chapter ten
THE CAMP MATURES AND THE WET ARRIVES
On the afternoon of 1 September, a convoy of five heavy vehicles thundered into camp down the new road – a grader, two bulldozers, a Caterpillar tractor/loader and a Unimog, a high-set army-style truck. Eamon had broken camp at the Djadié, and he and his men and their families had arrived to live in camp.
That day marked a turning point: more people and more technology in camp brought increased noise and greater complexity. Eamon assumed his role as chef de chantier – camp boss – and moved into Mario’s old bedroom in the guesthouse.
The next fortnight became a race against time to push the maximum volume of supplies through on the new road before the onset of the next wet season, which would last three months. There was no bridge at the Djadié River, and the crossing would be submerged once the rains came. Doug hired a fleet of trucks to speed up the process, and consignments of timber, vehicle parts, cement and hardware arrived at the rate of a truckload a day. The deliveries included all the toilet and basin suites for the two houses and six apartments, along with crates of glass louvres for the windows. Mixed in with the hardware were bulk supplies of rice and salt fish to tide us through the wet season.
M’Poko Lucien and I spent entire days checking everything in to the warehouse and updating the inventories – it felt as though we were stocking up for a siege. As we worked together day by day, I came to appreciate M’Poko’s quiet sense of humour and his calm, methodical approach more and more. Often the craziness of the situations we faced would leave us shaking our heads, then we would dissolve into laughter and everything would seem all right.
Down in the village, construction of an area of specialist workers’ housing was underway. Rodo had the sensitive task of allocating the housing. The position of a man’s house on the hillside would reflect his status and qualifications: the highest sites carried the most prestige. Rodo made a series of plan drawings showing which houses would be allocated to whom, and what furniture would be issued. All the houses needed beds, tables, benches and cupboards, which had to be manufactured on-site. With the total population in the village now close to 500 and the demand for furniture relentless, Win allocated four carpenters full-time to the task of furniture production until the needs of every family had been met.
Paydays were also Rodo’s responsibility. Each month, on a Saturday, he would spend an entire morning calculating the pays and preparing the 100 pay packets. In the afternoon, he would set himself up at a table outside the guesthouse, where the men would assemble to wait for their names to be called. The calculation of pay was complex – many men had received advances against their salaries during the month, and accordingly received only the balance remaining on payday. Each time, some would have forgotten about their advances and want to dispute the amount they received. The ensuing palaver always meant that payday stretched out to occupy an entire afternoon. Win and I would watch from the guesthouse and marvel at Rodo’s patience and good nature in the face of harassment. When it was all over, we’d invite him to join us for drinks on the porch to recover. In the village, pay nights were celebrated with large amounts of homemade maize and palm wine. These potent drinks quickly banished inhibitions, and outbreaks of violence were common.
With Belinga now a substantial settlement, the workers and their wives increasingly expected the économat to stock items they used to buy in town – clothing, babywear, toiletries, double foam mattresses, bicycles, perfume and cooking equipment. Every day people would come to me with new requests, and as fast as stock arrived at the économat, it sold.
Meanwhile, Mendoum Dominique needed to establish himself in his new job and keep the workforce fed. On his first day I sat with him and explained the ration system. He understood immediately and was eager to begin, but he’d arrived at a difficult time. The women who produced the manioc out in the villages knew that Mario had left. Unaware of Dominique’s appointment, they were reluctant to produce large quantities in case the company closed down and their market evaporated. So they had cut back production.
Accordingly, for the first few weeks, Dominique’s manioc-buying trips yielded no more than 400 bâtons a week, whereas we needed at least 1200. Compounding the problem, it was around this time – the end of the dry season – when the women worked on their maize and manioc plantations, preparing the ground before the onset of the rains. This left them less time for processing manioc. Dominique had to rely on taro, plantains and rice to make up the shortfall.
In time, the situation improved. Dominique negotiated verbal contracts with the women for set quantities of manioc each week, and built up their trust week by week until they were supplying 1500 to 2500 bâtons a week. Since each bâton weighed a kilo, the company was buying, transporting and distributing at least a tonne and a half of manioc every seven days.
Bushmeat was still scarce, and the men kept up their mock-serious routine of rubbing their stomachs, assuming a pained expression and declaring, ‘Patron, I’m suffering,’ at every opportunity. I wasn’t sure who was looking forward more to the arrival of the wet – they or we.
The surveyors’ equipment finally arrived in late August. They had lost almost two months of work time because of the delays, and now had to try to catch up. Jacques had resurrected two old Land Rovers for their use, and teams of labourers had worked steadily slashing secondary growth along the old tracks to give them access.
I felt sorry for these four young Englishmen: their job was the most physically demanding, and the terrain they had to map presented endless obstacles. Once out in the forest, they did most of their work on foot, climbing up and down muddy or rock-strewn mountainsides all day with no footholds except roots. They worked in all weathers and endured the incessant onslaught of biting mouches rouges and fourreaux, along with the ticks and ghiques that dropped or crawled inside their clothes as they struggled through the undergrowth. They also faced the ever-present risk of meeting deadly Gaboon vipers or hooded cobras. They had to place every step carefully, as the snakes concealed themselves in leaf litter. To cap off their miseries, the two old Land Rovers regularly broke down, as the rough terrain found their every weak point.
Often I would see the surveyors pull up outside the guesthouse at the end of a day’s work, their faces haggard, their clothes torn and drenched in sweat, and their skin covered in pink welts. Their morale grew chronically low and they suffered constant exhaustion. The only one who could still manage to smile and enjoy a joke was Andy, the big Yorkshireman with the curly hair. Whenever I could, I stopped to chat to him, and every few weeks I cut his hair on the porch while we exchanged stories.
During September, Jacques resurrected a third old Land Rover, this time for himself. He christened it the familiale, because it seated nine people. The Méhari was passed to Rodo, who shared it with me because he spent so much time in the office. At last I could deliver stock down to the économat myself and move around the camp quickly on other tasks. I loved how small and light it was, and I mastered the gears passably well after a couple of lessons from Jacques.
Rodo and I occupied a desk each in the guesthouse. His faced up the hill overlooking the workshops; mine looked out over the old plantations and the forest. After he had conducted rollcall and allocated the teams of labourers to the day’s tasks, we often had coffee together at the dining table.
It was only after we had settled into this pattern for several weeks that I realised what a difference his presence in camp had made to me. I had a congenial colleague with a ready sense of humour to share the daily trials with, and he spoke English. Before, I had battled a sense of isolation; now I had a comrade in arms. In the evenings and at weekends, Win, Rodo and I spent time together talking, swapping stories and listening to music on the cassette player. The three of us grew closer and closer with each passing week.
Eamon’s store of local knowledge and memory for detail constantly amazed me. He seemed to know things almost before they had happened. If someone’s mother-in-law had died in a remote village, if the buffalo were running near M’Vadhi, if the Fang and the Bakwélé were shaping up for a scrap, he would know. He knew where most of the men were born and who were their half-brothers, cousins and enemies. If he wanted to recruit a man who lived in a distant village, he would simply notify that man’s best friend, sister or uncle. Soon the grapevine would do its work, and the man – or a message from him – would arrive in the camp. When dealing with the men, he used the tactic of hints and rumours to great effect. A word here or an oblique warning there could be assured of reaching its target with no loss of face to anybody. It was a rare talent. He knew how the men thought, and they would do anything for him.
Eamon and Jacques, for all their toughness and resilience in the work environment, were gentle men off-duty, and their frontier humour was never far from the surface. Around the dinner table each night I took every opportunity to ask them about the old days, especially the wildlife – they had lived through extraordinary times when the camp was in its infancy.
Jacques had given me my first lesson on gorillas back in July. ‘Gorillas are calm and unhurried,’ he had said. ‘They approach their food delicately. In captivity, they are capable of great affection for humans, and often show a powerful need to be cuddled and touched. There have even been cases where gorillas in captivity have died of grief when separated from their long-term carers.’ I had listened with awe. How I longed to experience what he had.
He’d said that, in contact with humans, gorillas faced many health risks, and were especially vulnerable to lung complaints. In the wild, gorilla infants were raised with lavish care, and remained clinging to their mothers for two or more years. They didn’t breed until they were about eleven years of age. Mature males became ‘silverbacks’ when the hair on their back turned white, and some males lived to forty or fifty. His emotional account of these gentle giants, who had been maligned and misunderstood for so long in the western imagination, whetted my appetite to see them for myself.
‘Tell me more about the gorillas,’ I begged Eamon and Jacques after dinner one night. Both men’s faces softened, and a tenderness came into Eamon’s voice as he spoke.
‘Well, we had eight of them here in camp for a long time. Dr Annie Hion was studying them. They became part of the family. We used to play with them and they came everywhere with us. They’re so intelligent.’
‘What about Arthur?’ I prompted.
Eamon laughed, his blue-grey eyes twinkling and his mouth turning up at the corners. ‘Arthur’s favourite thing was friendly wrestling. He just loved us to wrestle him. He was so powerful we reckoned he was five times as strong as our biggest man, who stood at six feet four. The only way to break loose from Arthur’s grasp was to go completely limp all over, then he would know the game was over and he would loosen his grip. Oh, he did love it!’
‘What happened to the gorillas in the end?’
Eamon’s face clouded. He took a deep breath and sighed, ‘Ah well, that’s a different story. Annie had been looking after them and studying them for some years. Then there came a time when she had to return to France for a year, so she arranged for them all to be cared for while she was away. But when she came back, every one of them had been killed.’
I sat stunned. I tried to imagine it – the gentle animals who had come to trust humans, slaughtered, in all probability, for their meat. I didn’t press Eamon any further. The pain, even after all the intervening years, showed in his face.
The onset of the short wet, on 10 September, afforded a spectacle more awe-inspiring than anything I had ever seen. The clouds had been building up since early morning, and by three o’clock the sky had turned green-black and a solid storm front hung in the north-east. The air seemed to crackle with electricity. Rodo and I left our paperwork and stood side by side on the porch looking out, as a colossal anvil-shaped cloud mass swept towards the camp from the Congo.
Long before it arrived overhead, we heard the roar and drumming of rain on the forest. Ahead of the front, giant trees tossed their crowns wildly, battered by the force of the wind. Some were bent double. A solid curtain of water – silver-grey and opaque – advanced towards us and pounded the forest at the edge of the clearing. Then, just before the storm hit, violent wind gusts tore through the camp, ripping off roofing iron and throwing plastic chairs about like scraps of paper. The wind howled and shrieked through the guesthouse like a living thing, and a murky green light enveloped everything. We watched, transfixed.
Then the air overhead exploded in a thunderous crash, sending shock waves through us, and at once, the sky cracked open and disgorged its load on the camp. We sheltered in the doorway, dumb before its fury. Torrents pounded the corrugated-iron roof, and spouts of water gushed from the end of each corrugation, gouging holes in the red earth where they hit the parched surface. Within half an hour, the dry season’s layer of fine red dust had become a coating of greasy red mud.
When the storm had passed, the rain settled to a steady downpour, whipped up now and then by gusts of wind. By nightfall, it had eased. Waterfalls were crashing their way through the forest and down the hillsides. That night, as Win and I lay in bed in the Kombi, we heard the sound of a slow ripping and tearing from the nearby forest, followed by a mighty crash. The ground shook and the Kombi rocked on its tyres. The sound of a forest giant losing its grip on the sodden soil and plummeting to earth was something we would hear often in the weeks that followed. In our tiny clearing in the forest, it made us feel as insignificant as matchsticks.
The rivers rose quickly. The ford at the Djadié was rapidly submerged, so that the new road could only be used by setting up a meeting of two vehicles, one on either side of the river, at a pre-arranged time, and ferrying passengers and cargo across in a pirogue. On the Ivindo, the rapids, sandbanks and rock outcrops were soon covered by a metre of muddy water, allowing us to reach Makokou once more in just three hours.
In mid-September, the carpenters finished the new kitchen and a recreation area in the cas de passage. Here, Samba Bernard and Mohibi Léon would keep house for the surveyors and any visitors.
With the growth in size of the camp, maintaining supplies and servicing equipment had become major tasks. In some weeks we used 12,000 litres of diesel fuel, and Jacques now had a fleet of twelve vehicles to maintain. Fortunately, despite the wet, Eamon set the earthworks machines to grading and widening the road to the débarcadère. When the work was complete, the old forty-five-minute trip to the débarcadère became a thing of the past; it became possible to do the trip in just seventeen minutes.
Win and I were having coffee in the guesthouse one day when Rodo walked in carrying a dead cobra.
‘Do you want to have a close look? The surveyors got it out on Bakota South.’
I left my paperwork to peer at the metre-long reptile dangling limply from a stick. The head had been mangled, so the fangs and eyes were just a crushed mass. Étienne and Mambo Bernard put their heads around the kitchen door. They were usually quick to appreciate game meat, but they greeted the snake with silence. I knew many of the people ate snake – even regarded it as a delicacy – so I asked them whether this one would be good to eat.
They shook their heads. ‘No, madame! We do not eat that.’
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘Why? Because it’s poisonous?’
‘No, madame, it’s not that—’
‘But some people eat them, don’t they?’
‘Yes, madame, some do, but we don’t.’
I wasn’t about to give up, as traditional beliefs and practices intrigued me. ‘Don’t you like it?’
They looked at each other in silence, then back to me, shrugged their shoulders and repeated that they just didn’t eat it. Rodo handed it to them, and we watched as they made much of throwing it onto the fire and watching it turn black.
Win looked on with intense interest. He’d often handled snakes back in Brisbane: one of his sons had kept a collection of them in cages in the backyard. For Win, they were beautiful and fascinating, whereas for me they were creatures to be feared and avoided. My childhood understanding of them had been shaped by my grandmother’s stories of her early married life ‘out on construction’ at Oakey on the Darling Downs in Queensland when the western railway line was being built around 1906. The surroundings of their bush home, overgrown with shoulder-high grass, harboured many venomous snakes. Her tales of a deadly red-bellied black curled up under the back stairs or a king brown sunning itself near the clothes line filled my child’s mind with terror. Snakes were to be killed, I was taught – a belief that most Australians held as I grew up. Only when Win began educating me about them did I start to see them differently. ‘They’re more afraid of you than you are of them,’ he would tell me in our early days. ‘They’ll usually get out of your way; they’ll only strike if they think you’re threatening them.’ His respect for them, as for all wildlife, meant that he would never kill one.
I had occasion to witness Win’s comfort around snakes just weeks after Rodo had brought the dead cobra into the guesthouse. The two of us were out driving along Bakota South when we spotted the graceful curves of a snake moving across the track ahead. As the sky was overcast and the air cold it moved sluggishly, then stopped altogether when it saw the Kombi. We pulled up just metres away, close enough to have a clear view of its distinctive black and yellow markings. ‘It’s a cobra!’ Win said excitedly. ‘See if you can get a shot of it. I’ll get out and try to keep it still, but you’ll have to hurry.’
The cobra was large – around two metres long – with a small neat head. We knew deadly hooded cobras were endemic to the Belinga area and assumed that this was one, although no hood was visible. Somewhat nervously, I climbed out with the camera slung around my neck. Win had positioned himself in front of the snake, blocking its path to the nearby vegetation. Confronted, it slowly rose up, extended the hood on either side of its head and settled into a ritualised motion of threat, swaying from side to side, its eyes fixed on Win.
‘Now don’t fiddle around,’ Win urged. ‘I’m not going to be able to keep it here for long.’
‘For God’s sake be careful,’ I hissed as I fumbled with the camera settings, trying to compensate for the low light. ‘They’re not aggressive, you know,’ Win assured me. ‘I wouldn’t be doing this if they were. Come on! Hurry up!’ Each time I focused afresh the cobra moved and I had to start again, my concentration blurred by fear. The short depth of field dictated by a fully open lens only made the task more difficult. With each passing moment Win’s impatience grew, and with it the snake’s discomfort at being cornered.
‘For pity’s sake, get on with it!’ Win shouted. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘Trying to get it right. What do you think?’ I snapped.
In a languidly beautiful movement I wish I could have appreciated at the time, the cobra ceased swaying, sank to the ground, and began advancing towards Win’s feet. He leapt backwards, cursing my procrastination, grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it at the glossy black head. Momentarily distracted, the cobra paused just long enough for me to click twice and retreat to a safer distance. No longer cornered, it changed direction and moved off to disappear into the cover of vegetation.
‘Did you get it?’
‘I got something, but I don’t know whether it’ll be any good.’
I had never photographed a snake before, much less a deadly one that was threatening to strike at my husband’s legs, and it was not an exercise I was keen to repeat. ‘Next time we won’t be doing that,’ I said tartly as we returned to the Kombi. I should have been used to Win’s risk-taking behaviours by then, but they still had the power to annoy me. In contrast, Win was glowing with the excitement of his first cobra encounter. ‘I wasn’t in any danger,’ he insisted. ‘It was just telling me to move on.’
It was only months later when Win related the episode to Eamon Temple that we were brought up with a jolt. Eamon sat poker-faced listening to the whole story, then in his measured Midwestern tones offered one of his heart-stopping retorts: ‘You know there are spitting cobras round here, don’t you? They can spit venom into your eye from a couple of metres away, and if they get you you’re blinded for life. You’re just lucky it wasn’t one of those.’
There was little we could say at this news, but I hoped it might instil some caution into Win for future occasions. Eamon must have grimaced privately at the audacity of this newcomer to the African forest whose supreme confidence could have cost him so dearly. The ultimate irony was that when I had the film developed, I discovered the shots were grainy and out of focus.
I thought little about Étienne and Bernard’s comments about the dead cobra until one day I was chatting to Jacques’ plumber, Lougué-Lougué Marcel, about various types of game meat, and he told me he didn’t eat a certain animal.
‘And why is that?’ I asked.
‘Where I come from, we don’t eat that.’ I couldn’t persuade him to tell me why. These food taboos – for that is what I believe they were – reminded me of something Mary Kingsley had written. She described a Gabonese custom whereby each person was allocated a forbidden food at birth or in infancy that they were prohibited from eating for life. The food differed from person to person; abstinence from it was intended as a sacrifice to the spirit governing the person’s life. In Kingsley’s day, most people adhered strictly to this custom, as any lapse could result in misfortune. The belief was widespread, and the consequences of breaking the taboo greatly feared. I could only speculate whether this custom underlay the two conversations I’d had.
I often chatted with Mendoum Dominique about subjects unrelated to work, as he was articulate and precise in expressing himself. If anybody could explain to me the intricacies of traditional beliefs, I thought, perhaps he could. So one day I decided to try. I began with some general questions about local belief systems. I had barely started when his eyes widened and he became tense and guarded. He took a step back, put up his hands and declared, ‘Anyway, I’m a Christian, so it’s no use asking me!’ He repeated this several times, declaring that the Good Lord was his God and that he left all that traditional nonsense to others. I felt myself blush and changed the subject immediately. From then on I never asked people directly about their beliefs, and resigned myself to learning what I could piecemeal.
Not long after that conversation, Dominique received a large advance on his salary to cover the cost of his daughter’s treatment by a traditional healer near Makokou. The girl was gravely ill. As she had not responded to western medical treatments, he had taken her to the healer, where she spent three weeks being treated. Dominique related all this to me on his return. I listened carefully but asked no questions. I guessed that the girl was considered to be suffering spirit possession, a paralysing condition that some of our workers had experienced. It made them lethargic, fearful for their lives and unable to carry out their normal daily activities. Under Gabonese law, spirit possession was an illness for which workers were entitled to time off to be treated. In these cases, western medicine had nothing to offer.
As time passed, we found that traditional beliefs often emerged unexpectedly in the midst of everyday situations. One day, one of the men asked to be driven out into the forest to bring in a leopard he had caught in a trap. We took the Toyota utility, and the man and several other hunters rode in the back. When we arrived at the spot, there was a large antelope with its leg snared in a piège – a wire trap – but no sign of a leopard.
‘Where’s the leopard?’ I asked. The man looked sheepish, mumbled something and turned his head away – the leopard story had evidently been a ruse to persuade us to use the Toyota to save them carrying the carcass back on foot.
We stood at a discreet distance and waited for the hunter to kill the antelope. It bellowed in pain and fear as he twisted its head around to expose the throat for slitting, but then he froze, his face covered in sweat and his eyes wide. He remained bent over the animal for some minutes, paralysed, before calling to one of the other hunters to kill the beast for him. I turned away, unable to watch. When it was all over and the carcass loaded into the Toyota, I asked him why he had not killed the antelope himself.
‘Ma femme est enceinte,’ he explained – my wife is pregnant – as if that clarified everything. On the way back to camp, I mulled over what it could mean. Was it similar to the taboo the people observed on eating eggs? Eggs were never eaten but always fed back to the chickens. Was this about the sanctity of unborn life? Each time we witnessed these traditional beliefs in action, I realised afresh how little I knew about the world view of the people, and how little seemed to have changed since Mary Kingsley’s time.
By the end of September, Win had finished work on our flat at the eastern end of the old sample shed. It was one large room with a shower and toilet to one side and a bare concrete floor. Along the northern wall, louvre windows revealed a view out over the old plantations to the forest and mountains. The flat was insect-screened and equipped with a stove, a fridge, a double bed and a wardrobe with a light bulb inside to prevent mildew growing on our clothes. We set up our camping table and chairs at the kitchen end and our radio cassette player on the bench, then unpacked all the crockery, appliances and linen we had bought in Libreville three months before. Our long-awaited privacy had come at last. I could escape from the daily chaos if I needed to. It was cause for celebration.
It was a destiny day for another reason, too – I had turned thirty. Rodo, in his characteristically thoughtful way, had made me a birthday card and secretly organised Étienne to bake me a cake. We’d invited him in for a celebratory drink in the flat that afternoon; when he arrived at the door, he held the cake high over his head and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in his gravelly bass voice.
I hugged him hard, thrilled that he had gone to the trouble. Win put on one of our classical music tapes, and the three of us sat at the table eating the cake and looking out over the forest.
During the three months since we had arrived, I felt I had been in a crucible, tested at every turn. It was as if all the outer layers of myself that I had carried around for so many years had been stripped away, and I had come face to face with my inner self for the first time. I’d discovered I possessed a kernel of toughness. The more I had engaged with the challenges of helping to run the camp, the more my confidence had grown.
Although I didn’t yet know it, on that landmark birthday, I was poised for the greatest change of my life, and the three of us – Rodo, Win and I – would be bonded forever by events that would unfold in the weeks to come.