Sand rivers (7 page)

As the days went on, Brian and I got on better than either of us (I suspect) anticipated; all the same, we were still feeling each other out on the sensitive matters of race and politics. One night, over a tot of rum (my tot: he scarcely drinks), I put forth the widely held idea that man's brain capacity had not improved for the last 40,000 years. Until 10,000 years ago, I suggested, all men were hairy hunter-gatherers, perhaps nocturnal, in which case the chances were that they all had blackish skins. Hugo pointed out that chimpanzees had white skin under their hair, which seemed to suggest that white skin was no evidence of evolution of primates. We wrangled a little, rather uselessly, on old questions such as the true definition of "civilization" and the obstacles to "progress" in a tropical environment. Emboldened by drink, I concluded spiritedly that the white man judged Africans by the material standards of his own reckless civilization, by the "progress" that was ruining the human habitat, and threatening the future of the earth . . . ! But Brian, of course, also deplored such "progress", and I lost track of my argument. Abruptly we changed the subject, and peaceably, partly because both of us were talking half-baked nonsense, and partly because we wanted to get along - indeed we would have to get along, as it now seemed certain that we would make an extended foot safari into the wild region between the Luwegu and Mbarangandu rivers with no company but the Africans and each other.

Brian was quiet for a time, considering me in a certain way he has, lower lip curled, head cocked a little sideways, eyes lidded and cold.

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Subsequently he related an incident at Moshi in 1951, when he was temporarily attached to Game Department headquarters near Arusha, due to the excessive zeal of Nonga Take-Your-Heart. "A herd of elephant got into that banana belt between the plains under Kilimanjaro and the mountain forest, and the Chagga couldn't get them out. These elephant found themselves surrounded by a million Chagga throwing rocks and sticks at them. Then one who was a little smarter than the rest set dogs on them, those frightful little shenzi yappers, and those elephants really got angry; they went tearing after the damned dogs, and the dogs ran back into the village with the elephants close behind, you see, and they all went round and round among all those new pride-of-the-nation houses with tin roofs, and when the elephants got fed up trying to catch the little dogs, they tore into the Chagga houses, ripped those new tin roofs right off, tore them apart. And after that, they shot off down the mountain and kept going, went all the way across the border into Kenya."

It was a funny story and he told it well, and I had to laugh about the elephants and little dogS; but watching Brian watch me laugh, I wasn't sure that we found the story amusing in quite the same way, and hoped that the differences would not cause trouble on our foot safari.

Author with Brian Nicholson.

IV

After a few days we were to move our base camp south and west about seventy miles to the Madaba region, near Nandanga Mountain, where C. J. P. lonides is buried; David Paterson would meet us there with the supply plane. Meanwhile, in hope of photographing sable antelope and greater kudu, Hugo, Brian, and I made a "fly camp" safari to the Tundu Hills, perhaps twenty miles from Kingupira, setting off through the wild-dog woods where five of these apocalyptic creatures, half-hidden, watched us pass. At a side track beyond the Kilunda Pool, we turned south to a dry sand river called Chimbulili, then southwest once more toward the open woodland ridge called Nakilala. The half shaft on Brian's Land Rover was broken, depriving it of four-wheel drive, and in the wet shallow grassy valleys that occur so unexpectedly in these parched woods, his machine had to be hauled out twice by Hugo's winch, with the aid of thrust from Bwana Peter, old Saidi, the Chagga boy Renatus, Hugo's mechanic and assistant, and Mwakupalu, the assistant cook, who would tend to the sahibs on this brief safari. For Brian, the broken shaft was a minor frustration compared to the scarcity of animals in one of his old haunts in the Selous. "Always elephant and buffalo in this valley, always!" he said. "Usually sable or kudu, too, and often both." But all we saw along the way were two solitary buffalo, two small bands of Lichtenstein's hartebeest, or kongoni, a common duiker, and a band of zebra, very wild, fleeing like striped spirits through the trees. (This is a slightly smaller race of Burchell's zebra of northern Tanzania, with narrower stripes that look black rather than dark brown.)

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Here in the Kingupira region, which is relatively open and accessible, we saw most species only once and in small numbers, and most were exceptionally flighty - so flighty, in fact, that Nicholson, who had yet to see an elephant on this trip to the Selous, was already speculating that someone had been shooting at the animals. But, as he said, the situation in the Selous was quite different from that in the famous national parks of northern Tanzania, where wildlife could be readily observed not only because that highland country was more open but because many of the animals were hardened to the hideous sounds and outlandish sights and smells associated with the vehicles that turn up stuffed with human masks and glittering lenses all day long. "The parks are all very well in their place, but they are parks," he said. "The Selous IS the real Africa. This is what most of Africa really looks like."

In the Selous, the spoor on the tracks and in the stream beds testifies to the abundance and variety of animals, but because of the wildness of the place, one must hunt them out and count each sighting as an event. This suited me entirely. (Rick Bonham agreed. "To me, this is the heart of Africa," he had said. "This is how it used to be. The place is stacked with game, even if you can't see it - signs everywhere, even back in the miombo. And what you do see, you have all to yourself. In the parks, there's always a minibus parked next to it." This was especially true of the "Southern Circuit" parks near the Kenya-Tanzania border, especially Manyara, Ngorongoro, the Mara Game Reserve, and Amboseli. In recent years the more remote parks, such as Ruaha which Maria visited in mid-August, have been lacking in visitors as well as funds and staff, and buildings, roads, and basic maintenance were breaking down.)

For a photographer the situation was very difficult. Hugo was having trouble getting close to animals, and had to shoot through screens of foliage when he succeeded. Before he came, he had been warned by Alan Rodgers that the Selous animals were wild and hidden, but he had counted on their numbers to give him the opportunities he needed; even the Serengeti, he had heard, could not compare with the Selous in its large mammal populations, if one excepted the wildebeest and the gazelles. But whether this was true or not - and we were no longer confident - things wouldn't be easy. Not that Hugo complained; he was too professional for that. But he missed the conditions of the Serengeti, and I could not blame him. The animals further away from Kingupira might be less nervous, and those in the remote south the most trusting of all, but Hugo could not count on this, and as the days passed I could see that he was worried.

At Nakilala, where we arrived just before nightfall, Mwakupalu made quick tea while Brian paced around, disgusted; he was now convinced that someone had been out "hammering animals" for food, and perhaps for money. This region had recently been burned, and there was no regrowth to attract animals; instead, the black floor of the woods,

SAND RIVERS

with its cinder dust and gloom, seemed to emphasize the silence and the emptiness. It was plain to see that there was no systematic burning any more, Brian said, far less the foot patrols that were absolutely necessary if new game scouts were to learn their area. Effective patrols could not be made in vehicles, and anyway, all but the main tracks had been allowed to grow over and deteriorate to such a degree that the majority were now impassable. Without patrols, the bloody poachers could come in here as they pleased, the whole place would be shot to pieces, and meanwhile the bureaucrats, the townspeople who had been assigned by the socialist government to training in wildlife management^ whether they cared about wildlife or not, had taken over the Game Department from the good people Brian himself had trained. His people were less educated, no doubt, but at least they were interested and committed, with a sense of pride and accomplishment in their work, and in some cases - he pointed at old Saidi - with a whole family tradition behind them. "These lazy people they have now do nothing but sit around down here trying to figure out how they can get themselves sent somewhere else. We were proud of this place, and these people despise it! For them, it is banishment and punishment. And even while they are ruining the place, they are telling their superiors in government how well everything is going - a whole tissue of fabrications!" Brian snorted. So far as Brian was concerned, the Workers' Committees that made it so difficult to fire incompetent people had been fatal to morale in the whole Game Department. "Like so many of these socialist ideas, the theory is all very well, but it just doesn't work." The matter was complicated by the cumbersome bureaucratic structure of the Tanzanian government in which scarcely anyone dared to take responsibility, far less risks, lest he be set upon by his ambitious peers, particularly where the decision involved a white man. As Rick Bonham said, speaking from the hard experience of trying to arrange the logistics of this safari, Tanzanians seemed more "brainwashed" than Kenyans in regard to the perils of cooperating with whites, whom they were apt to obstruct as a matter of course rather than be accused of collaborating with "Europeans". Had it not been for the interest and cooperation of Fred Lwezaula, head of the Game Department, and especially of Costy Mlay, one of President Nyerere's aides who had once been on Nicholson's staff in the Selous, this safari could never have taken place. (When Brian and I called on Mr. Mlay in Dar-es-Salaam in September, I found his intelligent concern for wildlife and the Selous extremely heartening; he understood perhaps better than we did how crucial it was that the Selous be saved, not only for economic reasons and for Tanzania's future but as a counterweight to headlong "progress", to help keep man in balance and harmony with the other creatures on the earth.)

A few months after Brian left the Game Department in 1973, the government issued a ban against all big-game hunting throughout the

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country, even though the strictly administered hunting safaris in the Selous had supported Tanzania's entire Game Department operation and had earned crucial foreign reserves as well. "They couldn't afford to lose the revenues from those safaris. The Selous can support a hell of a lot of hunting, so long as lov^ quotas are determined and strictly enforced, as they were in my day. With no funds to maintain the place, look what has happened: the airstrips are overgrown, the tracks are going, the game posts mostly abandoned, and poachers - not local meat-hunters any more but organized gangs with precision weapons - are said to be coming in from the roads and settlements to the north." It was even rumored that those gangs might be led by the ferocious Somali, who had looted the Tsavo region of ivory, rhino horn, and leopard pelts, but Brian doubted this. "Bad lot, those Somali, don't let anything get in their way: they detest the Bantu, you see, absolutely detest them. But here they'd have a problem with supplies. They won't sit out there eating rhino meat like the local poachers; they have to have their rice."

In 1978, the government had reinstated hunting in the game reserves, not under the Game Department but under a new national company called Tanzania Wildlife Safaris, which in Brian's opinion was unqualified to do the job.

Over the campfire at supper, we had a mild dispute over the matter of the African's concern for wildlife, which Brian had said was virtually non-existent. But a number of my friends, George Schaller and Iain Douglas-Hamilton among them, have had African assistants who were expert and devoted in this field when they were given responsibility as real participants; and the boy Renatus, who was with us here, became fascinated by wild animals because Hugo took the trouble to instruct him. Hugo felt that Africans were increasingly interested in wildlife, and though he grumped a little for old times' sake, it turned out that the Warden agreed. At Kingupira he had received a letter from one of his former staff expressing sadness and concern about what had befallen the Selous:

Salaamu! I am well, and if you as well as your wife and children are well I am very happy. I am content to hear that you have come to walk here and I wish to send you best wishes and good luck for your safari . . . But for now The Selous Game Reserve is dead. There are no roads, there is nothing but hard times.

Salaamu to your guests. For their sake I feel sorry that there have been no roads for three years now.

Earlier, Brian had praised the dedication of a former assistant named Damien Madogo, who had been so zealous that when he made his Land Rover patrols he had used two drivers since no one driver could maintain his pace, and of the three old game scouts, Saidi, Goa, and Bakiri, whom