Riding through the heart of Africa, ALbert Russo [summer reads txt] 📗

Riding through the Heart of Africa

a travel story by Albert Russo (2400 words)


What is taking place now in the Congo brings me back to a trip I made with papa Sandro and Astrid in 1959. On our way to Elisabethville, we stopped at the Union Minière du Haut Katanga’s (UMHK) headquarters, and asked to see Tambwe, Fonsa’s eldest son. The latter who had already been working two years for that company - a state within a state, really, so powerful it had become -, resided in the township the UMHK had built exclusively for its Congolese employees. We were amazed at both its size and how well kept it was; there were rows upon rows of neat little houses with small gardens. They all had electricity, as well as hot and cold running water.
How proud Tambwe looked, receiving us in his abode! And how happy we were to see him so content! We took pictures to bring back home so that Fonsa could see in what privileged conditions his son lived.
Among other minerals essential to the West, the UMHK extracted and smelted copper, and of course, having a quasi monopoly on them, it was extremely profitable.
The country was also the world’s main exporter of industrial diamonds, as well as uranium, that very same uranium used in both atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus putting an end to Japanese aggression.
But one has to admit, whether out of interest or not, the company looked after its personnel, quite generously, for on top of housing, it furnished them with free health care. And yes, there was segregation, and yes it was wrong.
Yet, what do we see nowadays, especially in the dangerous Kivu mines? Hundreds of boys, men and women, scraping off the ground in the hopes of finding stones that could hide slivers of gold, diamond particles, or scraps of the much-sought after coltan, without which our cell phones and so many other electronic gagdgets could not function, all of this for a meager pay, often at the risk of their health or even their life.
Here the rule of the jungle prevails, survival of the fittest is the name of the game! Grab as grab can, is the unavowed motto of the companies operating - mostly illegally - on the ground, and even they are not immune to other predators, whether they be soldiers of the regular army, or rebels.
As for the surrounding animal kingdom, where the big cats, the rhinos and the elephants once reigned supreme, and where the great silverbacks used to prosper, you may now call it Poachers’ Turf. How much can you blame the latter? Many have nothing else to sustain themselves, no other proteins to give to their children. And there are hundreds of thousands of such displaced, sick and hungry people roaming the area, who often have only one meal a day, eating whatever they can find, a soup made of old leaves, here, a rotten mango, there, or even bitter roots that would be otherwise considered inedible.
People in the West and in the richer countries of Asia complain about the animals having been confined in zoos. Well, in this case, zoos are a thousand times safer for them than if they were left to the whims of a desperate population. The very definition of ethics here ought to be reexamined.
Let’s go back to the time when Kivu and neighboring Ruanda-Urundi, where we lived, had the coloring of paradise, even if that paradise was an illusion.
At the co-ed Athénée Royal Interracial d’Usumbura, which I attended, the future appeared to us so bright, so full of promises: Blacks, Whites and students of mixed race, we all sat on the same benches, following the same courses, playing in the same football or basketball teams, and to celebrate our victory (or defeat) over the guys of the all-boys school, the splendid Collège Catholique, which overlooked the city, the lake and the mountain range, we would go and clink our beer mugs at the Hôtel Paguidas, in the center of town, or else on the terrace of the Restaurant Tanganyika, whence you could see a horde of hippos frolicking and snorting loudly in the lake, or a lonely crocodile resting on the beach, indifferent to the hubbub we humans produced, so near to their abode. Did they not consider us like a strange breed of animals confined in an illuminated cage, when they evolved totally free?
We had gotten up at dawn and filled the trunk of our Chevrolet with blankets and picnic baskets which Gloria and Fonsa had prepared the night before for the three meals of this first day of our journey.
I loved these outings that would lead us through the scorching savannah and then into the rain forest, so contrastingly different, with its buzzing and invisible life, fraught with all sorts of danger, its 85 per cent humidity, until we rode uphill to another, much gentler world, where come the evening, you had to wear a jacket or even a light coat, since it got come the evening, you had to wear a jacket or even a light coat, since it got much cooler. In just a few of hours you would pass from a blistering dry heat to the sweltering jungle, and finally to a frisky autumnal temperature, all the while remaining on the line of the equator.
After having spent a full and busy day in the lovely city of Bukavu, which is set on the banks of lake Kivu and then reminded one more of a northern Italian lake than any other place, with its vivid-hued flower bushes and its mild climate - today it is ravaged by civil war, and the deadly eruption of the Nyiragongo partly destroyed the town of Goma in the north -, we drove down to the grassy plain and on to Rutshuru.
This was the third or fourth time papa Sandro had taken me to the heart of the Black continent, and it was always with the same anticipation that I got to see its striking flora and its magnificent fauna: the herds of elegant antelopes, the heavy-set zebus which, on the run, would produce thumping earth tremors, the oafish warthogs that seemed to be skipping along, as if to avoid invisible obstacles, the ever majestic elephants, especially moving when they were followed by their progeny. If we were lucky enough, we could admire, from a distance, a lioness with its cubs, and more rarely, accompanied by their lordly father. But the high point of our trip was to be able to catch sight of a leopard, drowsing on the top branch of an acacia tree. What a treat that was!
Only once did I have the chance of recognising an adult silverback through the thick foliage of the rain forest, but it disappeared so swifly behind the trees that I remember it as a mere apparition.
Africa’s denizens I least wanted to meet were the snakes, large and small, which you had better not disturb during their sleep, or those traitorous scorpions that would be hiding under the bed of our lodge at the Rwindi campsite, or even inside one of our slippers. Not to mention the infinite range of buzzing and/or stinging critters that would roam around us with an obsessive and maddening insistence.
But oh how marvelous and yes, how romantic - even if at the time I had no steady girlfriend -, were those candlelit dinners we had on the terrace of the campsite, surrounded as we were by the darkness of the jungle, a darkness vibrating with sounds that were not all appeasing.
My mouth begins to water as I recall the delicious poached river fish, the game meat we ate, rare, the incredibly tender baby pigeons served grilled, with local herbs, baked potatoes and eggplant, or the roasted leg of a suckling pig, that came with wild mushrooms and pili pili or green peppers. For desert, there were no pies and no cakes, just local fruit, but what fruit! The juiciest papaya this side of the equator, which you would eat with a zest of lemon, mangoes whose flesh was so delicate, you almost got intoxicated solely by its perfume, avocadoes served with powdered brown sugar, watermelon so sweet and so red, it had the indecent appearance of raw meat, and, finally, those tiny bananas, barely the size of a thumb, that had a slight taste of honey.
I treasure these memories all the more as they could not be relived before a very long time, if ever, at least not in the animal sanctuary once called the Parc Albert, known today as the Virunga Nature Reserve. How many silverbacks, those incredible gorillas, will remain, after all the massacres that have been and continue to be committed, by both poachers and starving hunters? If we cannot stop them now, that process will become irreversible, and like the dodo, those great cousins of the human species will soon be extinct. And Diane Fossey who was their best friend, dying for their cause, will
was their best friend, dying for their cause, will have to be mourned a second time.
Yet another question should be paused, more existential than moral or even philosophical: who or what must be saved as a priority? Our suffering fellow human beings, or these poor animals, even if they are on the brink of extinction? For me, there is no doubt as to who comes first. Yes, we shall have to shed tears over some of the beautiful existing fauna, for a man’s life is definitely more precious.

In the Ituri forest we chanced upon a pygmy tribe, close to theTwa of our neighboring Ruanda-Urundi; this part of Africa has the singularity of harboring the smallest and the tallest (Tutsi) peoples of the planet, the majority being composed of theBantu folk (Hutu).
Thanks to Kiswahili, which only their chief could jabber, we learnt of the serious problem they were facing: strangers, both Congolese and European, had invaded the territory on which they had settled temporarily - pygmies are nomads, they barter their artifacts for hardware, crockery and work tools, and once they have used up their resources, they move on to another area. But in the meantime, they consider themselves to be the legitimate tenants of their settlement.
A wooded hillock had just been bulldozed and, with it, a number of ancestral trees had been felled. Trees, for the pygmies, are living beings, and as such, they are deemed quasi sacred. Destroying them to build a road or to extract minerals is tantamount to committing a crime. It is an act of sacrilege, inasmuch as the death of a tree is a major offense done to the spirits of the Lords of the forest, an offense that demands revenge.
When we first saw the pygmies, they were busy sharpening their spears and coating the tips with poison. Believing at first that we were intruders, they shot daggers at us, until papa Sandro told them that we were just traveling through and meant no harm towards them. They remained suspicious and wanted to be certain we carried no weapons or wrecking instruments. Once they were reassured, the chief offered us his hospitality and invited us to share a meal with him and his subjects.
We ate smoked meat with bitter leaves and manioc, dipped in palm oil, then we downed it all with warm millet beer. We were finally served a slice