend; there was no way of obtaining information about travel north to the Parc de la Komoe. Our reservation at the Tiama Hotel, where huge fruit bats flop back and forth in the high trees, was the first of many in this land that were not honored; instead we were banished to Hôtel Ivoire, a huge, sterile, glaring “International Hotel” on its own bluff across the bay, a self-contained complex of expensive services and shops where the isolated guest, fearing the piratical cab fares to the city, is separated remorselessly from all his money. The high and shiny International Hotel in Nairobi is a snug family inn by comparison to its sister ship in Abidjan, which features bowling alleys, four bad restaurants and an awful “snackarama,” a wrap-around swimming pool so vast that part of its acreage has been set aside for boats, and the only iceskating rink on the whole continent. The Hôtel Ivoire is almost everything that one had hoped would never come to Africa.
In foreign parts, so it is said, the pampered guts of Americans, then Scandinavians, are those most easily undone by the local germs, due to the fanatical hygiene in our countries. Regretfully, I add our names to the doleful list. Having survived without ill effect the casual back-country cookery of Senegal, we scarcely expected tumultuous stomachs on the haute cuisine of the Hôtel Ivoire; yet by Monday both of us were sick, although we had eaten nowhere else. Also, Gil Boese was going broke. We were frantic to leave Abidjan, but there was no space to be had all week on any flight north to Korhogo. We therefore arranged with the state-owned tour company for wagon-lit berths on the evening train for Ouagadougou (Wagga-doogoo) in Upper Volta, which would let us off just after daybreak at Ferkessédougou, in north Ivory Coast.
At six that evening, we were waiting at the railroad station for this train supposed to leave at seven, accompanied by a bright young Ivoirien named Jacob Adjemon who had been assigned to us by the tour office as a guide. Jacob turned out to be a fount of knowledge, not always easy to believe, far less turn off, and the first information that he offered was the evil news that the tour office had not bothered to secure our reservations in the wagon-lit, despite its breezy guarantees at nine that morning: we would have to take our chances when the train appeared.
People—not all of them going anywhere—were camped all over the railroad platforms, and peddlers hawked bread, fruit, and water, as well as “notions” of all kinds. One man specialized in socks and purses, another in fezzes and prayer mats, for in the north part of this country, as in Niger and Upper Volta, near the desert, the sway of Islam remains strong. Near where we stood in the dying heat that followed the sudden sinking of the sun was a group of black-garbed women with narrow, elegant brown faces—these are Peulh-de-Niger, says Jacob Adjemon, a nomad people who have drifted southward with their herds of zebu cattle since the great drought years of 1973–1976. “Peulh” is one of many names of the Fulani, whom we first saw as sedentary agriculturalists in Senegal. But while the Tukulor Fulani were Negroid in appearance, these people are distinctly “northern” in the caste of face, betraying much more of the ancestral Berber whose pastoral way of life they have retained; it is because of this “Ethiopian” appearance that the Fulani are thought to have come originally from the northeast. Bartering their animal products for food grown by the farmers, they have attached themselves to local tribes across the whole of the West Sudanian savanna, over two thousand miles from Senegal to Cameroon.
A scarred and drunken tribesman from Upper Volta was attempting to sell us “China Balm” in a green box decorated with bright dragons; the inscrutable packaging reminded me of “Foul Mesdames,” the brand name of the cans of Chinese beans that may still be found in the back-country shops of Tanzania. Teased by a colleague who was seeking to tempt us with a bad sort of meat pie, China Balm’s man threw a punch and nearly fell, having described a complete circle in the process. He was shouting angrily, and Jacob, translating, began to laugh: “Here I am talking to Big Man, White Man, and you come around here with your dirty food trying to spoil my business!” But even China Balm could not have soothed us in the series of mishaps that continued to befall us throughout our sojourn in the former Bad People’s Coast. When the train appeared, it was quite clear that the wagons-lit were full, beyond all hope of argument or bribe, and the first-class seats to which we were entitled had been sadly overbooked; only quick action secured us stiff chairs in the dining car, which we would defend for the next fourteen hours.
The train moved fitfully toward the north into the heavy equatorial darkness. To blur the night ahead, we drank, and the early evening passed in a pleasant manner. A decent supper came and went as warm, sweet jungle air poured through the window, and afterward, staring outward at the forest, deep black against that other black of the night sky, I saw under the stars and moon an enormous burning tree of the doomed African forest.
Later on the air grew cold, and as we stopped at station after station—Dimbokro, Bouaké, Katiola—the dining car grew very crowded, until desperate travelers began to enter through the windows. Two of these were cadaverous young Frenchmen kitted out with rucksacks and guitars, who established themselves at a table of Africans and began to inveigh against the tourists who were starting to spoil this former land of French West Africa. The Ivoiriens, nonplussed, listened politely, but after a while, one man said quietly, “Et vous, Messieurs? Vous êtes quelle sorte de touriste?” Clutching his guitar, one youth said lamely, “Nous sommes des touristes de la musique!” No one laughed, and a merciful silence followed until dawn.
Daybreak came early to a broken country of low savanna woodlands, sudden hills. I had not slept, and my headache and increasing fever were intensified by transistor radios, a howling baby, and the exertions of a hungry man who was hammering coconuts on the car floor. In search of a breakfast chair for a rich old Muslim, the steward, put off by my grim expression, singled out the most defenseless among those who had filled the seats during the night, a confused peasant with young wife and infant who looked as if he might not know his rights. In the confusion, the infant urinated on the floor, in a sad puddle that rolled across the aisle as the train swayed; the mother rose, bent over forward, and laid the baby on her back, which it clasped unaided like a tree frog, its little seat supported by her own protruding rump, until she had bound it tight in her katanga. In my feverish state, it seemed to me that I had hit upon an explanation for the development of the African posterior, where the infant rides as an appendage of the mother: in early days when katangas were unavailable and a child was affixed precariously with a frond, this sturdy shelf on which it rode while its mother walked or worked her field would surely have been an evolutionary advantage.
At Ferkessédougou, where the Chemin-de-Fer-Abidjan-Niger arrived four hours late, we were met by a very small red auto. Originally our plan had been to drive ourselves, dispensing with a guide; but though the car had been leased to us by the tour agent in Korhogo, its driver turned out to be its owner and would not be left behind, being determined to keep an eye on his possession. And so, in the great heart of midmorning, our band of four set out rather cross and crowded on the fifty-mile trip east over rough dirt roads to the Parc de la Komoé, which lies in the northeast corner of the country. By this time I was so feverish that I scarcely noticed the Malinke villages, nor minded much when, after noon, the car limped to a halt with a flat tire; I stood like a victim of cataclysm on the dusty road edge. By the time we reached the park the spare had gone flat, too, forcing us to hire the lodge vehicle to pursue our research. The two tires were repaired that evening by the park’s mechanic, but the other two were flat next day at dawn.
Today I remember little of the Parc de la Komoé, a tract of more than two million eight hundred thousand acres set aside in 1958 as the Bouna Game Reserve and made a national park in 1968, eight years after independence. I was near-blinded by sick headache, and took small pleasure in the dozen kob and bubales, an oribi, a warthog, and three distant hippo in the Komoé River, which flows all the way south to Abidjan. Of elephants or buffalo, or even their manure, there was no sign. The urbane manager of the tour company had warned us about the lions of Komoé, one of which had mauled a careless client, and a lepidopterist whom we met later in the Parc Marahoué, to the south, claimed to have seen a lion and a leopard at Komoé, as well as the obligatory buffles and bubales (or perhaps it was Buffon kobs and bubales, for here, too, the crafty buffles eluded us) and no doubt we failed to give proper attention to this park which, excepting the chimpanzee and giant eland, is said to contain most of the larger mammals that are found at Niokolo Koba. Yet by the standards of that park (which would be thought meager in East Africa or Botswana) Komoé is thinly populated indeed, by birds as well as by large mammals, tourists included.
In view of the alarming decline of wildlife throughout Ivory Coast, a commendable law against shooting of any kind was passed in 1974, but laws are ignored by the Lobi hunters whose villages surround this north part of the park. The Lobi, who have successfully resisted Islam and Christendom alike, bring their families into the park during the rainy season when the tracks are too muddy to be patrolled; they build their square huts, plant yams and millet, and hunt very much as they have always done. Originally a wild people from Upper Volta, they take it much amiss when their old ways are interfered with, and only a few years ago, Jacob has learned, the warden at Komoé felt so threatened that he prophesied to several friends—correctly, alas—that these Lobi would take his life. Understandably the present warden, erstwhile adjutant to M. André Dupuy of Senegal, has made no better progress against poaching, if these lone sentinels of the vanished herds that could be supported in this huge, well-watered park are any sign. The warden lives outside the park, at Bouna, as we discovered when we sought to interview him. Not that the warden would have given us much hope about the prospects of the Parc de la Komoé, or of any other park in all West Africa.
Zoologists assume that the wild ungulates of western Africa were always less common than in the east and south, not only in numbers but in species. The black rhinoceros, if it ever occurred here, vanished long ago, as did the wildebeest and zebra; for reasons not well understood, West Africa lacks the astonishing variety of antelope that is found south and east of the Nile. Edaphic poverty is sometimes blamed, but the weakness of tropical lateritic soils is fairly consistent almost everywhere throughout this fragile continent, including the game plains in the east that support the greatest biomass of animals, and perhaps the imbalance is better explained by a simpler reason, one that suffices easily all by itself: south of the deserts, in land inhabitable by man, West Africa is far more populous than East, and human beings have been here for a great deal longer, hunting and trapping, burning and cultivating, competing for the pasturage and water, and eroding and exhausting the poor soils. There are many fewer animals in West Africa today than there were fifty years ago, when the white man’s tools and weapons became widespread, but the decline had begun many centuries earlier.
It is now assumed that the great West African states of early times were not in the equatorial rain forest but on the river plains of the savanna such as that region between the middle Senegal River and the Niger Bend where (it is thought) both pearl millet and sorghum were developed; and that the savanna all the way east to Lake Chad has been occupied by large and successful populations of cultivator-fishermen for at least two thousand years. Since these riverine margins, gallery forest, and savannas were also the optimum habitat for wildlife, it is not surprising that the wildlife is now gone.
Under the pressure of Islam and the Arab slave trade, the savanna peoples took refuge in the forests, putting to use the same tropical crops that the Bantu-speakers of Niger and Cameroon had used for their southeastward penetration of the Congo Basin—not manioc, maize, and sweet potato, which were brought from the Americas in the sixteenth century by Portuguese slavers, but the yam, taro, and banana introduced from Southeast Asia to the East African coast perhaps as early as the first century B.C. The deserted savanna was soon occupied by others—the pastoral Fulani, for example, and the Malinke, and the great Voltaic tribes of the Niger River, driven ever southward by the remorseless spread of the Sahara.
This open grassland of small, scattered trees that resist annual drought as well as fire is all but monotypic from Senegal east to the northern plain of the Republic of the Congo; the fauna (and flora) are essentially the same, not only in Niokolo Koba and the Parc de la Komoé but in the Mole Reserve in northern Ghana, a complementary cluster of wild parks—l’Arly, Pendjari, and the “Parcs du W,” near the common borders of Upper Volta, Niger, and Benin—and several parks in Cameroon, in Central Africa. Since most of this region has been man’s domain for thousands of years, and the rest will become so as tsetse is brought under control, there isn’t much hope that the status of wild animals in any of the West African parks would differ much from the status here in Komoé, and the few reports would indicate that it does not, despite the establishment of “reserves” and even some token restocking programs (as in Nigeria). As early as 1934, in a book on his travels in West Africa, one observer remarked, “But I should have been surprised if I had been told that I should travel about seven thousand miles without seeing any live wild animal larger than an antelope.”* Unlike Kenya and Tanzania, where the ambivalent attitude toward wildlife is quite similar but where the economic impetus of tourism is clear, these countries see small reason to protect what is left of their wildlife, far less restore what is now gone.
Except in regard to Senegal, good data on the status of wildlife in West Africa is rather scant—a reflection in itself of official attitudes—but a comprehensive survey made in Nigeria in 1962 confirms most of one’s worst fears about this region. Excepting the vast and empty lands of the south Sahara—Mauritania, Mali, and Niger—Nigeria is by far the largest of the West African states, and because it adjoins the states of Central Africa, such as Cameroon, where human beings and their weapons are less common, and where a reservoir of wildlife still exists, it might be expected to be better off than the smaller countries to the west. But according to this report, the last black rhinos in Nigeria were exterminated in either 1935 or 1945—no one really knows—the giant eland and several other antelopes have vanished, and almost all of the remaining larger mammals, even the jackals, are threatened with extinction, together with the larger reptiles and large birds. Of the thirty-two hoofed species, all but nine are extinct, threatened with immediate extinction, or “seriously depleted”; the exceptions are the bushbuck and a few species of duiker. Outside its only game reserve, Yankari, a tract of about eight hundred square miles northwest of the Benue River where it is claimed the fauna is increasing, it is unusual for the visitor to Nigeria to see any live wild animals other than, just possibly, a few primates; in five thousand miles of driving, the author of the 1962 report noted a dozen baboons, three patas monkeys, and two monkeys of unidentified species. Birds are scarce, too. Although Nigeria has the only ornithological society in West Africa, its national bird, the beautiful crowned crane, is at least as scarce as our bald eagle. “One is continually being reminded by Nigerians that theirs is the most densely populated nation in Africa and that perhaps, therefore, there is no place for wildlife.”*
In East Africa, the loss of habitat through intensive settlement, land use, and overgrazing has been the main threat to wildlife; but in West African countries such as Nigeria, which tolerates year-round hunting (often at night, and often in gangs) of every species, regardless of scarcity, sex, or age, together with epidemic use of steel traps, snares, and encircling fires, the outright destruction of the animals themselves may be more damaging. Out of seventeen animals in a collection made in recent years by a Monsieur Brandt, sixteen had been previously wounded by crude pellets from one of the estimated four million or more muzzle-loaders used in the back country for hunting “bush meat.” In these populous, poor countrysides, wild game has always formed a high percentage of the meager protein diet; thus, nama, the local Hausa word for “animal,” also means “meat” (apparently this word survived the southeastern migrations of the Bantu-speakers out of Nigeria and Cameroon and on into East Africa, where nyama is the Swahili word for “game”).
Similarly, in Ghana, there are wildlife preservation laws that date back to 1901, but as late as 1953, game preservation was administered by the Tsetse Control Department, which was dedicated to “eradication of the tsetse flies through game shooting and habitat clearing along river and stream courses.”* Since independence, in 1957, there has been a growing concern about wild creatures that older Ghanaians can still remember as part of their cultural and spiritual heritage; this is offset by a widespread belief that the wildlife is doomed and could never be restored to the abundance that might attract tourists. The only game reserve of significance at present is at Mole, across the frontier from the Parc de la Komoé. In 1967, a Department of Game and Wildlife was created, but as in Nigeria, there remains an almost total lack of public education and enforcement of wildlife legislation, which will be ignored in any case until the people’s protein needs are otherwise taken care of. In Ghana, almost anything that moves is esteemed highly as a source of nourishment, even those creatures formerly protected by traditional taboos. Warthog, baboon, and the small antelopes are still the most common source of bush meat in the back country, but a great many other creatures, including puff adders and civet cats, are also consumed wherever they are found. The “grass cutter” or cane rat and the giant rat lead the list of wild creatures on the bill of fare at Accra, the capital city.
West of Ivory Coast, the situation is no better. As of 1970, when a survey of wildlife conservation in West Africa was made by the IUCN, neither Liberia nor Sierra Leone had a single national park or wildlife refuge. Sierra Leone had lost all but four percent of the primary rain forests that once covered the whole land (its Gola Forest is the last hope for conservation) yet it still permits almost unlimited hunting, even by foreigners. Liberia retains a lot more of its forest (twenty-one percent), but here, too, the destruction of animals is epidemic, and there is no limit whatsoever on the elephant, which is in danger of extermination. No export permits are required for ivory, hides, skins, and assorted animal parts, and export permits for live animals—mostly young chimpanzees, whose mothers are invariably killed—may be had for twenty-five cents. Formerly, trapping permits were required, but for some reason these have been dispensed with, either because nobody bothered with them or because there was so little left to trap.
All along the coast, the lumbering and burning of the rain forests have largely depleted the wild creatures, but those countries whose territories extend north into the Sahel have retained small populations of the more common savanna species, and Benin can claim two important national parks. The Parcs du W protect about two hundred square miles of savanna, and the Parc Pendjari, about half that size, includes savannas, combretum woods, and gallery forest; there are also three game reserves adjoining these parks where some effort is made to control illegal hunting. Three other parks have been established across the border to the north, one in Niger and two in Upper Volta. Theoretically the savannas of Nigeria (see endpaper map) could be replenished by the animal populations that are protected by Benin and Cameroon. Although Nigeria was a signatory to the African Convention for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (Algiers, 1968), and has passed commendable wildlife legislation, it has not proceeded with the education of the public, which has an understandable contempt for laws that are not enforced. But this prosperous country that has left no place for wildlife has a reputation—among black Africans as well as whites—as one of the “angriest” and most confused of the new nations, and one must wonder if these two circumstances are not related.
After four flat tires, we had lost faith in our car, and, having missed the early game viewing for want of a vehicle, Dr. Boese decided to leave the Parc de la Komoé as soon as possible. With tires repaired, we headed west again across the Bandama River, which flows down to the coast at Grand Lahou. In the empty country beyond Ferkessédougou came the fifth flat tire in twenty-four hours, and this time, in attempting to repair it, Sauri the driver stripped the lug threads, making it impossible to remove the wheel. A vehicle bound for Korhogo, twenty miles away, took Sauri in, and when, two hours later, he had failed to reappear, Jacob Adjemon caught a ride in the same direction, returning an hour later in a taxi. We proceeded straight to the tour agent in Korhogo, to have words about the caliber of the car, but this Malinke gentleman, M. Toure Basamanno, blamed everything on poor Sauri, and swore roundly that Sauri would pay; far from expressing regret at our inconvenience, Basamanno saw himself as the real victim. He had another driver, Mamadou, whose car was in such superb condition that Basamanno’s great regret—and here he belched—was that he could not accompany us himself. This weary and cynical fellow had just lunched, and now he lay across his desk in postprandial repose; his shifting eye did not inspire confidence, and his questing mouth contained an outsized kola nut, bright orange in hue, that rolled into view like a hanged man’s tongue each time he spoke. Later we were told by Mamadou that this sacré Basamanno had yet to pay him for four days’ work performed last January.
Korhogo is a great center of Senoufou culture, and before leaving we visited its markets, where masks and statues, brown-and-black paintings on raw linen weavings, anklets and bracelets of old brass, carved ivory, wooden boxes, beads, and exotic knickknacks of all kinds are hawked by the network of Senegalese who control most of the antiquities trade in Ivory Coast. While some of the wood carvings were old, most were quite new, and in another street, we watched the carvers hard at work with “les vrais hâches de leurs grand-pères.” The growing tourist trade has taken precedence over tradition, and most of the stuff, hacked out with an eye for quantity rather than quality, is rather bad; the wax job that gives it a high shine only points up the facile decadence of style.
The Senoufou, like the Lobi, are a Voltaic people from the north; they call themselves Sienamana. Like many other peoples of West Africa, they were driven south toward the forest edge by Arab slavers, and have remained here due to the spread of the Sahara. Senoufou Land was formerly much larger, extending from Odienné to Kong and Katiola, but it was pressed in from east and west by invasions of the Malinke (or North Mande or “Mandingo”), a Niger River people who were also driven south by Arab encroachment. As early as the seventeenth century some Malinke were converted to Islam, and in the nineteenth century, led by a famous despot named Samory, they scourged and ruled almost all of the interior—Mali, Niger, Upper Volta, the northern Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone—until French troops from Senegal captured Samory and assigned his enormous empires to themselves. Like the Peulh, the Malinke are widely scattered in West Africa, north to Timbuktu and all the way west to Casamance, in Senegal. In the country east of Ferkessédougou (which was founded in the nineteenth century by Senoufou driven north and west by the king of Kong) they are called “Dioula” or “Traders,” having turned their warrior instincts toward commerce. The insistent pressures of the Malinke have forced the Senoufou to congregate in the large communities that are probably the source of their advanced culture, instead of littering the landscape in the usual pattern of savanna villages, and in the open countryside a few birds may still be seen—stone partridge, francolins, laughing doves, a hawk.
This is the season of feast and celebration, before the plowing that starts with the first rains, and unlike most spectacles folkloriques, in which the dancers are taken from planting or harvest for the titillation of the tourists and sometimes bribed to perform ritual dances that only initiates should see, the Senoufou dances staged here by the nearby villagers were performed joyfully, with a spontaneity I saw nowhere else.
The N’Goron dance took place in a garden square beneath a huge silk-cotton tree, around a bonfire that attracted quick, small bats. The troupe from the village of N’Dara included six young girls, none more than fifteen, in the first period of their initiation, and also a group of musicians led by the caparia or whip man (who later did a whip dance and walked barefoot across the fire); the group included a flutist, three tom-tom players, and three players of the balafon, a kind of xylophone with hardwood strips laid across the mouths of opened gourds. The tom-toms, set off by the weird balafons and flute, filled the night with their wild sound; the flute was melodious and wistful, high, unceasing, like the whisper of unseen water in the forest or music for a dance of forest ghosts. Alas, there was no oliphant, or elephant-tusk horn; one can only surmise how balafons and oliphants might sound in concert.
Hair whisks shimmering in each hand, on each back a shivering bird’s-tail tassel of straw plumes, the children danced forward and back, forward and back, like scratching fowl, yet quick and light, leaping and pantomiming in bird courtship, pausing to strut, flutter, and display, then skipping on again. The dance was a beautiful and stirring ceremony that summoned the deep mystery of earth. Before vanishing out of the firelight into the dark, the little girls dipped forward, touching each guest on both shoulders with their whisks, teasing, tantalizing, yet impersonal, expressionless.
While in Senoufou Land, we stopped at back-country savanna villages, very clean and quiet by comparison to the large towns. At Ouazamon, the small stone hearths, gourd calabashes of a shining bronze color, long wood ladles and log mortar and pestle seemed laid out, like ancient art objects, on the swept earth. Old women culled groundnuts, a vat of maize was being prepared, young women lifted a mortar, let it fall. An infant boy with fly-filled eyes slumbered in a wooden trough; a black hunting dog with rattan hoops about its neck, to protect it against cornered animals, moved silently away. The village people were not friendly or unfriendly; they avoided looking at us, they waited for us to go.
The thatched houses with their walls of straw and clay were mostly rectangular, with round maize cribs on clay legs off to the side. Fetish houses were located in a nearby grove of trees. If an unauthorized person should enter a fetish house, said Jacob, he or she would certainly be killed, if not by fetishes then by outraged tribal action; even the groves—high islands of silk-cotton trees that soar from the low woodland—are out of place in the savanna, therefore full of power, therefore sacred.
In a small shed behind the village, a blacksmith forges heavy blades for tools; a child perched like a troll under the peak cranks a crude bellows that fans the coals. On the ground outside the forge sits an ancient awale game (called bau in East Africa). The smith has made small, hand-faceted iron balls for the wood board, yet is quite indifferent to the most beautiful artifact I have seen in Ivory Coast; he says he would sell it happily, but it is the property of his brother, who has gone off to Korhogo. Jacob Adjemon is indifferent to it, too, indeed he is faintly contemptuous of our interest in these old-time things, the death fetishes, the dusty masks. Before all, this young man is the new African, admiring and envious of Western artifacts, frowning in unslakable discontent.
West of Ouazamon, the red road enters a new land broken by huge black boulders, the granite outcroppings of Africa’s old mantle. We pass an ancient hunter with his muzzle-loader, an old woman of Niger selling medicines, a solitary patas monkey near the road. The hundreds of miles of rough dirt track that we would travel in this land was not once crossed by a baboon; nor did we see the Abyssinian ground hornbill that was so common in back-country Senegal. This turkey-size hornbill is venerated by the Senoufou as a primordial animal, and is a common subject of the carvings, but even this privileged status has not spared it.
Odienné is a Malinke stronghold, a high and open town with a white mosque, set in low hills in the northwest corner of the country, near the Guinea and Mali borders. Of the native woodland, there is little left. At noon, the dust is bright, and the hot wind of the harmattan blows unimpeded through the naked branches of the flame trees. From Odienné a track goes north to Bamako, on the Niger, while the main road back to Abidjan turns south, among citrus groves, guava, and cashew trees. From hilly terrains of thickening vegetation flow thick streams, and farther south the savanna gives way to tropic forest. In the distance, tall pale boles of teak appear at the edge of the green wall, and at the forest edge are birds—big, dark forest hornbills, red-eyed doves, the gray-headed and pygmy kingfishers, elegant shikras and a Gabar goshawk, cattle egrets in multitudes, a tawny eagle. But no animal is seen or heard, only a band of twenty hunters armed with ancient guns, marching empty-handed home along the road. Behind them rises the dark smoke of a fire, for in the absence of public education, local hunters cling to the belief that wildlife is inexhaustible until it disappears entirely, and rarely make the connection between wildlife and habitat that might keep them from using fire as an aid to hunting.
Not far from Gouessesso is the Dan village of Biankouma, perched on a series of natural steps that rise into hillside forest, and scattered with small groves of banana and papaya, kola nut and coffee. (It was near Biankouma, in 1898, that the Mandingo leader Samory was captured by the French.) Unlike those of the savanna tribes, the houses of this forest people are round, built solidly with sturdy walls and sapling roofs that are lifted onto the hut cylinder in a single piece; the chief’s house, in this village, at least, has a roof of tin. All houses are decorated with a broad white band of kaolin on which red drawings and designs have been inscribed. The designs are made by young initiates to the tribe, and mostly portray the hunting and fishing that is swiftly disappearing from their lives. In addition, there are three fetish houses scattered wide apart in the big village, and readily distinguished by a half-circle of palmettos and a flat stone altar near the entrance. Outside one sits an old man whom everyone ignores; the silence all around is very strange. Indeed, he is like a sacred mask, for according to Jacob, nobody is supposed to see him enter or leave the fetish house; children playing anywhere near are called away. Nor is anyone permitted to take photographs. Explaining all this, Jacob keeps glancing at the fetish house, and before long he is accosted by a man who is offended by Gil Boese’s camera and demands to know why strangers lurk about; hurriedly we apologize and move away. It is the power of the fetish houses, Jacob says, that keeps these Dan from obeying official orders and moving over to New Biankouma, a treeless, muddy, and depressing litter of hard government housing that adjoins the village; such developments, built with customary bureaucratic disregard for the traditions of the people who must live in them, are all too reminiscent of the “efficient” government housing on Indian reservations in the United States. They are a common sight these days in Ivory Coast, and most of them—deservedly—are empty.
At the next village south, a dancing march is under way, led by a figure in a headdress mask who is hoisting a high pole; a number of costumed figures follow, leading a crowd of stamping, singing villagers. Many of these Dan wear Muslim dress, and it is true that the Malinke have made converts among these people, as they have among the Senoufou, farther north. But Muslim dress is a fashion here, and no proof of religion; where fetish houses and masks occur, the people are still animists, including many who have formally adopted Islam or Christianity. Our Jacob Adjemon is “Christian” but his Beté tribe—of the Kru peoples, who came originally from the Windward Coast—remains in touch with the old ways, and Jacob himself believes that his own brother died by sorcery. Jacob kindly invited us to visit his mother’s house on the way back to Abidjan; he says his room is still kept in waiting for his return. But Jacob has lost the family sense that is so powerful in Africa; by jitney bus, his village is not far from Abidjan, yet it has been eight years since he went home.
Jacob is generous and intelligent, but he is also arrogant and angry. Being a guide to the white tourists gives him a feeling of superiority, and so he resents very much that both of us have been to Africa many times before and might even know more than he does about wildlife, which like many young urban Africans, he fears and despises. His solution is to dispense information in a very loud, abrasive voice whether we want it or not, as if to say, This is my duty, and I mean to do it. Two days ago, he took offense when we declined a side trip out of Boundiali to view some hippopotami in a distant lake; everyone else he had ever guided had been to see those hippos, and although he granted the possibility that we had seen hippos rather often, while they, perhaps, had not, he could not reconcile himself to our defection.
Because his voucher entitles him to do so, and because he conceives of it as duty, Jacob insists on joining us for every meal. Having appeared, he slumps disconsolately in his chair, eats with his fingers village-style, and declaims against European food; almost invariably, an expensive dinner is left virtually untouched upon the table. In its place, he orders a Coca-Cola in which he marinates a large hard roll until it softens, whereupon he eats it out of the glass, using a fork. He is peremptory with waiters, then becomes furious when they ignore him and deal instead with us. He feels superior to Mamadou, who does not eat with us and is not entitled to a room in these hotels; as for Mamadou, who is quiet and gentle, he is even more exasperated by our haughty guide than we are. Jacob speaks German and English as well as French and expects to be hired shortly by Lufthansa; we’d like to warn him that his manners may count against him, but he is too touchy and volatile to accept this counsel in the way that it is meant. He has a color problem that is common in the new Africa: he envies and imitates the whites and is ashamed of this, and therefore is aggressive in his blackness, which makes him angry at both blacks and whites.
And so, though we like him, he has gotten on our nerves. Driving along, he will turn up Mamadou’s radio to full volume and join in very loudly and untunefully in the latest love songs. He is an authority on love, and speaks for Africa on this subject as on all others. “In Africa,” says Jacob Adjemon, “we say that first love is the best …”
Even more than the Senoufou, the Wobe and the “Yacouba” or Dan of the Man region, are famous for their masks, which have a serene and classical expression as well as a shell-like delicacy and lightness that has made them the favorite of Western amateurs of West African art. It is not strange that the Senoufou and the Dan have produced the most sophisticated art (as well as the most striking dances) in the Ivory Coast, since both derive from ancient and intense traditions; as in the great art of Benin, the Dan culture was already advanced before the first white man appeared on the Windward Coast.
The masks are in no way ornamental, nor is beauty sought; they are consecreated manifestations of the spirits, given human likeness so that they may be perceived by man. There are “small masks” that serve only the maker, and “Great Masks” that serve and protect the whole society in such ways as seeking out sorcerers, dispensing justice, and granting fertility and harmony. In these tasks and others, the masks are abetted by powerful secret societies with animal totems, notably the Gor or Leopard, which impose respect for the masks as well as punishment for those who disturb the public harmony; since this punishment may take the form of a fatal dose of crocodile bile, administered by a shaman who can make himself invisible, or even transform himself into the leopard, the secret societies, and Gor especially, are much respected—all the more so, perhaps, now that real leopards have disappeared.
The names “Wobe” and “Yacouba” are distortions of the confused responses from outsiders that met the early inquiries of the white explorers; in the great tradition of colonial impatience, words that mean nothing to the tribes became their names. Thus “man,” which in the Dan tongue signifies “I don’t know,” became the name for the great town of this region, the center of the trade in kola nuts to Mali and Senegal, and a depot for Mali cattle on their way south into what is now Liberia. It is still the great trade center of west Ivory Coast, with a vast and tumultuous African market that overflows a great two-story shed, spreading its rich smells and bright colors into the mud streets all around. The town itself is set into a mythic countryside of towering green forest walls and flowering trees surrounded by eighteen conical hills up to four thousand feet in height; the most stirring of these hills is the sacred guardian called the Tooth, which is crowned by a sheer monumental block of granite, and comes and goes mysteriously in the mist. The cloud forest is a phantasmagoric setting for the masks and dances, for Gor the Leopard, for the waterfalls and spidery bridges across the mountain torrents, made of miles of liana that climb to the highest and most delicate branches of the trees, strung magically in a single night, tradition says, and able to carry a weight of fifty tons. But the totem animals of these jungles, from which so much of the power of the old ways derives, are almost gone.
From these hilltops on the rare clear days, one can see as far west as Mount Nimba, which forms a common corner of three countries (Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Guinea) and at 6,069 feet is the highest mountain in West Africa. Using “bush taxis”—small jitney buses with such names as “Tahiti” and “Bob Dylan”—I had hoped to go straight across from Man to the slopes of Mount Nimba, in Liberia, to join friends on an ornithological safari, but the tour people in Abidjan, as well as the authorities in Man, assured me that this journey was not possible; there was no passable road beyond Danané, which was separated from the frontier by dangerous rivers and impenetrable forest, nor was there any road on the far side. No, no, they said, I would have to return all the way east and south again to Abidjan, take an international flight west to Monrovia, on the Liberian coast, then make my way as best I could inland to Nimba; in other words, travel a thousand miles to reach a point less than a hundred miles from where I stood. I would later discover, as a fitting end to my sojourn in Bad People’s Coast, that three months previously a new road had been put through that connected Mount Nimba to the main road to Man; instead of wasting six whole days and failing to arrive in time (which is what happened), I could have reached my destination in three hours.
And so from Man, we headed south again, on our way to the Parc Marahoué; this is the region of the Gagou, small forest folk who are sometimes described as being covered in reddish hair. (Both the Dan tribes and the Kru from farther south attest that they displaced these little hairy aborigines when they first came to these forests from the west; to the Lobi, in the far northwest, they are known as the Koutowa.) Western authorities have classified the Gagou as “small Negroes,” not true Pygmies—a contradiction, since “Pygmies” are also regarded as small Negroes, despite marked morphological differences which may include yellowish skin color and thick body hair—and even suggest that the small size of Bushmen and Pygmies is quite recent, an adaptation to the marginal environments into which both groups were forced by stronger peoples.
There is a possibility, at least, that “little people” not described by science still exist. The eminent animal collector, Charles Cordier (whose work is much respected by no less an authority than Dr. George Schaller), was so impressed by field evidence of unknown bipedal anthropoids in the upper Congo that he published a paper on the subject. Earlier (1947) a Professor A. LeDoux, at that time head of the Zoological Department in the Adiopodoume Institute, outside Abidjan, testified to several persuasive recent reports of small, manlike creatures with reddish body hair, including one that was shot at that same year in the great forest between the Cavally and Sassandra rivers by a celebrated elephant hunter, Monsieur Dunckel. In fact, agogwe—which the Africans regard as a small man-ape—have been reported from many forest regions all across tropical Africa, from Ivory Coast to Tanzania, and a Belgian zoologist makes a bold suggestion: “Although these ‘little hairy men’ agree with nothing known to the zoologist or anthropologist, their description could not agree better with a creature well known to paleontologists by the name of Australopithecus, which was still living in South Africa not more than five hundred thousand years ago, at a time when all existing African species were already formed.”*
The Ivoiriens assure us that unbroken jungle is all that may be seen at Marahoué, but a large part of this two-hundred-fifty-thousand-acre park is comprised of grassland and small hills set about with woods. In the deep forest, we observe magnificent butterflies of several genera and a white-collared mangabey (Cercocebus torquatus) an angular gray monkey with a reddish crown, sitting sprawl-legged in a tree crotch on the farther side of a green meadow by the forest wall, keeping company with smaller relatives, the mona monkeys. Atop a hill overlooking open country, we came upon a lepidopterist, caught in an illicit act of lepidoptery, who testified nervously that hartebeest and buffalo had been in view only this morning, but though we poked about the tracks until late afternoon, we saw no sign of bouffle nor bubale, nor even one dropping of the elephants that are supposed to frequent Marahoué, as well. The best that can be said for all too many of these “forest reserves” in the West African countries is that one cannot absolutely deny the presence of large animals, any more than one can prove a negative proposition; how can one say they are not there, since one cannot see them?
That night we stopped at Yamoussoukro, until recent years the small home village of the country’s president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who owns a coffee plantation and a factory there as well as a colossal modern palace that overlooks a manmade “Lake of the Sacred Crocodiles.” (We detected no sign of crocodiles, sacred or otherwise.) The village itself has been buried by grandiose housing projects, for the most part empty, as well as a number of pretentious, rather lonely modern buildings and an ornate hotel with a piscine that all but rivals the lagoon at the Hôtel Ivoire, all linked together by millions of dollars’ worth of broad triumphal avenues that soon die out in a worn countryside of red termite hills and scrubby bush. In Ivory Coast, as in many other countries of the new Africa, a privileged few have acquired enormous wealth, but for the rest things are much the same as they were in the colonial times from which their leaders saved them.
On Easter Sunday, we returned to Abidjan on the “Grande Route,” which is memorable chiefly for the number of dreadful wrecks along the way. A head-on collision of the night before was still being unraveled, and a little farther on was a truck-and-trailer, upside down, that had rocketed deep into the jungle. As in Senegal, the new two-lane roads are too narrow for the novice drivers, most of them young and inexperienced like Mamadou, whose total lack of anticipation in combination with slow reaction time and love of speed makes his driving a grave business indeed. We passed a sunny Easter morning on the brink of dire emergency, veering southward among rich plantations of coffee, oil palms, rubber trees, and pineapple, disputing the road with the great timber trucks that are bearing away the downed giants of the forest. At Ajamé, the whole landscape is a patchwork quilt of Sunday laundry, which is done for the prosperous Ivoiriens by poor people from Upper Volta fleeing south in a desperate search for work; at Banco we pass a forest reserve that according to Jacob no longer contains a single animal of any kind.
Jacob Adjemon is the born tourist in our group. For his homecoming, he is attired in a new kanzu bought at Man, and among the many souvenirs he has acquired on our journey is one of the mass-produced antelope lamps knocked out and shined up in the art factory at Daloa. In his opinion, old masks and carvings and awale games from the back country are of no use to the new African, and obviously he feels about them much the same uneasiness and disrespect that he feels for wildlife. Mamadou, on the other hand, bought an imaginative traditional bird-toy of wood covered in dried skin that comes originally from the Niger, and had hung it from his mirror as a charm; within the day, he had lost interest in this pretty thing, and when it fell, had flung it sullenly aside, perhaps in envy of all Jacob’s shiny purchases, or perhaps because Jacob had spent all of the money that he was supposed to give to Mamadou for his return journey. This injustice came to light after Jacob had been dropped off with his pile of packets near the beach, where he had persuaded us, wrongly as usual, that there was plenty of space in the hotels; his primary aim, it now appeared, had been to lure us somewhere close to his own lodgings. But Mamadou had not betrayed him, and even now, when we offered to advance Mamadou money, he refused our help until we promised that we would not get the perfidious Jacob into trouble with his employers. Thus was Jacob Adjemon repaid with kindness for his own selfish and unscrupulous behavior.
Poor Mamadou, poor Jacob—doomed to return to Hôtel Ivoire, we felt depressed. It seemed to strike us all at once that in hundreds of miles of travel overland in Ivory Coast, the only animal we ever saw outside the parks was that lone monkey on the westward road from Boundiali, and that the greatest concentration of wild mammals we had seen in the whole country were the fruit bats in the city park here in Abidjan. Nor did anything that we could learn of other countries in West Africa promise much better.
Earlier today, passing the road that leads toward Grand Lahou, Jacob had said, “In Abidjan, when we wish to regard elephants, we simply fly in an airplane to Grand Lahou, and there look down upon them.” Mamadou, at first impressed but now fed up with the grand airs of his compatriot, had stared at me to see if I believed this arrant nonsense. But perhaps Jacob had sensed that we were saddened by the disappearance of wild animals from Ivory Coast, as well as by the many signs that for all the “reserves” that have been set aside, for all the governments’ proclamations of intention, the fatal destruction of West African wildlife still continues. The arrays of steel gin traps in the Man market, the gangs of hunters on the roads, the hunting dog with the rattan hoops, the “bush meat” offered in back-country restaurants, the unobstructed poaching that, for lack of serious intervention, will soon destroy the remnant creatures, and thereby aggravate the protein lack in all these overpopulated countries—this obliteration of the native fauna is a crucial loss throughout West Africa, for reasons that go very much deeper than that “conservation of a priceless heritage” that white well-wishers like to prate about, having practiced it too late in their own lands. The animals are the traditional totems and protectors of the clans, the messengers of the One God that most Ivoiriens still perceive in all creation, the links with the world of the unseen, with the cosmic balance. Now the animals are gone, or at least so scarce that they have no reality in daily life. And perhaps even an urban boy like Jacob Adjemon, who has not bothered to go home to his Beté people in the last eight years, who is proud of the Hôtel Ivoire and disdainful of “the bush,” now grows uneasy. And so he says in a bored voice, “In Abidjan, when we wish to regard elephants, we simply fly in an airplane to Grand Lahou, and there look down upon them.”