Drums Along the Congo Page 15

  The elders snap their fingers. The witch doctor fades into the crowd. People relax, lean toward their neighbors, and speak in whispers. A mason wasp buzzes my face and then lands a few feet away, the sunlight glinting off its blue wings and gold midsection. It gathers mud from the edge of a puddle and prepares to fly off.

  Whack! A clod of dirt explodes on my chest. I look up to see Ange gesturing to me from the other side of the gathering.

  “I guess that’s the signal,” Innocent observes.

  We carry our gifts of salt and wine and scotch to the feet of the chief, who stares straight ahead, both hands gripping the spear between his legs. Up close, I can see that the red paint traces patterns of scar tissue on his face, shoulders, and chest, sure signs of royalty. The chest scars form elaborate spirals and circles, while those on his shoulders and face are mostly straight lines and rectangles.

  The cicatrices are formed by slipping peppercorns under the skin, a ritual normally performed by the village witch doctor when a male heir to the throne is just one year old. Often, if the surgeon has an unsteady hand, driver ants are substituted for sutures: the ants are positioned so that their mandibles clamp down on either side of the incision. The bodies are then severed, leaving the mandibles pinching the skin over the peppercorns.

  “Stop staring,” Innocent hisses.

  We walk backward to our chairs and bow to the chief before sitting. During the ceremony, no one but the witch doctor may turn his back to the chief.

  The chief rocks back and forth on his stool and thumps the ground again.

  The village elders snap their fingers.

  The witch doctor inspects our gifts. He says something to the chief and turns toward the assembly, pointing at our presents with both arms. He approaches the elder chosen by the spear and says, “Oui ou non?”

  The elder looks around and nods. “Oui.”

  “The chief and the elders have accepted our presents,” Innocent says. “We are now officially welcome in Boha.”

  The witch doctor keeps talking as he pulls out his penknife to clean his fingernails.

  “He’s talking about money now, village fees.”

  “How much?” I ask.

  “Shhh, I’m trying to listen.” Innocent cocks his head, and his jaw drops. “Big money… They want a half-million francs.”

  Ange smiles at me as I work through the exchange rate. It comes to almost $2,000.

  “What do you say to that?” the witch doctor asks in French, dragging the spear tip through the dirt. An iridescent green beetle scuttles out of the trough.

  I confer with Innocent. My French would get us into trouble, and my Lingala, as he knows, is only good for provoking laughter. He agrees, reluctantly, to represent me and asks the elders to reconsider their demands: “The white man comes by himself and asks you to lower the fee.”

  The witch doctor approaches the chief and says something in his ear. The chief doesn’t blink. The holy man retakes center stage and addresses the crowd, his voice rising at the start of each sentence and gradually dipping.

  “He says a Belgian expedition paid 250,000 francs, and they only stayed a few days at the lake. He wants us to make an offer.”

  I know that the British paid only 30,000 francs, plus assorted knickknacks like lighters, knives, cigarettes, compasses, and ponchos. Back in Epena, Rothermel advised me to do what he did: “Bargain, mate, bargain them down. They won’t wear you out like Arabs. Just tell them you’re broke.”

  “Innocent, please tell them that I’m poor and…”

  “No,” he declares, cutting me off. “Look at these people… And you want me to say that? Phew! You can come up with something better than that.”

  I remember my own years of overcharging, back when I lived in a resort community and felt justified in gouging outsiders for work on their fancy yachts.

  “Here you go,” I say, handing Innocent my wallet. “Let them take what they want.”

  “Yeah?”

  I nod.

  Theo grabs my knee. “How will you pay me?”

  “I don’t know… Maybe a camera.”

  Theo likes the idea.

  The witch doctor takes the wallet from Innocent and counts the bills. The elder chosen by the spear examines the contents, whispers to the witch doctor, snaps his finger, and hands the wallet to his neighbor, who also snaps his fingers after flipping through it.

  “They’re deciding how much they want,” Innocent explains.

  Across the way, Ange winks at me, Gabriel flashes a smile, and Raymond waves. Slowly the wallet goes from elder to elder, each one snapping his fingers. Once it’s back in the hands of the witch doctor, he returns it, grins, and says, “We want 25,000 francs.”

  “D’accord, merci,” Innocent and I say as one. It’s only ninety dollars.

  Snap!… Snap! the fingers applaud, and someone slaps me on the back.

  “Eyes forward,” Innocent orders.

  The witch doctor strides toward us, issues a short bow, and gestures for me to stand.

  “Questions?” he demands of the chosen elder, who scans the assembly before pronouncing, “Non.”

  The witch doctor tells me to sit and lowers his head, speaking quickly, blurting out words without pausing for breath. Once he’s finished, he bows toward the chief and raises his head to the sky. Several seconds later, people get up to leave or begin to chat among themselves.

  “That’s it, all over,” Innocent says. “The féticheur asked Mokele-Mbembe not to kill us and thanked everyone for coming. Now we should pay our respects to the chief.” The chief, however, isn’t in a mood for talking; in fact, it’s difficult to tell what kind of mood he’s in. He continues to stare straight ahead as flies hopscotch across his face. The forest is a fully stocked pharmacy of sorts, and I wonder if he’s in some drug-induced trance.

  “Picture?” I offer, holding out the Polaroid.

  He doesn’t respond, but a group of bystanders jump at the opportunity and crowd around the stony patriarch. Click!… The men whoop as the pictures materialize. The chief, though, remains cataleptic.

  “Is he all right?” I ask one of the men.

  “Hmmmm,” the chief hums, getting up to enter his hut.

  “May I ask a few questions?”

  “Hmmmm,” he repeats, grabbing a bottle of scotch and disappearing inside his hut.

  “Practice, practice.” Raymond hands me a spear, and Gabriel tosses one to Innocent, saying, “We leave in the morning.”

  CHAPTER 19

  A YOUNG WOMAN walks by carrying a bundle on her head. It’s white and looks like a loaf of bread. Perhaps it’s food she’s willing to share. Meeting my inquisitive stare with a smile, she detours our way.

  “Manioc… I’m starved,” Innocent says, rising to his feet.

  The young woman shakes her head. “Chalk,” she corrects, lowering the bundle and holding it out for us to inspect. The front of her plaid blouse is dusted white. “The chief borrowed it, and I’m returning it to the school.” Before leaving, she allows Innocent to carve a sliver from the block, and he gives me and Theo a piece. Nothing happens when I rub the chalk along my forearm.

  “Try this,” Innocent says, running the chalk back and forth over the grooves in the handle of his field knife. He sprinkles a bit of powdered chalk over my arm and does the same to himself and Theo. The effect of white is barely noticeable on my pale pink skin, but as Innocent notes, “The chalk looks great on black.”

  Responding to my story about visiting the Fetish Museum and learning about some of the more arcane ritual uses of chalk, Innocent explains that the rites of ancestor worship varied from tribe to tribe. “Only a few tribes used chalk to collect the power of the dead… Many more tribes kept a body part, like an eye or an ear, and quite a few saved fingers.”

  The body parts were considered a family legacy and passed from one generation to the next, father to son. This practice of preserving a piece of the dead was observed primarily in the mountainous areas
of the lower Congo and stopped years ago; even so, boxes of withered ears, eyes, and fingers remain in closets and foot lockers throughout the country. Theo recalls how his grandfather wanted to end the tradition once and for all, but he didn’t know what to do with the family bag of fingertips.

  “There must have been a hundred of them in a suitcase. He couldn’t throw them out like trash… Finally, he just mailed them off to his younger brother in Pointe-Noire. I have nightmares about them coming back to me, the first son of the first son of the first son.”

  Today most Congolese believe that the soul vacates the body not long after death and is transmuted into another form that leaves the corpse powerless. “We honor the dead,” Innocent says, “but it’s the living, our elders, that command respect.” Both he and Theo were taught to revere their elders as skilled soldiers in the endless struggle against invasive devils. Their wisdom and experience in battling evil is the family’s legacy. Innocent can remember “plain as day” his grandfather standing watch over him when he was a sick child, confronting and banishing the evil that had brought on the fever.

  “Maybe the antibiotics cured me, but I’ll never know for sure.”

  Theo excuses himself to retrieve a bottle of scotch, deeming it an appropriate moment to toast our ancestors. Innocent and I lean back and let our eyes drift with the thin clouds coming in from the northeast. The wind is kicking up, and the tree spirits talk for the first time all day. The humidity is near one hundred percent, and the temperature is in the nineties, perfect growing conditions for the fungus in my shoes. Directly above us a colony of weaver birds flit in and out of their cannonball-shaped nests. There are scores of them in one sago palm, and they seem oblivious to our presence, chattering away and fussing with their homes. Below our perch on the riverbank, kingfishers patrol the water, swooping up and down at high speeds. Flycatchers keep to the grass on the far bank, waiting patiently for a meal to buzz by.

  “Bonjour,” a voice rings out behind us.

  It’s the witch doctor. He spotted Theo walking with the bottle and glasses and decided to join in our toast. He also wants to ask a favor. The shotgun shell he used in the ceremony was his last, and everyone enjoyed the effect so much, he wants to try it again. I promise him a handful of shells.

  “Have you ever seen Mokele-Mbembe?” I venture.

  “Oui, tous les jours… Mokele-Mbembe is in here,” he says, thumping his chest, “and out there in the forest. He is a great spirit, so he is everywhere.”

  My talk of a living dinosaur doesn’t interest him. He believes Mokele-Mbembe is a powerful deity that constantly changes appearance, varying by divine whim and human perception. People have come to him with wildly differing descriptions of Mokele-Mbembe, and he believes them all, sure that no one would risk their own well-being by lying about the gods. Villagers confide in him, but he doubts anyone will talk to us about the god-beast. An encounter with a god is a personal matter that rarely if ever is discussed in public.

  I hand him my glass and fill it with spirits.

  “Sometimes people say Mokele-Mbembe is small, like a goat, and sometimes they say he is bigger than the tallest tree… They say he roars and hurts their ears, and they say he can speak so that only one person can hear him.”

  He has no desire to meet the supreme forest god face to face. He’s satisfied with the images he conjures of Mokele-Mbembe, which change shape “like the clouds in the sky.” If the situation arose, he wouldn’t run from the god-beast. “I’m too old to run from anything.”

  Like most witch doctors, he has, over the years, nourished relationships with specific spirits. Each day he curries their favor by praying to them and making offerings. In a world where everything is imbued with a spirit, the witch doctor must be highly selective in his choice of guardians, and Mokele-Mbembe isn’t one of his.

  “The wind god is a special friend, and the river god talks to me every day.”

  “Do you think it’s all right to look for Mokele-Mbembe?”

  He laughs and pours himself another drink. “If the spirit is missing, you must find it.” However, the way outsiders have been looking for Mokele-Mbembe confounds him. It seems that some of my predecessors have acted like devotees of the Church of Gadgetry.

  “One man said his metal box would find Mokele-Mbembe… He said the box was his eyes and his ears, and only the box could prove the existence of Mokele-Mbembe. How is that possible? And why does he need a box to find a god that is everywhere? The only instrument to trust is the heart. The heart, my friends, never lies.”

  I ask him about chipekwes, the limousine-sized lizards that have been sighted around the upper Ubangi River. Bernard Huvelmans, the father of cryptozoology and the author of the seminal work On the Trail of the Unknown, has suggested that chipekwes and Mokele-Mbembe are but two of numerous prehistoric creatures still roaming the rain forest. The witch doctor nods his head. “Oh, yes,” he says, he knows all about chipekwes and considers them mighty spirits, like Mokele-Mbembe, but not rivals to the gods of earth, sky, and wind.

  “The forest is home to many powerful spirits … what you call dinosaurs. They live all around us. Mokele-Mbembe is never far from Boha, and the chipekwe lives in Zaire … but they stay away from people and attack intruders. That’s why they live in the forest.”

  “So it’s true, Mokele-Mbembe really does kill people!” Theo exclaims. He opens his juju bag, takes out the nut that fell from the sky, and asks the witch doctor to empower it with a special spell. He has heard rumors that Mokele-Mbembe can cast the evil eye, death to anyone meeting its gaze.

  The witch doctor returns the nut to Theo and reminds him of the difference between an intruder and a guest. No one, he cautions, should enter the jungle without first communing with the more powerful forest spirits. While some gods are more tolerant than others, all have their limits and will rebuke insolent mortals who violate them, unleashing devils to do the dirty work. A minor offense may change a man’s luck for a certain amount of time; major offenses bring disease or death. Not being in daily communion with Mokele-Mbembe, the witch doctor can’t predict how the god-beast will react to us. However, he’s confident that the jungle deity isn’t an evil spirit, and in any case the god of wind will watch over us.

  “If there’s danger, the wind will blow the danger away,” he assures us.

  The sound of drums erupts behind us. A column of smoke rises from the far end of the village. People emerge from their houses, and someone shouts for us to join them at the fire. We linger for a while, sipping the last of our drinks. The waxing moon is visible now, a faint imperfect circle climbing slowly into the night. Off to the west, the last of the sun is melting into the treetops. The witch doctor stands, looks northward, and holds out his arms, pointing at the two astral orbs.

  “Tomorrow you will walk between the sun and the moon … to where Lake Télé lies. If I was younger, I would go with you. I’m told the fishing is still good.”

  The smoke is coming from near the council house. Women are dancing to an array of percussive instruments, from traditional drums to pots, pans, and empty aerosol cans. One man plays the sweet-sounding m’bichi, a thumb organ made from metal strips attached to a sounding board. The women dance and sway at one end of the fire, and the men stand together at the other. I wonder if this is the leopard dance, held once a year, a ritual event staged by the village women, who pretend they’re leopards; the young girls chase them off, protecting the men from attack.

  Innocent checks with a bystander. “They’re celebrating first blood. A girl has become a woman today,” he says, explaining that it’s a spontaneous party, whereas the leopard dance comes at the end of a three-day celebration of womanhood.

  An elder spots me in the crowd and waves. After taking a swig of scotch, he circles the fire twice and spits a bit of liquor over the flames, which sizzle and smoke.

  “All praise Mokele-Mbembe,” the elder intones. “He is great. He is big. He is powerful.”

  I lean t
oward the witch doctor to ask a question, but before I can speak, people start shouting and applauding. The young woman we’re honoring tonight has just appeared with her mother. The two of them start dancing, dressed only in grass skirts dyed red and brown from vegetable extracts. Other women soon join them. Gourds filled with palm wine appear and are passed around.

  “Could Mokele-Mbembe be a female spirit, a goddess?” I ask the witch doctor.

  He shudders and shakes his head. “The father creates his son.”

  “But it’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “No, no way,” he avers, and turns to bless the young woman, whom he introduces to the crowd as the future of Boha.

  CHAPTER 20

  OUR DEPARTURE IS SET for ten in the morning, but I’m awake well before dawn. It was easy to nod off last night, but impossible to stay asleep. The clapping of a loose shutter, the wind in the branches, and the odd noises from the jungle all disturbed my slumber. I sat up and tried to identify some of the nocturnal sounds, but soon gave up, distracted by the loud snoring of Innocent and Theo and by the drizzle tapping on the metal roof and dripping, drop by drop, into the rain barrels.

  I pull out my notes from the Van Cortlandt School of Jungle Survival and try to read them by flashlight. Instead of reassuring me, the notes remind me how little I actually know about the jungle. My ten-day crash course in the Bronx doesn’t seem like much now; my only real experiences in tropical exploration have been four day trips through Central American rain forests, with Nando, my guide, telling me when to move, what to eat, and where to sleep. I did little more than follow instructions and carry my own gear.

  Here I’ll be trekking with five men through an uncharted rain forest. We expect to be gone for nearly a month, hunting and foraging for food and drinking water where we find it. I hope no one is relying on me to do much hunting. I gave that up when I was nine, moments after dropping a squirrel with my Daisy BB gun. I was so distressed by what I’d done that I dug a grave, filched a cupful of holy water from the parish church, baptized the squirrel, and buried it in one of my mother’s best linen napkins. Later, in an archery class at summer camp, I was the only one required to wear steel-tipped safety shoes. I’m pretty handy with a slingshot, but my skill lies in shattering street lamps and bottles, not moving targets.