Sand rivers (3 page)

Godfrey Mwela turned his plane east again, following the rocky

PETER MATTHIESSEN

chasm of brown swift water for perhaps five miles until it opened out on the coastal plane below. There the plane turned south, heading out across a trackless wilderness. From this place for hundreds of miles to the south and west there are no habitations or facilities of any kind except the Game Department station at Kingupira, about eighty miles away, where we were to join the rest of the safari.

Because it is near all four habitat types of the Selous - the alluvial hardpan plain of the eastern border, the riverain forest, the Terminalia spinosa woodland, and the miombo or "karoo" that covers three-quarters of the Reserve - Kingupira was chosen for the site of the Miombo Research Center, set up in 1969 under Nicholson's direction by a young ecologist named Alan Rodgers. Rodgers, whom we had visited at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, was a bluff, husky, generous man who dispensed beer as well as his own documents, and also a fascinating discourse on the ecology of the Selous, where he had spent ten years; according to Nicholson, whose admiration he reciprocates, he is the greatest living authority on the ecology of the miombo, the vast wilderness of "dry forest" or savanna woodland which extends almost from coast to coast for sixteen hundred miles across the waist of Africa. Miombo is very similar to the so-called Guinea savanna of West Africa, but whereas Guinea savanna occurs in a narrow belt between the expanding Sahara Desert and the tropical rain forest, the miombo in places extends north and south for well over a thousand miles.

Alan Rodgers, who served as Game Research Officer in the Selous from 1966 to 1976, has no lack of arguments to support his high opinion of what he has referred to as "the sleeping wilderness"."^ With dependable rainfall, great rivers, and innumerable springs and seepage points, there is abundant ground water and pasturage in the Selous Game Reserve, and since its boundaries enclose three distinct ecological units (the Serengeti cannot claim even one), there is no need for its 750,000 large animals to move out into unprotected areas, or "migrate" to water or dry-season pasture, or herd up anywhere at all in vulnerable or destructive concentrations. Most of the reserve is between 1,000 and 2,000 feet above sea level in humid country not far inland from the coast, and the vast miombo tracts are isolated from one another by the barriers of the Rufiji River and its tributaries, especially the Ruaha, Kilombero, and Luwegu. The Kilombero delta and the open country between the great rivers in the south are very beautiful, but the only scenic region accessible to visitors is the one where the tourist camps are already located, less than one hundred miles from Dar-es-Salaam. That open Behobeho country, in Rodgers's view, is "some of the most magnificent wildlife country in East Africa", while the rest of the Reserve is decidedly unsuitable even for the local people, despite chronic demands for fishing, grazing, farming, and timber rights, mostly from the Mahenge district, which are bound to increase with the completion of the dam at Stiegler's Gorge. Apart from

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the problem of tsetse, the soil almost everywhere is leached out and eroded, and the miombo woods are of little use except for the gathering of wild honey: in fact, the management of wildlife is almost certainly the most productive use to which this land could be put. The gathering of people into settlements that could be efficiently administered by the colonial government has been continued in independent Tanzania by the uiamaa villages, where the people are ver>' similarly administered in the name of socialism: except in certain places in the north, the scattered human populations along the boundaries have actually decreased as a result of uiamaa. and this removal of human pressure, together with the difficulty of access, the abundance of game outside the boundaries, and the check on human predation by the uiamaa administration, have all served to reduce poaching, which since 1960 has been negligible compared to the activities in other wildlife sanctuaries of East Africa. As a result, the Selous can claim East Africa's laigest populations of many creatures, including elephant, rhino, buffalo, hippo, and crocodile (lion and leopard, too, according to Nicholson), as well as more than three hundred and fifty species of birds and two thousand species of vascular plants. According to Rodgers, "It is unique in its size, its state of naturalness, and its variety of genetic and ecological resources."

On all sides as we flew south the (5^en woodland was broken by scattered pans of glinting water; in the southern distance, clouds of smoke rose all along the low horizon. "Whole countr>^'s going up in smoke," Nicholson muttered, not without a certain grim satisfaction; he believed strongly in the use of fire for eliminating the drv^ grass and encouraging new growth to support more animals, but having little faith in the present Game Department, he suspected that most of these fires were set by local poachers, for whom hunting was easier when the landscape was burnt.

Godfrey Mwela dodged two vultures that suddenly came sweeping down on his propellers, and seated behind him and Nicholson I could see the wrinkles of pleasure at the Warden's eyes as he laughed and joked with his fellow pilot. ("Best pilot in Tanzania, Godfrey is; helped to train him myself.") Nicholson turned to me repeatedly to point out the flat-topped terminalia trees that dominate this eastern woodland, the arrangement of termite hills around the pans, the tamarind and mahogany trees that the hills support, Nandanga Mountain in the fire haze off to the west-"That's where Iodine is buried, Peter!" he said, calling me by my name for the first time. Brian caught me by surprise; in the excitement of coming home to the Selous, he had betrayed an unabashed enthusiasm, not only to me but to Godfrey Mwela, whom he was addressing not iust civilly but as a friend.

Later, as if to readjust a mask, he made an unpleasant colonial joke, expressing surprise that one of Rick Bonham's Kenya staff had been with us on the plane. "Must have been back there m the dark," Nicholson said.

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"He didn't smile, so I never knew he was there." He laughed slyly at our cold expression. "That's the kind of joke my brothers used to make," Maria said later, "but at least they outgrew it." I was beginning to suspect that Nicholson had outgrown it, too, that being obstreperous was just another way of saying that he didn't give a damn for the world's opinion. (Or perhaps, as a friend who was raised in Dar once said to me, "As white East Africans, we feel we have to talk that way. I don't know why.")

Rain came and went. Near the Ngindo village of Ngarambe, the plane crossed over the Lung'onyo River that forms this part of the eastern boundary, then swung back again to make a good landing on the strip at Kingupira, startling two wart hogs out of the long grass.

We had scarcely unloaded when two Land Rovers turned up. The first people to jump out were two old game scouts, Saidi Mwembesi and Bakiri Mnungu, who were so delighted to see "Bwana Niki" that they clung to his hands throughout the protracted greetings that African courtesy demands: both used the respectful Arabic salutation Shikamu, meaning "I kiss your feet". Bakiri could not get over how Sandra Nicholson had grown, how time had passed. He slapped his head, hooting with laughter: "See? I'm losing my hair!" Bakiri is a local man and still works with the Game Department, but Saidi, a very tall Ngoni Zulu in a Muslim cap, had quit the Department at the same time as his Bwana and gone away to live in Dar-es-Salaam, where Rick Bonham had picked him up on the way through. ("He's a great old chap," Rick told me later, describing how Saidi had replied when the senior warden asked him if he still remembered the Selous well enough to guide Mr. Bonham down to Kingupira. "Remember the Selous?" Saidi had snorted, brandishing both hands. "The place was built with these hands! MkonoyanguV]

Karen Ross, who was in charge of the safari kitchen, and Robin Pope, a young assistant from Zambia, were also there to meet us, and soon Hugo van Lawick came in his own Land Rover, which is specially fitted out for photography; van Lawick had just observed five pups at a wild-dog den, less than a mile from our camp.

A comfortable cluster of green tents awaited us in a pleasant copse of palm and tamarind along the edge of the Kingupira Forest. We were greeted by Philip Nicholson, aged nineteen, a likeable blond boy and fanatical fisherman who was making a last safari with his family before going off to seek his fortune in Australia. The only person not yet among us was David Paterson, who was to fly in the following week with Rick Bonham's supply plane to the airstrip at Madaba, seventy miles to the southwest.

This camp by the forest, a few miles away from the present Game Department field headquarters and the near-moribund Miombo Research Center, had been one of Brian's first safari camps and also the site of an early game post. Among the courtesies extended to our expedition by the Game Department was a resident's permit to shoot impala, buffalo, and

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guinea fowl, to help feed its seventeen black and white participants, and after a fine first supper of impala and red wine, we sat around a campfire under the stars. Though at pains not to show it - he was already grumping about the scarcity of his beloved elephants - Brian Nicholson was very happy to be back. For the first time since I had met him, he did most of the talking, describing how he had first come to the Selous.

At the age of sixteen, Brian Nicholson abandoned his formal schooling in Nairobi and went to work for the noted animal collector Carr Hartley, who paid him "one hundred shillings a month and posho (rations)" and gave him his first lessons in dealing with large wild animals. The next year he signed on with a professional hunter named Geoffrey Lawrence-Brown and made thirteen or fourteen safaris as an apprentice hunter in order to qualify for his professional hunter's license. But being a "white hunter" did not interest him. He had always wanted to be a game warden, which in those days, he said, meant living in the bush and hunting and shooting to protect the shambas of the local people from the depredations of wild animals, especially elephant and lion. No such jobs were available in Kenya to a youth of his experience, and in 1949, at the age of nineteen, he signed on as a "temporary assistant elephant control officer" assigned to the region of the ill-fated Ground-Nut Scheme, which had its main headquarters at Nachingwea, in southeastern Tanganyika. "My qualifications were virtually non-existent," Brian said, "but nobody else wanted the job."

In its first years, the Ground-Nut Scheme was a threat to the southern Selous, which the planners thought might prove suitable for agriculture; in the absence of roads to Dar-es-Salaam, they planned to export 440,000 tons of ground-nuts annually through the new deep-water port being specially developed at Mtwara (where Maria's father was asked to set up a hospital, and where her sister Patricia was the first white baby to be born). But the Scheme collapsed under accumulated folly long before its grandiose ambitions could be implemented; among its many serious miscalculations was the failure to realize that by harvest time the ground-nuts planted in the soft mud of the rains would be locked under the hardpan of the dry season, and would have to be chipped out one by one. A little late, the planners asked themselves why this region was so thinly populated in the first place.

Nicholson's supervisor was Constantine John Philip lonides, then Senior Game Warden of southeastern Tanganyika and already a notable collector of rare animals and poisonous snakes; it was he who reported, for example, that the green mamba and the Gabon viper, at that time considered to be largely West African in distribution, were in fact very common on the Makonde Plateau, where Tanganyika bordered Mozambique. (Maria's father, who remembers lonides with fondness, once told

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me that the hospital verandahs at Mtwara were a favorite place for collecting cobras.) lonides and young Nicholson took to each other straight av^ay, and the next year Brian transferred to lonides's headquarters at Liwale near the southeastern boundary of the Selous and began the long series of foot safaris that were to acquaint him with most of the southern country.

By the time Nicholson appeared, in 1950, lonides considered that his great work of creation had been done; he was devoting more and more time to the hunting and collecting that had become his passions, and increasingly so as he realized that this new young assistant in elephant control whom the Africans called Bwana Kijana (the Young Bwana) was capable of taking over most of his duties and carrying out the final steps in his master plan. At one point in 1951, when lonides was off in the Sudan hunting for addax, Bwana Kijana was called in by the Provincial Commissioner at Lindi in regard to a Game Department request to incorporate this Lung'onyo River region into the Selous. The P.C. stepped over to a wall map and slowly traced the expanding outline of the Selous with his thumb, then said coldly to Nicholson, "You people are sterilizing this whole area." Remembering this, Nicholson remarked, "That man could never look you straight in the eye. Don't know where they found such people - hadn't a clue about Africa. All they thought about was giving these local Africans just what they wanted, whether it was good for them or not. No thought for the animals at all!"

In 1954 lonides went off on leave and, except to collect his things, never came back; he formally retired from the Game Department in order to give full time to collecting uncommon creatures on commission for various clients, including the Coryndon Museum in Nairobi. Since renamed the National Museum, it still displays lonides's gorilla group, bongo, and addax - pursued on camel back - and an assortment of other creatures, including the black mamba that, in 1942, crawled over his bare legs in the dark while he was seated in an outdoor privy in Liwale. lonides later credited this creature with inspiring the snake collecting avocation that eventually displaced the hunting of rare animals as the great passion of his life. Of the local Provincial Commissioner - perhaps the very one disliked by Nicholson - lonides once remarked, "He wasn't an attractive character: he didn't like snakes and he had beady eyes and damp hands." lonides was fond of saying that he found human beings the least interesting of all animals, which may have accounted for his reaction when in the dark a green mamba fell out of the thatch roof of a local hut on to a group of sleeping Africans and bit eight of them fatally before escaping from the panic that ensued. lonides, who succeeded in capturing this snake, was outraged: "If I hadn't been in that area, they'd have pursued it relentlessly and beaten it to death with sticks! Hooligans, insensitive dolts, thoroughgoing bastards!"