Wild Spirit (13 page)

On the afternoon of 1 September, a convoy of five heavy vehicles thundered into camp down the new road – a grader, two bulldozers, a Caterpillar tractor/loader and a Unimog, a high-set army-style truck. Eamon had broken camp at the Djadié, and he and his men and their families had arrived to live in camp.

That day marked a turning point: more people and more technology in camp brought increased noise and greater complexity. Eamon assumed his role as
chef de chantier
– camp boss – and moved into Mario's old bedroom in the guesthouse.

The next fortnight became a race against time to push the maximum volume of supplies through on the new road before the onset of the next wet season, which would last three months. There was no bridge at the Djadié River, and the crossing would be submerged once the rains came. Doug hired a fleet of trucks to speed up the process, and consignments of timber, vehicle parts, cement and hardware arrived at the rate of a truckload a day. The deliveries
included all the toilet and basin suites for the two houses and six apartments, along with crates of glass louvres for the windows. Mixed in with the hardware were bulk supplies of rice and salt fish to tide us through the wet season.

M'Poko Lucien and I spent entire days checking everything in to the warehouse and updating the inventories – it felt as though we were stocking up for a siege. As we worked together day by day, I came to appreciate M'Poko's quiet sense of humour and his calm, methodical approach more and more. Often the craziness of the situations we faced would leave us shaking our heads, then we would dissolve into laughter and everything would seem all right.

Down in the village, construction of an area of specialist workers' housing was underway. Rodo had the sensitive task of allocating the housing. The position of a man's house on the hillside would reflect his status and qualifications: the highest sites carried the most prestige. Rodo made a series of plan drawings showing which houses would be allocated to whom, and what furniture would be issued. All the houses needed beds, tables, benches and cupboards, which had to be manufactured on-site. With the total population in the village now close to 500 and the demand for furniture relentless, Win allocated four carpenters full-time to the task of furniture production until the needs of every family had been met.

Paydays were also Rodo's responsibility. Each month, on a Saturday, he would spend an entire morning calculating the pays and preparing the 100 pay packets. In the afternoon, he would set himself up at a table outside the guesthouse, where the men would assemble to wait for their names to be called. The calculation of pay was complex –
many men had received advances against their salaries during the month, and accordingly received only the balance remaining on payday. Each time, some would have forgotten about their advances and want to dispute the amount they received. The ensuing palaver always meant that payday stretched out to occupy an entire afternoon. Win and I would watch from the guesthouse and marvel at Rodo's patience and good nature in the face of harassment. When it was all over, we'd invite him to join us for drinks on the porch to recover. In the village, pay nights were celebrated with large amounts of homemade maize and palm wine. These potent drinks quickly banished inhibitions, and outbreaks of violence were common.

With Belinga now a substantial settlement, the workers and their wives increasingly expected the
économat
to stock items they used to buy in town – clothing, babywear, toiletries, double foam mattresses, bicycles, perfume and cooking equipment. Every day people would come to me with new requests, and as fast as stock arrived at the
économat
, it sold.

Meanwhile, Mendoum Dominique needed to establish himself in his new job and keep the workforce fed. On his first day I sat with him and explained the ration system. He understood immediately and was eager to begin, but he'd arrived at a difficult time. The women who produced the manioc out in the villages knew that Mario had left. Unaware of Dominique's appointment, they were reluctant to produce large quantities in case the company closed down and their market evaporated. So they had cut back production.

Accordingly, for the first few weeks, Dominique's manioc-buying trips yielded no more than 400
bâtons
a
week, whereas we needed at least 1200. Compounding the problem, it was around this time – the end of the dry season – when the women worked on their maize and manioc plantations, preparing the ground before the onset of the rains. This left them less time for processing manioc. Dominique had to rely on taro, plantains and rice to make up the shortfall.

In time, the situation improved. Dominique negotiated verbal contracts with the women for set quantities of manioc each week, and built up their trust week by week until they were supplying 1500 to 2500
bâtons
a week. Since each
bâton
weighed a kilo, the company was buying, transporting and distributing at least a tonne and a half of manioc every seven days.

Bushmeat was still scarce, and the men kept up their mock-serious routine of rubbing their stomachs, assuming a pained expression and declaring, ‘
Patron
, I'm suffering,' at every opportunity. I wasn't sure who was looking forward more to the arrival of the wet – they or we.

 

The surveyors' equipment finally arrived in late August. They had lost almost two months of work time because of the delays, and now had to try to catch up. Jacques had resurrected two old Land Rovers for their use, and teams of labourers had worked steadily slashing secondary growth along the old tracks to give them access.

I felt sorry for these four young Englishmen: their job was the most physically demanding, and the terrain they had to map presented endless obstacles. Once out in the forest, they did most of their work on foot, climbing up and down muddy or rock-strewn mountainsides all day
with no footholds except roots. They worked in all weathers and endured the incessant onslaught of biting
mouches rouges
and
fourreaux
, along with the ticks and
ghiques
that dropped or crawled inside their clothes as they struggled through the undergrowth. They also faced the ever-present risk of meeting deadly Gaboon vipers or hooded cobras. They had to place every step carefully, as the snakes concealed themselves in leaf litter. To cap off their miseries, the two old Land Rovers regularly broke down, as the rough terrain found their every weak point.

Often I would see the surveyors pull up outside the guesthouse at the end of a day's work, their faces haggard, their clothes torn and drenched in sweat, and their skin covered in pink welts. Their morale grew chronically low and they suffered constant exhaustion. The only one who could still manage to smile and enjoy a joke was Andy, the big Yorkshireman with the curly hair. Whenever I could, I stopped to chat to him, and every few weeks I cut his hair on the porch while we exchanged stories.

During September, Jacques resurrected a third old Land Rover, this time for himself. He christened it the
familiale
, because it seated nine people. The Méhari was passed to Rodo, who shared it with me because he spent so much time in the office. At last I could deliver stock down to the
économat
myself and move around the camp quickly on other tasks. I loved how small and light it was, and I mastered the gears passably well after a couple of lessons from Jacques.

Rodo and I occupied a desk each in the guesthouse. His faced up the hill overlooking the workshops; mine looked out over the old plantations and the forest. After he had conducted rollcall and allocated the teams of
labourers to the day's tasks, we often had coffee together at the dining table.

It was only after we had settled into this pattern for several weeks that I realised what a difference his presence in camp had made to me. I had a congenial colleague with a ready sense of humour to share the daily trials with, and he spoke English. Before, I had battled a sense of isolation; now I had a comrade in arms. In the evenings and at weekends, Win, Rodo and I spent time together talking, swapping stories and listening to music on the cassette player. The three of us grew closer and closer with each passing week.

 

Eamon's store of local knowledge and memory for detail constantly amazed me. He seemed to know things almost before they had happened. If someone's mother-in-law had died in a remote village, if the buffalo were running near M'Vadhi, if the Fang and the Bakwélé were shaping up for a scrap, he would know. He knew where most of the men were born and who were their half-brothers, cousins and enemies. If he wanted to recruit a man who lived in a distant village, he would simply notify that man's best friend, sister or uncle. Soon the grapevine would do its work, and the man – or a message from him – would arrive in the camp. When dealing with the men, he used the tactic of hints and rumours to great effect. A word here or an oblique warning there could be assured of reaching its target with no loss of face to anybody. It was a rare talent. He knew how the men thought, and they would do anything for him.

Eamon and Jacques, for all their toughness and resilience in the work environment, were gentle men
off-duty, and their frontier humour was never far from the surface. Around the dinner table each night I took every opportunity to ask them about the old days, especially the wildlife – they had lived through extraordinary times when the camp was in its infancy.

Jacques had given me my first lesson on gorillas back in July. ‘Gorillas are calm and unhurried,' he had said. ‘They approach their food delicately. In captivity, they are capable of great affection for humans, and often show a powerful need to be cuddled and touched. There have even been cases where gorillas in captivity have died of grief when separated from their long-term carers.' I had listened with awe. How I longed to experience what he had.

He'd said that, in contact with humans, gorillas faced many health risks, and were especially vulnerable to lung complaints. In the wild, gorilla infants were raised with lavish care, and remained clinging to their mothers for two or more years. They didn't breed until they were about eleven years of age. Mature males became ‘silverbacks' when the hair on their back turned white, and some males lived to forty or fifty. His emotional account of these gentle giants, who had been maligned and misunderstood for so long in the western imagination, whetted my appetite to see them for myself.

‘Tell me more about the gorillas,' I begged Eamon and Jacques after dinner one night. Both men's faces softened, and a tenderness came into Eamon's voice as he spoke.

‘Well, we had eight of them here in camp for a long time. Dr Annie Hion was studying them. They became part of the family. We used to play with them and they came everywhere with us. They're so intelligent.'

‘What about Arthur?' I prompted.

Eamon laughed, his blue-grey eyes twinkling and his mouth turning up at the corners. ‘Arthur's favourite thing was friendly wrestling. He just loved us to wrestle him. He was so powerful we reckoned he was five times as strong as our biggest man, who stood at six feet four. The only way to break loose from Arthur's grasp was to go completely limp all over, then he would know the game was over and he would loosen his grip. Oh, he did love it!'

‘What happened to the gorillas in the end?'

Eamon's face clouded. He took a deep breath and sighed, ‘Ah well, that's a different story. Annie had been looking after them and studying them for some years. Then there came a time when she had to return to France for a year, so she arranged for them all to be cared for while she was away. But when she came back, every one of them had been killed.'

I sat stunned. I tried to imagine it – the gentle animals who had come to trust humans, slaughtered, in all probability, for their meat. I didn't press Eamon any further. The pain, even after all the intervening years, showed in his face.

 

The onset of the short wet, on 10 September, afforded a spectacle more awe-inspiring than anything I had ever seen. The clouds had been building up since early morning, and by three o'clock the sky had turned green-black and a solid storm front hung in the north-east. The air seemed to crackle with electricity. Rodo and I left our paperwork and stood side by side on the porch looking out, as a colossal anvil-shaped cloud mass swept towards the camp from the Congo.

Long before it arrived overhead, we heard the roar and drumming of rain on the forest. Ahead of the front, giant trees tossed their crowns wildly, battered by the force of the wind. Some were bent double. A solid curtain of water – silver-grey and opaque – advanced towards us and pounded the forest at the edge of the clearing. Then, just before the storm hit, violent wind gusts tore through the camp, ripping off roofing iron and throwing plastic chairs about like scraps of paper. The wind howled and shrieked through the guesthouse like a living thing, and a murky green light enveloped everything. We watched, transfixed.

Then the air overhead exploded in a thunderous crash, sending shock waves through us, and at once, the sky cracked open and disgorged its load on the camp. We sheltered in the doorway, dumb before its fury. Torrents pounded the corrugated-iron roof, and spouts of water gushed from the end of each corrugation, gouging holes in the red earth where they hit the parched surface. Within half an hour, the dry season's layer of fine red dust had become a coating of greasy red mud.

When the storm had passed, the rain settled to a steady downpour, whipped up now and then by gusts of wind. By nightfall, it had eased. Waterfalls were crashing their way through the forest and down the hillsides. That night, as Win and I lay in bed in the Kombi, we heard the sound of a slow ripping and tearing from the nearby forest, followed by a mighty crash. The ground shook and the Kombi rocked on its tyres. The sound of a forest giant losing its grip on the sodden soil and plummeting to earth was something we would hear often in the weeks that followed. In our tiny clearing in the forest, it made us feel as insignificant as matchsticks.