Drums Along the Congo Page 12

  The Brits spent almost two weeks on the trail and camped half the time alongside Lake Télé, surveying the water currents and depth. The land north and west of the lake, Rothermel assures me, remains unexplored; the guides from Boha refused to leave tribal territory, saying the region was filled with evil spirits.

  “What about Mokele-Mbembe?” I ask again.

  “That’s a laugh. Hey, don’t get me wrong. It’s a huge forest, and a dinosaur could be out there, but we didn’t see one bit of evidence.” Rothermel pauses to glance heavenward. The Scorpion lies almost directly overhead. “Look, we’re not going to make things up like Agnagna and the Yanks who’ve been around here.”

  Marcellin Agnagna is the forestry agent assigned to their expedition. He has accompanied almost every outsider visiting Lake Télé, and he led an all-Congolese expedition in 1983, when he claimed to have sighted Mokele-Mbembe. No one else on the expedition saw the god-beast, and the pictures he took of the dinosaur showed water and flora, but no fauna. The good shots, he later explained to the press, were spoiled because he forgot to remove the camera’s lens cap. At the moment he’s off visiting a friend in a nearby house, but Rothermel won’t be happy until there’s a thousand miles separating him from Agnagna.

  The first American expedition to reach Lake Télé, in 1981, also claimed to have seen and photographed Mokele-Mbembe. That expedition was led by two Californians, Herman and Kia Regusters, who scheduled a news conference on their return, only to announce to a roomful of journalists, me included, that unfortunately their film had been ruined.

  Other American expeditions were mounted in 1980 and 1981 by Roy Mackal, who, as a member of a Loch Ness investigation committee, claims to have seen “Nessie” on a sonar screen. Although he never made it to Lake Télé, he did scour Epena and an area to the south, around Kinami, interviewing people who claimed to have seen Mokele-Mbembe and substantiated previous reports that the dinosaur’s favorite food was the fruit of the molombo vine.

  A few weeks before I left for the Congo, in February 1986, I met with Mackal at the University of Chicago, where he works. Over the phone he left the impression that he was a full-time university professor, but I found him in the administrative offices associated with the building and grounds department. After we shook hands, he was quick to point out that he does hold a doctorate in biochemistry and has taught college-level courses.

  Throughout our afternoon together, he kept calling Mokele-Mbembe “my baby,” complaining that other expeditions had “kidnapped” his ideas and discoveries. He was reluctant to share information about the geography, and when I asked for advice on what to pack, he only said, “Take two pairs of Hush Puppies shoes. That’s important.” He had no doubts about the dinosaur; he was “positive Mokele-Mbembe exists” and read me a few eyewitness accounts he had assembled. He also showed me a plaster cast he had made in Djéké of a footprint the size of a Frisbee. It looked as if it could have been made by a sauropod, but Mackal wasn’t certain. He predicted that the Congolese would never issue me a permit, told me to save my money and avoid disappointment, and then sold me a copy of his book on the Loch Ness monster.

  Rothermel advises me to concentrate on the Lake Télé area; they found nothing of great interest farther south, in Nboukou and Djéké.

  “Don’t waste your time or money in Djéké to see the footprint.” Rothermel scoffs. “Dinosaur track, my ass. Looked to me like some fancy work with a ball-peen hammer… Christ, mate, it’s supposed to be the same one Mackal saw in ’eighty-one. Nothing lasts five years in the mud and rain around here.”

  Leaving the Brits to sleep, I walk down to the riverbank and sit under an oil palm. A fishing owl splashes into the water downstream and screeches victoriously as it whizzes past me. The rhythm of tom-toms and the chattering of jungle nightlife are interrupted now and then by the cheers of the crowd watching the wrestling on television. To my left, on a path to the water, a couple is having a mild argument. She wants him home tonight, but he insists on going fishing. They compromise: she will join him and hold the lantern. They pole off into the darkness, their voices raised softly in song.

  CHAPTER 16

  EPENA DISAPPEARS behind the green curtain as we round the first bend. To either side of the motorized pirogue, lianas and aerial roots curl out into the sunlight from the deep shade of mighty balsa, kapok, plane, and barwood trees. Woody herbs tumble down the steep riverbanks, and thin strands of yellow vines dangle above us in the sky. Off to starboard, a seductive flag bush beckons with its delightful red blossoms.

  Ahead, the muddy Likouala aux Herbes inhales and exhales, contracting from forty meters to twenty around endless tight curves. As we go, the jungle wall changes as well, touching the water where the banks are steep, then receding into the distance behind the floodplain. The river is calm today; the temperature is already 97 degrees, so Captain Prosper tries to keep us in the shade.

  Prosper has been operating the Epena-Boha ferry service since his father’s death exactly seven years ago tomorrow. To mark the occasion, the family will visit the gravesite tomorrow morning; three of his sisters who live in villages along the river will make the return trip with him.

  “Only the boys remained in Epena,” Prosper says, throttling back the twelve-horsepower Johnson outboard so we can hear each other talk. “My sisters had to marry whomever my father brought home for them… These days my daughters tell me what to do.”

  “How old do you think I am?” he asks.

  Prosper looks to be in his fifties; his face is leathery and deeply wrinkled, and I know he has six grandchildren with two more on the way.

  “Thirty-eight?”

  “Close! Two years off,” he answers, removing his Coke-bottle glasses so I may correct my assessment.

  “Gardez! Gardez!” Innocent cries from the bow.

  Prosper whips his glasses back on and jams the helm over to a safer heading. Lowering his voice to a whisper, he confesses, “I have bad eyesight.”

  He’s thinking about changing the name of the boat from Speedy to something more fitting. When his father launched her, two men could lift the nineteen-foot hull with ease; today she is waterlogged from stem to stem, and it takes three men just to slide her off a beach. The old outboard can barely push her along. Prosper has an eye out for a suitable replacement; patience though, is paramount.

  “Only when you find the right tree do you cut it. Don’t rush it. The tree is the important thing.”

  “What kind of tree?”

  He recites the local names for kapok, sterculia, and ambocensis. “Balsa,” he condemns, “is no damn good … sinks after a few years.” He’d love to purchase a boat rather than make one, but that will require some luck in the local lottery. It’s a weekly four-number game run by Epena’s sole bookie, who pays out $30 to $125, depending on the betting pool.

  If Prosper hits the jackpot, he says, “I’ll buy a tin bathtub for my wife and an aluminum boat. Something that won’t drink water.”

  Up forward, Innocent chats with Theodore, the newest member of our expedition. We met him yesterday, not long after the police commandant summoned me to his office. The commandant was reviewing his law books during the night and something “jumped out at him.”

  “Hmmm,” he said, inspecting my papers. “You have no Impfondo stamp. All visitors to Epena must have an Impfondo stamp. That’s the law, and I must arrest you for illegal entry.”

  After describing himself as a generous man, the commandant offered me two options. I could sit in a cell until the judge arrived sometime late next week, or I could put up bail. The colonel had left the day before on an extended hunting trip with his brothers, so I couldn’t ask him to intervene. I opted to raise bail (a total of fifty dollars), but unadvisedly I demanded a receipt. An hour later Theodore introduced himself. He was assigned to make sure I didn’t jump bail. Innocent and I groaned.

  “Look, I don’t like this any more than you,” Theodore fumed. “I’m on the commandant’s shit list.
You’re on the commandant’s shit list. And now we are shit together.” Changing his tone, he asked us to call him Theo.

  Theo is from Brazzaville and has one year left in his army hitch before he returns home and picks up where he left off: “I was real good at doing nothing … a pro.” Right now he and Innocent are chatting together like old friends, occasionally glancing back at me and laughing. As I try to shift forward to find out what’s so humorous, a chunk of rail snaps off in my hand. Prosper wedges the piece back in place, but seconds later it jiggles free and falls into the bilge. Prosper glowers at me.

  “Be nice to Speedy. She is old, old, old.” He blows her several kisses. “She is my friend, my faithful friend.”

  I stay put and scan the shore for wildlife. There are numerous burrows in the mud bank, but no animals in sight. Exposed rootballs, a favorite haunt of certain bee-eaters and trogons, are empty. What Prosper calls “the happy sound of an engine” must be a tocsin to the river life, sending every creature scurrying for cover. My suggestion to turn off the engine and drift for a while is rejected.

  “If I wanted to listen to birds,” Prosper announces, “I would have paddled to Boha.” He gooses the throttle of the engine he bought several years ago on one of the Congo River barges. Caramel-colored water splashes off the bow and ripples toward the shore. Behind us thousands of tiny bubbles mark our path, popping one by one until there’s no trace of us ever passing this way.

  Prosper slows down about twenty minutes later and points to the crowns of some oil palms in the distance. “Wherever you see them, you will see men.” Groves of palm, citrus, and nut trees mark the villages near the stream and serve as navigational aids. While it’s not unusual to see a lone palm or lime in the wild, a grove is always cultivated. Indeed, not once have I sighted a cluster of a single species growing along an uninhabited riverbank. Trees of all types grow side by side, hardwoods abutting softwoods. In the jungle, dispersion of species is the general rule.

  Naturalists once saw this spattered arrangement of trees as the rain forest’s best defense against the timber industry. It would be far too expensive, they reasoned, to cut away a half-acre of growth to get at one mahogany tree. However, that was before the emergence of the chipboard industry and technical refinements in the manufacture of pulp, plywood, and veneer. Today there’s a buck to be made from nearly every tree.

  As we clear a tight bend, we’re greeted by five men waving wildly from shore. I raise my arm to return their hearty salute, only to have Prosper grab it and order me to help him.

  “Allez-y!” he commands as we tilt the shaft of the outboard out of the water.

  A thick rope scrapes across Speedy’s bottom and pops up just under the propeller.

  “Now you can wave. They were swearing before, but now their net is safe.”

  The fishing net spans the river; one end is staked into the mud of one bank, and the other is cinched to a tree on the opposite bank. Two fishermen dive into the water and swim from the far shore with the rope, which they pass to their comrades. The swimmers stay in knee-deep water as the others start walking upstream, hauling in the net as they go.

  “They’re closing the gate,” Prosper says.

  As the shore crew pulls, the net forms an ever tighter loop around the fish; the two men standing in the shallows grope bare-handed for the trapped fish. One fellow shouts and scoops a catfish ashore, where his friends stun it with clubs.

  Farther downstream a group of women are washing clothes. Shirts, pants, skirts, dresses, and undergarments are lathered, then twisted tight to be pounded against a tin roofing panel. Beyond them a gang of children playing in the water stop their games to study our vessel as we approach. Seeing my smiling face, they turn their backs and dive underwater.

  Prosper slides the pirogue between two others and nudges her bow onto a small beach, the first toll station on the way to Boha.

  “Itaka,” our skipper announces.

  Innocent and Theo jump off the bow. I get ready to debark from the stern when Prosper grabs me. “Deep, deep,” he mumbles, and uses a paddle to demonstrate. He dips it all the way in without touching bottom.

  “Think, my friend, think before you step,” he says, stepping aboard the neighboring pirogue and walking to its bow before jumping.

  The chief and the village council are all seated in the shade of soaring palm trees. Drums have long since announced our arrival.

  “You’re late,” the chief pronounces, checking his jeweled wristwatch. “Your gifts will be adequate, won’t they?” He checks his fancy timepiece again.

  “Yes, sir,” I say, handing him four bottles and racing back to the pirogue for two more.

  The chief is pleased with our offering of four fifths of bourbon, two of scotch, and a kilo of salt. He and the council hold out their highball glasses, and I fill them to the brim. I toast the village, wishing everyone a long life and a winning number in the lottery. The chief graciously invites us to stay.

  “We will kill a goat. Eat and drink and drink some more.”

  “We have many more villages to visit,” Innocent, gentle voice of reason, says, ticking off their names.

  “And I must take my sisters back to Epena for the ceremony,” Prosper adds.

  The chief was a friend of Prosper’s father and asks him to stop on the return trip. “We will have flowers and fruit for you to bring to him. He was a good man sometimes.”

  My Polaroid portraits of the chief and his council are a big hit, and as we’re about to shove off, he opens his juju bag and hands me a quarter-inch stainless steel nut.

  “It dropped from the sky five years ago … landed next to me while I was standing under that lime tree over there.” He points to a citrus tree near the riverbank.

  The nut most likely fell from an airplane, and once we’re under way, Prosper asks if he can have it for his tool kit.

  “Stainless steel is hard to find around here.”

  “Sacrilege!” Theo exclaims. “This has power! I can feel it.” I let him keep it, and as he drops it into his juju bag, he says, “Maybe the gods hold everything together up there with nuts and bolts.”

  Innocent explains later that the Itaka chief was probably the son of a French political appointee and not the heir to a centuries-old family title.

  “He had no scars on his face. A true chief would have scars all over.”

  Unlike the British Colonial Department, which allowed chiefs to be installed according to local customs, the French Colonial Administration hand-picked most of them and thought nothing of demoting troublesome ones. There were three ranks of chief during the colonial period: chef de village, chef de terre, and chef de province. This three-tiered system invited not only rivalries for the spoils of office but also spying; the divisiveness effectively undercut any unified anti-French nationalist movement.

  “It was good for the French, but bad for us,” Innocent says, reminding me that the French never developed a competent civil service. When independence finally did come, no one knew how to operate a government; there was neither an infrastructure nor an experienced corps to set one up. “Lucky for us that the Russians and Chinese were around,” he says, noting their technical and financial assistance. Their scholarships educated thousands of Congolese, Innocent included. He went to college in Leningrad and studied for his master’s degree in forestry at the University of Montpellier in France under a grant from the Communist Workers Party.

  Prosper cuts the engine and points off the starboard bow. “Pygmies. Two of them.” We glide slowly by the spot, but I don’t see them. “Look … the gourd under the rubber vine.”

  White latex drips from a freshly cut liana into a large wooden bowl. My request to stop and investigate is soundly rejected. “Only an idiot would stop,” Prosper snaps, turning on the engine again.

  “He’s right,” Theo says. “If you got anywhere near the rubber, they would shoot you … poison arrow or dart. That’s their rubber, and you leave it alone. Pygmies don’t ask q
uestions even after they’ve killed you.”

  The Pygmies collect rubber in the forest and trade it, along with jungle fruits, nuts, and herbs, for Bic lighters, knives, and cookware. Over the past ten years a large number of Pygmies have left the forest for the city, and more emigrate every month. Today the largest concentration of Pygmies in the Congo is in Impfondo, not in the forest.

  “There’s no turning back for them. Once they leave the forest, they’ve left for life and won’t be welcomed back,” Theo says, adding, “They have more taboos than we do.”

  “And we have plenty… Catholic priests have been around here for years and years,” Prosper says.

  A half-hour later, when we arrive in Djéké, I reach out to pull another pirogue close to Speedy and step nonchalantly along its keel to the bow. As I leap for shore, Innocent shouts, “Care!” Too late. I sink deep into the chocolate-pudding mud while my companions cross over the next three pirogues before stepping onto solid ground. Prosper shakes his head in disbelief as I slither into the river to rinse. “You’re still not thinking,” he shouts.

  The president of the Djéké village council peers down the steep bank at me. He thought perhaps he had heard the splash of a large fish. He cocks his head, curious about the mundélé washing in the river, but he is polite and asks no questions.

  “Stay there, Prosper,” the man says. Moments later he glissades like a surfer down the slippery path with a bowl of fruit. “This is for your father. Say hello to him for us tomorrow.”

  “The drums?” Prosper inquires, wondering how he knew about the anniversary.

  “No, your sister, Camille. She wants you to hurry. I’m supposed to accept the mundélé’s gifts and tell you not to drink.”

  Prosper harumphs, grabs a bottle, opens it, and takes a swig. “Everybody, please, drink to my father.”

  A man shouts from the top of the bank. “Yo-ho. Come to see the dinosaur footprint? I’m your man. I’ll lead you to it. Cheap!… The footprint is very beautiful.”