A MODEST AFRICAN TOUR

EGYPT

South of Cairo, pastoral Egypt unrolls as a dazzling emerald strand of life, heroically ‘defying the Sahara and unremittingly grasping the Nile. The river irrigates luxuriant green fields which glow incandescently in the morning against the dull backlight of the brown desert stopped behind the ancient towns and ageless fields. The date palms, grains, rice, maize, sorghum and other forage growing in small, pent fields along the Nile, are a stark contrast to the vast expanse of bleak desert running into each horizon, east and west. Life seems divine here, despite the slogging human poverty, arid heat and grinding dust. I flew to Cairo on April 1, 1988, to begin a long journey south into the Congo, now Zaire. Although passing through Egypt quickly, I was keen on seeing the Nile’s beautiful scenery and a few of the crumbling monuments of ancient civilization that lay along my path.

Cairo is a dry, dusty city of dilapidated, concrete buildings, narrow streets and boulevards, rickety donkey carts, and noisy cars. Battered, crowded buses creep along in the snarled traffic, polluting the hazy, brown air. On the teeming streets outside the shabby cafes and shops, multitudes of people walk by, some in modern suits, others in flowing cotton robes, called oalabavvas. And as in other African and Asiatic countries, men often loosely hold hands as they stroll, adding a certain gentle spirit to the old city. Crusty tinkers sit in the alleys pounding scrap metal into pails and pots, while old women, wearing black cotton dresses, scarves and head-dress, dump food-scraps in the lanes for scavenging goats and chickens.

On the outskirts of Cairo are the ancient pyramids and great Sphinx of Giza. I had wanted to visit the pyramids ever since I first saw their potent image on a greenback. But once I arrived in Giza, the touts wouldn’t leave me alone. Drive one shamelessly pleading guide away, and instantly another would appear, so I suffered a slow, bumpy and ridiculous camel ride around the Sphinx and Pyramid of Cheops with an intrepid gentleman who, having once spent a fun year in San Diego, talked incessantly about how American women were sexually insatiable, and how well they entertained him, regretting dearly that he couldn’t get laid for free by an Egyptian woman. He would cease his monologue occasionally, pointing to some worn, incised scribbles in a broken heap of stone, blithely sayings “Hieroglyphic ,” or pat his docile, tassled beast on its neck, indifferently mumbling, “The camel, ship of the

desert; the desert is a great sea.” He also encouraged me to use his crotch for a horn, so as to avoid falling off the lurching camel. “Hold on to what you want,” he smirked, “I don’t care.” It remained a mystery why he returned to Egypt and the unglamorous existence of hassling tourists and grovelling to them for their pocket change, giving up the fabulous sex-life he discovered in America.

The stupid camel tour around the pyramids made me dejected, disappointed that I was unable to suitably contemplate their grandeur. They seemed a failure: hollow graves and ancient vanity come to nothing. If these tombs were ever meant to preserve an earthly spirit after death, they now evoke the stark failure of the human imagination. I thought about how civilization has restlessly passed through many dark centuries, responding to some impetus other than the mere need for survival, moving from gods to god, from science to science, splitting tradition into traditions, reinventing its world so many times that the past, being mostly forgotten, remains imperfectly knowable, even if there were truth within these dead stones that somehow could be known.

Napoleon and his army conquered Egypt in 1798 when the enigmatic young general seemed to be pondering the glory of the Roman caesars.

The subsequent sagas in France of Napoleon’s heroics in ousting the Turkish Mamelukes, who ruled Egypt, eventually helped to rocket him to power upon his return, on his path to becoming the emperor of France. The Turks and other Muslims were always challenging Christian civilization, dating back to the formation of Islam and continuing through the medieval crusades on into the present. In 1799, after fourteen months in the Middle East, Napoleon, only thirty years old at the time, suddenly fled Egypt after giving some shoddy instructions to a few officers and kissing his mistress goodbye. Disgracefully abandoning his troops, who had little reason to be there without him, he left in a fast frigate that busted through a British blockade off the Nile Delta. Egypt once again fell to the lurking, English-supported Turks in 1801. Bonaparte had come and conquered Egypt ostensibly to thwart British intentions in Asia, but he also tested his own aspirations of joining Alexander and Octavian as historic masters of Egypt. There are richer, more hospitable countries to conquer than Egypt, but few other triumphs so magnificently reward the effort with the grandeur of the ages.

The battered Sphinx, its face sheering away bit-by-bit, heels its bum punily before the colossal pyramids, sitting like a haunting archetype from a nightmare: a false pagan idol, or a primeval dragon keeping a fading face upon a primitive, mendacious world. Giza’s monuments are as dead as the people who made them, and ultimately meant to be reburied by the immortal desert that incessantly grinds everything into itself.

In Egypt, the constant badgering of the tourist for petty business or baksheesh is annoying, but not impossible to handle. More of a halfhearted game than a desperate request, it seldom results in a truly nasty scene. An exception are the hordes of screaming and lying taxi drivers at Cairo’s airport, who crudely fight with passengers and amongst themselves for the fare, making a tight traveler feel uneasily important. As in other poor nations, people living in so much shared poverty still manage to maintain a certain dignity in contrast to

richer nations where the impoverished are often spiritually brutalized and conveniently blamed for their condition, humiliatingly coping in the cold face of excess wealth. Muslims are commanded by the Koran to pay alms to beggars, charity being the third pillar of Islam.

Travelers, like beggars or pilgrims, are also traditional recipients of Muslim generosity and are seldom denied food, water and shelter if needed. This strong sense of kinship bestows upon Islam its finest trait, all people being equal under Allah, in his Koran.

I took a train from Cairo, going south to Luxor. Travel is simple in Egypt—because most of it is clumped along the Nile and much of the rest is trackless wilderness. Civilized Egypt is easily negotiated by tourist boats, feluccas , trains, and buses. The comfortable morning train pushed 14 hours from sunrise through sunset, from Cairo to Luxor into the vibrant panorama of an Egyptian days laboring donkeys carrying ceramic water jugs or burlap bags strapped around their backs, or turning wooden wheels that draw water from ancient wells, the water spilling into irrigation ditches, tethered camels and cattle, sheep and chickens foraging amidst each other, and felahin working the fields outside the small towns of packed-together houses clustered around minarets pointing their spires into the sky. Rocks, sand and empty hills, looming in the distance, squeezed the fields and villages tight against the churning river. Scavenging Black Kites, really brown, swooped through the air, ever-ready to pilfer any carelessly exposed food and to seize any edible garbage strewn on the ground. The scenery unrolled as if from a Chinese scrolls a vivid silkscreen of domestic animals, and people coming to work, working, and stopping in the midday sun and heat to eat and rest, returning to work, and finally backtracking to their homes in the shadow of dusk, making me feel like I knew everything about them except the secrets of their thoughts and homes. Along the Nile, three monumental forces of nature were melded into an uneasy alliance: an incessant, beneficent river; the barren desert, and clever, steadfast Homo sapiens banded together like ants in the communal habit of survival.

I arrived at Luxor, finding a raucus pre-Ramadan festival. The streets were flush with excited Muslims coming from both the city and countryside. Squashed amidst a huge throng of people struck with religious fervor, I briefly feared that the crowd might run amok in a frenzy. Later that night, I met an Egyptian who escorted me through the crowds, taking me down an alley to a late-night barn dance. The dance was a scene from a forgotten Marx Brothers movie: turbaned men sat cross-legged, playing zurnas <oboe-like instruments) to the simple repetitive beat of drums while men danced suggestively alone or with each other. Many appeared to be stoned nomads just in from the desert, and some men were veiled. I caught a smiling, innocent wink from one gentleman when he found me staring too long, as he briefly adjusted his veil to show a handsome face. I was made to dance, doing a silly reticent number, only to be asked for baksheesh by an unabashed musician when I wobbled near the strange band. Alcohol and women are normally not allowed at these hootenannies.

Outside tourist hovels beer is difficult to find and that found is a wretched brew, seeming to have known many hot, stagnant days in the bottle before cascading into one’s dry and thirsty gullet. All liquid

is craved in the arid heats one never gets enough of it. The Egyptians prefer glasses of tea with mint. Night comes with great relief, though there is little to do but join other tourists at outdoor tables at the cafes and hotels, drinking and swapping stories.

An Egyptian cafe is a pleasant place where a person can stare at nothing, relax, read, or rent a waterpipe. One even begins to blot out the constant requests from childrens “Your pen, Mister, your pen?” follows a person everywhere. Many of the Egyptian men sit quietly alone puffing on hookahs while the waiter brings them small chunks of charcoal to keep the tobacco lit. I almost wished that I still smoked. One man smoked on a hookah made from an old fumigant aerosol bomb. Sitting at a cafe, outdoors under a leafy Acacia tree, sipping endless cups of heavily-sugared mint tea, I’m conquering satan itself: the maddening sun.

Egypt’s culinary conditions are typical for a poor country: flies and dirt everywhere, and alien stomachs run the usual risk of getting sick on bad water and falafels sold in street stalls. In a bazaar, I watched several workers canning fresh fish in used foui—liter oil cans, sealing the tins with a lead paste spread on like silver butter over the folded edges, as I wondered who could ever eat it.

On April 7, I was at the Aswan rail terminal drinking an early breakfast of tea and cola, guarding a bag of oranges and my backpack while waiting for a short train ride to the Aswan high dam. From there I only needed to walk a long dock to board the ferry to Sudan on Lake Nasser. Aswan, aside from its daily life, is almost uninteresting: the historic islands of Elephantine and Philae, the ancient portals to the south, and the old noble’s tombs across the Nile from the city are spent, soulless places. But modern Aswan is a winter resort that attracts the lazy, sun-starved Euro-tourist fleeing bad weather and boredom at home who wishes to do mostly nothing and pay little for the pr ivilege.

The heat brewed a sappy sweat from my skin while I anxiously waited to get on with the long trip into Central Africa. I watched tall, elegant white-robed Nubians and diverse veiled women wearing colorful costumes with spangles, gold rings and dangling silver necklaces or other jewelry, their hands painted in henna designs.

Entire families milled about the station or sat on pots and pans, foodstuffs, plastic prayer mats and boxes of goods and gifts, everything waiting for the ferry that traverses Lake Nasser from Egypt into Sudan.

I attempted to find an occult role in my surroundings, but couldn’t escape the sensation that I was just another skinflint wayfarer, frivolously probing the third world for cheap thrills. I’ve had a few inferior roles in the scheme of Americana: small-town child and farmworker; then a college flunky followed by long spells of idleness, punctuated by hanging out in public libraries during compulsive, indigent wanderings across the U.S.A. and Canada.

Eventually I became a fruit-tramp. One winter, in desperation, I entered the navy, becoming a hospital corpsman and psychiatric technician (an orderly in a lunatic-ward). Following my enlistment, I graduated from university to undergo a miserable attempt at teaching high school, painfully discovering at age 37 that I lacked the proper

mood and instincts of a teacher. I then found it mentally impossible to return to taming maniacs, so by default I settled into an unhappy and somewhat dangerous career driving taxi in San Francisco.

In this casual summation of my personal history, I cannot escape the premonition that I’m a loser, rendered somewhat criminal for my inadequacy. I’m haunted by a declining compassion for self and others, having little more than a cynical, non-participating interest in modern society. I once thought that gaining an education would somehow introduce me into the American mainstream where I might find security as a mediocre human doing average things. The undoing of this delusion came in realizing that, despite a degree, I remained a floppish drifter with underclass ideas and expectations. And so, refusing to continue my dubious battle against nature, I gained the leisure to pursue a different imaginative course, play out my impaired knowledge of the world, and attempt to claim a sense of humor about it all.

As I grew older, my fantasies of Africa became increasingly suppressed by unsound thoughts of career, relationships and survival, but revived when confused attempts at intimacy and vocations failed, and mere survival brought no joy. Some of my earliest memories are dreams of the silt-laden Nile flowing past the limestone edifices and granite images of anthropomorphic gods and pharaohs sculpted by the ancient Egyptians. At that time, I also dreamed of the Congo, where there were legends of fabulous riches, anthropoid apes, dinosaurs and lost civilizations in the jungle, but knew soon enough later that only some of this was true. Although much of this childish daydreaming was inspired by pulp novels, Africa has been a persistently recurrent muse, and so I believe there is some occluded, gleaming ore that might be found in the black muck of what I imagine earth to be.

SUDAN

The cramped overnight ferry to Sudan chugged past the transplanted temple of Abu Simbel remounted high above the manmade floodwaters of Lake Nasser. On the listing deck, an unfortunate soul rested uneasily next to me in iron shackles that were chained to a post, but otherwise sensitively tended to by his father who brought him water and food.The son was crazy, and shackled to prevent him from causing a crime. He glared at me with perplexed eyes, uttering bizarre clicks and grunts, as if he were no longer entirely human, but rather an odd ape chained to a tree.

Enduring the cruise, people drank water from the lake, ate beans with their fingers from a dirty bowl, and at night found a grimy place to sleep amidst the sundry jumble of inscrutable strangers with their goods and domestic animals. Pots, pans, plastic carpets and people constantly shifted during the night, preventing proper rest as I lay on deck half-dreaming, I pondered the mysterious riddle of the diverse human spirits floating uneasily beside me, deciding that everything was tainted with fear, frailty and a divine sadness.

Arriving at the customs dock in Sudan, I presented my visa, and after entry changed dollars for Sudanese pounds with one of the many black-market touts who waited outside the customs post. Afterward, 1 jumped into the bed of a pickup for a lift into Nadi Haifa hoping to find the train to Khartoum, as well as immediate rest and refreshment. Nadi Haifa is a stark moonscape encampment of people, some busy with their daily affairs or moving goods, but most just lying about, idle and waiting. Sprawling over the sand among the foraging goats are a few austere government buildings, several hostels, and houses, family compounds, and a number of ragged food stalls built from bent sticks, scavenged tin and burlap. The food stalls sell tea, cooked fish, beans, and rice. At night the sprawling town is sparingly lit by the glow from numerous wood fires and a few fluorescent tubes of light, or from the stars and moon sparkling almost insignificantly in the clear desert night.

Nadi Haifa is an impermanent place, replacing an old Nubian town flooded by the creation of Lake Nasser. The boundaries of the lake are forever shifting with the amount of water released by Egypt and also by the irregular flow reaching the dam from its distant sources. The Sudanese, wanting to be as near as possible to the water and its sparse commerce, are unsure where to build a new permanent settlement. In the process of creating Lake Nasser, half of Nubia was inundated. Thousands of Nubians were forced from their ancient homelands into new settlements, most Sudanese Nubians moved a short distance south into traditional Nubian lands, while others were relocated hundreds of miles away, south of Khartoum, where a new town called Nubia was built for them. The Egyptian Nubians resettled in the nearby desert or went north of Aswan to a place named New Nubia.

The Nubians were made refugees by two callous political bureaucracies: an insecure Egypt, seeking to control and better exploit the Nile, and a poorer, politically cowering Sudan, deriving far less

benefit. The inundation flooded Nubia’s fertile fields, historic towns and traditional way of life for some imagined progress. Nubia, traditionally extending along the Nile from Aswan to Dongola in Sudan, is now half drowned.

I stayed at an open air hostel that reminded me of a field hospital; it was midday and beds were filled with people sleeping outdoors. To wait in Sudan is to sleep for hours on end. I looked greedily for something to drink from a clean tin or bottle and wondered how long before a dead locomotive train, sitting on the tracks, was ready to push to Khartoum.

After two nights at Wadi Haifa I found second class tickets for myself and three other travelers by rising early on the day of departure, screaming and pushing my way past others in the chaotic queue, all persons equally desperate. Women are normally allowed to go to the head of any line in Sudan but that wasn’t true here. There simply wasn’t room for everyone. The ticketless rode the roof for free or hung outside by whatever appendage the train offered and endured the heat and dust, others were crammed into the stifling hot aisles.

A person might imagine a two-day trip by antique locomotive through the Nubian desert as a leisurely, romantic journey: one leans back comfortably in a first class chair with a cherished novel on one’s lap and a cup of tea in hand and watches the legendary land of Nubia and Kush stream by with its long brown caravans of camels, a dream-like panorama broken by small clusters of palm trees around an occasional oasis while a coachboy warms the tea and adjusts the shade. One sits there in the cooling air from a fan, enjoying the beautiful scenery, thinking of good things, of home, friends, favorite foods, and special places. One might even serenely consider the peculiar aspects of the novel that rests gently on the lap, or extend the legs, inhale a breath of fresh clean desert air and dream. Regrettably, one could not be more mistaken.

Our cabin had ten people, though it was billeted for six and could comfortably seat only four. We tore the headrests from their screws, threw them out the window to make more room, put pads and sleeping bags over the bare springs that were seats and used the windows to enter and exit, the door being blocked by a crushing mass of humanity and their belongings. So as not to lose our places, we sat in our seats for eight hours, hot and sweaty, before the train budged. The dry air was filled with dust and it was impossible to read because someone seemed to be always seeking to sit on my lap. I quietly vowed that if the Sudanese could stand this, so could 1.

Finally the overburdened train chugged out into the vast desert, taking a more direct southern route to Khartoum instead of following the Nile, which snaked languorously back to the west. The train left late because, I think, the conductor wanted to avoid the day’s heat and moved at a snail’s pace because he was afraid of shaking off the people who clung to the outside of the train or stood on the roof. Perhaps the train and tracks were in such poor repair it was simply impossible to make speed for any reason.

I was in a ^“special” tourist cabin, graciously reserved for foreigners, with two Germans, an Australian, a Canadian, a Britisher, an American and a crafty Sudanese and his sons who moved baggage around

constantly and seemed to enjoy Making everyone else up in the night by trying to stand up and move. Mysterious others Mould artfully find their May into the cabin at night and cleverly make a place to sleep where there was none, sleeping underfoot or on one’s lap, and in the morning the whole train seemed to cough and clear its nose and throat. Some people spat through their teeth, after rolling the sputum over in their respiratory tracts, unless it was a really big glob, and then it came straight down from the nose with a honk and a grimace. One’s nose has formed the biggest buggers of its life, causing it to get sore and bleed as they’re picked. If a person ever wanted tuberculosis, this is the place, and for an encore, one can take his or her chances with the meningitis epidemic raging in Khartoum.

Once, the train slowed to a stop at some lonely outpost, and the American, complaining of diarrhea, clumsily dove out the window with a crash and a plop. Moments later we heard him asking frantically where he might find a taxi or plane to Khartoum. The town saw a plane almost never and having no roads, a taxi was a pipe dream. The American, who lived in London and had worked for E. F. Hutton, had bribed his way into a first class berth on the boat and had bribed his way into our cabin—otherMise it was the roof for him. He made further attempts to buy his way into first class and failed, in the end enduring the two days to Khartoum like all of us.

After twenty-four hours without urinating, you wonder about your health and begin to notice the dry skin cracking on your feet. Everything is gilded in an eerie layer of white grit. 5 people wear scarves over their noses and mouths to keep from breathing it in.

At some of the stops I put my tin pan out the window to be filled with sweet tea, or found,fruit to eat. The desert and its few towns are brown gritty places, dirt kicked up anytime the wind blows or something moves. The sun, wind and sand makes you crazily think about why you came, as if uncovering a bad secret, serious flaw or ugly weakness within oneself while discovering stronger, more stoic faces on some of your new companions, ghostlike masks of dust.

Khartoum offers little diversion for the traveler. Although alcohol is officially banned, the disease is not without a few victims here, so if a wayfarer is desperate, he or she might try visiting one of the squalid, non-Muslim Southern refugee camps for a dram of bootleg honey-beer.

Note the burning piles of trash on the streets; goats rummaging in the markets and among the heaps of garbage, even consuming plastic bags, a man grazing his camel on acacias planted for shade along a sidewalk. Take a pleasant walk along the Nile or go to the dusty field in Omdurman across the White Nile from Khartoum to see the Sufi whirling dervishes. On Friday afternoon they come marching in like a wild costumed Mardi Gras band, foaming at the mouth and falling on the ground in trances, testifying to the mystical cycles of madness and healing, pain and pleasure.

Because the Sudanese pound is grossly overvalued by the government banks, I illegally changed money with a sinister “big man” in a room off an alley in the downtown area, both of us sweating from the heat, nervous about getting busted. From across the table he gave me a devil’s glare and I felt he would kill me if my traveler’s checks

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bounced, but I received five times as many pounds per dollar from this slimy criminal. I left, looking everywhere for trouble.

I ended up staying in Khartoum much longer than anticipated, mainly because I had to keep introducing myself to low-level bureaucrats in order to get permission to travel outside the city. I had to apply three times to finally get permission to go west to Nyala, a town located in Darfur province on the frontier with Chad and the Central African Republic. Because of the war in the South this is the only safe and practical route left by which to travel overland to CAR and Zaire. I grew so frustrated that I obtained visas for Kenya and Tanzania, preparing to fly to Nairobi or Dar es Salaam. On a whimsical final effort to gain permission to travel to Nyala I was abruptly refused by a clerk who recognized me from my two previous attempts. I took a seat and spoke to two Australians who were getting their papers to travel to Nyala! Exasperated, but confident, I approached the next bureaucrat, bypassing the clerk to explain my dilemma. The gentleman took my passport, disappeared into a room and within minutes returned with the required permit to go to Nyala. From there I hoped to get further permission to exit Sudan for the Central African Republic. The U.S. embassy was not advising travel to this part of the country because of banditry, political unrest and fighting near the border with Chad because of the revolt and war with Libya in that country.

The national museum, unfortunately, was closed either because of the meningitis epidemic or for Ramadan—the Islamic month of fasting— so I toured the decrepit zoo. A man had already told me I could see all the different animals in Sudan at the zoo: “Why bother going to the national parks?” The parks are remote and difficult to get to, and many have been ravaged of their animals by hungry poachers. This squalid zoo provides much pleasure, although the animals are mostly dull as sheep and badly kept in small filthy cages or barren enclosures.

Any animal is vastly more than its simple physique; it’s also its ability to survive. Specially evolved and often limited to a unique environment, animals follow distinct strategies of behavior based largely on physical evolution. This natural process produces the many wonderful visible components of nature. One does not find the entire animal in the zoo, any more than a person might surmise a complete, representative human being by looking at an unhappy prisoner in a cell, or a restless businessman in his cubicle. Deprived of action within its natural milieu, many animals seem brooding and dying spirits, severely wanting for unconscious purpose, even if that purpose seems only to eat, breed and feed the lion.

A train arrived from the Southwest last week with seven refugees who had died en route from disease, starvation or exhaustion. A large number of war refugees from the south had boarded the train at a remote stop, overloading it. Sometime afterward the conductor stopped the train, announced a long layover, and when many of the refugees had gotten off desperately looking for food and water, the train abruptly parted, leaving many people behind to starve while waiting for another train which might be twenty days or more coming back. These refugees are largely non-Muslims from Southern Sudan who have been forced from their homes and villages by the fighting. On their trek to the distant

tracks, they face starvation, animosity and violence from soldiers and villagers in the Muslim areas along the way.

The Southerners aren’t the only refugees leaving their homes, uncounted thousands of Islamic tribesman have fled desert oasis’s and desert margin <the Sahel) during the current drought to live in loose camps of flimsy shelters in the sand outside of Khartoum, joining a vast encampment of diverse peoples. The camps are scattered to the barren horizon, the people totally dependent upon foods donated from abroad and water trucked in from the Nile. There are few places as tragically poor as this country. No matter how well adapted to the desert, no one can live without water. When the old sources dry up from extreme drought, a barely inhabitable place becomes completely ruined and its people must leave, many of them coming here, for food and water. Here, they live in huts made from sticks and whatever garbage they can find, and covered in old cloth, burlap or flattened tin from food and oil cans.

I visited a family of refugees with a Dutch nurse who had done prior work with them through a relief organization. The nurse, gone for a year, was well remembered, and they gracefully shared both their tea and scarce food with us, served by a beaming young child. These courageous folk, living in a squat shack covered in tattered burlap, displayed a dignified composure and even humor while ardently attempting to preserve their lives. The grazing land that had nourished their goats had been desiccated by extended drought and when the animals could no longer eat, neither could they.Khartoum was victimized by severe floods only a few weeks after I left, the rainy season arriving in torrents and spilling over at the confluence of the two Niles which meet here.

We left at dusk and then stood in the bleak sand, waiting for what seemed an improbable lift back to Khartoum. Eventually a distant light appeared, drew near, and we ran to flag down a truck under an exquisite starlit sky.

The most sybaritic thing to do in Khartoum is to find a watermelon, a leg of fried chicken and relax with an ice-cold lemonade or tamarind drink from the central market. There is an excellent American-style ice cream parlor in a newer addition of the city known as Khartoum Two, not far from the Youth Hostel where I stayed. At the hostel a person can pull a bed out from the hot dormitory and sleep outside in the garden, where the nighttime temperature is near perfect.

I traveled east by bus to the towns of Dinder and Kassala. Kassala is on the main route to the Red Sea city of Port Sudan, and this road acts as the final funnel in North Africa’s pilgrim trail to Mecca, just across the sea in Arabia. Accordingly, it’s served by a paved road and air-conditioned buses from Khartoum. The mountains of Eritrea rise dramatically from the plain just east of Kassala.

On the Lake Nasser ferry I had met a man from Dinder who gave me his address written in Arabic. But when I showed the address to a man at a market tea stall, he scowled at me and bluntly said: “I hate that man.” So I didn’t pursue him further. This part of Sudan is home for many refugees who have fled war, chaos and famine in Ethiopia; there are hundreds of temporary new villages. The houses are built within a walled compound and each house is a small, circular straw hut with a

cone roof, topped by a simple ornamental tip where the stalks are tied.

Back in Khartoum, I finally received permission to cross the Kordofan Plateau to Nyala, so as soon as I was able, I started out, taking a bus to Kosti, about 150 miles south of Khartoum on the White Nile. Kosti was the northern terminus of the Nile ferry to Juba through the Sudd, Southern Sudan’s vast swamp, but because of the war the ferry had been out of service for several years, so effective government territorial control ceased just south of here. After getting off the bus at the souk, a market, I was greatly surprised to find a lorry parked nearby, bound for Nyala, leaving that very evening. This all happened with the ease of a dream.

For the next six days I rode in the back of a Morris lorry, bouncing on an uneven load of truck tires with eight others. The lorry took a westerly route that first dipped southwest around the Nuba mountains through the Kordofan towns of Kadugli and El Muglad, and then headed northwest to Ed Da’ein and Nyala in Southern Darfur. The Bahr el Arab river just south of this route forms the tradional boundary in Sudan between Arab and Black, the warring parties of North and South. The Southern guerilla fighters haven’t the impulse or logistics to carry the war far from their homes. The main danger along this route is from bandits and for this reason, particularly in Darfur in Western Sudan, the drivers take irregular routes to avoid ambush.

We drove through miles of desert, then dry, wooded steppe, much of it overgrazed by camels, cows and goats. We passed thousands of tall, hardened, earthen spires made by termites, who compete with everything for the grasses, no longer held in check by the exterminated pangolins, aardvarks, and other mammals and birds who would destroy the mounds to eat the termites. West of the Nile, there are no bridges over the numerous dry wadis, and no surface water anywhere. Soon the rainy season would arrive and most of Southern and Central Sudan would become impassable and completely isolated. The rains typically extend north from the equator, much like spring advances in North America. Here in the Sahel, the ever-shifting southern boundary of the Sahara, the rains diminish in magnitude, giving this area a short, but sometimes intense rainy season.

Among the group were two dusty, ragged young boys, the personal property and vassals of the driver, who looked stern, yet serene in his clean white robe. When the lorry stopped the children jumped into action, changing tires, washing sand off the engine, and performing other odd jobs long after others had found prayer and rest. They somehow slept during the day on the lurching load of the truck.

The driver stopped at small outdoor concessions where women sat before smudge pots and charcoal fires, offering sweet tea and maybe a little food. Someone might be selling a mango or a dry, shriveled tangerine or a few miserable chunks of goat, complete with mashed bone, yet eminently chewable. The Sudanese eat a sticky porridge of millet or maize, called the dura, by dipping a handful into goat gravy, a gagging dish I always found difficult to swallow no matter how hungry I was.

When evening came, the Sudanese broke their Ramadan fast. They fell on their mats and prayed, then gathered in groups, sharing food and talk, becoming animated after the heat and fast-induced daytime lethargy, drinking refreshing drinks made from grain or eating sweet,

red watermelon with great delight. Being an infidel, I was not forced to abstain from food and drink during the day, but nonetheless ate little because food was hard to find. I craved fruit, but otherwise had a poor appetite; eating didn’t seem worth the effort of putting food in the mouth. My entire food intake for six days would roll into three burritos. I began to love dirt and deprivation.

At lonely stops a kerosene generator powered a few fluorescent tubes, the lights going on when the people heard the sound of trucks, then extinguished as quickly as the trucks passed. People in dusty-white, flowing muslin gowns squatted and relieved themselves in the open because there was no place to hide, and they carried plastic pitchers of water with which to splash themselves afterwards. The height of the lorry bestowed an austere view of straw, sticks and bare earth. These remote hamlets were straw kraals encircling round straw huts and sharing common sanctity. Men heeled on their knees, bending and bowing towards the distant Red Sea, a direction everyone knew, to solemnly chant their prayers. Stopping for sleep or siesta, I first walked around and stretched, grateful to be off the bouncing, dust-blown truck. When I wanted rest I looked for an empty string-bed <a wooden-legged cot, several feet long, with a loosely woven mattress of twine), ordered a glass of hot tea, lay down and fell asleep. If there wasn’t a bed, I’d lie in the dirt, like everyone else, and smell the goats, until my waking senses found a brief recess.

Tree branches constantly brushed the lorry when we drove through dry, deciduous forest and thorny acacia, and I alertly dodged the limbs while living silently through my eyes. People led goats and camels from the exposed, barren earth around the villages off into the dusty distance to find what little forage there was left. How much better things would be when the rains arrived! The rains would completely isolate them from the world because of the mud, but with sufficient ground moisture, the water would quickly return to the sky in the incessant hot sun that followed the rains. Then the hidden roots and seeds of grass, dormant trees and gardens, whose seed was preciously saved and guarded, would quickly burst into forage, fruit and vegetables, and these people and their animals could then fatten and healthfully bare young. Until then, everything exists upon a vulnerable fatalism born from their utter dependence upon capricious nature. But I have no clear junction with these lapsing scenes, nor with the murky air of latent tragedy that envelops the dust blowing around me.

I read 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a book that grew more tiresome and less clever as the truck bounced along. But it oddly inspired a subject that interests me. In the North everything is precisely weighed, measured and further defined by color and shape. Normal people perceive a similar image when observing the same commonly defined phenomena, this mainstream experience being essential to effective communication, commerce and education. A traveler might then ask his or herself these questions: What if people didn’t each have their own culturally-biased educations? Would a cow appear different if people hadn’t heard about kilos, steaks, the electromagnetic spectrum, iridescence, Western religion, hallucinations, functions of organs and neurons, theory of evolution, that only humans have a soul, that a cow really “moos” or that its calf is a result of mixing sperm and egg? The

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com is realized according to what accumulated knowledge and experience has taught each of us. Now imagine a society where some cows might be suspected of being a human who had been cursed by a magician or is indeed a transformed sorcerer himself; a land where the cow hasn’t come under the scrutiny of scientific theory and observation or a place where important scientific models are scorned or unknown. Imagine the Hindu cow which is never beef. Or a golden calf of pagan worship. Or the anthropomorhic imagery of the Egyptians: Isis sometimes wore cow horns. Then people begin to think that when they see a cow, it’s a Northern beast, not a universal one. If there were no invented standards for defining judgement of material phenomena, each of us would flounder in exaggeration or understatement, miscalculation and misunderstanding. Travelers who depart their own measured world and confront another with different standards must examine their own cultural baggage and prepare for some general discord about the nature of cows and other things, while reflecting upon their own perceptions and the potential reality of what are called illusions and delusions, and the uncertain progression of knowledge.

The idea of human star travel is too firmly planted in our minds to delete, as people steadfastly attempt to find a way when there is none. Rockets can’t travel fast enough for interstellar trips, nor do people live casually enough, needing not only food, but regular infusions of comfort, air and water to nourish their short lives. But, people don’t stop dreaming of star travel because it’s impossible. We consider these things because of a surfeit of restless, wild thoughts and emotions in the seeing mind that constantly challenge and contradict knowledge, eternally seeking to ursurp better judgement. We want to know the stars because space is pure and mystical, possessing the ultimate chaste knowledge that humans have always dreamed for themselves. But supposing star travel were possible, could humans endure a long journey without booze, avarice and sex? Would their spacecraft smell like a sweaty brothel, a stock exchange or the inside of a shoe? And send along a versatile crew of pals for desperately needed rounds of sympathy amidst breakdowns in the pecking order.

We experience dreams that take us to any multitude of wonderful and frightful places, furloughs from the acrid balloon of waking space, without our needy eyes and our dying legs. Dream is where the crippled newspaper seller, the smelly tramp, the retarded, the blessed and the norm, the meek and powerful, are all equalized, dream is justice, and rest from competition, exploitation and pain. Dream is a universe of both earthly and nonearthly sets that defy re-creation. Tapping dreams, life abides as if the unconscious is turning inside out, defying matter and mechanics, escaping the frustrations of the rational experience of incomprehensible nature.

The rugged ride continued over desert margin, savanna and dry woodland tracks, rolling south of the Nuba mountains. On certain hillsides were stone walls built around small fields to keep domestic animals away from the crops, but the fields were barren. Near villages, their animals had perilously overgrazed the parched land leaving dying trees or bare ground where the wood and dead stumps had been carried away and burnt for cooking fuel. Because the range grass has all been uprooted and grazed, goats rise up unsteadily on two legs to stretch

their mouths for leaves and climb on any tree with a lean or low branch to eat the foliages twigs and bark. Sand and dust covered everything.

A grizzled old many bouncing along in the lorry, knew a few words of English and kept asking me, “Why, Mister?” but he never understood my answers. Another popular phrase was “Seven hours,” the response 1 always got when I managed to convey a question like “How long are we stopping here?” Often he was right. He called me “kwajah” (foreigner).

I regretted not knowing enough Arabic to match his English.

We typically started between 5:00 and 6:00 AM, drove for a couple of hours to a truck stop where I drank tea until the truck continued on. The Koran allows travelers an exemption from fasting during Ramadan, provided they fast later. But my companions fasted anyway. One day the driver stopped from 9:30 AM until 6:00 PM, leaving after the afternoon heat. The driver usually halted, by the early afternoon when I would hop off the truck, and find a shade tree or a tea-stall’s thatched roof to escape the sun and to rest.

The third day was brilliant. We traveled through large uninhabited stretches of savanna and open woodland, with splendid stands of dried long-stem grasses remaining ungrazed. There were no wild mammals, but I spotted birds—small flocks of nervous parrots, pairs of Ground Hornbills, as big as turkeys, hopping away from the lurching truck, an endless succession of solitary lavender and blue Abyssinian Rollers perching serenely on the desiccated branches of trees, and two brown owls watching us pass from a roost in an acacia. I had an early burst of energy with wonderful thoughts, but by evening the continual rattling and shaking of the lorry and my filth bothered me.

Later there were moments of masochistic bliss when I overcame the discomfort, enjoying the tremendous spectacle of it all. One time I felt especially exhilarated, as if this were all a fantastic safari, and I stood up like a Roman warrior on his chariot, watching the spent grass bend and birds fly before the awful groan of the truck, the most powerful thing in the forest. As we careened through the yellow grasslands and past gutted baobab trees, I felt 1 was being driven by a monstrous beast. The immense, hoi low—trunked baobabs were formerly often used as water tanks. During past droughts, the trees would have been gutted by elephants for their stored water, but now there are no elephants, and people have wasted many baobabs by hacking off the limbs for firewood. We passed more isolated straw villages where dozens of goats, cattle, camels, and people with buckets and canteens made from animal skins, all gathered around a single well, waiting their quiet turn to drink. As we passed, I stood, extending my arms, and screamed ridiculous babble at the milling house sparrows and people, smiling and waving like a crazed politician. What did it matter? The roaring truck drowned out my unintelligible shouts, so I heard no cheers as we passed these solemn, dusty gatherings that kept repeating themselves.

Two or three evenings we drove until midnight or later, in a small convoy of several lorries, stopped to rest, then started all over again several hours later. I wore the same clothes, sleeping in them on the dirty lorry or on the ground, like the Sudanese. My life became that of the cargo, fully managed by the lorry driver. When the driver felt like stopping, I stopped. I moved when he did and silently watched everything because I was unable to understand anyone’s voice.

By the fourth day I was bruised, exhausted and dehydrated, and fed up with all the stops and delays—I’m sure the same trip could be done in two days rather than six, but the driver was not rushed to reach his home at Ed Da’ein. Despite wearing a hat, sunglasses and scarf, the dust was almost unbearable. I was raw from the aridity and dust, my nostrils were painful with scabs and the skin split in my feet from dehydration. I recalled driving taxi, and afterwards coming home at four in the morning, taking off my shoes, propping my feet up on a desk, and serenely quaffing beer. Sudan is a great thirst and I thought more of brew than almost anything else, nothing being as dearly missed.

At Ed Da’ein, a flat, wind-blown town in Southern Darfur, a shopkeeper warned me to sit low in the middle of the lorry the next day so that I’d be less likely to be shot by bandits. I took his advice, and rested my back against the cab. No bandits appeared, and we arrived unscathed at my destination—Nyala, built on the sandy banks of a wadi where people had dug wells in the the dry river bottom.

The Islamic Sudanese refer to themselves as Arab and to the Southerners as Blacks, but the Muslim is normally as black as the Nilotic southerners. The Arab and so-called Black, in this unraveling nation, long ago ceased having mutual peaceful interests; beneath the striking hospitality, gentle humility and tender reverence for Allah, a person knows that the Sudanese, like all people, are also capable of great cruelty and fearful violence.

Despite the religious fundamentalism expounded by the government and the cruelties inflicted upon the non-believers of the South, there are many positive things about Islam: the fraternity; the trust and faith people have in order to endure immense hardship and poverty; the decent way people obey their laws and follow proper social custom without threat from police; the safety of the streets in any city here at night and the general sobriety of the public. Islam is the glue and tradition that holds life together and keeps the peace in such an otherwise marginal and fickle environment, giving water, food and shelter to strangers and bestowing upon believers the courage and discipline and strength to survive under the poorest circumstances imaginable. Islam can guide devoted people to simple, purposeful, somewhat contented and dignified lives. Muslims have a strong sense of identity and don’t seem to question or doubt themselves in the same sense that non-Muslims might. But, Sudan is in many ways a country planted firmly in the middle ages, a place and culture yet to have seen a modern reformation or a scientific questioning of its past or itself.

Sudan seems destined for war and political instability. The feeble national government is unable to solve its immense internal problems. Sudan recently accommodated the Islamic fundamentalist front by returning to Islamic law, Sharia, a major step backward, particularly for non-Muslims. The antipathy between North Africans and Sub-Saharan Africans dates back to the ancient Egyptians, followed by Roman, Greek, Arab, Turkish, and later European conquests of North Africa, resulting in slavery or servitude to the victors by the Southerners. Sudan is unable to do anything about the Southern rebellion other than attempt to starve the rebels out or to massacre the defenseless villagers. Khartoum refuses to make conciliating gestures while lacking the

ability to squelch the rebellion through force. Army and fearful civilians are both implicated in the murder of refugees fleeing war and famine in the South. The nation’s food supplies are inadequate, water quality is poor, while government concern about life outside Khartoum and more developed areas seems largely nonexistent, aside from the war. The animosity between Arab and Black is clearly disastrous for Sudan.

Sudan is the largest nation in Africa and has significant natural resources. Some have even said the Southern rebellion is more about control of oil reserves in the south than anything else, but this idea seems to cheapen the profound cultural differences between North and South. Sudan also has large tracts of fertile soil and vast farms southeast of Khartoum. As the nation vacillates with each political coup, it keeps wanting to rid itself of Western influence. There are both fundamentalist and progressive opinions in Sudan about what to do about its problems but few signs of sensible compromise. However, Sudan might ultimately be judged an unworkable nation of chronic ethnic and ideological conflicts that are unsolvable in a peaceful manner. Like many other African nations, Sudan is cursed by a colonial legacy of contrived political boundaries drawn years ago in Europe, not yet forming itself according to innate ethnic and political realities. The traditionally conservative Sudanese are unwilling or unable to alter classic values and familiar lifestyles, despite a fast changing world. That means new roads, bridges, medical facilities and other essential items of national infrastructure might never be built.

One man asked me why the Americans don’t help build Sudan roads. Giving foreign aid to build roads in a country like Sudan is as good as burning money, and lives. If the Sudanese want roads they can, like the early Romans who had less technology, build them themselves. However, any good roads here will greatly assist the military in fighting Khartoum’s genocidal war against the south.

Despite the war, the Sudanese are largely passive; the poverty and the heat breed much lethargy most afternoons, making hard labor difficult and unhealthy. When one is poor, and misses or abstains from life’s dynamic vices, like many Sudanese, family, toil, sleep and prayer are about all that remain.

In essence, Sudanese society is lacking both a political and scientific enlightenment, with no indication that one will happen.

There is no stake stuck deeper in permanent muck than Sudan. I heartily recommend to anyone planning to travel here to bring a lawn chair or cot as one has a lot of lying down to do, listening to an empty stomach churn. Forget about the booze as well.

The Sudanese, a religious people, often want to discuss their faith, but not before asking if one is a Christian. If a person says no, then there is poor conversation and one has no chance of knowing them. Only a fool would come here and announce oneself an agnostic or an atheist. When a lorry driver asked if I kept Ramadan, I said that I didn’t need to because I was a free man—I imagine myself free from the medieval tyranny of unreformed church, school and king. These words elicited a wry smile, probably moving him to pity for my ignorance.

Sudanese Muslims lead structured, often tedious lives, but are resolutely religious, sharing a common tradition and standard of living with each other, knowing no benefit from their government. But they are

kind and generous to travelers. So enjoy the hospitality and simple, moving presence of life and witness how Islam has powerfully endured and why many of the world’s poorest people remain steadfastly faithful to it. Poverty is often a misfortune of birth, not a crime. These people’s valiant, enduring faith might well outlast the varied ephemeral chimeras of progress passing through their detached world.

Hunger might be politically tolerated as long as people’s minimum bestial needs are met, as it keeps them too weak to cause real problems for the state. In the end personal survival is most precious, under almost any condition. To be hungry means that something in a person might still wish to live, to grow and someday find the luxuries of health and liberty. To be happy might mean to be prostrate and praying to the breeze, to be drunk or high on drugs, or making a few piastres selling tea to the rare truckie who passes their hut in the African bush. It might also mean enjoying that sweet tea, denying oneself the drugs and beer, and finding oneself to be a strange intruder who could easily merge forever into the parched, struggling earth everywhere, as we are seemingly meant to do, and as many are doing now.

On Hay 2, I reached Nyala and stayed at a spacious, poorly kept but somehow comfortable, government-run hostel, sleeping at night on an old sweat-stained mattress under a chugging ceiling fan. There was no drinking water except what we could sometimes dip out of a fifty-gallon drum in the front yard, or from clay pots in the hall that needed to be refilled daily, if anyone remembered. I took warm bucket baths but not the cold showers I dreamed of on the lorry. Nyala has several decent restaurants, abundant market produce from Jebel Marra and irrigated schemes, and the odd foreigner for familiar company.

My roommate was a young volunteer school teacher from England who had been living in Sudan. He had malaria and faced a rough three day bus-ride back to Khartoum before flying home. Sudan is phasing out foreign workers, pushing to perfect an Islamic state and rid itself of foreign influence. In the process, Sudan is also de-emphasizing the study of English, the former colonial language of the government.

Searching for something to read, I went to another guest house to ask the patron if he had any books that travelers might have left behind. To my surprise the English-speaking gentleman lent me, without comment, Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima. The theme of this book is hatred of self and women, set against a sleazy background in postwar Tokyo unwillingly rebuilding itself into a place less Japanese and more American. Mishima portrays a desultory predicament of bitterness, fear and militant hatred in a muck of social turmoil. I think we can learn to accept and love decadence, weaving active and exciting lives around it, as long as we never need a good reason why nor wish to know better.

I received an exit visa at a government office situated in front of an intersection with a black and white flaking cement cow’s head on a stubby concrete pillar planted as a monument at the center of the cross. What the defibri1lated holstein celebrated I couldn’t tell, perhaps it commemorated the second Surah (chapter) of the Koran or the wasting of Sudan. In any event I received my exit permit without fuss. In closing this chapter, I might add in sum that Sudan can’t be recommended for a frivolous visit.

17

THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

One truck a Meek left Nyala, from a place called Texas Souk, for Am Dafok at the frontier Mith the Central African Republic. It was packed with people, all riding uncomfortably. I jumped on with two new friends: Alan, a young English skydiver, and Isabelle, a French school teacher. Alan hoped to make friends with some military personnel who might give him the opportunity to jump into Africa. Isabelle was on a break from her job at a French school in Khartoum. They were both as skinny as myself and had met while traveling the northern route to Nyala that went through El Obeid.

We constantly ducked tree limbs as the lurching lorry swayed down the track through the forest on the two day trip from Nyala to Am Dafok, spending one night sleeping on the ground. At Am Dafok there is a poor, small souk (a market) and a quiet Sudanese custom shack built near a beautiful shallow pool. The muddy pool was nearly dry, but attracted large numbers of aquatic birds including Openbill and Saddlebill storks, a variety of probing waders and several Crowned Cranes. Am Dafok was silent except for the clammer from domestic animals, and I nicely passed the night sleeping under the stars in front of the custom shack. The custom agent already knew our names and itineraries, which had been radioed to him from Nyala. From here, papers in order, we walked across the shallow muddy river, around the pool and into the Central African Republic to again wait for transport.

After crossing into Am Dafok, CAR on May 9th, we slept on the ground outside the custom post. The bored, sad-looking official, maybe a thousand kilometers from his missed pleasures of Bangui, treated us to a warm, stale bottle of Centralafrican beer, which broke the alcohol fast Sudan had imposed upon me. He seemed to take particular pleasure in killing scorpions which appeared to be everywhere at night, showing us dead ones that he kept in a bottle as souvenirs. The tiny settlement around the custom post seemed transient, only rickety shacks built on sand. The Centalafricans, without a market, crossed to Sudan to shop, but at least had a few stale, miserable bottles of beer for sale.

The next day we found a lorry going to Birao, the first town after the border. Before the lorry left, we watched it being loaded with gum arabic smuggled from Sudan for sale in Bangui. The loading was somewhat comical, with sacks breaking and many loud arguments. It took all day to finish what might have been a two-hour job on any American farm, leaving the traveler with little to do but laugh and avoid sunstroke.

Exiting Sudan did not mean I left behind the Sudanese or their lorries. The little traffic going through this part of Africa consists mostly of Sudanese traders. The gum arabic lorry was extremely crowded. I was the last one on and hence had the worst position, squashed like an ant between a group of veiled and costumed Sara women. The Sara are a Muslim people inhabiting a large area of Southern Chad, adjacent to Sudan and in Northern CAR. I couldn’t sit, but rather lay on my side with my legs bent and in the air. Not having a solid perch, I kept rolling against them, and they don’t like to be touched! Each time I

bounced against them, they retreated into a covey and then exploded to strike feebly at me with their tiny fists. I continued to bounce around the uneven bags of gum arabic« cursing the wobbling truck as it dipped into one pothole after another. Fortunately this was a short ride, and a few hours later we stepped off the lorry at Birao.

We stayed at Birao for several days, trying to find a lorry to Nd£l£» maybe 300 kilometers further southwest into CAR. In this quiet Muslim town lives the loneliest Catholic priest in the world, an unpersonably distant Frenchman who begrudgingly put us up at his mission without a smile or supporting comment. This mission had a terrible well, it was impossible to draw a bucket of muddy water that wasn’t swimming with animal hair, insects or dirt, but lacking anything else, we drank it anyway.

The dusty cement outbuilding where we were to stay remained too hot at night, so we spread out on the ground in the open air to sleep. Inside the shed, the walls were cobwebbed by spiders and crawling with scurrying solifugids, more of the latter than I had ever seen in one place before. Solifugids are also known as wind scorpions or wind spiders because of the speed at which they move, and they have a superficial resemblance to scorpions and spiders. Whenever I got up to urinate, I flashed a light and spent time killing nearby scorpions that lay poised on the bare, rocky soil, waiting to dine on insects.

The next day, Isabelle and I converted our French francs into CFA with an Israeli who lived at the mission, and lent some to Alan who had brought none with him. The CFA, an acronym for Communaute Financiere Africaine franc, is the common currency shared by most of the ex-French colonies in Central and West Africa. It’s fixed at 50/1 to the French franc, freely convertible at that time at about 275 CFA to one U.S. dollar. Dollars and sterling are almost impossible to exchange outside Bangui, except with foreigners.

The Israeli was guarded about his purpose, only saying that he worked for a Swiss company and had been in Birao for a few months. I surmised that he might have been mineral prospecting or buying ivory, precious gems and minerals. Perhaps he was a spy, linked in some way to Sudanese or Chadian rebel groups—Chad was a few kilometers away to the northwest. He had a land rover and was obviously well funded. The Israeli uneasily coexisted with the Muslims, saying that his life had been threatened several times. He gave us a nice present of a whole cooked chicken with fruit and salad which we gratefully received like manna from the skies. The second night we were able to use a shower. This, along with the meal and a day off the trucks, made us lazy and endowed a sensation of being in heaven. But, feeling generally unwelcome after two nights at the mission, we gave the priest a small donation and left.

We spent the next day waiting for a truck going to Bangui, drinking calabashes of honey beer (duma) with soldiers at a street stall. Later that day, after scouring the town for something to eat, we bought a goat’s head, made a fire, and attempted to cook it. I had the pleasure of splitting the burnt skull, discovering that its dripping brains were not fully cooked. Then we heard thunder, saw the lightning flash, and felt the rain come down, ending the whole unappetizing endeavor. Isabelle and Alan found lodgings with a family for a night.

Preferring to revel in the fresh, rain-sweetened air, I borrowed a string-bed from a store, and placed it on a veranda under a tin awning of a sewing shop. The rain was fantastic, erupting into a spectacular electrical storm and dumping torrents of water that instantly dispelled the heat. This was the first rain I’d seen on the trip, and it was good to be out of the arid Sahel. Resting on that porch for the night was splendid and invigorating, as serene and free as I’ve ever felt.

After three nights in Birao, we found a Sudanese lorry bound for Bangui. The truck carried gunny sacks of small purple onions and garlic to be sold in Bangui. There was probably contraband hidden underneath, the name of the game being to gain convertable CFA currency to purchase coffee, ivory, gold, or diamonds and resell it in Sudan.

We gave our transport several bad names, including lorry from hell and demon truck, but none can curse it severely enough to the eternal torment this vehicle deserves. For starters, the Sudanese merchants who owned the vehicle rode in back with the passengers, but interested only in comfort for themselves, they damned the rest of the cargo to cramped misery. Surrounded by several groveling lackeys, these sneering princes persisted in stretching full out, pointing their feet at us, and sleeping while the rest of us, including three young Gambian farmers and a traveler from Cameroon who had wanted to go to Egypt to investigate Rosicrucian theories about the pyramids, were forced to crouch uncomfortably over the back axle on a very uneven and jagged load. But the ultimate insult came when they spit and watched the wind blow it into our faces, without apology.

The rough track grew more beautiful as we moved south, approaching the more humid and lush equatorial regions of Africa. We met the advancing rains and got stuck in mud. The lorry broke down every ten kilometers or so with flat tires; a two to three hour repair job ensued in which the tube was patched and the tire painstakingly sewed together. This was followed by tea, food, prayers, and sometimes a nap. Eventually, we’d get back on the busted road, passing through a forested wilderness of hills and streams, the desert forgotten, only to break down again and again. The lorry covered less distance in a day than a camel could walk. I waited through the successive breakdowns in midday heat, panting without food or water; my temper and patience barely under control. I began feeling weak, embarrassed, and slightly daft.; a confused condition that changed into stupid anger at the repeated delays. An elderly Sudanese gaped at my anxiety with curious alarm, as if he were frightened by my glare. Then, with a nervous smile, he would put his hands to the side of his nodding, unshaven face, telling me to go to sleep once again, as if Allah meant sleep to fix the road, the truck and myself, and for me to return all that I hadn’t spent from life, somehow renewing everything.

Three days and ten punctured tires later we abandoned the cursed lorry at a place called Tiroungoulou, only seventy kilometers from Birao. Once, in the states, I had covered 3,000 miles in the same period. The merchants had skimped on the tires, so after each puncture, the tears needed to be tediously resewn to keep the tube in. Later the tires could be discarded and new ones bought cheaply across the Ubangi River from Bangui in Zaire, put on the truck, pass customs without duty and be resold in Sudan for profit. It was obvious, however, that their

plan had backfired on them—the tires were becoming completely ruined.

We demanded our money back—about ^0 dollars worth? and when they refused we threatened to find the police. The Sudanese? noticably uncomfortable on foreign turf? couldn’t afford to take our threats lightly. I’m sure if we had been in Sudan? under similar circumstances? they simply would have left and been done with us. Isabelle? who spoke some Arabic? was loath to argue with the men? so it was left for me to scream brutishly at them in French and English? which they couldn’t understand. Alan later commented how much better Americans are in shouting matches than the English? having less emotional reticence? a more colorful argumentative vocabulary and less conceit to inhibit themselves. It was a long? tedious argument? largely in hastily invented sign language. First? we argued whether we should get a refund? then in what currency and finally about when we should be paid? now or later in Bangui. We had paid them in CFA? which they had demanded in Birao? and they tried the trick of offering a refund in now-worthless Sudanese pounds. In the end I won? getting an immediate and somewhat fair amount? but only after angrily throwing one ridiculously small wad of CFA notes back at them? causing a surprised startle and finally a condescending laugh among the Sudanese? as if they thought me boldly stupid? which perhaps in many small ways? I was. Finally they lumbered off in their lorry? leaving us peacefully admiring our new surroundings.

Tiroungoulou is a poor? quiet Muslim village. Once the roar of the straining lorry died in the distance? I could hear every note of the birds and each stirring of the wind. When the dust of the lorry settled? a male Pin-tailed Whydah loped sluggishly through the unsullied air? lugging its long? black tail feathers behind it. A sunbird? appearing like a scythe-billed neo-tropic hummingbird? nervously perched on a tall? yellow weed stem? iridescently glistening in the light and bobbing with the breeze. The small victory from the argument was therapeutically calming as if coming-from a primal scream.

Isolated Muslim villages like Tiroungoulou? have lazy gathering places where men lounge? gossip? teach? read the law? receive orders from a chief or discuss Islam and their community. Benches and string-beds are put in a shaded spot outdoors? often under a mango or hibiscus tree where the men drink glasses of mint and hibiscus tea and talk.

Noisy yellow and black village weavers (Plociedae) sometimes communally nest in the tall red-flowering hibiscus or in the spreading branches of the ubiquitous mango trees growing in the hamlets. Dozens of their gourd-shaped nests dangle like straw Christmas ornaments from the limbs. These gregarious birds are grass-seed eaters? finding their food in the village clearings. Because the Africans quickly kill any snake found near their homes? these birds may be more successful nesting in the villages than in the wild? provided they aren’t shot.

The first night we were invited into a home? where we purchased a chicken? ate it? and then slept together on a straw floor-mat? leaving a donation when we left in the morning. The next evening we camped under an open-sided thatched-roof shelter next to the road? just outside the town? so we wouldn’t miss the odd truck coming through. Durinq the day when we read or rested quietly in the shade? nervous flocks of Bronze Mannikins would land and settle peaceably nearby? into

2I

the tail, waving grasses softly foraging and eating seeds. But with a careless movement from anyone, the tiny finches discarded their calm and as one, would rapidly burst into the air5 the excited flock winging a short distance off, before quiescently dropping onto and into the grass once again. There are few things more pleasing than calmly watching a flock of mannikins feed, causing a sensation of general tranquility, lest they fly away. Next to the shelter was a tea stall that a jovial woman opened when trucks arrived or when people like us camped there.

We waited for another truck passing this way for Nd616 and Bangui. Largely because the tsetse-fly has excluded domestic animal herders from moving into this area, Northeastern CAR is still wild, not yet overgrazed by goats and cattle. It’s a very deceptive wilderness, however. Until the beginning of the ^BO’s this part of Africa retained some of the largest herds of free-ranging elephants remaining on the continent, and it also supported a healthy population of both black and white rhinoceros. Today the rhino has been virtually exterminated for its horn and the large herds of elephants have been gunned down by poachers for their ivory. While in Khartoum I read a small column in an English language newspaper about how a government official had given ivory buyers permission to make large purchases at Nyala. This in effect legitimized the purchase of poached ivory from CAR, because Arabic Sudan has long been devoid of elephants; whatever few remain are in the war-torn south. Because of the resulting carrion from the poaching, Northeastern CAR experienced a boom in the population of lions, who scavenge from the kills.

I made the best out of several lazy days waiting for a lorry, hiking around or relaxing in the shade, enjoying Tiroungoulou’s splendid scenery. One day, I took a walk to a nearby hamlet, a small Dinka fishing camp on the Ouandja river of about two dozen dwellings. The Dinka, a tall Nilotic people, recently moved into this area from southern Sudan to escape the war. I walked on a rutted road through tall dead elephant grass, flushing out mannikins and pairs of Cordon-Bleu finches. I passed a pair of River Eagles, somewhat resembling Bald Eagles, perched in a snag above a marsh, and I watched a muddy gathering of several dozen hippopotami. The dry, open deciduous forest qrew from dark, brown hills of jagged rock, the leaves just beginning to burst their buds. At the fishing camp they sold paniers (flat, woven stick baskets) of blackly burnt smoked fish to passing trucks. Other fish were slit, then hung on racks to dry. I found a fresh slab of capitaine (Nile Perch), and had it grilled over charcoal for an excellent meal. 1 had lost perhaps ten pounds since leaving Nyala, as my loose shorts indicated.

The Dinka also hosted the before-mentioned demon truck, broken down again as usual, its rainsoaked onions spread on the ground to dry in the temperamental sun, making their hamlet reek. The rotten onions were given to the Dinka for helping unload the lorry and unbag the cargo. The lorry had made five kilometers today, tires shot and the cargo rotting from the increasingly frequent rains. Even the merchants were grumbling. Our former traveling companions were stuck with this truck, unable to get their money back and not having enough to purchase a lift with another passing lorry.

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The next day I climbed a forested hill that rose from the valley of elephant grass to view the surrounding terrain. The budding trees were well spaced amidst the rocks and sparse, dead grass so that 1 could always see where I was. The wood and rocks billowed and rolled endlessly over successive hills into the horizon. Below, I again saw the muddy hippos saturating a shallow pool of the river which was only now refilling with the advent of new rains. While sitting on a rock I was mobbed by a large flock of Black Kites. This somehow made me feel lonely and forlorn; it was eerie how they swooped and divebombed around my head, and for lingering moments I feared their impulse and intent.

On the walk back to Tiroungoulou I heard the rumble of a lorry, so I left the path, running frantically across a stretch of broken forest toward the sound. I managed to intercept the lorry just in time, and joined up with my traveling friends and my backpack. I hopped aboard and then we were back in the Dinka fishing camp, where we stopped for the evening. The drivers of the lorry from hell were still trying to dry the onions after yet another rain.

This new lorry began its trip at Omdurman, and was almost unimaginably bound for Tanzania via Bangui and Zaire. The Sudanese and Tanzanian drivers were kind and civil. Having the afternoon free I walked behind the settlement, along the river and in the small neatly-tended manioc and peanut gardens that the Dinka had carved out of the forest. A ghostly troop of Maribou Storks stalked, man-like, among the garden plants, picking at insects. They show a remarkable lack of fear of humans, testimony to the mixed respect Africans give them.

In a river pool next to the hamlet the raised snout of a solitary and sedentary hippo would briefly appear to breathe, then vanish.

Gandi, the Cameroonian who was stuck on the lorry from hell, said that hippos had tromped through the hamlet last night while he and the other travelers slept outside on the ground. The hippos leave the water nightly to forage, and encountered on land they ar.e sometimes belligerent and dangerous animals, killing and maiming incautious people. In the water, hippos pose little threat to anyone on the bank, not being inclined to leave the mud and cool water, but people in boats should give them a wide detour. However, more hippos are killed by people than vice versa; their meat is very tasty.

Months later in Zambia, I stayed for a week along the Luangwa River, home to an abundance of crocodiles and hippos. The fishermen took to the water daily to set and check fish nets, yet the nearby animals never bothered them or disrupted their nets. When I asked a fisherman how he managed to avoid harm, he replied in halting English, “Lucky charms.” He also needlessly warned me not to try it myself.

During my walk in the gardens, I found a shotgun, stock and forearm wired to a rusty chamber and barrel, hidden near a freshly cut tree, probably used to shoot monkeys and other small game, but possibly elephants as well. I saw a man pretending not to watch me so I walked on, pretending not to notice the gun and looked for sunbirds and barbets in the trees along the stream. The shotgun was illegal and possibly the one gun served everyone. Centralafricans (this term refers to people living in the CAR, as opposed to Central Africans) eat almost anything except animals representing a family totem. Within pagan Banda

clans it’s believed that people become monkeys or other animals after they die, so that meat is taboo.

Belief in metamorphosis from human to animal is common among Centralafricans, part of a specially developed belief in sorcery and magic. The promise of the afterlife in Christianity and Islam is a highly sophisticated and compelling tale, possibly because this proselytizing issue is crucial to larger societies which suffer so much competitive conflict with each other. It’s not surprising to find smaller, more insular societies with refined but non-proselytizing beliefs, and practical systems of magic lacking a slickly coherent, universally-appealing explanation of the beyond.

Christianity and Islam have both enjoyed the critical input of millions of born believers and converts over the centuries to become what they are, powerfully invasive and strongly persuasive religious forces difficult to resist for the many smaller, eccentric and isolated human camps of the world. It’s little wonder that restless Muslim zealots, who took advantage of North Africa’s expanding medieval caravan trade in precious goods, commodities and slaves, and who arrived before Christians in both Nest and Central Africa, made such easy headway converting Central Africans, the kingdom of heaven promising vastly more in death than the struggle of a lower animal in the earthly jungle, as well as proposing an ideal worldly society offering some relief and protection from the cruel vagaries of survival and magic in the present. Much of Saharan Africa was Islamized before 1300 AD. Before the Muslim conquest, Christian societies existed in Coptic Egypt and in Ethiopia, and Christian kingdoms succeeded for some 700 years in northern Sudan until all those people were either converted to Islam, enslaved or killed by the 16th century. The Egyptian Copts linger as a small minority within Egypt while many more Ethiopians steadfastly remain Christian in one of its oldest churches. Each of these religions brought with them new technologies, superior weapons and political organization that was likely more persuasive for religious conversion than promises of a rewarding afterlife in eternity. Africans in their turns, have made both good Christians and Muslims, many becoming better at it than their teachers.

The venerated oral traditions that crafted and preserved history, religion, legend and poetry are fading in both Muslim and pagan Africa, replaced by Northern ideas from books and modern media which arrive with increasing literacy in European languages. Modern Africans are well aware of what is being lost and the issue conerning declining traditions and values is constantly debated among them. The tribal and clanish ways of life are vanishing, but not the loyalities; traditional beliefs move over or confuse themselves with compellingly powerful global concepts, principally arising from misappropriated European economic, political, educational and religious institutions that forcefully intrude upon African society. Africans are now found bringing their native villages to live with diverse other villages in the new slums of their new nation’s capitals, or the disruptive youth go alone to do their best in societies still loyal to tribal clans. The African often lives in a corrupt, brutish and ineffectual police-supported dictatorship where individual liberties, minority rights, and free speech are unknown. The traditional foundations of unique, locally

specific cultures are swept into the murk of the moderns unstable nation. Natures also, is reshaping the old ways, with disease and environmental change transforming daily life and killing social memory outright.

Like other young Africanss Gandi listened regularly to radio and read whatever he could find. He was keenly fascinated with the idea of travel. Having developed an interest in ancient Egypts he set off on a personal ha i (the required pilgrimage to Mecca required of able Muslims), an arduous overland journey across CAR to Sudan, and thence up the Nile to uncover an African past, but never made it. Upon arriving in Birao, he was arrested for not having a visa and accused of spying. And since he was not Muslim, his creative ha.1 was not recognized. But, he was released after 46 hours in jail when the police realized that they couldn’t get money or goods from him, and joined us on the lorry from hell on his way back to Cameroon. To him, CAR was a backward mire of corrupt soldiers and police who were always asking for identification and bribes.

When I asked Gandi, a devout Catholic, what he thought most distinguished people from the other animals he replied that only humans, among all the animals, were able to reflect upon their world and upon themselves. Fair enough, but at what price? He had an interesting antecdote about the whole tragic game of Black and White: When his own people saw their first white person many years ago, they promptly ate it. Why? Because they thought it was just another monkey wandering out of the jungle.

Africans often travel with little money and next to nothing; no bags or blankets, no shoes or change of clothing. They risk theft of whatever they may carry, so they must be prepared to lose everything as painlessly as possible. The robbery is mostly by police, soldiers, or by opportunistic people using stealth, but it’s rarely life-threatening. Gandi’s shoes were stolen in Birao, so I gave him my spent thongs, having a second pair in my pack, which he magically repaired and wore. Undersize thrift-store shoes that find their way to Africa are often seen worn as clogs, with the heel crushing the back of the shoe, the foot apparently getting used to it. There was irony in the fact that although I had cash, money was useless in buying comfort during the most stressful and difficult parts of the trip.

I slept on the ground that night, resting very badly for the heat, biting or stinging ants, mosquitos and pricks from God knows what else. Jt also rained. While the hippos didn’t visit, just before dawn the fitful night was broken by the mournful sound of a nearby lion roaring in the forest. At that moment, I wished very much that it would stroll through the encampment of sleeping fisherman and gypsies; a fuzzy thought to cap an almost sleepless night.

In the morning, we took off only to get stuck in mud a short distance away. It took nearly all day to get unstuck, and the lorry from hell caught up with us, only to catch another flat. With some amusement, I watched from under a tree as they patiently repaired the tire with an awl and twine. Another lorry came and stopped to help. The passengers on the lorry from hell, long delayed now, were going hungry and forced to forage for food. I had to drive one strange fellow away from my tiny, miserable pile of soggy, boiled peanuts that I had I

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dumped on the ground» shaking the last of them from crevices in my daypack. When I saw myself (yes, a part of me, then, seemed to hover in the air and peer down upon the remainder which was planted in muck) searching for a few spilled peanuts in the dirt and grass, poised on my haunches, almost ready to snarl or show a fang at any intruder, I felt more like a baboon than a human and knew that I was also making a parallel journey distinct from the physical act of traveling.

One of the Gambians disappeared into a swamp, but soon he returned to dole out some white, moist tubers the size of yams. They were starchy, thirst-quenching and eminently edible. Alan and another Gambian came by and we sat on our haunches in the drizzle, eating roots and squishing the mushy peanut shells and wolfing down the puny nuts, barely saying a word.

Meanwhile, we had run out of good drinking water, and when the rain clouds parted, the hot sun would reappear and quickly dehydrate us. Isabelle seemed to be holding up better than Alan or I; she spoke some Arabic, and she was not shy about approaching people and getting something to eat for herself. While Alan and I were content to ineffectively groan to each other about our sordid condition, Isabelle, every bit as worn and ragged as ourselves, did the obvious thing, artfully searching out and begging food from people who enjoyed feeding her.

Five days out of Birao, we had gone less than 150 kilometers. The bloody affair of getting unstuck became the work of tortoises as the lorry crew seemed to care less whether we moved or not. But I think that typical African patience and the fatalistic sense of ”inshallah“ was playing against my own irrational urgency to move too fast. Here, nearing the center of the great continent, I idly imagined eating ice cream on a beach washed t|,y huge breakers in Cameroon; nothing but a feeble mental effort to master fatigue and hunger. The Tanzanian driver expected to be at Arusha in two weeks, but he had to be dead wrong.

Built as a military route by the French, this road did not serve an important part of the CAR, and so was in complete disrepair. The rains had just arrived and water was again flowing in streams—if we were lucky, a rotting, broken or makeshift bridge let us cross, but usually there was none at all. The rain was turning the road into impassable mud. I found out later that these trucks were the last ones throuqh for the season.

We briefly lost the lorry from hell, until it caught up with us one more time. Stinking of the rotting onions that its human cargo was riding upon, it once again broke down. I heard later in Bangui that the onions had to be dumped and the lorry was stopped for a long time awaiting major repairs at Nd£l£ before it could go on to Bangui. The merchants refused to refund money to the passengers and they were forced to stay with it as it waited for parts. Although Nd£l£ offered regular transport to Bangui over a good dirt road, it was too expensive for these unfortunate people to purchase new tickets. The new lorry was only slightly better than the first, and it suffered from regular flats as well. Two other lorries caught up with us, and we formed a convoy. That night we circled the trucks in a forest clearing to form a kraal to guard against lions and other wild animals. We lit a large fire, and

everyone slept under the sky until it rained, when we crawled under the vehicles to watch the passing of a brief, violent torrent.

The next night I failed to dodge a tree limb, and began gushing blood from a blow just above the eyebrow. I tied a filthy shirt around my head to stop the bleeding and after a poorly considered emotional outburst I decided that I must be going mad, if I was not indeed going to die.

We camped another night in the forest and the next day we passed through a wild area where huge rock outcrops jutted out of the forest. Once, in the forest, the truck suddenly stopped, shut its engines and we silently watched a troop of agile baboons, and a few bounding gazelles disappear amidst the trees. Several dozen baboons slowly retreated from us, scrambling over spreading and sprawling tree limbs, leaves and bare rock. Some individuals, even mothers with young, stopped to calmly sit and stare back at us, while others climbed trees or disappeared behind boulders. The forest’s hushed guard was breached by our intrusion into the secret lives of these animals. Great trees sprawled out their limbs, touching and running over the huge rocks. The baboons moved smoothly and deftly over everything, unbound to a certain path, while we struggled so mightily to negotiate our well-worn but fading human road. I think everyone sensed something personal and familiar about this place, as if we had all been here before, long ago in the forgotten past—something we all knew but couldn’t verbally retrieve from unconscious memory; there was an intimate part of our secret selves in these animals, in this splendid glade.

Once before, in a vivid fatigue-driven tropical dream, I saw a random passing of people freeze in their tracks, as a rain trickled and stopped; a woman unloaded her firewood from off her head, a man quit his hoeing, and children forgot their ball. Everyone was rapt by the same magical spectacle of a stunning, fantastic combination of painted light arising from a broken, multi-hued fading rainbow, white jagged lightning, and a solemn orange sunset mixing together in the vast, brooding sky of changing grays and blues. It was like watching an octopus pouting or an uncertain chameleon flickering its tints, never quite settling on anything until the sudden black equatorial night came and forever draped everything but distant, muffled thunder and the odd nervously degenerating spark of lightning.

The incident with the baboons was a deja-vu, as if the same powerful force had appeared, but finally arrived in a waking manifestation as something equally magical; a single, invisible commanding presence which never fully revealed itself, but willfully and effortlessly passed through everything, dream and life itself, something that saved this part of the world for itself, that kept us stoutly solemn for a rare moment. It dramatically touched an occult sense, then carelessly pushed us on through its wilderness until we could find the company of other people.

Later that day, we reached a government post, which administrated the Ouandja-Vakaga reserve that we had passed through. The camp was on a river near a large meadow where buffalo and waterbuck grazed at the forest edge. 1 met a burly Belgian marksman, who had been hired by the government to begin the task of fighting back against the slaughter of large mammals going on in this remote part of Africa. His job was to

cut trails into the bush, setting up camps for soldiers who had orders to shoot to kill anyone suspected of poaching. He made us a welcome present of citrus fruit. That night, all of the travelers slept on the ground in front of one of the buildings.

The next morning we continued on, getting stuck, getting unstuck, then going flat, until finally the lorry descended into a steep gully, crossed a stream and completely twisted the rear axle from the frame. A few hours later, a new lorry came by, its bed filled with people going to Nd£l£. He hopped aboard and soon the road improved, so that the crowded lorry sped. But on the outskirts of Nd£l£, in fine weather and on a perfect stretch of dirt road, the speeding lorry failed to negotiate a curve, ran off the road, narrowly missed a tree, and abruptly became stuck in the mud. So we walked the final stretch into Nd£l£, arriving twelve days after leaving Am Dafok, 350 kilometers behind us at the border.

We checked into the Catholic mission, finding the situation here friendlier and more sympathetic than at the lonely missionary outpost of Birao. Nd£16, in this season, is lush and cool from regular daily rains. After a torrent, squatting toads appear everywhere, often next to buildings under which they’ve burrowed, feasting on the enormous swarming hatches of mating termites. The termites quickly lose their weak wings, which break off, and fall to the ground, ready, if not devoured, to start new colonies to devour everthing else. The Africans eat the nutritious termites which are best roasted or saut&ed in oil, giving them a crunchy texture and a nut-like flavor. Low bluffs rise above the Miangoulou river not far from town: its gallery forest hosting a thriving population of leopards.

Nd£l£ is the former home of the Senoussi Sultans who were powerful slave traders. While many Muslims live here, as they do throughout Central Africa, this is the first settlement with a large Christian component that one reaches taking this route into Africa. The Christians and Muslims coexist peaceably in Central Africa, but form seperate societies. And with the Christians come their habitual social antics, been—drinking and tavern-dancing. Nd616 is also the site of a recently-built Baha’i temple. Baha’i advances a belief in one God but believes in the unity of all religions, human equality, abstentation from the usual vices, communal ism, and the pressing need for universal justice and world peace.

For the hungry there is a good supply of mishwi, beef grilled over charcoal, sold by the roadside and glasses of chai and red hibiscus tea at the tea stalls. The seasonally rich grasslands support the nomadic Bororo and their cattle who have only relatively recently expanded south into CAR from Chad, Niger and Nigeria. They have benefitted from earlier French attempts to destroy the tsetse-fly which included destroying forest and brushy areas where the tsetse rests and also killing wild animals (many native species are infected but have a natural resistance to the disease unlike cattle) that act as a reservoir for the disease-causing organism, various strains of Trypansoma. The Bororo herders continue to move southward, partly in response to worsening conditions in the Sahel and also because many Southern areas have recently gone from forest to grassland, providing

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new grazing land for their cattle. The modern state also affords them protection that they might not have enjoyed in the past.

There is little or no electric lighting» yet the innate trust people have in each other lets them walk the dark streets at night without fearj saying hello to each other. The noises of the night are dogs barking, human voices, soft laughter, frogs, and perhaps, music from a boom-box. From every bar, music drifts out at the loudest volume the boxes can sustain. But the lack of mechanical noise and engine fumes is striking—we are so numb to it in the North.

The people are up at dawn to tend their gardens, principally consisting of manioc, okra (gumbo.), beans, peanuts, peppers and maize.

A lesser emphasis is placed on vegetables or fruit—manioc and chunks of meat being preferred. The African town is also given over to goats, pigs and chickens. Polygamy is lawful and families are powerful, intact social units falling into clans, tribes, and villages. Food is often prepared outdoors over a stick fire. Men usually dine with each other, and before the women do, sitting at hand-built tables, typically eating rather methodically and without ceremony.

The standard African house here is a simple structure of a few rooms, built from mud bricks and roofed with thatching or tin. The bricks are often made on site, baked in wood fires. The hole where the dirt was mined is gradually filled in with refuse and then quickly colonized by bananas, which thrive in the compost. Together, people and nature repair the pit in a few years.

The dirt floors are swept daily. The central interior has a few pieces of handmade furniture and perhaps some simple wall ornamentation: a gazelle’s horns, Christ’s imagined portrait or a cross, a picture of the holy Kaabah at Mecca, or even a familiar pop-star’s photo, cut from a magazine.

Nd£l£ has an interesting market selling regimes of bananas and other fruits along with fly-shrouded meat at the butcher stalls. Any large market in this part of Africa will have a variety of viande de brousse, bush meat, for sale. Duikers, elephant, crocodile, monkey, bats and virtually the entire edible animal kingdom are all eaten, with very little wasted from each animal. Ulomen brew coffee and sell surplus produce from stalls, and people sell outdated medicines that have spent months improperly refrigerated or protected from sunlight. Here, one can find second-hand clothes from Europe and America in the “choisir^Mpiles, empty bottles and cans, simple toiletries, bent nails, broken spark plugs, lengths of used wire, odd tools and parts from cars and machinery, penny sweets, firewood, and the services of blacksmiths— Africa has a long tradition of iron-mongering, dating back to the Sudanese kingdom of Meroe in 500 B.C. Many of the used dry goods seen here could also be found discarded on the streets of any American city.

Near the Catholic church is a tiny cottage bakery, where one can smell the dough baking into crisp baguettes in a clay oven, fired by wood. Among the greatest of aromas is that of baking bread and among the greatest of simple pleasures is eating it hot from the oven, the woodsmoke making it taste like campfire bread.

African children are typically bright-eyed, head-shaven, and quieter than their American counterparts, but many appear unhealthy, having distended stomachs or serious skin conditions. Children perform

family services and errands as soon as they are able, without great complaint. They carry firewood on their heads to the house, like their mothers and follow them to work the gardens. In the village one simply calls for the nearest “petit” to get an errand done or message sent and the child does what he or she is told. Children smile readily, making one’s journey all the better for it. At play, they are seen beating a rim about town with a stick or guiding a curious hand-built model car with a long, spindly wire steering column. African children have a well defined, useful role in the family, don’t beg from strangers, and are loved dearly. One man told me that a measure of a man’s real wealth is his number of children, not money, which can be easily squandered on beer and cigarettes.

Boys and girls are treated the same until they come of age. Although the government has banned traditional initiation rites, they are still performed in secret. The boys are taken away from the village and introduced to the rigors of the hunt, taught the secrets of nature, the traditions of the tribe, and are then circumsized. Girls, until recently, suffered excision. Children sometimes die during the initiation, and if they fail to return home, he or she is simply forgotten. Those that return are educated to perform the family and clan duties expected of them.

From Nd£16 I rode two days in a cramped minivan (trafiaue) to Bangui, broken by a night sleeping at a comfortable hostel near Mbr&s. The ride was only notable for a young African who when asked to pay for his ticket could produce no money. He had traveled from Sudan into CAR the same way we had come, but having only a student card for identification and a simple story that his mother was a Centralafrican, somehow passed customs. When unable to pay his fare, he was asked to get off of the traf iaue and when he refused to leave, he was forcibly thrown off. The youth then got on his knees and tearfully begged the driver to take him to Bangui. He was left at the side of the road, in the trafiaue’s dust, when the driver sped off.

Travel in Africa is a foreknown hardship. Africans typically approach their journey with patient stoicism and good spirit, facing the rough conditions with quiet resignation and an air of tolerance. They have little baggage and usually sleep in their clothes under the stars. Hotels are rare or too expensive. They are thirsty and filthy from the ride and when they find a river or other source they drink, bathe, wash their clothes and rest. Or they might go hungry and get sick. Africans are often bothered by authorities who want to see papers, when possibly they have none, or who want bribes, when they have little or no money, and who then threaten to beat them up or toss them in jail. Many are too poor to pay for transport and walk instead. They are whipped by the ride, getting sore and bruised. Transport is in bad repair and too frequently brings disaster and accident for the passenger, without hope of much help or medical care. They can easily imagine good roads, and the clean, safer trains and buses of Europe and America. But they know it’s highly unwise to speak out or complain to authorities. Africans might also curse their fate to be left making their difficult way in the terrible conditions of poverty here, perhaps even resigned to the fact that the situation is so bad, things might never get straight. They are prepared for misadventure knowing that one

can plan and dream everything perfectly only to have it all fall apart in the end. African travelers can do little except roll with the bumps and indulge their sense of adventure, being happy to someday find rest, healing and safety, after having made a home where there is none.

I spent nine days camping at Le Centre d’Accueil Touristiaue, Bangui’s only cheap tourist hovel. I carried a cheap pup-tent, bought at the last moment before leaving the U.S., and this was my first chance to use it. All budget campers coming to Bangui, including a slew of traveling “overlanders”, stay here because of the fenced-in campsites. The typical overlander journey starts from London then goes via Spain, Morocco, Algeria, Mali, Nigeria and Cameroon to Bangui, most often enroute to Kenya or South Africa, through Zaire. They travel with up to twenty people in a group, sitting on comfortable seats under a canvas roof in the back of a modified lorry. Most of the overlanders were women and almost all of the drivers were men. Relations seemed tense, some lorries seemed like rolling encounter groups. Africans had thrown rocks at them in some towns and two women were forcibly robbed of their cameras in broad daylight at the market in Boar, in northwest CAR. Others had better experiences.

Theft is a problem in Bangui, and as the overlanders kept a constant watch over their gear , I enjoyed both their company and protection. I prefer a tent because it’s clean, free of mosquitos and rats, and cools off fast at night, much better than the sweaty, rat-infested rooms for rent here. The equatorial rains fall almost daily this time of the season in Bangui, and although my tent leaked badly, I still got a good sleep and could dry everything out in the sporadic sunflecks during the day.

The campground is some seven kilometers from downtown, and one needs to first walk to the large market known as Kilometre Cino to find a shared taxi there. The insane, bizarre, unwashed and ragged live around the market because they find food there. One morning I saw an athletic young man, completely nude, gracefully lower himself, leopardlike, onto the pavement, and lap water from a puddle. An old woman at the market had a mad fixation against Whites. Once, she limped after me to chuck an empty yogurt container, hitting me painlessly in the head. The next day the same fool attacked again, crazily muttering something in Sango, the national language of CAR, or a tribal tongue. I jogged to escape her as dozens of amused people laughed.

I drank coffee, sold for 50 francs a cup at a coffee stand run by a friendly, talkative man wearing blue-jean pants and jacket, cowboy hat and Western buckle. The coffee was brewed over an open fire beside a road near the large market. A lady sold delicious guinea fowl, cooked on a charcoal grill across from the coffee stall. The coffee cowboy did an animated little show in which he ranted about the poor manners of the complaining French tourists and soldiers: “If they don’t like our food, our toilets, or the way we live, then they should quit spoiling my country and get the hell back home I”

The French Barracudas are military commandos strategically stationed in CAR to help maintain regional neo-colonialism, providing France enough military clout to rapidly intervene into the politics of several nearby countries if and when it chooses. France retains significant economic investment in Central Africa and protects itself

by keeping African leaders dependent upon it for their survival. The Centralafrican chief of state exists almost purely according to the degree of French support. When the French engineered the overthrow of CAR’s Bokassa in 1979, it was almost universally applauded. However, more spurious French intervention into CAR’s internal affairs is deeply resented by most Centralafricans.

Bokassa, a Napoleon fan and former French military officer in the Indo-China war, declared himself emperor of The Central African Empire in 1976, after having seized power in a military coup in 1966. He sired at least fifty-four children from numerous wives and imprisoned concubines. He had numerous real and imagined political opponents beaten, tortured and executed, and then had their corpses fed to zoo animals; he killed and imprisoned school children and was rumored to have eaten that tender flesh himself. Bokassa is now jailed on death row in Bangui, but not without a few supporters still, so he might never to be executed.

The police confiscate all passports at a checkpoint before one enters the city for the first time, and leave it be retrieved later from Immigration. Because it was Mother’s Day, and I needed my passport to cash traveler’s checks and to apply for seperate visas for the Congo and Zaire, the closed offices delayed my business. I only got my passport back after finally losing my temper at the Immigration office over continued, unexplained delays. A few days later I needed to return to Immigration to request a visa extension after I realized my original thirty-day visa was too short. I sheepishly gave my passport to a familiar clerk while apologizing for my earlier impatience. The clerk’s surprising responses “Vous avez eu raison.¹¹ (You were right!) However, they kept my passport for three days before issuing a ninety-day extension.

Visiting African capitals can pose official difficulties for travelers. Here travelers get their visas and permits, often confronting red tape. Some countries might require a letter of reference from one’s own embassy or a bank statement showing financial responsibility before issuing a visa. Fortunately, the Zaire embassy issues a two-month multiple-entry visa in only 1 1/2 hours for 10,000 francs; while the Congo consulate sells a fifteen-day visa for 4,000 francs, issued in one day where a friendly clerk sits in an austere office in front of a colorful wall-poster of Lenin, Che Guevera, and Patrice Lumumba. The Congo government normally doesn’t allow casual tourists to loiter long in their country. Some consulates refuse visas because they do not like a tourist’s appearance or country. Official business takes time and keeps one in places like Bangui longer than planned.

While waiting for bureaucratic events to unfold in Bangui, you might consider calling at the U.S. Information Library; a small, air-conditioned place with a tiny collection of books, magazines and Herald Tribunes, and video tapes of U.S. TV news. Or visit the U.S. Marine embassy guard mansion on the Ubangi for a drink at the bar and a swim in the pool. See the Boganda Museum of Ethnology and History, a small, wel1-organized museum sporting a 450-kilogram, 4.5-meter dead crocodile and a huge mounted gorilla said to have been killed while attacking a woman brewing beer. The museum also has many Aka (pygmy) and Bantu

artifacts. And quaff some fresh, ice-cold Mocaf lager brewed here, spared the destructive rigors of hot, bumpy, unrefrigerated travel. Or sit along the Ubangi and think about why you came to such a beautiful, but troubled place, with plenty to see but so little to do.

While daytime Bangui can be very pleasant, the city may seem fearsome after dark because of its reputation for street-crime, but never evokes the sheer terror of visiting a crime-ridden American city. Many people live in the unsanitary squalor in Bangui’s impoverished neighborhoods and suburbs. Near downtown there are quiet, shady side-streets and not far away, past the Mocaf brewery, on the riverbank is a row of rickety shacks which serve simple meals and beer. On the Ubangi are fisherman and smugglers plying their pirogues (dugout canoes); across the misty river is dreamy Zaire. Bangui is on the northern fringe of the great Central African rain forest which stretches roughly five degrees on each side of the equator for over a thousand miles through several nations from Africa’s West Coast almost to the Ruwenzori Mountains in Eastern Zaire.

I said goodbye to Alan at the beer shacks, before he went searching for a pirogue to take across the Ubangi to Zongo, Zaire. Later, I learned that he was thrown into jail for two days after attempting to change money on the street in Zongo. Isabelle found a job at a pharmacy in Bangui, and may still be working there, not wishing at that time to return to either Sudan or France.

One hot morning I wasted time drinking cold Mocaf beer under the swirling fans at the Hotel New Palace, an old colonial bar in central Bangui. The hotel overlooks the Place de la R6publiaue« a large traffic rotary going around CAR’s grotesque national monument to itself. The informal bar is now only open from the early morning to early afternoon. Until recently, the bar hosted beautiful prostitutes who were said by expatriates to be impossible to resist if one relaxed, cooling too long under the fans drinking the cold, fresh beer. Now the hotel is closed early by a government wary of prositutes spreading HIV, so the hookers ride in taxis, beckoning customers from the street.

When the hotel shut, I strolled around the rotary and saw a man selling books on the street. His books, mostly crumpled school texts in French, were clumped on a blanket placed on the sidewalk. I bought a novel by John Dos Passos and two moldy paperback editions of the short works by Herman Melville and Fyodor Dostoevsky. What a find! The musty books were probably lifted from some unlucky Peace Corps volunteer, as they were commonly having their houses broken into and getting things stolen. I tramped down the street past the swank Novotel Bangui and returned to my favorite place in Bangui, the beer shacks where I sat on a bench drinking more beer, watching the fisherman and idle barges floating on the sultry dreamscape of the river.

My thoughts drifted back to my rural childhood near a beautiful lake, the most substantive experience of my life, living in an ephemeral hamlet surrounded by dairy farms that nourished barely four generations of healthy families before falling to ruin. I remembered the big, leaking transnational landfill that replaced a family farm, and a dredged river that became a toxic agricultural drain, and the riverbank where the nesting, resting and feeding areas of passerine songbirds, herons and ducks were destroyed by the senseless gouging of

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the riverbed and the heinous logging and burning of the hawthorn, linden, ash, birch, maple and other trees. I recalled the choking dust, filling the air in the dead of a desiccating late summer day when the farmers often turned over their wheat stubble, things drifting away.

And the seagulls, so many things were becoming a gull, who left their scavenging at the dump to follow the tilling machinery, eating the worms and grubs exposed in the soil. Gone were the beaver, woodducks, fish, turtles, frogs and mussels, and the secret wooded seeps where the woodcocks and snipe rested and fed in autumn, the land and water trashed. Before that, family fisheries were ruined on the lake because the fish became too poisonous to eat or sell from industrial chemicals entering the water from runoff and rain. The obsession with guns, the suicides, the lonely drunkenness, problems with the cops, and yet another war. The raging crime and corrupt police power, the confusing gods, the drugs, the seperate angry worlds of black and white, the dead Indians, dispirited winos, sleaze, stupidity, greed, hate, racism, murders, boredom, ugliness, and the selfish arrogance of every corrupt, unjust political bureaucrat working at government’s rotten nadir in small-towns to the sociopathic zenith in high-flying Washington. And the same misdeeds migrate from Washington to Africa, seeking to foster another glorified, boring, polluted cesspool of a nation from innocent ignorance to shopping malls and unemployment, creating more homeless, more violence, and less plausible reason to cherish life. Do the Americans, with their technological might, want to destroy the African gardens in the same way its economic schemes have ruined their own family farms, or take away traditional communally possessed lands from the villages and give them over to private ownership for pillaging? Flood these poor police states with spunky, suburban peace corps types, foreign aid experts and military advisors so that the Africans might grow poisoned fields of cotton for export instead of organic corn and peanuts for themselves, trade food for exploitative industry and government, then drown themselves in narcotics, luxury goods, fiber optics and electrical wires, telephones, eighty-five insipid TV stations, pollution and unrecyclable waste. Let modern industry ravage the land, air, water and family. Build hospitals that treat only the rich, construct tract homes that no one can afford and erect desolate tenements that wharehouse the hapless poor, and open corrupt colleges that teach a deceitful elite the cunning to live off of the backs of others. Plant a greedy, selfish materialism and love of money that contradicts the most gracious ethical and spiritual teachings of Christianity, Islam and almost any other valued creed. Where is the superior morality that comes to replace love after creating a hatred of self in a corrupt, polluted world? Where is a pleasant place to live? What else can neo-colonialism possibly teach but tragic folly? What is this insidious, proselytizing force that repeatedly attacks Africa, always wanting slavery and ruin? Someday this raw, crass realm might be a wondrous American-built nirvana, as if the Yankees had made one at home, from their own charred wilderness, and weren’t chasing a few satanic delusions themselves.

One morning, I left Bangui by trafioue for Bayanga, near the southwest corner of the country where I hoped to find a boat descending

the Sangha River into the Republic of the Congo as far as the Sangha’s confluence with the Zaire river, so I might then enter Zaire.

On the way to Bayanga, I stopped at Berberati which is a diamond-rich town near the Cameroon border, rumored to still host a few European Nazis who came here after the last world war. The town has several restaurants serving imitative European-style meals. I was spared sleeping at the brothel near the market, staying instead with an American expatriate whom I met. The next day, I played tennis with the fellow on a cracked, cement court near a ruined European factory. The bush was so thick around the court, we hired a ballboy.

The American was a Baha’i teacher who also owned a general store in Berberati. A former Peace Corps volunteer in CAR, he spoke both Sango and French. He was in the process of closing his business, tired of the hassle of doing business in Africa, and gave a generous bonus to several African employees so that they might themselves set up their own shops. A few days after he distributed the rewards to his store employees, his house-servant approached him demanding a shop of his own. The American, after having lived over eight years in CAR, then remarked that any foreigners living in Africa who ever tell me that they understand Africans are lying. “It’s impossible,” he added.

He gave me W.P. Kinsella’s insipid little novel Shoeless Joe. As much as I like baseball, this frivolous rubbish read badly, so when I finished a third of the book, I gave it to a market wretch so that he could trade it to someone for food or money.

As I boarded a minivan at the market to go to Nola, a sweating youth was unloading boxes from a flatbed truck while enigmatically singing, “Lobaye, Ouham-Pend£, Mbomou, Vakaga, Bamingui-Bangoran, Haute-Sangha, Sangha…”, the names of CAR’s sixteen prefectures.

Naked, pot-bellied children played in a mud puddle, as one child peered beneath leaves that he lifted from the ground. Another child, with a grossly distended navel, dutifully wiped the bum of an infant, amid the foraging goats and breeding flies.

South of Berberati where a bridge had collapsed, the minivan needed to be ferried across a wide, turbulent river and once across, we rode further into the great tropical,rainforest , rising along the narrow dirt track. At Nola, I stayed with two young American Peace Corps volunteers who taught high school there. Nola has a port on the Sangha River and is surrounded by hills of verdant forest.

One day an African school colleague visited the volunteers. He recently had cracked his wife’s head with a shovel, sending her to the hospital, but got into little trouble himself, nor did he show remorse, unless a drinking and pot problem is a sign of regret. On another day,

I saw two young men severely beating a woman on a street, before a dozen excited and laughing onlookers. Afterwards, the half-naked woman stood up with hysterically mustered vigor to verbally taunt her weary tormentors who threw up their arms and safely ignored her.

I spent time reading from a nice library built by successive generations of American volunteers who came to stay in the same house. Reading is a special indulgence. Extended foreign travel denies a traveler normal pleasures, including choice literature. A traveler misses the great libraries of America because one has an enormous amount of spare time in which to read, as well as many questions to

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research about one’s travel. U.S. Information Libraries exist in most third world capitals, primarily propaganda mills, but also unintended gifts to the roving reader.

One morning, we rented a pirogue to go about fifteen kilometers north, upstream on the Mamb£r£ River. The Mamb£r6 and Kad£’i Rivers merge at Nola to form the Sangha, which flows south through the Congo, emptying into the 2aire River. In the Congo, the Sangha flows through vast lowland swamps, near a mysterious jungle pool, Lake T£l£, rumored to harbor an extinct dinosaur, the mythical Mokele M’bembe. Access to the area that we were going to visit is controlled, but we were allowed in because the teachers were friends with the local gendarmes.

We disembarked from the pirogue at a small settlement of leaf-covered frame huts and followed a path into the jungle. On the walk, I saw a blue butterfly land on a branch nearby, fold its wings and camouflage itself as a dead leaf in the foilage, almost instantly disappearing in front of my eyes. I couldn’t resist touching it and seeing the brown leaf erupt into azure wings, the cryptic Nvmphalid fluttering away into the jungle.

After walking on a narrow footpath for about two kilometers, amid throngs of butterflies, we came upon a startling sight: a diamond mine being worked by dozens of frantic miners. It was a scene from the pages of Tarzan, a reminder of my childhood fantasy of Africa; a concealed jungle mine in a secluded kingdom that foreign adventurers and mercenaries, bandoleered and goaded by myth and rumor, were always ruthlessly seeking to find and plunder. Under the towering trees of the great forest, the sweating Bantus worked shoeless and half naked, digging like demons into the earth while Muslim foremen stood over them in white flowing gowns. The work was done by hand, except for a few gasoline powered sump-pumps evacuating water from the pits. At one site, sixty to seventy people toiled like ants, madly shoveling white gravel into piles to be sifted. The largest site had about twenty pits spread over about a relatively small plot of wasted jungle.

Nearby a tiny boom-town clung to a steep slope. Its only street was was a twisting footpath beneath tall trees that blocked out most of the sky. Recently, the miners had been ravaged by an epidemic, but the survivors stayed on living in tiny but functional stick-frame houses, roofed with leaves. A shop sold coffee, canned sodas, Mocaf lager, and Guinness stout from Cameroon. Lifting up the cover of a cooking pot, I found the remains of an African porcupine stewing. While I drank a cup of coffee at the shop, a Muslim merchant marched past followed by a small entourage of Aka pygmies, who carried his steamer trunks and cardboard boxes on their heads, walking somberly in single file. The stout and sturdy Aka work cheaply, and not always needing money accept booze and cigarettes, forming the bottom of the economic ladder here, much like Indians and Blacks do in the Americas.

The rain forest hushed all the drama like a great secret; as soon as we left the mines we were again swallowed by the tranquil, damp wood and swarms of butterflies. On the oirooue back to Nola, we met a Muslim diamond buyer. He opened a folded sheet of paper, taken from a shirt pocket, to display a dozen small diamonds for which he had paid about 500 dollars. The diamond buyer got off the pirogue before Nola to avoid the aendarmes, and walked to a road to flag a trafiaue for Berberati,

the center of the diamond business in CAR. Most of these diamonds are exchanged underground, then smuggled out of the country.

Along the banks of the Mamb£r£ River are many small dams with mining pits behind them. The Bantus and Akas have always built dams to trap fish, which are then killed by using a natural poison derived from a plant. In many places the incessant use of poison has resulted in an overkill of the fish, ruining the fishery. Building dams for mining alluvial diamonds is restricted to the short dry season, when people can block the reduced flow of water, and then dig up the river bed.

Saturday night, Nola’s Medila bar was packed and the dance floor jammed with people pulsating to Afro-pop from Zaire—a blend of rumba, modern electronic music and native rhythms. Men dance alone, with women, or each other. I began the evening as a stale wall-flower, but after guzzling a fair quantity of beer and overcoming my shyness, danced all three of the above styles. Several times, 1 impulsively flopped on the floor like a landed fish, rotating on my stomach and gyrating absurdly to the rhythms. When I wanted a leak, a dance companion grabbed my hand and led me outside to a place behind the bar where she casually squatted and pointed for me to piss as well. I then saw that we were relaxing upon a massive heap of human waste and garbage, covering about one hundred square-feet, surely the sloppiest toilet in creation. Bar Medila rocked smashingly, but despite the therapy, I left for Bayanga the next morning with a massive hangover.

To get to Bayanga, I rode some fifty kilometers sprawled on top of baggage carelessly tied to a canvas roof, the roof supported by metal struts, over the bed of a Toyota pickup. Under the six of us on the roof was a crammed bed of passengers. I had no option but to climb ten feet onto the roof or wait another day or two at a crossroads village.

I had already spent an uncomfortable night there, staying in a stick shelter at the roadside. Someone warned me that buffalo came out of the forest at night to graze in the fields and frequently came into the settlement. The fields were man-made savannas carved out of the jungle, still visible at some distance.

The red laterite road snaked through the tall forest, passing several small Bantu villages, many hosting Aka camps with their curious shelters built like leaf-covered, stick-frame igloos. The pickup was overloaded, its brakes bad and its frame bent from too much weight carried in the past. I held tight to a rubber strap cut from an inner tube used to tie down the baggage, but worried that a flat or a quick stop might cause the load or the truck to tip, I was ready to leap.

At a stop, I met a Bantu poacher from near Bayanga. The guileless gentleman told me that he went with “his pygmies” into the forest and stayed as long as a week hunting mostly elephants and bongo, a large forest antelope. He also shot gorillas for food and perhaps out of fear, as they can be dangerous animals in places where they have been hunted. They are feared by the Aka as well, who are sometimes seriously mauled by gorillas. He asked if I wanted to go with him on a hunt. Although I abhor the relentless destruction of Africa’s elephants, the man was only doing what he could to make a living and I couldn’t hate him for it. I thought it might be worthwhile to go into the jungle with him and document the experience. But, the more I weighed the idea, the more dangerous it seemed, because of the police who, if they discovered

me with an ivory poacher, might find a good excuse to busy themselves with a profitable arrest.

At Bayanga, I stayed in an abandoned company house at the defunct Yugoslavian lumber camp. Bayanga, surrounded by rain forest, is about 120 kilometers south of Nola on the Sangha River. The muddy river, rising with the increased rains, is several hundred yards wide here. During the rainy season, barges come from Brazzaville, Congo to pick up lumber, and also pass here going upstream to Salo and Nola to drop off petrol or to pick up more lumber. As I was here too early in the season to find a barge, I wanted to go by road another thirty kilometers south to Lidjombo, at the end of the road (and the nation), to possibly find a pirogue going farther south towards the Congo.

Bayanga is both poor and picturesque; a paradoxical juxtaposition of the impoverished human condition against the splendid natural scenery of Central Africa. Only cans of sardines and tomato paste were available at the few simple stores in town, and the early-morning market sold stale bread, peanut butter, doughnuts, caterpillars and several avocados for ready-to-eat food. No restaurants either. While strolling through the almost empty market, I stopped to buy some sweets from a young man. As I walked away, he followed me asking if I could hire him for some work. It was impossible to accommodate him, having not really enough for myself to do.

There wasn’t enough money circulating nor enough necessity to support a good market in Bayanga. Nearly everyone still harvested their food from family gardens. People have traditionally raised what crops they need, trading amongst themselves their surpluses. The new market seemed a government attempt to prepare the villagers for a changing economy, as if stemming from an economic lesson in primary school.

The room at the lumber camp, without a lock on the door, had been ransacked for any valuable furnishings. Drops of water trickled into the sink, and the toilet still flushed. I made a wooden bed frame comfortable by spreading my tent, sleeping bag and ground pad over some loose slats that once held a mattress. This homemaking, combined with my nicely hung mosquito net, made for a brilliant rest.

There is one bar in Bayanga and plenty of mbako, moonshine that keeps any person who can afford it loaded and charged enough to bravely face the rugged world none of us made. Honey beer, commonly found in the north and middle of CAR, doesn’t seem to exist here. Fortunately, most minivan drivers are now sober Muslims, so drunk trafiaue driving is posing less of a constant hazard than in times past. However, to buck this trend, the Lidjombo trafiaue driver stops here for a cocktail en route. Pot is ubiquitous because many people seem fond of it.

Early one morning, I listened to the Lakers/Pistons NBA playoff game on the Armed Forces short-wave radio station. It transmitted badly, but I got the score and found out the Pistons led the series 3-2. Eleven hours of darkness is a lot of down-time to silently contend with each night. Did these people lie awake as I did listening to the hum of mosquitos, sweating from the heat under a bug net, hearing a rat scratch a wall, thinking about the past? The memories of distant places drifted through my mind, I felt lonely and dissatisfied. The more I traveled, the less I seemed to exist. To not have family and to remain

unmarried is almost unthinkable for Africans, and yet there I was, proof that foriegners no longer needed those ancient, customs.

Before I could leave Bayanga, my passport was stamped again by the oendarmei common procedure for foreigners in many CAR locales: “seen to enter, seen to leave,” say the pages of stamps. The official asked for a small sum of money for a visa. When I replied that I had a visa, he chatted meekly about the cost of petrol, paper, pens, of all the things it took to run his sleepy post, which sees only a handful of vehicles each day, all of which must stop. What he really meant was that he wanted money for a drink. I didn’t want to accommodate him, but as this was the only conversation I was going to get that day, I smiled and slipped him 500 francs, receiving my passport back. That was the first bribe that I paid in Africa, it was a beautiful day and as I needed to wait an uncertain period of time for the trafiaue to Lidjombo, I was doing both of us a favor by not arguing with the gentleman over exotic principles and a piddling amount of money, and so I waited in contented peace.

I sat with the driver, in another Toyota pickup, riding over the narrow dirt road that goes to Lidjombo through the Sangha forest. The forest is impenetrable except by following overgrown Aka portals or by using a machete to hack through the wall of chaotic vegetation guarding the less-chaotic, muted realm of the great trees. The roadside vegetation takes advantage of the increased sunlight, growing swiftly, as thick as an unshewn hedge. Clumps of tall, slanting bamboo wildly searched for the sun like the other adventitious plants.

We met a small group of Aka, some with filed teeth, who stood along the road, wearing thrift-store rags. They carried simply-woven baskets and wore handmade backpacks. The backpack had an animal skin support, its basket beautifully wound from plant fibers with bark strips serving as shoulder and head straps. Inside the pack were the blackened slabs of a smoked duiker, including its head, wrapped in freshly cut leaves. The driver bought two of the better cuts for 700 CFA.

June 18: Lidjombo is a dog-eared village of about 500 people, with rectangular wooden shacks built over eroded gullies for streets that curve around the houses before dipping steeply to the river. The shacks lean according to the miscalculations of their builders and to the whims of their roofs, but each shack is similar, with few windows. Africans like to splash a little paint on their houses, usually whitewash—a few distinctive dots or washes—or sometimes paint a minimalist mural depicting a floral or sports scene, but the houses, both mud and wood, go largely unpainted as it’s too expensive. Lidjombo offers very little in the way of food. The one tiny store sells sardines, bread, locally grown coffee, tea, sugar cubes and salt.

Across from the store, a young man was building some wooden tables under a thatched roof that is, someday, meant to be a market. Lidjombo is bordered by a large coffee plantation that went out of business four years ago. The processing factory near the river is already in ruins. The coffee trees looked healthy, shaded by taller forest trees left in the plantation while the rain forest loomed nearby in the background.

I checked into a small wooden inn named Amiti£, open for barely a month. Bar Amiti£» next door, was three months old and had the only generator in town in which to power electric lights and recorded music. The bar attracted several people without money who enjoyed asking me for drinks. The previous evening, a few young men and children were dancing while seven or eight other people sat for a while, having a good time drinking beer. But, the bar closed at 9:00 PM for lack of business. A large crowd of young children gather outside most rural CAR bars, intensely studying the action. In Lidjombo I saw their curious, shining brown eyes peering through the narrow cracks in the plank walls, reflecting the light from within the bar.

The muddy Sangha flows swiftly before the quay, the grassy riverbank in front of the commissariat» where they have confiscated my passport. Across the river, the thick rain forest runs down to the bank, uprooted trees bending over and into the water. Lidjombo is the end of the road. A Cameroon town lies just south, across the Sangha. About forty kilometers downstream is the Republic of the Congo where I wanted to go—if I could find a boat.

That morning, I returned from the market to finish reading A. F. Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway« an uninspired collection of literary anecdotes. The final two chapters are descriptions about Hemingway’s mental deterioration, subsequent treatment and suicide. Hemingway also was said to have remarked that his father only talked to him about sex twice: once, when he was told what a “bugger” was and again, when his father defined ^,‘mashing^,, to him, after Caruso had been arrested for mashing. Hemingway once said that his father stank. Did his comment reflect anything other than a child’s acute sense of smell?

In the end, Hemingway was as paranoid as a demonized skid row wino. Mental illness is like physical illness, an animal disorder that may or may not be cured, ,the temporal mind breaking before the body. A symptom of irreversible deterioration is entropy? something wanting to recycle whatever we were. Some of us rot after a long life, while others destruct as teenagers or even earlier, at birth or shortly thereafter when someone important might have forgotten to demonstrate their love. I can’t begrudge anyone their ruin? it’s a natural process of winding down, part of a general summing up and fading away. And this is what I thought about Hemingway, staring at the shadows dancing off the wall by the faint illuminations of a kerosene lamp.

Melancholy is an odd sensation of homesickness and fatigue from idleness, which insidiously eroded my spirit and cash. The only place to change money was in Bangui, several days backward by transport. I could wait here only a few days, hoping for something to click.

I was surprised to meet an American, Michael, a biologist studying gorillas at a field station named Bai Hokou, some SO kilometers south. He hired Aka who already knew more about the habits of gorillas and the life of the forest than a single visiting scientist might hope to discover for himself in a lifetime. I chatted with him over drinks at Bar Amiti6. Michael was interested in all aspects of gorilla ecology, but his field study focused on the gorilla’s eating regimen, poorly understood by scientists, but better known by the Aka.

The western lowland gorilla’s range is limited, for unknown reasons, to jungle areas west of the Ubangi, even though similar,

apparently suitable habitat exists only across the river in Zaire. Rivers form effective barriers for many animals, until those rivers and their natural circumstances change, which over time they do. Gorillas don’t readily swim but this seems an inadequate explanation for their range limitation. The Ubangi is strewn with a multitude of islands, leaving only small gaps of water between land in many places; during past periods of drought, natural calamity or climatic change, any curious animal could probably have waded across the river. The African rain forest has at turns shrank and expanded due to climatic change, which separated and isolated animal and plant species from each other, surviving in “islands” of suitable habitat, often along rivers or in mountains which can “shift” or preserve ecological niches. Overhunting, disease or inadequate forage are other possible explanations for the gorilla’s apparent absence from western Zaire. The rain forests of southwest CAR, the Congo, Gabon (where gorillas are even seen on wild beaches), Cameroon and Nigeria are the last stronghold of the lowland gorilla, with isolated populations also found in eastern Zaire. Hunted for food both by Aka and Bantu, the lowland gorilla can be belligerent and intolerant of humans, thus difficult to study. Contact at close quarters, amidst thick foliage, can be an abrupt and frightening and typically brief, before the animal flees. As many as S50 gorillas might live within Bai Hokou’s twenty-five square-kilometers, a dense population.

The Sangha forest’s rugged terrain and remoteness from the world’s timber markets has preserved its original ecology thus far. Gorillas are distinctly threatened in the wild, like most large mammals in Africa. If suitable habitat is not protected, they’re doomed to extinction in the wild. Corruption, illegal loggers and miners, new settlers and game poachers threaten the Sangha’s flora and fauna. An international bio-reserve, in adjoining areas of Cameroon, CAR and the Congo, will help protect the land shared by these nations. But successfully controlling commercial access, stopping poaching, and sensitively modifying traditional ways of life still hinder conservation.

African rain forests, in comparison with the Amazon and forests in tropical Asia, have been thought poorer in species diversity, but this assumption was based upon old studies made in Zaire and Nest Africa. Recent studies in nearby Cameroon indicate that the Sangha forest might support a richer diversity of life than previously thought.

Like Bayanga, almost all of Lidjombo’s buildings are built from rough lumber. The one-story auberoe is divided into six rooms along a central corridor. One corner of the inn was used by a woman for cooking over a log fire built on the dirt floor, the smoke sifting through the thatched roof. A little light burst through tiny windows and flecked through slits between the boards, casting shadows, but much of the interior was always murky. At night, or when it rained, the windows were closed by wooden shutters. The rain, however, blew into my room through the cracks between the slats. To overcome darkness, there was a small kerosene wick lamp.

The previous night at the quay, in a sinister scene lit by flickering primus lanterns, the commissairei surrounded by a few soldiers, said that I must pay him 3,000 CFA for a “visa” to traverser

la frontiere—a bribe. I sat stupidly, listening to the commissaire dictate his rules. I didn’t pay, but they kept my passport, and told me about a “Senegalese” <a general term used to refer to a foreign Muslim trader) living across the river in Cameroon who had an hors-bord (a pirogue with an outboard motor) and chartered his dugout to take fares and goods to Ouesso, the nearest town in the Republic of the Congo.

I wished to rid my head completely of the obsession that brought me to a place like this, live a meaningful life, gain a few pounds, and act more sympathetic towards the world. I wanted to fully satiate a selfish, foolish passion and after that, be satisfied with the planet as it exists, close to a home. Meanwhile, I couldn’t mistake myself for an African, American or any other animal.

Later that same day, I heard the racket of a motor and rushed to join an excited crowd gathered at the riverbank. A magnificent eighty foot, three-story barge had appeared at the quay, arriving out of context as if from another planet, the first boat of the rainy season. The custom officials dutifully went over the boat, more attentive to getting bribes than in finding contraband. All boats going upstream and downstream need to stop here for entry and exit formalities.

Mike had already boarded to meet the French Captain. Mike’s news was depressing. The barge didn’t take fares and was going the wrong way for me anyway—back to Nola. It was setting buoys and marking the new season’s shipping channel along the way—but then it would return this way, after an indefinite stop at Nola, en route back to Brazzaville. I soon met the Captain, shook his hand and extended a hollow hello, feeling sheepish and a tad guilty for having stupidly wanted something that wasn’t mine, an imperfect wrong-way dream.

I paced about Lijombo, listening for the sound of an outboard and talking with soldiers drunk on mbaco (moonshine). At the auberge, I kept the window open not only for air and light but also to hear motors so I could run to the river, about 150 muddy yards away, if another boat arrived.

In Bangui, I read Beryl Markham’s Nest with the Niaht which I borrowed from a small lending library at the campground. Two of the best chapters are about lions, one when she was attacked by a lion as a young girl, and another when she was again attacked while walking with two Masai. The descriptions of the Masai’s ability to ward off lions with spears are particularly good. I was now reading Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). Despite the vivid writing in each book, Africa is largely portrayed as a vast zoo, colonial plantation or as an exotic playground for the peerless Europeans.

I enjoyed about three hours of good reading a day, sometimes more. The best time to read was in the quiet morning, when the mind was clear and alert, eyeing the fresh light perfectly. Nhile I liked reading in the evening, the dim, stuttering light emitted from a sooty kerosene lamp was barely adequate and strained the eyes. Candles are better- At best, a tropical wayfarer adjusts to the balanced cycle of light and darkness, going to sleep early and awakening near dawn, like the locals, if one isn’t groggy from partying all night.

5:30 PM: Bar Amiti£ cranked on the electrical generator and with it, the reggae of Peter Tosh. I felt like a wandering medieval monk, celibate not for God, but for fear of AIDS from my sole company on

4-2

forsaken planet X. I might as as well consider myself diseased, if not with AIDS, than by whatever else is killing me. Sex was readily available, although at some unknown risk.

I sat on a stool in back of the small auberoe staring at a grassy soccer field and a three-room clapboard, tin-roofed, open-ported school. Lidjombo’s homes resemble fish shacks on a wharf or outbuildings on a farm. The daytime sky changed quickly from clear to cloudy to rain in a flash. Uhile goats and chickens foraged in the soccer field, there was a beautiful sunset in the west over the green treetops of Cameroon. The sky was a fading blue and orange, combed with vague, hazy clouds. I resisted buying beer for as long as possible. I thought about listening to baseball and getting the standings. Eight PM in Lidjombo is three PM in New York, prime time for a Saturday night afternoon—game on the radio.

I took a wooden chair from the small bar and moved outside with a bottle of “33″ Export du Cameroon to watch the stars sparkling in the dark sky. I sat shirt less, barefoot and wearing shorts enjoying the perfect temperature. I waited until almost nine for the baseball game to come in clearly. A bent, old man walked by in the shadows, and without prompting, said: “I wish I had some batteries”, but didn’t stop and disappeared into the village night.

June 19: I awoke early in the morning to the sound of an hors-t?qrd. False call. The hors-bord belonged to the barge that remained docked overnight. Although my window and ears were still open, I considered returning to Bangui to look for a boat going down the Ubangi, a busier river. It would be easier to connect with river transport there, or if unsuccessful, cross overland to Zaire and travel by road to Kisangani.

I felt stagnant, as if time has been welded inert. I couldn’t explain my presence to anyone except by saying that I wanted to move, the direction became increasingly irrelevent. Idleness in Lidjombo is intolerable, perhaps a crime. Proper deportment can’t be cleanly separated from an animal’s indigenous environment because something is always left behind. Zoo and human responses to loss of environment: 1) maladaption to stress; <2> abnormal sexuality; <3> quiet staring; <<0 restless pacing and constantly testing boundaries; <5) depression, neurosis, and madness; <6> conversion of neurosis into physical disability; <7) suffering from chronic loneliness, loss of enthusiasm. According to Gandi, the Cameroonian on the lorry from hell, only people can reflect upon their condition because of their self-awareness, forming a vague line of separation between themselves and other animals. And we only suppose that other animals can’t, in some way, reflect upon their past, although chimpanzees, and other animals, seem to learn to recognize themselves in a mirror. But humans can’t realize their entire condition. There is invisible consciousness and all else is food; an edible world feeding a mysterious, solitary beast.

After I returned from the river this morning, my kind hosts came by with breakfast: two morsels of spicy crocodile, bread, four beianets (deep-fried balls of dough, similar to doughnuts), and a cup of boiled coffee. I was constantly hungry and grateful for any food.

11:00 AM: The police came to the room to say that I was wanted at the quay. The commissaire was disturbed. I didn’t understand everything

the policeman Mas saying, but he seemed irked about the fact that I wasn’t leaving fast enough. The commissaire said that my tourist visa was expiring, although I had seventy days left. I explained that I had to wait for the rumored Senegalese with his outboard pirogue, that I didn’t have any idea when that might be, but hopefully today, and if not today, I was leaving soon for Bangui. The commissaire didn’t like my indefinite flexibility, perhaps because he was out 3,000 francs if I failed to cross the frontier. The tone of the palaver wasn’t pleasant. He asked why I didn’t get on the barge. I answered that the boat was going the wrong way, and that the captain didn’t take passengers. The commissaire was disappointed because my fate was unkind and he made me feel responsible for his displeasure.

1:0^ PM: Another visit to the quay. Mike and two Aka were loading a pirogue with supplies to carry downstream to his camp. Look for them again in National Geographic. I wished that I could get a start south with him, but didn’t ask.

A soldier gave Mike a note to take to the Senegalese in Cameroon, asking him to come here so that I could talk to him. The soldier wanted to bargain for me. He and a friend wanted some beer for their help. There were a dozen cases Df it sitting in the sun in front of the commissariat, recently unloaded from a pirogue coming from Cameroon, and now spoiling in the sun. The bar was too slow to retrieve its prize and I winced to see the beer going bad, tomorrow’s headache.

The soldier mentioned 50,000 CFA as the pirogue price to Ouesso, telling me that three Europeans had been here three weeks ago and paid the Senegalese 150,000 CFA ($550) for the same ride. I told him that Mike said it should cost only 15,000 francs. If 50,000 CFA was the real price, then it exceeded my ability to pay.

Despite the poor news at the quay, I was content to read in my room. Books take me far away, on an easier journey. The hushed din of playing children, mixed with the passive mumblings of goats, sheep, chickens and songbirds, filtered into the room. From the noise alone, this could be rural America. The soothing sounds were familiar and comforting, a natural hymn that one might hear anywhere outside a city from birth to death, the chorus of recognizable life.

My advice for anyone coming here: Plan on getting to know the police and soldiers, whether at their posts or in the bars and palm wine stands. Be clever, but don’t excite them; they can be distracted from creating mischief. Also, plan on spending $100 in CFA a week and then add $200 cash for the unexpected. The officials try to blackmail a person in the gentlest of ways, laughing and wanting to be friends, but one should avoid paying them. They have your passport and know all the angles, but the wise laugh along, while holding on to their wallets.

The officials are as bored and cynical with foreign tramps as you are with them. Being in uniform and drunk, provides the enough courage for some soldiers to intimidate or steal.

Transport is relatively expensive; generally 12 CFA per kilometer, but 1,000 CFA just to go thirty kilometers from here to Bayanga. Gasoline is about 300 CFA a liter, and the soldiers at each checkpoint demand a payoff from each trafiaue driver, often several thousand francs. Police checkpoints exist at each major town and sometimes there is another stop for the conservation department as well. They all

inspect personal identification of drivers and various passengers, and the condition of the vehicle. There is almost always some infraction, the driver paying on the spot.

Out of Africa might be better titled Out of Europe. Europeans were claiming one last “empty” place, with a typical self-serving unawareness of failed colonies elsewhere. The future consequences of this blind attitude might have been better anticipated from previous experience. Karen Blixen lived in Africa as a joy-riding colonialist, a privileged merchant living on easy street, her possessions and life ruthlessly protected by her colonial government. She was a wonderful writer of dreamy fantasies lacking a true crux because she failed to adequately portray the actual magnitude of African discontent with colonialism, and indeed symbolizes some of its worst elements.

In telling their interesting tales, both Blixen and Markham gloss over racial bigotry and colonial injustice. Neither writer, enrapt by her own remarkable life, had enough awareness of the temporality of the colonial debacle which would soon collapse into native revolt and violence, leaving Africans suddenly facing monumental problems in forming nations. Each writer was notable for discussing some of the contradictions and ironies of the colonial situation, but despite this, I doubt if many literate Africans like either of these carpetbaggers, who gave them a lot of condescending verbiage to swallow without a decent apology for being there. Ditto for Hemingway.

My apology for remaining in Lidjombos 1 was marooned, stuck in its muck. The future seemed an impending accident to be awaited in fallow isolation with passive anticipation. But why rush to disappointment or folly? Nothing is put in one place forever. I wanted to roll on smooth bearings, useful coincidence and good judgment. An Aka footpath goes to Ouesso, but I hadn’t the wherewithal to walk it, lacking Aka guides,

CFA and at least a week’s supply of food and sundries for everyone.

3:45 PM: I walked to the river, finding an hors-bord making a wake for Lidjombo. It was the long-awaited Senegalese; a lanky, serious man who was going to the Congo frontier in two days. He wanted 25,000 CFA for me and 10,000 for my backpack, forty kilometers for $130. No argument or bargaining—I said no and that was it. I didn’t have 35,000 CFA left. The Senegalese mentioned that had I gone with Michael to his camp, I could have found a cheaper lift from there to the border.

I might have went to Berberati or Bangui, changed money and returned to hike the Aka path, or floated with the Senegalese, or waited indefinitely for a supposed barge going south, but this journey wasn’t that important. The trafiaue for Nola was going to leave at eight the next morning. I shook hands with a soldier who seemed as happy as I was with my decision to abandon Lidjombo for Bangui, as long as I left soon and took my weird inertia along.

Lidjombo is a great place for that creative getaway vacation or for a wild honeymoon. National Geographic will love Amiti£« surely one of the sweetest auberoes in Central Africa. Not enough loose women around to make it a brothel yet, so everything still smells like new!

5:30 PM: Since dining on two spicy morsels of crocodile early this morning, I drank only a cup of coffee. To my delight, the baker delivered a fresh, delicious loaf of bread. Supper was a margarined baguette, and a tin of sardines, solemnly eaten as if I were jailed.

7:25 PM: At sunset, I drank Mistzig d’Alsace, sweetly brewed in Cameroon, again pulling a chair and table outside the bar. The moon was an upturned sliver, a mystical Islamic crescent, almost due west in the sunset which killed a hot, sunny day. Perhaps the quality of a nation’s beer reflects its state of civilization, but if so, why does a more civilized America offer so many acrid, watery brews? As I sat drinking beer and contemplating the fading colors of the sky, the children, attracted by the only electric light and racket in the village, came to dance at Bar Amiti£. A rampaging mother came to drag a seven or eight-yeai—old child off the dance floor, whipping the screaming kid with a stick. When he held for dear life on to the stick, she beat him with her hands. Mothers are such monstrous creatures! Other children began crying. The loud music was heard all over town and the poor kid instinctually responded to the compelling rhythms. I came to drink, but the children only came to dance. What a splendid sensation to read, sip beer or stare at the stars, listening to the night, while curious strangers came to shake hands, most simply saying hello and goodbye.

Afterward, retiring to my room, I recalled a sappy quatrain from Edward Fitzgerald’s first translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “…come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.”

A glass of beer, a book, but whither thou? Sad that Persia is no longer so liberal, or that the world can’t be remade from what we think we have come to know. Rats scurried on the rafters while the bar blasted thunderous music until 11:30. Rats were familiar companions, brothers in the food chain and fellow travelers, wanting crumbs and bananas.

When people are too rich .or wasteful, they recycle the excess. The night’s final sound was the dull roll of tom-toms softly resonating through Lidjombo’s still air, which lulled me into welcome sleep.

I left Lidjombo on June 20, riding for ten hours on several different vehicles. When I picked up my passport, a soldier asked if I had slept well. “Yes.” He then asked if I had had a woman. “No.” He responded that I should have asked le patron at Bar Amiti£ for one. Thank you. I appeared sexually wanton to him; perhaps the soldier knew my problems better than I did.

The crowded trafioue vans fly down the dusty road to Bangui, mowing down unlucky goats and chickens foraging in their paths. After Berberati, mud homes with tamped, red-dirt yards hug the narrow strand of road. Behind the houses are gardens, and in the distance is forest. The vans are often delayed by frequent breakdowns and rain, when the road is temporarily closed to prevent ruin. Arriving back at Bangui, after two long days of traveling, I felt as if I had arisen from years spent underwater and was beginning to breathe easily once again.

THE UBANGI RIVER

I first saw Jay at Kilometre Cino in Bangui where he stood apart from the market throng, walking with a heavy wooden staff, and wearing chic American-made hiking boots and a rainbow-colored tarn. I met him later that day at the campground where he was nesting in a leanto that he had constructed from a tarp. A twenty-six yeai—old student from Washington D.C., Jay had spent the past year at university in Dakar, Senegal, before flying to Cameroon and coming overland to CAR. Jay was a soft-spoken and well-educated, middle-class American. Jay was also a Rastafarian, but he seldom showed his dreadlocks kept hidden under his tarn. Rastafarianism is an odd idea for older Centralafricans who object to pot-smoking and the dreadlocks.

Jay’s intended goal was to travel on the Ubangi and Zaire Rivers, then cross Central Africa overland to East Africa, and finish at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where his brother was a university professor. As I was still looking for a barge down the Ubangi, wanting to get to Kisangani by boat, and then go overland to Kenya, we joined up in the search. A few days later, we found a Brazzaville-bound barge, but wasted an entire day at the dock, with our bags packed, only to be abruptly refused passage at the last moment. Despite persistent pleas, the officious clerks of the boat company flatly declined our business. We sadly watched the barge untie from its moorings and slowly motor off into the water, joining the current and launching downriver without us.

That evening, over a few bottles of beer, we had an idea. The barge would have to make a customs stop at Zinga, across the Ubangi from Zaire and near CAR’s southern border with the Congo. Perhaps if we went to Zinga we might try talking with the captain in person. Early the next morning we found transport to a hamlet near Zinga from the trafiaue stand near the market. It was the typical hot, crowded trip in a van, and although it lasted only a few hours, it couldn’t end soon enough. When we finally arrived at a crossroad, as close as we could get to Zinga by trafiauei we had a heated argument with the baggageman who wanted a considerable sum of extra money for our packs, which we refused to pay. He was still screaming obscenities at us as we walked away down a forest lane. We hiked the final ten kilometers over a rutted road along the Lobaye River, past coffee plantations under tall rainforest and through clouds of butterflies—a wondrous spectacle to behold and a testament to a land not yet decimated of its insects by herbicides and pesticides.

We passed an old man sitting in front of a mud house playing an African sitar, a handmade mandolin-like instrument with strings made from fishline. We stopped for awhile to listen to him sing in both French and Sango. He picked up his notes as we watched him sing, and spontaneously putting down our sweaty packs for a rest, we sat stunned in utter wonder at this splendid moment that captured us.

We met the Ubangi where the Lobaye emptied into it, just south of the small village of Zinga. The Ubangi is about three hundred meters wide here and pirogues cross freely back and forth between Zaire and CAR. Docked at customs was the same barge we had seen the day before in

Bangui. We marched up to the customs post, only to be ignobly searched and have our passports confiscated. Inspecting my bag, a soldier rudely demanded my fish hooks. Realizing that he Mas just beginning his request list, I put him off by telling him I’d give him some later.

Zinga has a small auberge., where Jay and I took a room, sharing the same rickety double bed to save money, like Melville’s Ishmael and Queequeg waiting for a whaler in Nantucket. It rained daily and the thatched roof leaked. Almost always, the streets were slippery with red mud from the equatorial rains, but a rare emergent sun, with extreme heat sometimes dried the dirt for a few hours. The intense cloudbursts were brief, and while the rain’s coolness was welcome, the almost constant dark clouds shaded the uncertainty of our situation more gray.

Our second attempt to board the barge was a failure; an official had radioed Bangui and was told not to let us on. We were now somewhat infamous, at least in the small world of Ubangi boat traffic, and were again denied by explicit instructions not to let us board. We sought out the captain who told us that if we had seen him first in Bangui he might have taken us, but now it was impossible. I think he was merely trying to save face with us. Unbilleted passengers were illegal and an unnecessary hassle, so why bother? For the last time we watched the barge untie from its moorings and depart.

The soldier who wanted the fish hooks made several visits, each time staggering drunk and asking for things. I eventually gave him some unsnelled hooks and was successful in diverting him from my radio and clothes. After a few days he ceased to be a problem and would stumble by the auberoe completely ignoring us.

Soon after the departure of the barge, a passenger boat appeared from downriver and docked off the small village of Batanga in Zaire, across the Ubangi from Zinga. We learned that this boat was continuing upriver to Zongo, the city opposite Bangui, and would return in a few days to Batanga, stopping for trade and passengers before heading for Mbandaka, the Zaire city on the Zaire River above the confluence with the Ubangi. Me decided to wait for it.

The six days at Zinga was a monotonous time, broken by walks along the river, reading or drinking beer at the only saloon. The greatest monument in Zinga is an ancient rusting steel barge, beached on the bank where people now use the rusting decks and bulkheads to dry laundry. There is also an old tin wharehouse with a dusty locomotive and cobwebbed train equipment, a colonial Frenchman’s busted dream from long ago. The French forced Centralafricans to build roads here, and roads and railroads in the French Congo, many miles downstream. The work was humiliating and grueling, and many natives died of fatigue, punishment and disease, a long way from home.

Zinga is a quiet place with only the rare truck appearing, coming over the rough lane that we had walked on, carrying goods for town or bags of coffee to be loaded onto the barges. Each night there were tomtoms, the talking drums of Central Africa, and the sound carried animal mystery and magic out into the churning river and rain-sweetened tropic air. I asked one man the meaning of the drumming and he said that the drummer was simply expressing happiness.

One day a market boat arrived from Bangui and tied ashore. It was headed up the Lobaye River to a place near Mbaiki, selling goods and

trading with people who lived along the river. I went aboard to look for fruit and finding a ripe pineapple which interested me I asked a young women her price for it. She stated a ridiculous amount and when I responded with a lower offer she went into a rage about Whites, how we thought we were better than anyone else, how we thought we were different, demanding better foods than Africans, telling me bluntly that if I didn’t like her price I could go to hell. I took a quick look around at the people glaring at me, and at the other stalls with piles of foodstuffs, and sheepishly returned to the auberoe, not entirely out of sympathy for the woman, but still craving a pinapple.

A Sudanese coffee buyer stayed next door who spent his abundant free time drinking beer and carousing with women. Younger than myself, the gregarious Jay went out nightly to drink beer and eat with new friends, while I spent most evenings alone, either quietly drinking at the bar or secluded in the room with my books and thoughts.

One rainy afternoon, while sitting on the veranda in front of the auberoei I watched a crippled polio victim drag himself through a torrential storm by planting a crooked stick in the mud and laborously pulling himself along like a mountainier. His legs were twisted, and his entire body seemed shrunk to that of a wastrel. Despite his adversity, he managed a wet smile for me as he dragged himself by. Seeing this undaunted man successfully cope with his disability in the mud made my own depressive musings seem trivial, which indeed they were. Why him and not me? This friend, is the question of the ages.

I was growing weary of unwanted attention to myself and Africa’s cruel poverty. I was emotionally fatigued and depressively bored from idly waiting, while nursing persistent doubts about my adventure’s real worth. I had the disturbing feeling that I was an indulgent tourist, slumming through a miserably suffering realm on another planet, perversely exalting myself simply because I had the means to escape.

On July first, we were told by customs that the passenger boat would arrive at Batanga the next day and were given our passports back with exit visas. I thanked an official for having such an interesting country. We left CAR at once, renting a pirogue for Batanga. Jay wanted to swim across, but was dissuaded by CAR customs. At Batanga a policeman met us and said that we needed to go to Immigration in Libenge, a few kilometers downstream to get our passports stamped and so we hired another oirooue to take us there.

Libenge is a quiet, old colonial town with squared blocks and cracking paved streets sprouting weeds. There were few cars or trucks, and chattering flocks of birds could be heard in trees a hundred yards away. It was my first sight of the decaying remnants of Belgian colonialism, so typical of larger Zairean towns. Belgium built a number of impressive towns throughout the Congo basin to host over 100,000 Europeans who once lived here and exploited its considerable resources. We had no trouble at the austere and sleepy custom office. The cordial agent addressed each of us individually, calling me an “American tourist” and Jay an “American Black”. Perhaps we really were different creatures, but Jay knew that he was a tourist as much as I was. We changed with him our small sum of remaining CFA’s for Zaires, said thanks and left.

We made a brief stop at the market for a lunch of rice, beans and bananas and delicious coffee before taking the pirogue back to Batanga. The hired boatman struggled mightily against the swift current while returning us upstream, hugging the shore where the flow was weakest. We arrived to set up our tents before a large, curious crowd.

The next morning the Yanoambi returned to dock off Batanga. We purchased tickets to Mbandaka, and walked aboard, finding a roost and camping space on the roof of the front barge that was being pushed. Three flat, smaller steel barges were tied end to end on each side of the Yanoambi. Aft on the front barge was a kitchen, and the barge itself seemed mainly a floating store selling cloth and clothing, shoes, soap, fishline, razor blades, and the like. A dozen stalls extended onto the smaller side barges. The total population on the barges was around one hundred, people sitting everywhere among the hanging clothes. Small wood fires were lit on the steel decks where women brewed coffee and prepared food.

I realized we wouldn’t be pushing off for awhile, but I was in no hurry to get to Mbandaka. On Central Africa’s rivers, the boats are as much a destination as they are a means of transport. Throughout the day, pirogues from CAR arrived to trade with the merchants aboard the moored barge. A loudspeaker blasted Zairois music, giving the boat a carnival air which also drowned the monotonous sounds of the engines.

An awake crowd eschews silence and the boat’s passengers, like an army marching to war, jauntily made a racket as if to ward off a fear of the mystery that awaited them in the awesome silence of the jungle. The music enticed drinking and dancing, and so precluded any existential thinking among the pilgrims.

Amidship on the main barge and under a canvas canopy extending onto a side barge was a large boombox with flashing lights, and a small dance floor beside a steel washtub of warm Primus beer. Above the dance floor where several men were dancing, was a fluorescent light wrapped in orange tape. Aft of the dance floor, the boat’s noisy diesel engines were encased by wire mesh. A man with a calculator counted bottles in a cargo-hold full of beer. On the second deck was a fridge of ice-cold Primus with chairs gathered around it as if it were an altar. When night fell, the barge cast a bright spotlight on the narrow gangway to shore which sported a dim line of light bulbs.

The main auxiliary barge, named the Bateki , had a few sweaty passenger rooms, already let to merchants. We camped on its rusting roof in the fore of the boat train. At the rear of the Bateki was a galley which served coffee and beianets in the morning, then generous portions of fish, beans and rice in the evening. A sheen of goat’s blood coated the lower rungs of the ladder next to the kitchen where the animals were strung and butchered. Three smaller barges were tied tight to each side of the Yanoambi and Bateki. each measuring about 10 by ^0 feet. The other barges were windowless, rusting hulks with people camped on their decks or staying beneath them in the dark holds. Commerce was everywhere—a woman gave haircuts, a tailor toiled late into the night at his sewing machine, and women fried beionets. Many goods were for sale: new handmade wooden tables and chairs, woven baskets, sandals, shoes, charcoal, marijuana, colorful African cloth,

and clean, used clothing from abroad. And like Africa itself, the boat teemed with goats, chickens and children.

1 absurdly imagined sitting in a deluxe lawn chair equipped with a canopy, mosquito net and holsters for books and beer, and making a ridiculous theatrical experience of the natural panorama and phenomena in the curious world about me.

July 3: Just before leaving Batanga, several resplendently dressed ladies arrived from CAR in a large pirogue paddled by boys to do some last minute shopping. They attracted a lot of attention from the merchants, and when the women were finished buying, the boat picked up another barge, then pushed off into the still, humid morning air, creating a delightfully cooling breeze with its movement. We passed the Lobaye river inlet, the river we had walked along a week ago.

I put down John Dos Passos’s USA: The 4Snd Parallel to celebrate the golden moment; after three weeks of trying to board a boat up or down either the Sangha or Ubangi, I had finally found success. In the open air in my roost on the roof, with a brilliant forward view of the river, sky, and forest, I felt exhilarated and tremendously fortunate to be alive and finally merge with my dream.

The bartender who tended the fridge told me of a gorilla onboard in a policeman’s cabin, so I went there almost immediately and was soon holding a dusty, wide-eyed baby gorilla. The policeman had bought the docile creature for 15,000 Zaires at Zongo along with a legal document attesting that the creature was a chimpanzee¹. Gorillas are protected, but, apparently, chimpanzees are not. The limpid, brown-eyed animal appeared healthy and was eating well. Except for a ruddish pate, its fur was a dull, dusty brown. Untied, the gorilla restricts its slow, gangly movements to a small area below my roost with the most uncomplaining and placid expression imaginable, a gentle dwarf moving with the ease and quiet agility of a kitten. The policeman was going to take the gorilla to a veterinarian at Mbandaka and then sell the animal in Kinshasa, the capital, for 100,000 Zaires. If the animal survived the trip, it would be resold and exported for further resale. The policeman insisted that the animal had been captured in Zaire, not CAR, but could not say exactly where.

We hugged the CAR shore until we passed Mongoumba where that bank of the Ubangi became the Congo, opposite Zaire. The river was flush with islands. Two irredescent, blue swifts fed on the wing in front of the boat. As we glided along, pirogues arrived from either bank to meet the barge, the boatmen performing the difficult task of boarding the moving barges with athletic ease.

The normal meal, included with the ticket, was a quart of rice and a pint of pounded manioc leaves with essence of fish. I’d take my own container to the galley, like a soldier or prisoner, fill it up, and wolf it down like a hungry dog, giving the leftovers to the gorilla.

The owner once made it a sandwich with a stale baguette, but the gorilla licked each slice clean before discarding the bread.

One pirogue landed with a supply of Congolese palm wine which had the bouquet of a sewage ditch I used to play in as a child, where we used to trap muskrats and mink. A fresh vintage is wonderfully relaxing and refreshing, not strongly alcoholic, and complete with a few drowned bees floating in the cup, which everyone ignores.

Each bank of the river is dressed by luxuriant foliage bending and spreading over the water, occasionally broken by stunted sand beaches and small settlements. Flimsy, makeshift homes are built on some of the islands, but most islands seem vacant; a tear-down or scenic lot for that dream holiday condo that many Americans crave. But, America seems an impersonal political spectre of the mind lost far beyond this jungle that swallows the puny boat plying its winding ribbon of muddy water.

That night, I was awaken in my roost from being pelted by rain, and sought shelter in the smaller disco, putting my head on a burlap bag of rice and curling my body around the fridge on the smelly steel deck. The sheltered areas of the boat were cramped for space. I read about fifty pages of USA, taking advantage of a light bulb there, before fading into a short rest. During the night, the boat tied onto shore at a wild-looking place when the searchlight could no longer find buoys or crudely painted markers posted on trees. The pilot visually navigates the boat in the marked channels of the river to avoid going aground on the seasonally shifting sand bars or hitting rocks. Thus, the course is often a repetitive zig-zag from bank to bank.

The next morning, I breakfasted on weak coffee and three fresh beianets for fifty Zaires, about 25 cents. Gray clouds portended more rain, and I felt more animal than human as I grimly watched the heavy sky from my damp shelter. A steward informed me that the boat was making its inaugural trip for the season, doing only six or seven roundtrips a year between Mbandaka and Zongo, and stopping normally around January when the low water makes navigation too hazardous. Rain is yearlong here, but mostly seasonal at the headwaters of the distant rivers that compose the Ubangi.

Frightening rumors abound in CAR about the dangers of traveling alone by pirogue on the rivers drunken fisherman and pirates who disembowel voyagers with machetes, cannibals, crocodiles, hippos and mamvwatas—white people, living in whirlpools and eddys, who can be manipulated by sorcerers to drown people. The basic message seems to be that one is never safe too far from home. However, aboard the homey Vanoambi one is somewhat guarded against these supposed terrors.

I read more of John Dos Passos, finishing The 42nd Parallel before handing it to Jay. The book was familiar to me, having already read some passages in high school and also because I was once an indigent in many of the places Dos Passos describes. He gives only a terse desciption of people, places and events, but is faithfully accurate about what he chooses to describe, letting the reader decide for himself between right and wrong. Dos Passos uses common language and simple narrative to elevate social awareness in the reader. His writing reads like a rational blend of Sartre and Kerouac.

The boat pulled into the shore at Dongo and as it took on additional cargo of rough lumber, charcoal, goats, and manioc root, I disembarked to explore the town. The weather was damp and chilly, and I put on pants, a light wool shirt and shoes to stay warm. Dongo’s market is poor, and the eroded routes through the hilly town are uneven and gullied. One man sold grilled pork. Pigs are better suited to jungle than cattle are, so beef is rare. A lady sat beside a pile of crushed manioc, covered with the ubiquitous water hyacinth to keep it moist.

Another sold fruit and I bought several fresh pineapples and some sweet bananas, eating them with pleasure.

Young people asked me for jobs, money and gifts, just as in CAR. A pole flew the Zaire flag, looking like a banner for a Communist track club: red fist clenching a lit torch in a yellow circle against a lime field. I asked a young man what he thought of CAR. He replied that CAR was a poorer country. Perhaps, but I could detect no ready difference in the destitute lifestyle here. The Ubangi is a big, muddy river cleaving apart the same people.

The forest is everywhere that people aren’t. A short walk upstream quickly took me out of town. I followed a path through gardens of banana, corn and manioc; the air was flecked with myriads of drifting butterflies. Finding a private spot, I hung my clothes on a limb and took a refreshing bath in the Ubangi, the river quickly deepening away from its bank. For a few moments I was free from constant scrutiny—the Zairois in Dongo seemed even more suspicious of me than some of the Centralafricans, but perhaps I was simply getting more paranoid.

Jay received a rooster as a gift, and I amazed a small crowd by putting the creature to “sleep” using a trick that I learned from a Frenchman in CAR. Take the bird, place head under wing and rotate slowly and gently in the air for a minute or so, then place on a surface and voila: a chicken napping. Alex, the steward, took the sleeping bird away to grill over charcoal.

On the night of July fourth. Jay and I drank a little extra beer. The quality of the Primus was excellent, each bottle consistently crisp and delicious, a godsend after the bruised, burnt and road-weary beer of CAR. The farther away one is from a brewery in Africa the worse the brew is going to taste, although any port will do in a storm. Bottled in a comely brown glass, the Primus is exquisitely stored in the cool, dark holds of the Yanaambi. One fridge keeps a few bottles frozen and the ice is heavenly to suck on in the heat! The boat’s gentle rocking motion impart’s some mysterious benefit to the taste, or perhaps it’s the effect of this motion upon the drinker. The force of gravity is slightly less at the equator, and combined with the sweat, might explain the mind and body’s improved tolerance for beer. Primus is a superior brew, a refreshing miracle in this steamy nation where few foods are processed and carted about the country for sale.

The river was about a mile wide, sporting countless jungle-covered islands, some sparseley inhabited. The boat slowed its pace, and the pirogues were having a much easier time boarding. Jay and I changed $10.00 each with a merchant aboard ship, equaling 13 beers apiece until Mbandaka where there were banks. This deal insured some profound relaxation during the more complicated moments of the day, enhancing the recreational and pensive aspects of the cruise.

Whenever the boat pulled ashore, the giant boombox boomed even louder, and the merchants would leave the boat to set up their stores. The blaring music and the rarity of the boat’s visit to a place gave the transient markets the atmosphere of a county fair.

The young Zairois men are fastidious at their toilet. In the morning they often stood brushing and picking at their bright and beautiful teeth, staring into a mirror, arranging their clothes and effects just so, and carefully preening their hair or painting their

nails. When socializing, African men can be very sensitive, holding hands and laughing softly with each other.

A youth named Rasta sat down next to me, and lit up a massive joint rolled from a magazine page while another youth stood over my shoulder watching me read. Rasta smoked his pot with Jay. I asked Jay what “Rasta” meant. He laughed and said, “Simply put, Rasta means love.” I could use some of that, I thought, but not tolerating marijuana well, I denied myself. Everyone else looked to stand up and dance, if only I would spring for the drinks.

Young people often badger me for personal items like shirts or shoes, and stare curiously while standing over me sorting through my disorderly pack for something. It doesn’t occur to them that I might feel annoyed or wish to keep things and secrets about myself—only someone with a bad secret would act that way. I spent a lot of time ignoring intrusive young people who constantly wanted my time, as if I was protecting something valuable from being stolen. I felt ancient among the teens who always wanted beer and cigarettes, and came to talk about music, sports, America or themselves, seemingly seeking to spirit away their floundering misguided hopes of worldly success.

The teenagers have the same bored, arrogant looks as their American counterparts. They are better educated than their parents, learning required Mobutuism (their dictator’s national philosophy), French and incoherent smatterings of science and the humanities in their corrupt schools. The crowded classrooms, some having as many as 100 standing students of widely mixed ages, lack furniture, texts and almost any other supplies, and properly educated teachers. The students learn by rote, from assiduously copying a brief lesson from the blackboard. Homework isn’t done because kerosene and candles are too expensive to burn during the twelve hours of darkness each night. Even if a student has a notebook or text, any available light other than electric is too dim for concentrated study. The students are often hungry and away from home, having moved into a town to stay with friends or relatives to go to school. They might be seen surviving on the fallen fruits of the mango trees shading many school yards and after the mango season ends in the spring, the weak and hungry kids might leave school to help their families grow crops. The grounds are littered with human waste and flies because there is inadequate sanitation. Very few students advance beyond the elementary level, to do so requires a good grasp of literate French which isn’t spoken or read in most homes. Books are rare and would probably be sold by any student having one so that he or she could eat. Cheating is rampant and tribal loyalties prevail over national ones, hindering cultural minorities. Poorly paid school administrators and teachers are susceptible to accepting bribes and other favors from the parents of richer children who wish to insure their child’s competitive advancement through a misappropriated colonial educational legacy.

The curious youths know the modern world from education, magazines, the odd movie, and radio. Many want to escape their impoverished isolation in Zaire. Young men hope to join the military, much like the poor are forced to do in America, biting their lips and bitterly serving the leviathan, klomen have virtually no opportunity and become promiscuous because that is the only way to get favors or money,

traditionally getting a gift from anyone who has sex with them. The young readily get bored with traditional rural life and restlessly go to the cities looking for something to do to end the tedium. But young Zairois searching for opportunity meet frustration everywhere in facing nepotism, corruption, and economic depression. These unhappily stifled youths will choose chaos over oppression if there is no improved social and political transition in Zaire, and drag down the richest and fittest to better appreciate the aggravations of the weak and poor.

The majority of Africans suffer from bad government, but they are powerless to force change. The chief outrage of their unelected leaders is the unconscionable failure to use personal power and communal resources to do common good while pandering to personal interests. Deleterious leaders, whether in America or in Zaire, fail to serve people by not resisting their own raging egos.

Being imperfect, what do we hold most precious? Mhat latent traits arise when contrivances self-destruct? Homo sapiens deems itself most precious, and fights to survive, either alone or banded with others, unleashing tears, when vanity or energy fails. Nobbling earth, not spinning true, is paradoxical: at turns beautiful and ugly; warm and cold: sweet and unappetizing, inspiring and depressing, waking and sleeping; suffering and delighting; giving birth and dying; gaining and losing. But earth is getting snagged in an unredeemable competition that’s fixing itself into a dreary heap.

A motor was fixed and the boat again picked up steam. Red buoy: keep right; white buoy: keep left; and so the river is marked. 1 started my first beer about noon, leisurely slurping down the 72 CL of foamy nectar in thirty minutes. I drank with a retired riverboat captain who had spent 25 years piloting Zaire’s rivers, and was traveling now purely for a nostalgic love of the boats and the water. Mhen the captain had left I took a pause for prayer and reflection: I might be a dragon or mad, stupid king who must, at all cost, be kept serene; the world gains an unquiet peace for it, the less 1 do the smoother the infernal clockwork of it ticks.

The Yanoambi lost one of its engines again, and we made two brief stops where small mobs of people greeted the boat with fruit, fish and vegetables to sell, wanting in turn to buy some of the boat’s sundries. I saw hornbills crossing the river, laborously flapping their wings and sometimes carrying fruit in their beaks. The male hornbill brings food to a female who has walled itself in a hollow tree using a mortar of mud and secretions to guard her eggs and young. The foraging pair of swifts still gathered insects in front of the Yanoambi , reminding me of Barn Swallows that I once saw nesting on a car ferry repetitively crossing a river in the Sacramento delta, entirely unbothered by the clamor of near-constant movement.

The Yanoambi cruised south of Impfondo, Congo, on the way passing a large passenger boat going upstream. The crowds from each boat cheered and jeered at the meeting. The other boat was the Impfondo , which plies twice a month between Bangui and Brazzaville, taking eight days each way. Me missed boarding her two weeks ago in Bangui.

I again bathed with the vainglorious young men in the open air bath behind the engines. I scooped buckets of the Ubangi, drenching myself with the cool water, and then washed my clothes. Drinking water

comes from the river as well. While bathing one is hidden from the rest of the ship» but for the villages and oirooues> the wayfarer is smiling, fresh and naked, for all the world to know.

A single cotton sheet has been warm enough cover against the nighttime’s cooler dampness when sleeping on the roof. The bowed roof has some spring to it, so sleeping on the steel is tolerable. This morning I woke near 5:30, and instantly began the day searching for coffee and donuts. The coffee mama, boiling her potion over an open wood fire on deck in a large pan, never has change for a fifty Zaire note when one buys a thirty Zaire cup of coffee, so she gives one beionets at the rate of two for twenty Zaires, plus a gift. Don’t forget to playfully request the customary cadeauafter making a purchase—a little extra thrown in to sweeten the booty. It might cause sly smile from the seller and warm yourself to her as well. Beionets are the closest thing to fresh bread found aboard ship, but avoid the terrible-tasting reddish ones that are deep-fried in palm oil.

There are no accurate road maps of Central Africa that gazette all settlements and routes. The Michel in tourist map seems to be the best. Some former colonial roads have deteriorated into footpaths, while many more towns and settlements exist than any map will show.

We might make Mbandaka on Friday, in two days. Alex, the do-all and know-all steward, blithely crowed that he drank twelve bottles of Primus at one recent setting and has a sagging pot-belly to back up his boast. One of my thongs suffered a serious strap injury. In the U.S.A. it would have been fatal but here in barge-town one seeks a cordonnier. In Africa these are mostly scruffy boys who roam town markets and streets with heavy needles, string and cotton, seeking torn shoes and other things to mend on the spot. Alex took the thong and promptly returned it, ready to be worn once again.

Alex said that sometime tomorrow the boat will turn upstream onto the greater Zaire river. He also remarked that we should be able to board another boat at Mbandaka for Kisangani, but quite naturally did not know when. Last night, the boat stopped at a village to unload a cargo of lumber and blasted music all night.

The young Zairois have many questions about traveling and America, and ask if I work for the U.S. government. They are unable to imagine any other way of making enough money to squander on travel, living in a kleptocracy like Zaire, where the state wants everything for itself. If they did make money, Zaires are difficult to convert to other currencies while rapid inflation constantly reduces the value of their savings towards nothing. Most Americans they meet are either missionaries or Peace Corps types. I say that I am an infirmier» a nurse, keeping it as simple as possible while not discussing the cab business with them. I can’t begin to explain psychiatric technician or tramp to anyone. There are few psychiatric wards in Zaire, and probably experimental at that. And why incriminate oneself as a bum? Zaire has as much madness as anywhere and perhaps more, given the poor health care, malnutrition and poverty. The insane are tolerated as long as they behave well. Markets are often kitchens for the insane, and when they misbehave, merchants or police beat them off as hyenas would chase away mooching jackels who move too near a kill.

A small riot occured on the main deck. A pirogue landed with some bananas for sale when a male merchant and female merchant began arguing over who was going to buy them. Other people joined the shouting and several bottles were broken for weapons. The merchant, who attacked the woman, was almost pushed overboard by a mob. Two policemen, without weapons, and the captain eventually separated the feuding parties, but the air remains troubled. The competition among the merchants has intensified, and normal coutesies seem to have disappeared. Strong role differentiation between the sexes may also escalate rivalry when traditional boundaries are crossed. Physical violence between the sexes seems all too common in Africa and the general lack of privacy leads to more public disputes.

My health is excellent! All cuts nicely healed, normal waste and vital signs, no lethargy and plenty of vigor without need of an afternoon siesta, healthy appetite, normal speech and body movements (though weak muscle tone), eyes clear and thoughts varied and pleasantly flowing like the river before my eyes. I delight in being sheathed by the warm humidity and soft breeze from the river. The contrast with the raw, dry desert heat could not be greater. In the desert, skin painfully cracks while the body seems always in search of moisture or a state to conserve it, as in increased lethargy and sleep. The desert is relentlessly harsh, with an almost unvarying cloudless sky of dust and devilish sun. Here, there are billowing cumulous clouds that are virtually identical with those of Middle America; the kind that cause vigorous daydreams when one takes a sweaty break from baling hay; magnificent forays into the imagination, klith nothing to do, in a sympathetic climate, I’m in a personal state of advanced civilization.

A gentleman is ringing an empty beer bottle with a spoon. It’s 18:4-5 PM, time to eat and time for a beer. Kinshasa was called and the cook has been given permission to serve “free” food again tomorrow; the problem being that the boat is running behind schedule and passenger tickets only include food for the scheduled number of days for the trip; so permission was necessary to continue feeding passengers beyond the regular allotment. Many more pirogues have boarded the boat today, both from the Congo and Zaire. Merchants excitedly run around the boat holding big wads of Zaires. Today has been very warm, ending with a quick, unseen sunset and a cool breeze off the river. The boarding oirooues bring with them strings of beautiful fish.

1:30 pm: The boat lost its way and cautiously beached itself against the jungle for the night. I sat on the roof, under the leafy branch of a great tree, the ship’s spotlight shining on my paper as I wrote. The boat is still blasting music, and people are eating and talking. Despite the music, the dance floor is a bust—two men sat reading bibles beside another man sleeping on a mat. One of the men looked up from his bible to smile at me and point a classic thumbs up as I stood sucking down a Primus. The boat’s spotlight is too weak for night navigation here. Many of the markers are white dimly-painted boards nailed to floating buoys or trees ashore on islands or mainland. They are easily missed in poor light and the many islands create a myriad of shallow channels which further complicate navigation.

Around the fridge each night an important looking gentleman (“don’t walk in front of him while he is speaking”) holds court to a

small rapt audience of almost a dozen souls of all ages. As he is speaking in Lingala, the major native language of Zaire, I can’t understand him. Lingala, which dominates over numerous other tribal languages, is spoken over the western two-thirds of Zaire and in neighboring Congo while Swahili is spoken over most of the Eastern third of Zaire where it was introduced long ago by Arab slavers.

Lingala has borrowed many words from French, the official language, as well as from Swahili and other native tongues. The French word ticket becomes tik6 in Lingala. The word for yesterday and tomorrow is the same. Lingala, like Sango in CAR, began as a common trading language among different tribes speaking mutually unintelligible dialects and languages. Africans possess a useful talent for languages, often speaking several. A Zairois might speak French, Lingala, Swahili and a tribal tongue, and whatever else he’s found practical.

The Yanoambi has taken on many burlap sacks of coffee and onions.

I ate a delicious evening meal of several catfish, each about eight inches long, which were fried in oil after being dipped in a batter of peppers and flour. Tonight, the Great Bear and the Southern Cross were each visible at opposite sides of the sparkling sky.

When young Africans are asked about the status of certain wildlife in their area, they often say that a rare animal, which has been heavily poached or had its habitat ruined, has “fled far into the forest to find safety.” But the idea of fleeing to sanctuary is wishful thinking. The animal that has been chased away will run into hazards elsewhere. Most mammals and birds are territorial, either as individuals or as members of a strict community. They establish and defend territories either permanently or at some critical point in their natural history, and compete mainly within their species for resources and a suitable •breeding and foraging habitat.

Leopards, widespread and highly adaptable animals, when deprived of their feeding territory by human encroachment, .may turn to hunting the intruders. If a leopard flees, it might well be forced into a fatal confrontation with another leopard protecting its own turf. Largely solitary animals, like leopards and the more sedentary rhinoceros, might become doomed when their numbers become so thinly spread over a wide area that males and females are unable to find each other to mate. And when critical population numbers fall below certain levels, it can cause inbreeding, if successful breeding happens at all. A species then fails to maintain enough genetic diversity within its community to sustain healthy populations. Other, more social animals, like elephants and primates, with complex behavioral schemes essential to sustaining themselves, might fall below certain critical population numbers, too small to stimulate reproduction and insure local survival. A “fleeing” animal might not find anywhere else to live, or anything else to live with. It’s better to concede that an indigenous animal, now rare or missing, has been killed.

There is no daily tallying of the status of living things, but with each sporadic inventory something comes up missing and another human takes the position of something gone. With each person doing his or her quiet part, whether wastefully consuming oil, heedlessly cutting down a tree, or draining a wetland, the destruction of wildlife and habitat happens at a relentless, inexorable rate, while nobody knows

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the immediate extent of the ongoing destruction. We fail to restrain ourselves or to properly value the elaborate complexity of life.

Across Africa, the destruction of natural habitat combined with poaching for subsistance and sale, is threatening free-ranging wildlife. Protected animals are often restricted to parks too small to sustain healthy populations. Africans, mired in poverty, shouldn’t be blamed for the destruction of native habitat and fauna. Until recently, they have had a sustainable way of coexisting with nature, doing it little harm. This balance is now upset by surging populations and the universal quest for money and resources. People are compelled to fulfil immediate needs, but tragically damn their future in the process.

Richer nations help devastate the African environment through careless, short-term investment in development and by wasteful import, sale and consumption of products and natural resources. Africans, in return for their hard labor and precious land, don’t receive a fair wage for their products or just compensation for lost resources.

Political development in Africa was obstructed for centuries by the grotesque violence of chattel slavery which intensified tribal conflicts and left many fertile areas virtually destitute of people. Comparable European-type development always has been complicated by the powerful, less productively malleable tropical environment which Central Africans inhabit. The tropics can easily sustain certain numbers of people, but modification of the environment to grow increased yields of old and new crops for export, and to add new living space results in colossal problems of sustaining a reasonable quality of life. Colonialism, on the tail of slavery, brought the plantation to the slaves and further stifled progress by raping the continent of natural resources and human dignity. Africans were ignobly contributed to the process, forced to work on railroads, mines and plantations.

They were obliged to pay unjust taxes or made to surrender possessions and goods to companies, soldiers and other colonial agents. Europe then fueled its own development with this wealth, much of which was eventually squandered in two vicious world wars. The Europeans also enlisted Africans to fight in these wars, and to help quell political unrest in their far-flung, troubled outposts of colonialism afterward.

Africans exist in increasing numbers with expanding needs and modern expectations about life, intensifying personal disatisfaction and environmental pressure. They now will do what others have done elsewhere: attempt to forcibly alter their condition and natural situation. But Africa is a formidable continent with a multitude of potential limiting factors upon development. Africa has vast tracts of uninhabitable hot desert. Unmanagable cycles of drought, flood, and famine tragically stalk those living in Africa’s semi-arid desert margin, already less productive from overgrazing and deforestation, and when adequate rain falls, cyclical plagues of locusts and birds often destroy the crops. Sub-Saharan life is a moist, heat-charged cycle of rapid decay, breakdown and transformation into regenerative growth. Here, people tend to have high birth rates, but the average lifespan, until recently, has been much shorter than in the North. Everything in the humid tropics is less static and subject to quicker change than in temperate climes. Tools, machines, stores and schemes begin a rapid decay almost at inception, too soon needing replacement. Central Africa

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also hosts uncontrollable malaria, tstete flies, river—blindness, yellow fever, leprosy, AIDS, syphilis, polio, malnutrition and kwashiokor, filarial worms and diverse orders of intestinal parasites, stinging ants, scorpions, poisonous snakes, and madness. And if this is not enough malady, Africans tell of malicious sorcerers who send spirits soaring over trackless swamps, who call forth killer white men from mysterious whirlpools, and who can metamorphose into leopards and other menacing animals who roam in the tangled forests of the African night. Terrifying Africa harbors a wild gallery of wicked spirits that the rest of humanity might never wish to know.

Increasingly intolerant of concerns outside individual interests, people fail to perceive the ultimate plight of their own species by spoiling the landscape. We fail to appreciate our own sense of wonder and curiosity while living on an intricately fair planet, its gross clockwork apparent enough through human knowledge and reason. But each transient human generation incessantly seeks food and comfort, has a poor sense of history, and lacks proper interest in how or why things exist, or what has come and gone before. How many Americans bemoan the bear and butterfly that no longer exist in their own backyard?

When it was done, the new Americans celebrated the destruction of the wolf, the bison, and the Native American because they possessed the land which the invaders needed. In retrospect, lamentations about the ugly human effort to satisfy itself are easy. But is there any doubt, under similar circumstances, despite our present knowledge, the same tragedy would reoccur. Simple, momentary remorse is a non-corrective way to accept the horrible deeds of people long dead while safely enjoying the fruits of their labor and wars.

If the multitudes of the world’s decent Christians and Muslims are right, then we should try to gain heaven and forget about preserving purgatory. But who can imagine a place where humans find peace with each other and their world? Our brains, mouths, copulatory organs and sphincter muscles would instantly pollute any paradise. If paradise exists, then it does without food because eating is murder. How else could the lion ever lay down with the lamb?

Nature constantly recycles itself into successive or supplanting ephemoras—a marvelous resistance to complete destruction. No more dodos, kudus, bongos or Congos, but if suitable conditions remain, then something persists. Refresh the spirit of a spoiled world with the charm and resplendence of children, but why leave them a boring, tyrannical garbage dump to live in? Esthetical sentiment shouldn’t impede human expansion when animals of uncertain value meet their doom, or when verdant forests become dust. Homo sapiens can thrive in desolation because it’s a spook here anyway.

July 7: We dipped below the equator sometime this morning, but are still some distance yet from turning north onto the Zaire river. Alex said that we might make Mbandaka tomorrow because the boat can push on all night on the deeper river, once we turn into it. Although the boat isn’t making any more scheduled stops, there is still an active commerce with the boarding pirogues. The merchants continue to eagerly vie with each other for fresh and smoked monkey, duiker, fish and produce (mostly bananas). They determine who goes first by standing at the edge of the boat and tossing small objects such as a wet cloth,

clods of water hyacinth, or a portion of manioc root at the pirogues as they paddle towards the main deck. The first merchant to hit the desired cargo gets first dibs. The Yanoambi is a gold mine for the merchants, equivalent to a seat at a stock exchange. They sell as much soap, cloth, medicine, batteries, matches, beer, cigarettes, etc. as possible, and then buy as much produce, fish, and meats as they can to turn over again later at the market in Mbandaka. The ship’s crew are also buying things to sell later. The fish are smoked to hell, eventually meant to be crushed, bones and all, to flavor soups and marmites. Several large catfish were brought on, slowly fanning their useless gills for oxygen. Some of the catfish brought aboard appear to be almost forty pounds in weight. A four-foot long live crocodile had its legs tied behind its head and tail and appeared like a de-1imbed freak, its eyes seemingly seething in anger from its bondage.

A woman cleaned a monkey by tossing it upon a charcoal fire to singe the hair from the skin. When that was done, she cut off its head, drained the blood and disembowled the animal, saving all edible organs. Then the monkey was butchered like a pig, by splitting the spine and quartering. Later, Alex brought us a cooked monkey to eat over rice and beans which I wolfed down, particularly enjoying a fleshy thigh.

The Yanoambi has not passed a town in sometime while the river sprouts more numerous sand bars and smaller islands. The few families living along the river seem to exist alone or in small clans, appearing as homesteaders rather than villagers. Their simple houses appear both impermanent and timeless, being constructed of mud, palm fronds and wood. Fires are built inside the houses with smoke permeating the roof and wood, helping to preserve the structure by killing insects. With time, the elements wear down the homes. The homes are then abandoned to collapse and decay back into earth and new ones are built. The boat causes thrills for the people on shore who watch and wave as it passes. The weighty forest towers over the hamlets and gardens while sprawling trees pack the riverbank, their heavy branches dipping into the flowing stream.

5:15 PM: The Yanoambi made a three-hour stop at a Congolese village on an island that is also claimed by Zaire. 1 disembarked to walk around. Boxes of twelve-gauge shotgun ammunition are for sale at a shop. In both Zaire and CAR, people can only legally own pellet guns which are used to shoot monkeys and birds. The Congo police ignored me, bending the laws and not requesting to see an entry stamp in my passport. So, I stretched my legs on the muddy streets and behaved like a tourist before returning to the boat.

After taking the walk, I felt cramped and bored sitting on the boat, so I consumed, much to my ease and surprise, four bottles of Primus which helped a rather mundane day pass with more interest. The teenagers still hang around me, giving me claustrophia. Teens are the tired, impossible dreams of their parents compelled to troublesome reality. Like shuffling a deck of cards, life can be given near infinite chances to generate satisfaction through additional generations. Fat chance. It’s sunset, the river flowing as before, but with less privacy. I’m an irritable old crank and should thank my new friends for not tossing me overboard.

July 8, 8:00 AM: In yesterday’s fading light the Yanoambi entered a narrow channel between two islands; having passed through that the boat turned left and upstream into the the Zaire River. The confluence of the two great rivers forms a large pool of churning water. The Yanoambi slowed going against the current, but pushed on through the night. Dozens of pirogues tied aboard the barges, arriving all night.

At about 8:15 PM, I sat in my normal place at the bow, blandly watching the river, when a pod of four pirogues mistily appeared in the boat’s spotlight at midstream. Several people were standing in each pirogue, patiently treading water with their paddles to slow their drift downstream into the Yanoambi« waiting for the right moment for the boat to come to them and then board. As the boat came upon them, the people suddenly began to maneuver the pirogues to the side of the boat’s path with their paddles. There was confusion as they tried to get out of the boat’s way and one pirogue crashed against another, bounced into the passage of the Yanoambi , and was cut in half. I then saw a wide-eyed young woman and a swaddled baby, tied with cloth to her back and peering over her shoulder, together float past in the swift current, disappearing quickly downstream into the black water behind us. The woman’s dress billowed around her in the river, as she bobbed in the water, drifting helplessly past. Her face appeared shocked, as if she had seen a ghost, and if she screamed, the sound failed to break through the noise of the diesel engines and no one heard her. The Yanoambi slowed to a stop, but people had already boarded pirogues and were quickly lost in the night behind the boat, calling and searching downstream for survivors from the accident. Many of the pirogues returned to the boat almost as quickly as they had left, giving up the search in the dark, fast current. This morning, there has been much discussion about the incident as people compare their stories. A woman and two children are missing and believed dead.

Immediately following the tragic accident, a fight broke out in the club below. There was wild scuffling, loud shouting, and people rushing about on the main deck: a riot. After about thirty tense minutes, which affected everyone on board, I was able to climb down from the roof, enter the very same club where the riot began and purchase two more bottles of beer, to go.

Flotsam floats by the boat, endless clods of hyacinth and grass moving downstream. In the spotlight the plants appear to glow, absorbing the light against the opaque, shimmering water and night. The drifting plants create an anticipation of coming upon a shipwreck or another disaster. The air is sweetened, perfumed by the immense number of hyacinth that swathe the boat in an almost narcotic fragrance.

I am pestered by the drowning woman’s death mask. The glow in her startled eyes emitted a desperate plea for help which paralyzed me. Her frightened eyes had glared at me. Should I have madly leapt into the water after her? Were her final sensations about meeting a mamvwata , a sorcerer’s zombie, who was myself?

The deck is crammed with cases of beer bottles, large burlap sacks of peanuts, women smoking fish in steel-drum ovens, goats, chickens, and new passengers. Women are slamming heavy, wooden pestles into chalice-like wooden mortars containing manioc root. The softened manioc is then cooked and sold cheaply as chickouin in small rolls, wrapped in

a banana leaf and eaten like bread, for a snack. Fried caterpillars, manioc leaves, peanuts or some other food is mixed into the chickouin. Manioc, a daily staple, is full of starch, and has a peculiar, bland flavor; similar in taste and texture to Hawaiian poi. At meals, Africans take manioc from a moist dough-like mound in a single bowl, tearing at it with their fingers and eating it with meat or fish. The manioc plant, also called cassava, tapioca, and qozo <in Sango), originated in the Americas, but is now found across the tropics worldwide, being easy to grow from stem cuttings stuck in the ground. UJomen are also shelling peanuts, frying beignets and fish, washing clothes and dishes, and tending the many children. Children are everywhere, often clutching naked babies and tending smaller children.

I profoundly abused the dog yesterday, gaining a headache for it, and questioning the soundness of my equatorial theory about beer. The Vanoambi had an elated atmosphere as merchants and crew tidied up their stations and affairs. Jay has been quietly reading. He is disturbed by the drownings as well. A stranger approached me. Knowing I gave Alex a raincoat, he asked for his cadeau and got nothing. The pirogues» tied to the barge and each other, are bobbing idly, empty but for pools of water splashed in from the river, and hitching a ride upstream.

Alex showed me a copy of ONATRA’s (the state owned shipping company) national shipping schedule. The schedule included exact dates and precise minutes of arrivals and departures for numerous river craft, but they were likely ficticious, given the poor condition of Zaire’s infrastructure. The schedule lists four different classes of accommodation beginning with luxe and ending with “climb aboard”. No luxe class here, but “climb aboard” the roof is fines sleeping under the clear stars in the clean tropical air with a soft breeze blowing away the sweat and insects makes life near perfect. The motor noise is way aft, and when the boombox dies a person is left with one’s thoughts, sleep and peace.

A stunted waterlogged forest rises from the vast lowland swamp here; dugouts are tied ashore in front of houses built on stilts and made from woven grass and palm fronds. On higher ground, other houses are built of stick frames packed with rocks and dirt, and covered with mud, plaster, or more sticks. These simple homes are economical, often built with front and back doors, directly opposite each other. A chief normally gives permission to build at a certain site because land is not privately owned. The builder then gathers sticks and rocks, or bakes dirt into bricks, and finds fronds for a roof, eventually fashioning a house. Fires are lit inside the house in order to cook and give heat when it rains; the smoke drives away mosquitos, termites and other insects, blackening the thatched roofs as it seeps through, making the house appear to steam. Sometime after sunset, the evening quiet is broken by the chief, who stands by himself at some central spot, shouting news and tomorrow’s duties at his people relaxing in and around their homes. At night, people cover up with sheets and sleep on straw mats placed upon the dirt floor, and everyone is up at daybreak.

The boarding pirooues, many with outboard motors, are larger now, and about thirty canoes are now tied on to the Vanoambi. The dugouts, many over twenty feet long and about a yard wide, are crafted from a single log. The rough interior is gouged flat along the sidewalls and

leveled on the bottom. The dugouts are often dangerously overloaded) carrying a dozen people or more and their belongings.

The ferry-train lugs against the current about twenty kilometers from Mbandaka, while a dark sky threatens a storm. The surviving husband of the drowned woman, when taken off the boat by police in a motorized pirogue this morning, was wildly flailing his arms and miserably wailing in agony. The husband might face charges for the accident. Similar tragedies cannot be rare, given the magnitude of river commerce and the difficulty of boarding.

I ate a meal of chickouin rolls with small fish cooked in palm oil and lightly spiced with red pepper. Much of the deck looks like a hobo camp with smoldering fires, burnt burlap, empty tins and rusting steel drums.

The Yanoambi» only a few kilometers from Mbandaka, again had engine problems and landed ashore, smashing itself against a rock.

After a delay for repairs, a violent rainstorm made the river very choppy and the air surprisingly cold. I wore long pants and a wool shirt as the Yanoambi limped home. The party was over, with goods being crated in boxes or stuffed into sacks. People then boarded large motorized pirogues to go ashore. Goats and chickens went too.

Along the southern riverbank are large European-style homes and buildings, a cathedral, a fleet of rusting barges tied to moorings, and the port. On July 9, after 8 days aboard the Yanoambi, we landed at Mbandaka where a tattered barefoot army of stevedores, many wearing only shorts, waited to unload the boat. I walked off as they rushed on.

The sweating stevedores pushed bicycle-wheeled carts, or carried trunks and bags of incredible weight on their bending backs while jogging to unload things. One after another they worked in the steamy heat with amazing strength and stamina. Anyone who thinks these people are lazy would know better if he or she could see this.

Work in Zaire is often performed in a dangerous environment with poorly maintained tools and equipment with few safety standards. An unagile person could easily be maimed by slipping on the Yanoambi ,s wet deck and catching a leg between the loosely attached barges, shifting and grinding in the current.

Jay and I were required to go through immigration once again. I then understood why people abandoned the boat early: to avoid the port police, but they gave us no problem.

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MBANDAKA

Graham Greene once came to Mbandaka in search of his character, preparing to write his fine novel, A Burnt-Out Case. Mbandaka, on the equator, was strategically founded as Equator Station in 1883 by Henry Morton Stanley, then in the employ of Belgium’s King Leopold II who was claiming the Congo for himself. Leopold later deftly convinced the other European powers to legitimize his title in the Act of Berlin in 1885, preventing a war among the Europeans over Africa by deciding the colonial boundaries of the continent. These spurious boundaries, mainly drawn where few <if any) Europeans had been, later served by default, to demarcate the new African nations when colonialism began crumbling in the 1950’s. Equatorville became Coquilhatvi1le after the Belgian parliament seized the Congo Free State from Leopold in 1908. When the Congo became Zaire, Coquilhatvi1le became Mbandaka, capital of Zaire’s huge Equateur province and the largest city between Kinshasa and Kisangani on the Zaire river.

Leopold never visited his Congo Free State. Instead he enlisted international investors and diverse companies to extract whatever wealth they could from almost 900,000 square miles of land and water. Prior to Leopold, the Congo had for centuries been ravaged for slaves, both by Europeans in the west and Arabs in the east. After slavery ended, the Congo still coughed up rubber, copper, diamonds and ivory, with Leopold getting a personal cut from all profits.

Central Africans were unjustly taxed and killed, indentured, tortured and terrorized under Leopold’s rule. The brutal taxes forced natives to surrender wealth or do work for the companies. Much of the early fearful violence centered around rubber, then a highly desired commodity on the world markets. The foreigners forced Africans to gather rubber because they couldn’t do it themselves. Ruthless companies, soldiers and adventurers, fearing their own safety in such a remote and dangerous place, did whatever they could to gain wealth and save themselves. Hands and limbs were cut off from Africans who refused to cooperate with the Europeans, and when bounties were placed on bringing in the hands, a trade in human hands developed among Africans and the Europeans. The Europeans humiliated chiefs, exploited traditional rivalries and split tribal and family loyalties. The conquerers took the best lands, destroyed villages, and forced the Africans to serve the invaders, or flee further into the forest with their traditions. The Congo lost tens of thousands, if not millions, of people between 1880 and 1920, with perhaps half of its population dying. Untold suffering was caused during Leopold’s wanton reign.

The Congo later became infamous as the setting for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1902. For six months during 1889-1890, Conrad, working for Leopold, commanded a tiny, narrow, double-decked steamboat (the toy-like Roi des Beiges) up the Congo River, but made only one complete trip from the Kinshasa (then a small native village) to Stanleyville, now Kisangani, before falling seriously ill with malaria and leaving Africa forever. But other European fortune-seekers came and stayed, many dying here from disease, but not before serving

their absentee employers well enough, ruthlessly raping the Congo of anything that might make investors and the king rich back home. The gloomy mood of Heart of Darkness derived from Conrad’s fearful homesickness for the open sea and his feverish, tropical deliriums, but his narration of events proved a faithful recording of the truth.

Roger Casement, who had met Conrad in the Congo, later published a thorough description of abuses in the Congo which caused a world-wide outrage, eventually prompting British pressure upon Belgium to seize the Congo from Leopold. Casement was later knighted for his humanitarian work on behalf of Africans, but not long after that, he was executed for treason by the British for his Irish patriotism.

Casement and Conrad, among others, gave the Congo world-wide notoriety which inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs to write Tarzan of the Apes, published in 191E. Burroughs, like Leopold, never visited the Congo, but instead created mythic fantasies from the Congo’s rumored, pristine splendor and known horrors. Tarzan, an orphaned Victorian boy-prince, was nurtured by the uncivilized African jungle where he had been shipwrecked. The jungle cultivated stifled, latent senses from his pure stock into a moral and powerful human being. He arose from a feral childhood as a superman who understood the mixed course of nature. Tarzan never finds lasting peace for himself, but employs his heightened senses and prowess in a paternal attitude towards hapless things. With perfect judgement, he kills dangerous creatures and wicked Africans alike, while protecting the meek and good, and always zealously thwarts the ruthless foreign mercenaries who come to greedily plunder mother jungle, thus saving it from civilization. This was Burrough’s colorful allegory tD the long-standing moral dilemma about the mysterious Congo—told as a profitable, racist fantasy. But the jungle does have something to teach us. If Western civilization had any goodness within it, then there had to be a noble path for it to follow in the Congo, despite the ignoble realities. The Congo beckoned and provoked the worst of Western society, but it also’ demanded that society somehow achieve a moral discipline and the able courage and conviction to put an end to its depressive and loveless cruelty.

Society was out of control, and while the Congo’s riches made many stupid, heartless people comfortable, it fostered terrible suffering among many more nameless others. Central Africa proved too much. If anyone ever doubted civilization’s poor graces before, there was little doubt after Leopold, his clients and their universal customers had spun their iniquitous web in the Congo.

The Belgian government, replacing Leopold, sent in soldiers, settlers and priests. The soldiers ruthlessly attempted to quelch any and all resistance to Belgian rule, effectively conquering much of the Congo by the 1920’s. Belgian reform corrected some of the abuses, but unfair commercial exploitation and political repression continued. Still, by the 1950’s the Congo was relatively well off under Belgian rule. Health care, education and employment opportunies were better here than in most other European colonies in Africa. Belgium, a tiny, normally poor, and unstable European country with barely good reason for itself to exist, welcomed investors and companies from many Western countries, including the U.S.A., to make colonial inroads into the Congo.

Catholics established schools and hospitals, and Jesuits Mere given an almost exclusive contract to set up missions, getting Belgian financial support for the attached schools. The Christians, genuinely abhoring the pagan traditions, attempted to retrain and brainwash the youth, turning them against the old people who clung to their traditional lifestyles, beliefs and laws. This helped enforce Belgian rule and created a massive, divisive ideological confusion among the Congolese about themselves. (Could the invasive Europeans have been so crassly insensitive to the nature of their profits not to have felt the confusion themselves, and not have suffered some personal depression and remorse for the violence they themselves brought with them and upheld? Perhaps they did, but mistakingly called it malaria. Surely devoted Jesuits and other missionaries, gentle and courageous in their own way but taking money from caesar and anyone, recognized sin. All memory, reason, eyes and hearts were plugged with rubbers a soulless, ridiculous, bouncing sap. High, sardonic civilization suddenly and fashionably craved rubber, beyond ivory or copper: a maniac king and numb pope, mercantile governments, corporate lackeys and ignorant peasants; all society acting in unknowing unison, constructing its macabre machines to till the increasingly powerful cycles of vicious war and tedious peace. How can an individual appreciate the compelling social impulse to wreak horrible destruction upon nature and the misery it springs upon its own weakened poor? How could a thoughtful person ever put other causes or ideas morally above or beyond those of trying to end or escape the vicious rounds of cruelty, even if one’s society somehow can? Give the slaughter God’s blessing and send every dim heart, blind mind and murky soul into the seething clouds—plant a cross, deception and suffering fade now; everything die once and forever!) The Africans who remained to live with the Europeans were not educated, but trained to menially serve the Belgians, and many Congolese developed a humiliating dependence upon-the conquerors as modern goods, new technologies and new laws were introduced. The subjugation of the Congo parallels, in many respects, the European conquest of the Americas, but the Belgians never had enough time to ultimately supplant the Central Africans as the Europeans enjoyed after snuffing the Native Americans.

A jumbled fleet of old, rusting barges and river boats are strung along Mbandaka’s riverfront. From the port, Alex took Jay and me to visit his wife, their children, and his extended family living in the Cit£i as the Zairois still call it from the Belgian name; traditional African neighborhoods of families, clans and tribes within the modern city which restricted them there. Alex comes from a family of nine brothers and no sisters. Most of the brothers are married, living in small houses near each other and their relatives. Dozens of kin welcomed him home. He was first seen by several small children who screamed in delight, running up to touch him and saying their hellos.

We sat outdoors around a table drinking shots of Zairois whiskey, made from corn and manioc, followed by cold glasses of beer. Alex likes to drink his beer straight from the bottle by tilting his head backwards and pouring the amber lager down his throat, without the bottle touching his lips, in a prodigious act of guzzling. And he would

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■follow that with a maniacal grin. Being by habit a somber American bottle sucker, his technique seemed exhilarating.

Later, Alex took us to the Le Bon Samaritan, an auberoe situated along the river, a ten minute walk south of the port. The inn has four sweaty rooms, built like airless caves beneath street level, and a roof covered with bougainvillea. Each small room is simply furnished with a bed, chair, and an electric lamp. The electricity is on from about six to eleven in the evening. That night I watched TV with the friendly patron. The first program was a political message from Mobutu, followed by advertisements for social and cultural events in the capital, Kinshasa. Then came an excellent program from a French series called The World of Arti which was a film excursion to the wonders of Tibet.

Attached to the inn, in typical African fashion, is a fresh-air restaurant and bar, open mostly on weekends. The restaurant has a fine view of the river, and in the morning, one of the patron’s two young wives serves a breakfast of giant cafe-au-lait’s and margarined fresh bread. The patron is an educated, sensitive looking middle-age gentleman who speaks good English. When he saw Jay’s dreadlocks, he gave him a quizzical stare and asked Jay why he kept such tangled and ugly hair. Jay laughed for an answer. The patron is originally from an area south of Kinshasa, after studying at universities in Paris and London, he traveled over other parts of Europe and Africa, since. It seems strange to meet such a person here but I know no reason why that should be so. His life however has since suffered much decline and he mentioned sadly that he feels like dying. He has a rusty Vespa that is always broke, which he can’t afford to repair. When I saw him struggling to start it, he complained that he owned a nice car when he was living in Europe, as if to further emphasize the difficulty of living in Zaire. His clerical job with the government paid him less than 100 dollars a month, while he censored his complaints to avoid political trouble. In Zaire a citizen cannot criticize the state or its self-proclaimed founder and ruler, Mobutu.

The Patron prated about having several concubines to go with his wives, adding a self-satisfied grin while saying so. I asked if his wives got along together and he replied, “Of course they have problems with each other but they manage.” In America, love seems to exist primarily to sell soap, and to drive people crazy with romantic illusions through incautious sex to lugubrious ruin. That too in Zaire, but love seems to be publicly expressed more often between men than between men and women, and almost anyone my age is or has been married. Men enjoy the company of men and seem to date each other for fun, whereas marriage seems a tedious social necessity with the wives staying home. But homosexuality is strongly taboo. Central Africans are traditionally casual about sex, but sexually transmitted diseases are common in Zaire, and AIDS is dramatically changing attitudes and lives. AIDS in Africa is almost an apocalyptic tragedy, not only destroying individuals but threatening African society as well.

People, under almost any circumstance, must have some fun or be dreary for lack of it. Among the simplest and most basic pleasures available to healthy people is the enjoyment of sex, without a universally correct rule about it. However, how can two or more women “love” the same vainglorious, authortarian man in polygamy? Can

polygamy be equated with Western romantic ideas about a pleasurable bond between the sexes centered around a compulsion to breed? The varied trappings of comradeship and reproduction result from the world’s great cultural diversity? each culture having devised its own locally relevant style and ethics? not necessarily compatible with one another. Western notions about love and style might not yet make the entire world go around? but they are contagious and catching on in the expanding economy and morality of its eve,—pressing global city.

Love under any guise seems an unfortunate mistake? but as we all come to final ruin? is one’s chosen method really so important? The chief disadvantage of finding ruin through love and marriage is that it takes a suffering accomplice to complete the crime. As a method of ruin? love is no better than loneliness which can be darkly beautiful? even mystical? in its brooding detachment? whereas love enslaves one mind to another and stifles the mood and liberty to peregrinate towards a magical possibility of transforming one’s life.

A wondrous diversity of behavioral strategies exist among the world’s cultures and among its countless animal species. But to look at what a certain monkey? bird? spider or insect might do and then attempt to extrapolate a meaningful analogy for humans from the myriad of natural behavioral models is wrong? because of the vast number of different ways for accomplishing identical tasks? so that a specially adapted behavior is ultimately relevant only to the survival of a particular species or dependent. It’s misleading to take a survival strategy out of context and make that single ethology apply to theories of human behavior. Although humans share 98/, of the same genes with chimpanzees? the 2V, genetic difference does not truely gauge the greater divergence between human behavior and that of their animal relatives. Apply all of nature’s diverse expression at once to explain human behavior and that’s closer to the confusing portrait that arises when using natural history as an analogy for human whys and wherefores. Because a female praying mantis bites the head off a mate? whose nerves are still trying to copulate and say that this somehow explains some aspect of human intercourse? or that competing gangs of squabbling baboons mirrors human violence proves nothing? one might as well include the antics of woodcocks? frogs? crickets? or dogs and cats on the prowl? ad infinitum. Humans are more complicated? and nature offers us little wisdom other than anthropomorphic parables from which to mistakenly glean understanding? the bright stuff of ancient legends. An animal’s behavior might be an approximate analogy in somewhat describing an individual’s action at a certain instant in time? but not for explaining motives. Few consistent parallels other than genetics and an earthly compulsion to survive in the same space and time exist between humans and anything else in nature. We reside alone in the animal kingdom with our craven fire? and given a full belly? with muddled minds—conduct goaded by pangs of morality? haunting mortality and incessant desires for wealth? power and sensual pleasure.

If relatively little public affection or role exchange is displayed between sexes in Central Africa? there is a notable dedication among partners in living daily life. Children? extended family and role identification make marriage work more than anything else. Without these critical elements? traditional society crumbles.

Although Africa must better educate its women in order to progress, new imported lifestyles fail to promise real improvement in daily family life. Ulhat do we really offer? One night spent in an average Western household—whether it be in the slummy hotel room of a misfit or lonely retiree, or at a suburban family mansion terrorized by a drunk or drug-addicted lawyei—might reveal the answer.

In Zaire, children are essential to everyone’s happiness and wellbeing. Children are wanted, cherished, appreciated and scolded as anywhere else, but few African homes are complete without them. And fewer Africans are whole without marriage. Children’s abilities are normally not stifled with an overload of toys, affection or abuse. As soon as a healthy African child can walk and follow instructions, he or she must work for the family, typically fetching or carrying things for others, but also helping their mother and siblings tend younger children. Most children do their required household chores in a quiet, cheerful and effective manner, gaining a worldly purpose while making a noble contribution to the family. The major problem for most African children, and adults, is staying healthy and alive while living in abject poverty. Many African children are killed or gravely sickened by malnutrition and disease. They often have grossly distended stomachs, poorly healed wounds and serious skin conditions.

The price of Primus has dropped in half because a short walk from the auberae is the strikingly modern-looking Bralima brewery owned by Heineken, and probably Mobutu as well. Beer is one of Zaire’s most lucrative industries. The brewery sits on a hill, overlooking the docks, and men unload cases of beer from trucks and stack them onto the barge. The freshly-brewed beer is eventually covered by canvas, the shade preserving enough of the beer’s prisfine character to make everyone happy. Beer travels no better than people do. This barge was going to Bumba, over halfway to Kisangani, but took two weeks getting there. If a tramp is patient and lucky, it’s possible to hitch a ride. Tugs, with Primus brightly painted on their bridge, sluggishly push barges of brew from Mbandaka to many remote jungle ports on the Zaire River and its tributaries.

Each Saturday morning in Zaire is salinooi when everyone must do some sort of public service. People clean streets, clear footpaths, cut weeds, and do other work for the community. This was Mobutu’s idea and subsequently became the law. Afterwards, people lounge about socializing under trees growing from the tamped dirt yards around their homes. The tropical weather encourages this, particularly in the evening after the day’s heat has begun to pass, when the cooler air seems to reinvigorate everyone.

Men and women arrive to use the two other vacant rooms at the inn. They come and go at all hours. One man is a cop off the Vanaambi, and says that he is going to Kisangani when the big boat arrives next Saturday, one week from now. At night, my tiny room is hot and stifling, having only one small window with a broken screen, next to the door, facing the street. The room is buzzing with mosquitos, so I keep a mosquito coil lit, and crawl under my mosquito net <never leave home for Zaire without one!), looking for baseball, or the BBC, on the radio and eventually finding the Tigers versus the Oakland A’s. The stuffy heat persists past midnight, so I slurped beer for relief and

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prayed for sleep. While the general situation of the auberoe is delightful, and the patron sympathetic, the room is unbearable. It’s right for trysting lovers and other rooters but miserably sultry for dreams.

July 10s This morning, I searched all over town for another place to stay, but the other hostels seemed worse or too expensive. The room next door to mine is used about eight times a day. Brothel does not seem the proper word to describe Le Bon Samaritan. A rather awkward expression like “popular love nest” is more to the point. Some couples stay only a few minutes, and the sheets are never changed for them or the next guests. When I asked the patron why my stinking-from-sweat sheets weren’t changed as I had requested, he apologized for his negligence saying that two young girls who worked for him were “stupid”. Everything had gone wrong since he returned from Europe. He then advised me to leave Africa quickly, before I died, or before some other terrible thing occured, and to travel elsewhere. He then repeated that he wished he were dead. I told him about the bad locks on the room facing the street. He explained that he was a neighborhood chief, so nobody ever stole from him, and things left in the room would be safe. He was right. Besides, his customers were some of the more important, powerful looking people that I had seen in Mbandaka, men in fancy uniforms and suits; the kind of people no one messed with in Zaire. I washed my clothes and sheets in the river, after pushing away a light film of petroleum that wafted over the water, and dried everything by putting it under the sun, on top of the restaurant’s straw roof.

Jay returned with a young woman last night, and may have been tickling her, for all the soft giggling that filtered through the walls. He feels safe with condoms; I don’t, but I’m an unwilling voyeur because of the thin walls seperating his world from mine. I think the heat inspires Jay to stay out late on the town; the rooms are almost intolerably hot each night. I avoid the nightclubs because I’m uneasy in them, nor could I remain celibate for long, if I drank there. Fear of AIDS has ruined paradise and has annoyingly complicated reality.

Male friendship here could easily be mistaken for homosexuality in the U.S., with strolling men holding hands and talking sweetly to each other, all of which I’m uncomfortable with. A young African man might seem too aggressive in starting a friendship. A youth has been frequently visiting me, living just down the street from the auberoe, on the road along the river going downtown. He wants to know everything that I’m doing, wanting to go about the Cit£ and ouartiers holding hands, seemingly showing off, although I’m nothing special to have on parade. The “friendship” happens too fast, from a pressing and seemingly insincere stranger. There is no gentle way to act other than to quietly drink beer with him and fog the morning. A clear mind is more wonderful than a sodden, muddled one, but almost inevitably, even with fine, budding thoughts for the day, in the dismal heat and boredom, the mind fails as the day wears on and the body grows thirsty.

The young man comes by every few hours asking if I’ve gone anywhere? Alone or with who? Where? What’s up? Then he asks for a cadeau. I feel inordinately pressured. Perhaps he is a police informer? But this is not a heavily weighed question because his intrusiveness seems normal to me, and if he were, then I’ve got nothing to hide from

the police. I can’t explain myself to him, when I hardly give things a second thought about doing the nothing I do. He’s intolerably oppressive, but I try not to be rude. And he wants to go dancing, I think that if I went to the nightclubs, it would lead to other trouble besides sex. With all the annoying drunks, including myself, at the clubs, someone would find good cause to make a confrontation. Paranoia, friend? How about homosexual panic?

This morning, I drank large cups of black coffee and ate fresh bread, avocados and papaya at a small market not far from the auberoe. The coffee stall was under a straw pai1lote, a tree stump table below an umbrella of palm fronds with lizards scooting through the leaves.

On Sunday, the city is very quiet with almost nothing open but a few bars. After again searching for another hostel and then aimlessly wandering around town, I stopped for a soda. The bar, empty save for one customer, was in a former Belgian hotel, now beautifully decrepit with cracking, plaster walls. Several wooden tables with chairs were spaciously set on the floor. The faded, brown interior sported a broken, antique Belgian wall clock, numerous spare tables, pushed against one wall and stacked on top of another, a hanging picture of a recent Pope meeting an African cleric; and a dusty, untended wooden longbar shoved against another wall. Tattered photos, mostly of nameless white women, were randomly pinned to the walls. An old telephone, from Zaire’s prehistory, collected dust on a table. In a back room, a chugging kerosene fridge chilled drinks, and past the fridge through a smoky corridor, a woman was cooking food in an iron cauldron over an open wood fire on the back porch overlooking a garden.

Ulhile staring at the smoky cobwebs on the cracked plaster ceiling of the bar, I felt a certain satisfaction to find a peaceful place where European commerce went bankrupt, overextended beyond its proper milieu, and where the greedy delusions of exploiting one last vulnerable continent were utterly destroyed. Zaire is both too eccentric and remote from Europe, and its buoyant, rowdy citizens are unconquerable. As an African might say, this isn’t Africa in decline, but colonialism. Rapid decay is essential to the regeneration of all tropical life, and timeless, pragmatic Africa was reemerging through the sludge, adroitly making something to eat on the veranda.

A soda wasn’t quite enough to shake the heat, so I ordered some suds, ferried to me by a shy, young girl. I wasn’t yet drunk, and a few potbellied kids came by for a laugh, but I couldn’t understand the language of their laughter. If I was funny for them, then my idleness is useful. Otherwise, I was just a snooping, skinflint tourist, scrounging for food at the markets, wearing shabby clothes, walking or hitchhiking, rooming at cheap inns, wandering through the Cit£, etc. As a foreigner, people assume that I’m rich and expect that I can do better than than themselves. I met their expectations only when I ingested their precious beer and then became buoyed above the lepers and craven, enjoying what they couldn’t as a ruined pharaoh lording over a destitute realm.

I’ve seldom abused beer without eventually suffering an ugly psychotic hangover, the psychosis usually scaring me sober for a few days. Drunkenness loses things: health, jobs, friends and lovers, money, and respect for the world and self, but these wasted items are

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nothing compared to losing one’s mind. Uhile hungover, it’s often occurred to me that the innate coiled psychosis might someday unspring into a permanent state. It’s always a miracle when, after suffering an entire ruined day from hangover, I drift asleep and miraculously awake forgiven, feeling somehow refreshed and unimpeded by regret and ready to drink once again. But, this subdermal insanity is too close for comfort to ever feel secure about life or ever to enjoy more pleasurable drugs to transcend it. So instead, each sober moment is a gift, each clear thought a jewel, and whatever compassion I can possibly muster for anything else, a grudging duty that helps me know the world’s failure, including the most collosal, myself. And while I have no original ideas, nor emotions, I possess, like others, a unique situation of perceptions. The African often holds the misconception that white skin is necessarily thin skin, but undeniably white skin is more transparent, and as these children laughed and giggled around me,

I wondered if they were seeing something I couldn’t hide; something misnamed or mislaid within the dreamy darkness of myself.

The girl opened another bottle of beer by prying the cap loose with her perfect white teeth. I laughed, amused to see this done. After finishing the beer, I walked down to the port to check the blackboard where ship’s logs are posted and found nothing definite about the grand bateau coming from Kinshasa, still rumored to arrive in about one week. Opposite the port and across a street, I met the man on the Yanaambi who owned the gorilla. He took me into the central courtyard of a housing compound where the baby gorilla, now named Rambo, was tied like a dog to a tree. His owner and several other men were sitting outdoors around a shaded table, chatting and drinking beer. Both Rambo and Rambo’s boss were waiting for the boat to Kinshasa.

Near the port are a line of busy bars facing the river, but I avoided stopping at them as 1 walked back to the auberae along the riverfront, past houses, shops and warehouses, and past the old Belgian cathedral, still used, but looking more and more a ruin with many bricks fallen because of crumbling mortar, leaving numerous jagged holes in the walls sprouting epiphytic plants and green ferns, jungle lianas and misshapen spires of seedling trees.

The next day, Alex took me to meet some American missionaries living in Mbandaka, and also an American coordinator for Habitat for Humanity, an organization made famous by former President Jimmy Carter’s membership. Through the coordinator, I met Rex, a young Pennsylvanian, who lived and worked at the original Habitat project in Bikoro, on Lake Tumba, about 140 kilometers south of Mbandaka.

Habitat for Humanity was initially founded by an American missionary who once lived at Bikoro, which became the site of Habitat’s first housing project. Habitat’s noble goal is beautifully simple in its application. Habitat’s primary purpose is to build comfortable, healthy and affordable housing for the world’s poor. The general idea is to first build a house with volunteer labor using cheap, efficient material, and sell that house at cost and then recycle that money into another house and so on. Underway, the program is meant to both sustain itself and be run by local members, dispensing with outside aid.

Rex invited me to stay at Bikoro with him, and showed me a newly built Habitat house to stay in, on the outskirts of Mbandaka. I

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retrieved my things from the sweatbox at Le Bon Samaritan> and left a note for Jay telling him where I was going. I hopped into Rex’s pickup and we drove to the Habitat house about 5 kilometers from central Mbandaka. The unfinished house smelled of fresh cement and lacked electricity and water» but was roofed> cool, airy and bug-proof. The houses among others) sat in a weedy field on the road to Bikoro two or three kilometers past Mbandaka’s large market) a short distance from a monument marking the equator. I spread my tent and ground pad on the cement floor and found marvelous rest) a welcome relief after spending four nights in a dank) bug-ridden hovel.

One morning) I watched a man climb a thirty foot tall palm tree) Raphia vinifera. to extract sap from the heart to make vin de oalme. He climbed the palm like an electrical lineman) but used a strap made entirely of plant fibers. He artfully made his way up the tall palm) jumping from hatcheted notch to notch) and then nimbly circled the leafy heart at the top checking his taps_y and draining several small gourds) which had been tied below the taps) into a larger) brown urnshaped calabash which he hung around his neck. The tapper solemnly tasted the contents of each gourd before emptying the smaller gourds into the larger one.

I went to the Primus brewery to play on a private basketball court with missionaries) elite Africans) and European residents who met there most afternoons. There was also a swimming pool) a lighted clay tennis court) and a small clubhouse that sold ice-cold Primus for ninety Zaires a pop₉only a stone’s throw from its birth. I drank a liter of beer before participating in a full court game. I didn’t shoot well) so positioned myself for anyone’s miss and got the odd rebound. I then borrowed a tennis racket and rallied with an African.

I ate at street stalls or bought food at the large market and brought enough beer back to the house from the brewery to greatly assist the solitude and rest that I craved. When it was time to leave Mbandaka) Rex took me in his pickup) making swings through town visiting people and loading things to take to Bikoro. When he stopped for gasoline) a gang of snickering people jumped into the pickup’s bed) but after gassing up_f Rex drove around in circles until they jumped off. He made one pass by the Le Bon Samaritan where I saw Jay sitting on a stump in the restaurant) looking sweetly serene> still wearing a tarn and clutching his wooden staff like a scepter while staring peaceably at the river. I had no chance to say goodbye to him.

The road to Bikoro was one pothole after another going through miles of tropical swamp > and past numerous small Bantu settlements in the higher areas. Ragged-looking pygmies lived here also.

Rex lived in one of the simple) beautiful homes that Habitat had built on the shores of Lake Tumba> a misty backwater connected to the Zaire river just below its confluence with the Ubangi. Nearby and along the lake are old rubber plantations where the Africans now bury their dead. Rex spoke excellent Lingala after living here for over two years. A compatriot directed a Habitat program at TondO) a smaller village a few kilometers away. There was no electricity at Bikoro) and so at night) we sat in the light of kerosene lanterns) talking and reading in the dancing shadows. Sometimes people came to the door) selling fish or produce) or asking for money) food) or medicine. Rex seemed unbothered

by his cultural isolation and enjoyed his life there, also having a pretty girlfriend who visited frequently- Rex also had a small library which I perused.

The Habitat house is superbly-built from locally-made cement bricks and has a tin roof. It has screened windows and vents below the eaves which keeps the inside air fresh and cool, while keeping the mosquitos out. The daytime light is wonderful. There is a kitchen, bath, two bedrooms, and a spacious living area; all costing less than US $3,000. The problem in Bikoro was that because of the rapid currency inflation, houses that were sold on fixed payments in Zaires failed to return the initial investment in dollars. Also, many buyers had difficulty making their payments for one reason or another, so that the project was failing to sustain itself, as intended, and was still reliant on donations from abroad to keep it going. Habitat was ready to hand this project over to locals, but Rex had serious doubts as to whether the locals had the proper inspiration and resources to make it work on their own. But then the Africans won’t go homeless, as long as they exist within familes. They have always known how to build their own practical houses, more cheaply.

One day, we spent two hours hiking to Tondo on a footpath through the old rubber plantations along the lakeshore, past cement gravestones on which were placed old photos, flowers and other offerings. In a shallow cove a fisherman poled his pirogue through papyrus and water lilies crossing to Tondo.

At Tondo, a pair of young Australian travelers, Dave and Danny, were staying with the American Habitat volunteer, Ken. The Australians found Tondo by starting overland in Tunisia, then taking trucks through Algeria, Niger, Chad, CAR, and into Zaire. Dave lost his health while traveling on a riverboat going south towards Kinshasa. They left the riverboat at Lukolela, south of Lake Tumba, when Dave became bedridden for two weeks at the Catholic mission with suspected malaria and hepatitis. When Dave could travel again, they found a gypsy vedette sailing into Lake Tumba and they got off at Tondo. Vedettes are narrow, roofed and leaky wood-plank cigarette boats with outboards that ply the smaller rivers, moving people and cargo from one place to another. Dave and Danny had been at Tondo almost two weeks and wanted to eventually get on to Kenya. Dave said that he generally didn’t like Americans, so I left him to his peace. We drank a few cocktails and swapped adventures, before Rex and I returned to Bikoro.

One night after eating popcorn for dinner, we chased down a bat that had somehow made its way into the house. After releasing the bat, we heard a persistant rustling at one of the screened windows, and found a small bird either feeding against the screen on insects attracted to the light, or disoriented by the light like a moth. We easily caught the bird, and bringing it inside, I saw, with much pleasure, that it was a beautiful jewel-like Pygmy Kingfisher with its iridescent-blue back and ochre tail feathers. They migrate at night and are attracted to lights. We carefully examined the bird for a few minutes, before it escaped to fly loose in the house. We eventually caught it again with a mosquito net, and tossed it back into the night. These small kingfishers normally dart through the air and are hard to see when perched in the foliage.

Bikoro has a poor market, and a bar near the lake. The bar has a generator which powered lights and the electric guitars of a young band. Loud music roared for a few hours each night, the noise carrying to Rex’s house. July is the best time of the year here because of a constant mist which keeps temperatures relatively cool. The lake offers a delightful swim.

Beyond a certain point of haze, the lake merged with the mist at a

shifting grayish-blue near distance. The warm, humid fog encompassed

both the lake and sky in the horizon, so that it was impossible to

seperate one from the other. A fisherman cast a bundled net. Unfurling

flat on the water, it sank from the weight of small stones tied into the mesh, but was drawn back empty. The fisherman patiently stuttered his steps to avoid splashing, wading like a heron in the shallows, halting and poising himself for another deliberate cast. He repeated this until he had caught a few small fish in his mesh, which he put into a coat pocket, and then he meandered into the mist. Men poling pirogues appeared like apparitions in the fog, and a worn vedette swayed in the choppy waves close to shore, anchored to a submerged, engine-block.

One morning, a car stopped outside the house, and three Chinese men stepped out. Two were doctors, one a traditional Chinese healer and the other a modern practitioner. The third man was their French/Chinese interpreter, while a chauffeur was left in the car. They had been living in Mbandaka for two years as participants in China’s foriegn aid program. They explained how traditional healing and modern medicine complemented each other. Traditional healing, using acupuncture, herbology, and animal-based potions, treated chronic conditions where contemporary medicine failed. I had already met one of the doctors at the market in Mbandaka, where he had asked, through his interpreter, to change his Zaires, which the Chinese government paid him, for dollars.

I had already changed money with the Belgian Consul in Mbandaka, so put him off, but he asked where I stayed, and I told him I was going to Bikoro. Now, they had come 140 kilometers just to beg me to change money with them.

We talked through their interpreter for about an hour. It was strange that the Chinese government hadn’t taught the doctors French or Lingala before coming to Zaire. Rex had studied Lingala before taking his post, and capable Peace Corps volunteers are routinely taught to effectively speak a language after only ten weeks of training.

All foreign aid programs are ultimately self-serving. The Chinese are purveyors of numerous practical small-ticket consumer items to many third world countries. China manufactures poorly-made, but utilitarian kerosene lamps, radios, razors, blades, pens, utensils, nail clippers, garden tools, machetes, pocket knives, etc. sold at markets throughout the third world. China has these consumer goods already in production for their own people, and can export them for sale cheaply. Some are manufactured in prisons using forced labor.

These doctors and their interpreter were not in Zaire to learn about the Africans and their ways. Nor were they here to satisfy some individual need to do good by helping the poor and sick, like Albert Schweitzer did in Gabon. The doctors were unwillingly here protecting China’s foreign markets and they weren’t particularly happy, now

wanting just to make a few bucks for themselves before returning home. Some of China’s problems in foreign affairs stem from an awkward narrow-mindedness» arising from its traditional insularity from the rest of the world, but suddenly China craves international business, and the jungle.

These tactless, chain-smoking guys kept insisting that I change money, while I diverted them by asking questions about their work. One of the doctors said that Africans too often came to him to be treated for venereal diseases, and that the Africans are lazy, stupid, and useless, just wanting to screw all the time, and wanting everything to be given to them. The traditional doctor, who claimed to have treated Mobutu for some undisclosed condition, noted that Zaire is a rich, foolish country, having everything, but remaining poor. Minerals, forests, water, fertile land, all waiting to be exploited.

Perhaps Zaire could be the China of Africa, I thought, if the Chinese ran this place, one smokestack, rice paddy, and teeming, filthy city after another. The Chinese didn’t want to be in Africa, had no use for this wild, disorderly place, and wanted to be back home in China with their families and with the things they really loved, klhen it became clear to them that I wasn’t going to change money, they invited me to a Chinese dinner with them in Mbandaka, undoubtedly prepared by their Chinese chef, and abruptly departed for the four-hour trip back.

I left Bikoro after five days, returning to Mbandaka with the Australians in a dump truck full of bananas, manioc, baskets of peppers, chickens, a squealing piglet, and people; all bouncing down the rutted road. At one stop I gnawed on a stringy piece of monkey and then filled my plastic canteen with warm Primus for the road. The truck halted for everything and anything, taking eight hours to go 1A0 kilometers to Mbandaka. &iven the miserable state of roads in Zaire, heavy duty trucks are more practical than buses, even if they are less comfortable, because this is the only reliable way people can bring produce to market, and return home with goods and money.

The truck, the only regular public transport to and from Bikoro, made the round-trip several times a week and was owned by a friendly young American missionary couple living in Mbandaka. The husband had grown up in Zaire with his missionary parents; his wife was a doctor who ran a medical dispensary in Mbandaka. They were decent people who were doing something practical for the Zairois. If it came to a choice of putting government sponsored foreign aid into Zaire or letting a missionary help the people, one might choose the latter because a practical missionary can be more efficient, better motivated, and more effective, accomplishing more with less. Preaching comes and exploitation follows any agency, so that’s a canceled issue.

At Mbandaka, Dave, Danny, and I moved into the Habitat house where I previously had stayed. I was nervously eager to begin the trip to Kisangani, and went to the port and beer dock checking for incoming and outgoing boats. By going to Bikoro I had missed the grand bateau to Kisangani, and it would be two weeks before another one would likely return. If there weren’t boats going towards Kisangani, then I might go in the opposite direction, to Kinshasa, just to satisfy my unease.

The next day, I walked the five kilometers into town, and back, three times, anxiously searching docks along the river for a boat going

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anywhere, preferably east. The beer dock was empty too. And it,s impossible to get to Kisangani, or Kinshasa, by road from Mbandaka, despite what some crazy maps might indicate. I went to the Air Zaire office looking for a flight to anywhere from Mbandaka. In the heat, a heavy feeling of inertia overcame me, which I restlessly tried to overcome. Knowing the uncertain transport, I was attempting to will my way out of Mbandaka by frantically pacing back and forth about town.

That evening, I again played basketball and a set of tennis on the lit clay court at the brewery, and drank the fresh, cheap beer at the clubhouse after the games, talking the three kilometers or so back to the house, I stopped at a small candle-lit market at a crossroads to eat some fried fish, attracting a mob of teens and other onlookers, some of whom said angry, unintelligible things to me in Lingala which made the crowd break out into mocking laughter. I sensed an unfolding tension, so as soon as I could finish eating, I began walking again into the darkness back to the house, away from the cooking fires and candles. Some people followed me, demanding money and shouting what I took to be threats or insults. I became frightened and ran at full speed, running until I came to an intersection with a small wooden street store lit by a primus lantern, and breathlessly stopped, finding nothing but still, sultry darkness behind me.

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THE ZAIRE RIVER

July 21s After my fright last night in Mbandaka, I awoke at daybreak today with a more definite mind to catch the big market boat to Kinshasa arriving tomorrow, and from there fly to Kisangani or even Goma in Eastern Zaire. I felt uneasy staying longer in Mbandaka, and regretted not leaving with Jay on the grand bateau to Kisangani a few days ago, having stayed too long at Bikoro. It’s not wise to overstay anywherey lacking a stated purpose and/or a good reason to exist, because everyone is soon going to know a wayfarer, and whether he or she likes it or not, it’s better to be something other than an idle tourist or a drifter. People get uneasy when one does nothing but drink beer, think and stare, or aimlessly walk around. Is loafing some sort of universal crime?

After again visiting the port and not finding another boat to Kisangani, I retired to drink beer at one of the nearby bars along the river with Dave and Danny, who were determined to go to Kinshasa by boat tomorrow to pick up some expected mail from friends, and then fly to Kisangani. I thought of joining them. At the bar, I watched a recently arrived barge being unloaded, and decided to find out where it was going. I walked down to the river, climbed over several rusting and idle barges to which this barge lay tied, then walked over a narrow plank gangway and boarded the ship. The boat was bound for Kisangani 1 I made my intentions known, but before I could find the captain, a policeman from the boat grabbed me, asking if I had permission to be on the boat, and then curtly ushered me off.

I rejoined the Australians at the bar. Dave, a former Greenpeace employee, berated Americans for exacerbating the world’s environmental and political problems. And even buying him a beer wouldn’t get him to shut up. Just after 9:30 AM, the same policeman appeared with a much older man, who was both mightily disheveled and merrily drunk. He limped and had one bad, motionless eye. The older man, who said that he was the boat’s captain, asked if I wanted a ride to Kisangani. When I answered yes, he said to grab my gear, some food, and to be ready within an hour; then to wait on the river bank in front of the boat until it was ready to sail, and someone would motion to me to board.

The discussion lasted only a few minutes, after which the two men suddenly left. The older man did not seem the captain of anything, looking more like a drunken bum. Neither of the Australians believed him. I had serious doubts as well, but it took only a few minutes to decide. I ran out from the bar, flagged down one of the rare collective taxis, retrieved my belongings, and returned to the river in just under an hour. I sat under a palm tree in clear sight of the barge, anxiously waiting to get on with the journey.

At Mbandaka, the river is more than several miles wide, but there are dozens of low-lying islands, so that a person doesn’t gain any idea of its size by looking across. President Mobutu was in town, having arrived in his own luxury yacht, so there was much clamor around the busy port. Mbandaka had a great festive air, crowded with noisy people.

After waiting about two hours? I was motioned aboard. The Nkov 12 soon discharged itself from its moorings and got underway. It’s a double barge; about thirty-five yards long? hanging a large Zaire flag off the stern? and seems in excellent condition. The price for my passage was 3?500 Zaires? about sixteen dollars? which I paid directly to Mois£? the captain. On board were a few other passengers? the crew? and about a dozen superbly conditioned soldiers.

I left so suddenly that I had no time to buy a case of beer or other provisions. I was on the sauce in Mbandaka? usually beginning in late morning? and continuing on through the evening. I have yet to uncover more than one bad bottle of Primus. Elle Fait Mousser la Vie state the ubiquitously posted advertisements. I can’t precisely translate that? but that is exactly what the stuff does? it makes life sweet and foamy 1 The Mbandaka brewery is said by the Africans to be the best of four others in Zaire. I had a bottle of Kinshasa-brewed Primus and it was flat and uninspired? compared to the lively? addictive potion from Mbandaka.

The boat went downstream to a point only several kilometers from where it had been docked. (Waiting there were numerous pirogues with passengers and goods which all quickly came aboard with much excited commotion. Soon the boat blew its whistle? turned around? and headed upstream. This is not an official QNATRA passenger boat? so passengers were not allowed aboard ship at the port in Mbandaka? with its police and port authority. 1 had been twelve days in and about Mbandaka.

Upon leaving Mbandaka? the boat passes the small settlements along the riverbank. The cozy? rustic houses are set modestly in the hazy? dull landscape? as in a Rembrandt etching. The trees are smaller than those along the Ubangi? reflecting the poorer soil and water-logged conditions of the swampy ground. Around Mbandaka it is the brief dry-season? it hasn’t rained since the day I arrived? nearly two weeks ago. The Zaire River has low water which presents potential navigation problems? unlike the Ubangi? now rising because it gathers rains from above the equator? a different climatic zone. Many of the sources of the Zaire river above the Ubangi confluence come from below the equator? where it is now the dry season. A beer was brought to me

by Aim£? the thin? intensely alert QNATRA cop who had first ushered me off the boat? and who had accompanied the captain to the bar in Mbandaka. The brew tasted cool and crispy as I sat on deck? just below the bridge. I soon bought two more bottles from someone’s personal stash? saving one in the galley’s fridge. I sat on a comfortable wicker chair in the shade of the overhang of the pilot’s deck above me. The beer is delicious? kissing my mouth and stomach much as the fresh breeze from the river refreshes my naked legs? face and arms. Beer is like a manmade fruit? a brilliant imitation of nature’s apples? mangos? papaya? and pineapples. To feel happy? I probably need about four bottles of beer a day? which seems impossible aboard this boat? unless there is a secret cache somewhere.

^:30 PM: Today was lucky because I boarded the Nkov 12 and saved my original plan to continue upriver to Kisangani. Moreover? I didn’t have to wait longer in Mbandaka to board the boat to Kinshasa. We passed the grand bateau» a huge conglomerate passenger boat? after it had been dismantled into three separate barges. The dismal barges were

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each overflowing with humanity. Two barges were stranded in midstream on sandbars, while another double-decked barge had been casually pushed ashore on an island. The powertrain, a large multi-decked river tug loaded with people, was steaming alone back to Mbandaka. The tug was going to Mbandaka to discharge the passengers, then return to get others, and eventually return to budge the lightened barge off the sandbar. There may have been as many as two thousand people floating in the crammed hell of the stuck barges.

While passing the disaster, we saw Mobutu’s splendid yacht, with its helicopter pad, flying both the Zaire flag and the president’s personal banner with a leopard against a purple background. The leopard is Mobutu’s personal totem and he often sports a hat made from leopard skin. The impressive white yacht is very sleek, with four decks, and a large “P” (for President) painted on its smoke stack. The yacht made a special cruise out of Mbandaka just to see the broken arand bateau. Everyone on the Nkov IE went out to cheer and wave at the President. Aim£ encouraged me to wave and told me that Mobutu made a substantal gift of money to purchase beer and food for the stranded passengers, while they waited to get rescued. I didn’t see Zaire’s infamous president, but waved like everyone else as the yacht passed. Mobutu spends a lot of time on this fast yacht, cruising at whim about his beautiful realm, some say he fears for his life in Kinshasa.

I’m to sleep on the floor of the captain’s cabin, a small, comfortable wood-paneled room just below the pilot’s bridge with four windows, a table, chairs, and a bookshelf. Opposite from my sleeping space, about ten feet away, is a bed against a bulkhead where Aim£ sleeps. The captain rests in a seperate bedroom attached to the cabin, and between the two rooms is a cramped head with a shower, stool, and wash basin. The shower powerfully spills a generous quantity of water, worthy of the great river, Zaire, from where it came.

Aim6» after checking my passport, presented me with a delicious plate of cooked eel in a hot pepper sauce. After eating, I went on deck and massaged my mind watching a beautiful sunset. Afterwards, I met a young man who told me that he was a history student. The student soon brazenly asked for some of the beer I was drinking “to make the conversation go better.” During the course of a forgettable chat, he stated an absurd notion: “America is like a father and Zaire, its son.” Perhaps he was thinking of democratically-elected Ronald Reagan’s paternal praise of the unelected Mobutu for his sensibility and goodwill, when the two leaders visited each other in Washington. The meeting was much more significant for the Zairois than it was for Americans who barely noted it. A U.S. blessing of Mobutu is powerful political propaganda in Zaire, and further strengthens Mobutu’s harsh political oppression of the Zairois. America, the father of Zaire? This can’t be so, I thought. I soon returned to the cabin where, like a wastrel, I shared my last bottle of beer with Aim£, and then slept on the floor where I had been told.

July EE: I awoke shortly after dawn, not sleeping well on the cabin’s hard plank floor above the noisy engines that churned and pushed the boat upstream all night. It took quite a time for the cabin to cool down from the day’s heat, but mosquitos were few while outside the cabin the air was thick with them. By 10 AM, the cabin was

sweltering once again and I moved out onto the deck where a cool breeze drifted in from upriver.

The Nkov 12 has a powerful searchlight and strong diesel engines.

A bronze plaque on the prow says that it was built in 19^^ in Leopoldville. Me seem to be making excellent time. The deck has become a small market, as bags of clothing have been unpacked. Many pirogues are tying on, the people boarding to sell fish, chat, or hitch a ride upriver. The boat has blossomed into a population of about one hundred people. Canoe paddles and sticks have been stuck into hatch-holes to support cloth tents—to keep the sun off of men, women, and children who sit underneath them cooking food on wood fires. Still the boat is uncrowded and it’s pleasant to walk about the decks of the two barges. Me continue to pass small hamlets of one to a dozen homes, many of the houses being built upon stilts to protect against flooding.

I purchased two bottles of Primus from a soldier, just after I began to dread spending a dry day in solemn memory of the alcohol suppression in Sudan. So God surely provides, and I believe in him now as no other believer has in history, so long as the spring keeps flowing.

Last night, Aim£ talked a little about himself. He has a wife and children in Kinshasa, and gets one month a year off from his job. Often he works on the grand bateau. There are normally few problems on a cargo barge like the Nkov 12, but working on the grand bateau is difficult because of the hundreds of people on board, and they have trouble finding places to rest and sleep on the overcrowded boat. The overcrowding causes much tension among the passengers and crew. The grand bateau is like a city, with both petty and major crimes committed, even murder. And with all the people constantly coming and going, it’s a chaotic situation to control.

About thirty pirogues are now tied to the Nkov 12. This is one of the few chances that people living along the river have of making money by selling their natural harvests: crocodiles, monkeys, bananas, fish, turtles, palm wine, etc. A crocodile for sale in Mbandaka had been sliced across the spine in huge, round slices a foot or more in diameter, but I have yet to see one that large brought aboard. The crocodiles on deck are small creatures under four feet in length.

Aim£ and I bought a panier of smoked fish. The oanier was the size and shape of an old snowshoe, about eighteen inches wide by a yard long. The blackened fish were all under a foot long and of uncertain species and of uncertain vintage. A panier is loosely woven webs of vines tied in two oval stick frames, pressed over a double layer of fish and then tied together, making a neat, rustic package. The same general design also serves to make larger collapsible crates. The paniers vary greatly in size. To purchase a panier, a person simply estimates its value, compares an offer with the seller’s price, and bargains to make a deal. My share of the fish cost 500 Zaires. But for lunch, Aim£ prepared us a nice meal from fresh fish cooked in oil and dumped over a plate of rice and beans.

After lunch, Aim£ and I drank cups of sweet tea while he showed me photos of himself and his family, including two of himself in uniform with a gun strapped to his side. Today, he is casually dressed wearing a T-shirt, shorts and sandals. Later, I walked out onto deck to the

hull, where the soldiers camped and were having their mess. They offered me a pint of coffee and a chat, and so it was. At Lisala, the first real town on the river between Mbandaka and Kisangani, I can buy provisions and stop mooching.

A‘ crewman walks about the deck with an archaic orange and black baseball jersey with the letters GIANTS scrawled across the front. A large choiser pile of salable used clothing sits on deck, including shirts stenciled: Ed’s Chevrolet, Philadelphia, Evergreen Lanes,

Regatta 84, etc. Some African nations refuse entry of these cheap second-hand goods because they unfairly compete with the native cloth and sewing industry. In Zaire, clothes are worn until they fall off in tatters. Some women wear slips or lingerie outside their dresses. They like the lace and delicate designs of the underclothing to be seen. Girls often wear sweaters and jerseys as skirts, stepping through the neck holes, and knotting the arms around the waist, or letting them dangle to the side.

People have set up chairs on deck or are lying down on woven straw mats. Mothers are suckling their children as the barge persists upstream under gray skies, and through endless clods of grass and water hyacinth drifting in the brisk, muddy current.

In 1874 Henry Morton Stanley began a trip from coastal East Africa and explored both Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika, searching for the source of the Nile. In 1876, on the same long journey, he reached the Lualaba River, the major headwater of the Congo <now Zaire River), after which he claimed to have fought over thirty separate battles with cannibals and savages while rafting downstream towards the Atlantic Ocean, which he finally attained on foot in 1877. Stanley then became the first European to have explored the Congo Basin.

It’s odd that Stanley’s personal luck held out so long, while so many others in his expedition perished. Stanley could not have possibly survived such constant intense assault by the natives, as he claimed. More to the truth, Stanley murdered and pillaged his fearful path through Zaire in a constant series of brutal preemptive strikes against almost everyone he met. If Stanley were to make his trip now, his main problem would be chasing away a constant stream of freeloaders from his table in the bar.

I must regularly explain myself to the police and others, who all ask the same questions. I usually answer “nurse” or “tourist” depending upon my whim and then “from U.S.A. to Kenya” to the other daily question, responding wearily because of the repetition and my lack of creativity in thinking of something else to say. The comfort of home and friendship comes from not having to continually define oneself. The simple orientation questions, asking who I am and what am I doing, are similar to the questions a psychiatrist might ask a prospective client. The same queries from dozens of different people blend with the largely unchanging scenery of the river, everything appearing as an endless expanse of the same gray-green production, blown to occasional boredom by repetition. Zaire is a world of hazy, mist-shrouded islands which float in a dim soup of sky and water.

18:30 PM: Of about 100 people on board, two-thirds are furiously sucking sugar cane, including a family of twelve sitting under a makeshift canopy, strung between two canoe paddles. A tall, sturdy

young mother held a large, sucking infant to her chest with one arm while she angrily argued with a young man. She flailed her free hand and shook a defiant finger in the air while scolding him. Her adversary only cowered, looking embarrassed because of his infraction against her. Meanwhile, the infant intensely clutched the mother’s breast with both hands, sucking furiously for milk, oblivious to all else. The feisty mother, at once nursing and doing spirited battle, seemed to possess the fortitude of all life itself.

An angry Zairois woman will seldom back down from a public dispute with anyone, if she is convinced that she is right. She is spirited and often as big and strong as most men. Each day, she works at a variety of tedious tasks: tending children, working in the fields or at the market, and preparing meals. Much of her work requires physical strength and stamina. She brings produce to market, gathers firewood outside villages, and then carries home immense loads of wood on her head (even the elderly must do this, if they can). She softens raw foods like manioc and plantain by tirelessly pounding them with a long pestle into a mortar. Men seldom do these things.

Young children are paddling small child-size pirogues at midstream. The boarding procedure, often one pirogue tying on to another already tied to the moving barge, is a graceful athletic maneuver requiring much skill and physical dexterity. A person from a landing piroaue smoothly jumps from one dugout to another at just the right instant, while retaining his delicate balance and the cord to his rocking canoe. The cord is most often a twisted vine. To walk along the edge of the deck is to also step over these rustic ropes. Many of the boats are hitchhikers looking for a lift somewhere upstream.

Afterwards, they can easily paddle downstream back to their homes. If people stay too long on the boat, they are asked for money to continue the trip.

As if by magic, more women and children have appeared on deck, hidden away in the holds when the boat was in Mbandaka. Two men pass the time playing checkers, African style. The board is larger than in our game, with ten squares in each direction and four rows of pieces instead of three. A woman fetches water from the river with a rope and bucket. The commandos lounge around in civilian shorts and T-shirts, staring aimlessly ahead.

Near the bow are four sealed containers and a barrel stove used to smoke fish purchased from the people who live along the river. A man brought on board several grotesque bundles of smoked monkeys, two or three mummified corpses to a bundle. He also sold freshly killed monkey and a large, live soft-shell turtle weighing twelve to fifteen pounds. The fresh monkey sells for 650 Zaires, but there are no takers. Another man is weaving a fishing net, using nylon string and a wooden awl. The line is tied between posts, and he weaves a square at a time, holes about the size of those found in a tennis net. Next to the net-weaver is a man splitting a reed, about an inch thick and just over a yard long, to make a broom, basket, or mat.

A boy wanted to sell a fish for 300 Zaires, but unable to find a buyer at that price, he accepted 100 Zaires that an older man had silently left under a steel pipe. A woman quickly split the fish down the spine and left it to dry on the steel deck. Another woman is

braiding a child’s hair into cornrolls. The man in the GIANTS jersey, a hard-working steward, sweeps the deck and does various odd jobs for the boat. Feeling nostalgic, I asked him if he would sell me his shirt, but he told me to go find my own in the choiser pile. Fair enough.

July 23, 11:30 AM: About two hours after sunset last night, the boat was tied by a rope to a tree on an island. The engines were shut off, and everyone went to sleep. Mois6 said it was necessary to stop because it was too dark to find the shipping channel in the low water. Mois£ is short, maybe 60 years old, and sees poorly with his bad eye.

He has sailed Zaire’s waterways for many years, including Lake Kivu in the east. A city type, Mois6 blandly says that Zaire has only three real cities: Kinshasa, Lubumbashi (in the southern copper-rich province of Katanga), and Kisangani.

Another barge is passing, smaller and uglier, but moving faster than we are. It is somewhat distressing to be passed. I had wishfully imagined our boat fast, only to realize once again that the Nkov 12 is

moving like a waterlogged snail, maybe five or six kilometers an houi—

about the pace of a slow jog.

Last night, I ate a bowl of mushy rice with smoked fish and smoked monkey. The smoked fish tastes awful by itself, but is tolorable when used sparingly as a flavoring for rice or beans. The smoked monkey meat is served with skin and bones, I picked away at the monkey’s rib which reminded me of a human child’s, then tossed the bones overboard. After supper, Aim£ spoke to several men who gathered around him about Mobutuism, a bare spoonful of which I understood—citoven.

I slept reasonably well, except that I awoke thinking that a rat was nibbling at my toes; but I returned to sleep without one gram of scientific evidence that this was true and got up with everyone else at six. I had a strange, vivid dream where I was riding in a car somewhere around New York City with a friend and his girlfriend. I was reading a newspaper account of drug dealers taking over two .abandoned buildings at opposite ends of a small island near Manhattan. There was a photo of these two buildings, and in between them was another ruined building that had formerly been a mint. The drug dealers were reported to have been finally evicted from the buildings by the U.S. government which owned the island. I was going to the old mint to apply for a job as a psychiatric technician, as the mint was now a mental hospital. The car followed a highway which went along the edges of a bay, past beautifully forested hills, until we reached a bridge to the island. Against one horizon was the skyline of Manhattan. I got off at the hospital, with my backpack, and my friends drove away. I went into the building, then up some stairs, and finding nothing to indicate the offices of a psychiatric unit, I returned below to meet a familiar face who began speaking to me in French. I then awoke, with a crimp in one hip from sleeping on the hard floor.

This morning, Aim6 brought two women into the kitchen. He told one woman to prepare plantain, and she spent much of the early morning pounding and cooking it. After pounding, the olive-colored plantain was cooked, then molded by hand into the shape of a medium potato. For breakfast I ate the plantain with fresh monkey and drank a quart of heavily sweetened coffee. Fresh monkey is a misnomer. The rancid meat can’t be refrigerated and seems several days old.

At breakfast, Aim£ asked if I wanted one of the women. He calls me Monsieur John, using the middle name on my passport. Aim£ has a difficult time pronouncing the English “R” beginning my first name and it is not worth the effort to correct him, John works fine. I make up stories about how I have a girlfriend back in America, which the Zairois would call a concubine, as opposed to having a wife. Zairois men seem to have both. From experience, it is easier to tell him I have someone at home, than it is to use my inadequate French to explain the reasons why I’m not married, when I don’t really know myself. Marriage and children are purpose enough in life, and one gropes hopelessly to explain oneself in any non-monastic way to a Zairois. It is one lie or another, and I choose the most concise and simplistic one. What a prude I am not to share his pleasure with the women. And how dishonest I am.

I helped buy some fresh fish for supper which a woman prepared.

The woman, perspiring heavily, complained of the heat, and requested my last bottle of beer, which she knew relaxed comfortably in the fridge downstairs. I promptly drew a line, saying “no way!” I’d go without the food before giving that prayer up.

Benefitting well from Aim£’s attention and generosity, I’m now obliged to lend him money. He also asks for my pens, mirror, and drinking water from my canteen. The water is drawn straight from the river via the kitchen tap, but I sometimes treat it with chlorine pills. I don’t always treat the water I drink because my gut seems well-used to native conditions now. There is no way travelers can live perfectly clean and germ-free in Africa. They are going to be exposed to whatever pathogens might be in the food, the dirt, air and water, and that’s it. Get used to it. Take your malaria pills because malaria is rampant.

Central Africans suffer dearly from malaria, although many are “resistant” (not immune) to less virulent strains, due to a prevalence of sickle-cell anemia among the population. More powerful strains cause recurrent debilitation and death, especially among the young and old, and those suffering from other infirmities, like HIV infection. Widespread use of suppressive medications are thought to have encouraged the rise and spread of drug resistant strains. African “resistance” to malaria made them ideal workers in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the major entrepot of the slave trade. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Europeans may have brought malaria, or a more powerful strain, with them to the New World, causing thousands of Amerindians to die from the disease. Although malaria was widespread in southern Europe and America until the late 1800’s, it was a summer disease which afflicted mainly the poor, who often lived in lowlands and could not go to healthier climes in the summer or afford quinine. Quinine, derived from the cinchona tree of the Andes, was almost a monopoly of Spanish Jesuits, and due to its high cost, only available to the wealthy following its discovery in the 1600’s in Peru. During the 1800’s cinchona plantations were successfully started in tropical Asia and in the Caribbean. Only then, combined with later German synthesis of cinchona’s alkaloids, was ready and affordable treatment of malaria’s symptoms made available. Quinine gave Europeans the necessary courage to penetrate Africa and finally dominate the interior by the end of the 19th century.

A boy dragged a dead monkey dripping blood from its mouth over the deck. The monkey Mas mostly gray, with a long black tail and black hands, about the color and size of a stretched raccoon. It also wore a white beard, had a curious black semicircular brow, and sported a patch of orange hair on its head, and resembled most a collared mangabey. I think someone once discovered a new monkey riding a boat like this. The average Zairois doesn’t seem to differentiate between species, it’s all food. Someone also brought aboard a red colobus-type monkey with a long red tail. Another monkey for sale was a small smoked corpse with the top half of its head cut away, revealing the cranal cavity. Its gutted thorax was propped open by skewered sticks and its hair was singed off the thick, black crust of its skin, while the legs and arms were tied to its side with a vine. Its thick tongue was stiffly projected between its teeth, grim as any gargoyle on Notre Dame de Paris. A man wanted 400 Zaires for the critter, which I pettily rejected buying because it was much smaller than the one I saw yesterday at a fairer price, and the man refused to bargain. The smoked meat looks ancient, and I feel as if I’m in the business of buying and selling human corpses. The Zairois love to eat monkey, seeming to prefer it smoked.

I read John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. There is just enough wisdom in this book to make it go well with the Primus, both being lightweight intellectual activities. Steinbeck’s novel is best when he returned to a favorite bar in Monterey to remember the lives and deaths of his favorite characters. While not a gem, the book was alive and a blessing to read on this slow boat to Kisangani.

In Travels With Charlevi Steinbeck considers himself an ordinary old man collecting souvenirs of America and his own past. He has left social and political battles to be fought by more vigorous soldiers, dropping the facade of ‘’writer” or any other profession, and enjoying the simple activity of being a man at home in his country. It’s as if he ended his career with a long, sweet vacation, and is gracefully accepting another stage of life, beyond old, tired concerns about the world’s chronic problems.

Each of Steinbeck’s novels is a refreshing literary experience. Once, I found a tattered copy of In Dubious Battle in a Salvation Army bin, and read it, while living in a leanto at a cherry orchard near Wenatchnee, Washington. There, I met an old, dispirited fruit-tramp who suffered dearly from rotting teeth and a saddening weariness of life. While sitting by a kerosene lamp one evening, discussing trouble and literature, the old tramp made a simple comment that I never forgot: John Steinbeck had nobility in him. Indeed, this is true: Steinbeck showed an uncommon creative nobility when he portrayed the hopes, dreams and endless toils of the impoverished.

Few people in America are as invisible as its migrant workers and tramps, many of whom are anonymous misfits living silent, undignified lives as superfluous humans, with only each other’s shattered sympathy for company. A condition for many of these people is a life of incessant, heavy brooding about the injustices of life. The positive realization of an enlightened tramp is to know that one is doomed to miserably fight an unwinnable war, if he or she cannot forgive. And that it’s better to accept the harsh, lonely world for the way people have created it, forgiving oneself and all others for the crime. This

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is an admission of defeat, in favor of peace—forgiving oneself of unrightable wrongs, knowing there is no ledger to be balanced, and scarcely a poor, inadequate measuring of justice in the world—with poor satisfaction at that. For a tramp to realize a greater, impersonal eternity, and his or her own ultimate unimportance within its mysterious scheme, seems a primary step towards comforting peace.

Rain is falling, so I’ve retreated inside the cabin. Everyone has sought shelter from the cloudburst. Aim£ and I talked about Muhammad Ali who defeated George Foreman at Kinshasa in a 1974 championship boxing match. The fight was important to Zaire because Mobutu wanted the world to dispense with notions about the Congo being a forsaken jungle of ignorant cannibals and disease. The Zairois well remember Ali for donating money to charity in Kinshasa and he remains a great hero.

Aim£ also wanted to talk about religion. I normally tell people that I’m Catholic which dispenses with any unwanted discussion about religion, saving me the mischief of would-be soul-savers and others, even if the questioner is Catholic, as Aim£ is, because most Catholics needn’t discuss their beliefs with each other, naturally deferring to a more knowledgeable and professional priest, and saving their own weak minds for other treats. The best use for having been born Catholic is that I needn’t testify to strangers my unsound and unstable thoughts about these things. A friend of mine readily confesses himself a drug addict and alcoholic to Jehovah Witnesses and other proselytizers in order to drive them away from his door. I have found that merely saying “Catholic’’ has a similar effect.

Aim6 asked if American priests ever married. I told him that I didn’t know, even if it was forbidden by church law. Priests frequently married in Zaire, Aim£ said, because he has seen their wives and children. I commented that the traditions in Europe and America are somewhat different. It’s not surprising that a priest would marry here, as Central Africans have no apparent tradition of .celibacy. Any message from Italy concerning that might easily get lost in the inability to effectively translate it.

The rain was sweet, lasting less than an hour. The women have brought a foam mat into the cabin and are sleeping on it. Earlier, Aim£ asked if I could leave the cabin for awhile so he could 4 cause (causer means to chat in French, but it also implies to flirt, seduce, etc.) with one of the women or both.

Yesterday, I drank one bottle of beer, but have had none so far today, feeling somewhat more attentive for renouncing the golden slurp of ecstasy. In Kisangani, I must devote one or two days towards ruining myself. I think it was a Sufi who once wrote that “nobody can see God and live¹.” A brilliant thing about being a binge drinker is that I have so many rebirths to follow each little death. I cling to this one vice with all the desperation of life itself clutching the biosphere. As Steinbeck demonstrates in Travels with Charley, for all that a pilgrim sees of the world, he or she is less a part of it with each additional day consumed by the pilgrimage. When sailors reach port, they aren’t on an ethnological mission, at least not until their minds and bodies are properly replenished.

5:00 PM: A pirogue glides on the river to meet the boat, after leaving from a damp, straw village of smoking fires. The essence of

everything is brown: men sparingly dressed in dirty shorts, sitting in canoes, and cutting the water with the wet wood of their paddles. The trees have gotten larger as the Nkov IS passes higher ground, moving out of the vast swamp that surrounds Mbandaka. The shore once again looks like the mighty jungle.

I once had a professor who asked her class not to use the word ‘, jungle” because she worried about the bad implications it carried. The word “jungle” comes from Sanskrit and is still used in India to describe a thick forest. In English, it is a wonderful word that refers to hobo camps, the maze of the rat-race and any tangle of human affairs, as well as meaning tropical rain forest, with all those florid connotations. “Jungle” is splendidly ambiguous, summing up any complicated condition. The old word has a mellifluous ring, no other single word says as much about a rain forest, so sweetly. The African jungle is many of the cliches we believe it to be: the home of monkeys and apes, leopards, specially adapted humans, and an abode of thick, dripping foliage, dim and mysterious as the putative soul. Words come and go, staying as long as they are useful, then dying a natural death as the sound and character of language changes. Words are both thoughts and breaths of spent air. So, the honest impression goes something like this: beyond the tremendous magnitude of the flowing river through the drooping trees beneath the vast, swathing sky… is endlessly driving water and more dripping jungle, jungle, jungle.

6:30 PM: At sunset, a huge flock of small birds blew across the river, looking like a retreating corps of ants in the distant sky. The tangled forest was alive with the clamor of invisible birds as we moved fifty to one hundred feet past it.

Palm trees indicate the presence of humans, small and large plantations appearing frequently along shore. The many different palms are one of man’s most useful plants. Various palm species provide coconuts, dates, seeds for drinks, and edible palm hearts. Natives in Eastern Indonesia make sago, a starchy foodstuff, from the pith of Metroxvlon. Goats and cows eat the fronds, the clumped fruits of the oil palm (Elaeis ouineensis) are squeezed into oil, the heart of another species is tapped for palm wine, and wood and fronds are used to construct homes. The leaves protect floating pirogues , tied to the Nkov 12, from gathering too much rain. But never fall asleep under a palm; the heavy, spiked fronds of some species erratically break off when spent, and can cause harm to anyone struck by their fall.

After the rain, it was cold and people bundled up in whatever they could find. The commando captain invited me over to the bow for a pint of coffee. As we stood there, another immense swarm of birds, first flying tightly together, exploded in the air then quickly regrouped to disappear, flying beyond an island. The captain said that it hasn’t rained in Kinshasa for three months, normal for the dry season.

However, at Kisangani, some 1800 odd kilometers into the interior and above the equator from Kinshasa, it is now the season of heavy rains.

The Nkov 12 left Kinshasa on July 13, and might reach Kisangani on

the 2nd or 3rd of August—another ten days from now. The boat zig-zags

from one marker to another, greatly increasing the distance traveled.

We are now roughly half way between the two cities, according to a map. The sun set and the boat pulled onto a jungle island for the night

where a cable was tied around a tree for a mooring. The captain makes no particular choice about where to land, doing so at any convenient place after the boat can no longer proceed safely. A searchlight was kept on all nights pointed at the access to shore. Anyone seen trying to board would be confronted by the commandos camped at the bow.

When I returned to the cabins Aim6 asked for aspirin to treat a cold and took it with ampicillin. Africans often misuse medicines in lieu of unavailable medical counsel. People take whatever drug they can finds at the drop of a hat. Medicines like tetracyclenes chloroquines and penicillin are commonly sold in the markets. These medications are of dubious efficacys often outdated and further spoiled by exposure to the heat and suns instead of being refrigerated.

July 24s 10 AM: The boat turned its screws and broke shore about 5:30 AM; the sound of the revved motors vibrating the floors causing me to arise. From shores the boat cautiously moved towards deeper water. The steward in the GIANTS jersey stood at the bow with an eight to ten foot pole and slowly turned it like a spindle into the river to find bottom. At each probe he shouted signals as the boat carefully plodded forward.

Last night was cools but I slept well in my light down sleeping bags the feathers clumped and molding from the humidity. Before sleepings I read from Democracy in Americas my concentration excellent enough to find interest in it. This is a book a traveler reads by defaults lacking better. Alsos I gathered solids scientific evidence of rats in the cabin: constant squeaking noises and the flash of a filelike tail sliding through a loose door jamb.

After seeing the rats» I fell asleep and dreamt that I was a youth falling asleep in a pew of a familiar Catholic church> taking another scary, interminable Sunday lesson in that persuasive institution. A cynical schoolmate devil sat next to me. His contagious boredom and disbelief infected me, prompting a futile desire within myself for freedom from the entire human tragedy that the priest proposed.

This morning) I drank a flood of black) sweet) boiled coffee and one warm bottle of Primus) breaking a one-day beer fast. Yesterday) I was hungry) having not enough to eat. If I drink beer₉ I’m not hungry-which seems good. As old drunks used to say in America: if you are drinking well) there is no need to eat. I tried living by this folk wisdom many years ago) but I soon went nuts with hallucinations.

Cooking and fish-smoking fires are made over a layer of mud splattered on the bottoms of some of the idle pirogues whose damp wood is tinted with splotches of green moss and algae.

As I sat on deck) a pirogue touched ship₉ from which a man alighted) carrying a case of Primus. This welcome phenomena occurred magically) as if it were invented from my invisible thoughts and cravings. After quickly rising from my haunches to greet the beer> I met a stocky) intelligent-looking gentleman with a shaved pate. He was a forty-year old medical doctor) attached to the military. He once lived in Los Angeles tending to a daughter of Mobutu who studied at a university there. I bought five bottles of beer to replenish my store.

We drank beer on the deck along side the rushing water) talking until the sun suddenly flowered between the lapsing clouds and it got too hot; then we moved into the shade of bridge. He said) if I

understood him correctly, that two million children had died in Zaire since January because of an epidemic of measles and diarrheal An almost unbelievable number, but he insisted it was true. In fact, he said that a child died of measles on the Nkov 12 last night. The doctor had liked America, bemoaning Zaire’s wretched poverty and the curable ills which cause so many needless deaths. Staring at the current, the doctor casually remarked that people living in this part of Zaire are great swimmers. When I asked about crocodiles, he replied that while crocodiles are numerous, they are mainly nocturnal, so daytime swimmers have little fear of them.

As it was Sunday, several people gathered at the bow reading the bible, and one man seemed to preach. However on any day, people are seen reading religious literature. It occurred to me that in my dream I attended Mass this morning. What a god-fearing gentleman I’ve become! And how my unconsciousness takes me to places my consciousness avoids.

12:30 PM: I ate a delicious lunch of beans and smoked fish with a side of boiled plantain. Plantain is essentially a large, yellow banana with a firm texture and very tasty. The panier fish are more tolerable with beans than with rice, but then my stomach has become African, if the rest of me hasn’t.

At some nameless point on the river, the doctor stepped into a crowded pirogue containing eight children and four other people and waved goodbye as the throng paddled off through a narrow straight between two islands. The dead child that he had mentioned was carried with them, wrapped in a bundle of cloth placed at the bow. I thought of the many children who quit the barge by doing a gay somersault or a careless backflip into the river and then swim vigorously for their pirooues drifting downstream. How miraculous all of this temporal vitality really is.

As we pass small settlements of palm-frond homes on wooden stilts, people turn out to wave at the boat. The women are gayly dressed in native cloth, while barefoot children, wearing only dirty shorts, signal and smile brightly. The young men deftly push off from the shore in their pirooues to meet the boat. One place looks much like another.

Yesterday, we saw about six boats, some similar to the Nkov 12.

Two of the smaller boats were tugs pushing flat, narrow barges, the decks stacked with hundreds of yellow plastic cases of bottled Primus and empties. People sit high on a tattered canvas, covering a mountain of beer. Despite lacking shelter from rain or sun, there must be a certain serenity traveling through the wilderness with such a surfeit of brew. The beer barges are a fleeting glimpse of heaven. To float upon this wildly beautiful and somber river while sitting upon an eternity of sweet booze seems earthly meaning beyond hope. Sun, rain and comfort be damned. A jacana skipped upon a garden of water lilies growing in a quiet eddy near the shore. Elle fait mousser la vie!

I was set to praise temperance once again, but reality interfered so I drank another beer. De Tocquevi1le’s Democracy in America can be provocative. America, as a people’s invention, incessantly tries to foster patriotism among its diverse citizens. Until the late 18th century, most Europeans were dumped into a place by birth and meant to suffer from whatever tyrant who claimed the city or country for his own. The peasants lacked a compelling notion of patriotism, being

unessential to an entrenched, inherited government. Democracies need patriotric support to survive, and so elected government is always preaching it. De Tocqueville makes an excellent point concerning the tyranny of the majority over diverse minority and individual opinion, an inherent systemic flaw of democracy, along with the assumption that people could ever be perfect enough to make democracy just. Although only worse alternatives to elected government seem to exist, elections don’t insure that democracy is best for each individual. The democratic message is to support patriotism or perish. Everything important that I have ever voted for has lost, but since the ruling class is elected by the majority, I’m freed of the responsibility of their errors.

The crime of American government is essentially the same as Mobutu’s: a failure to do common good with its entrusted power and resources. If there is to be a tyranny of the majority, then it should be humane. Minorities might better maintain their dignity in nonpar t ic ipat ion, than by being vacuous cheerleaders for a perverse system from which they can’t hope to gain proper reward. The disaffected then might be morally content to idly complain and unhappily survive, rather than lose precious life and liberty waging an unwinnable war.

How could men be so vain to form a nation from bloodshed, genocide and pillage, and call it “under God”? Did the founding Americans modify the unstable image of this Mediterranean phantom to self-bless their wanton greed, power, slavery, murder and land-lust? Government is not in the business of apologizing for whatever wrong it inevitably manufactures. However, government is negligent not to have reasonable doubts about the wisdom of all its action and the certainty of its own corruption. Where is a government office of apology for its grave errors of judgement and all of its other failures? What is this crap that all men are created equal if they are not treated so, and their unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? It’s remarkable that women were not included in these ambitious slogans copied by Jefferson into the Declaration of Independence, nor were Native Americans, termed “merciless savages”, nor were African slaves who were not worth mentioning. The modern, secular state gained political power at the expense of monarchy and traditional religion which each became more of a spiritless, self-saving barker for God and fatherland than they already were. The righteous majority is winner; the spoils of logic and justice theirs to freely dispense.

The sum of human wisdom in government courts is no surer than the wisdom of one sound mind because each makes mistakes; combining imperfect parts does not create a perfect whole. But it’s impossible for society or government to suffer failure in the painful way that an individual does. Freed from the restraint and pangs of human conscience, a nation’s institutions can become superhuman monsters, capable of doing immense damage to all life and the human spirit. The institutional pyramid is glazed with a patina of braggarts and egotists near the top, followed by impressive layers of grovelling, inept mediocrity in the middle, and a languishing, struggling heap of peasantry at the base. Instead of using resources to foster justice and common good, nations inevitably and frivolously squander their wealth in corruption, and in destructive acts of war and industry in a manner seemingly meant to hasten an end to themselves and civilization.

Yet the worldly vitality of the majority, for good or evil, far surpasses the vitality of one person. For disenchanted individuals, it might be best to internalize defeat, quietly retreat from social concerns, and struggle to effect an unobtrusive existence. There is happiness there I To drink with the Zairois as an ambassador of the self, with an unpaid embassy staff of one, responsible to nothing beyond life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; a worthy human goal beyond the wildest reality of the society that proclaims it. The U.S. pays political lackeys to proxy for all else.

Some people doubt me being a “nurse”. I seem too unsympathetic to them to be a nurse, and besides it’s a woman’s job with no money in it to save for travel. Some think I’m a professor or a U.S.-paid journalist because they see me reading or writing. And in Zaire, journalists are government paid. Indeed, with my education I might be considered a professor. But, I’m just a trail of rubbish; one moment a cabbie, another a psychiatric technician, another in the navy, a student, driving a tractor on a farm, or for the most part just unemployed en route to somewhere else, looking for a good place to live. It’s flattering to be considered an achiever, and to be emotionally buoyed above my disadvantaged friends.

I can’t explain my confusion to myself or anyone, which created the circumstances bringing me here. Whatever I say beyond a few words is a lie in an attempt to satisfy their curiosity, not mine. The more I add, the more incoherent the lie becomes. America became monotonous, indigence brutal, and driving a taxi (or working on a lunatic ward) dangerous. To say that I’ve failed to make an acceptable peace with my environment is too delicate for my inadequate French. And for further emphasis: Infirmier touriste!

We continue to pass African oil-palm plantations on many islands, including one immense stand of derelict palms overcome by enveloping, strangling lianas. The palms remind me of the date palms found along the Nile in Egypt and Sudan. The yellow or orange oil-palm fruit is attached to the tree in large clusters, with both the flesh and stone used to make cooking oil. Each fruit is about the size of a walnut and is pressed into a viscous reddish or yellow oil that is used for cooking throughout Central Africa. A traditional homemade oil press is an upended log screw with two protruding spokes turned by several people into a buried metal tub, crushing wetted palm fruit. The pressed oil seeps from the tub through a bottom spout, draining into containers. The fruits are also used more simply by splitting several fruits open, and then tossing them into a boiling pot of water and peppers to make sauces for fish and almost anything else.

On the lower deck is a simple store consisting of a small table with five bars of palm-oil soap, small plastic bags of sugar, a pan of rock salt with a glass setting on it for measuring, a pair of pants, and a pair of sandals. The shop is set up and taken down each day.

A man often stands at the prow, away from the engine noise at the stern, with a small short-wave radio to his ear. The radio might be the ship’s communication with other ships and the office in Kinshasa, but the man may be just listening to music.

July E5, 9 AM: The barge pushed on until about 1:30 AM before stopping for the night, and departed its anchor at 5:30 this morning.

For breakfast? I again drank coffee with the commandos? most of whom seemed bored from the enforced inactivity while on ship.

We are supposed to reach Lisala tonight? the fifth day after leaving Mbandaka. On the map? the distance between Mbandaka and Lisala seems to be about A60 kilometers? but the real distance is elongated by the snake-like channel the boat often follows from bank to bank. On deck? a boy was selling a wading-bird tied to a string? a long-toed lapwing? beautiful with its flaming red eyes and legs.

Last night before sunset? bee-eaters chased insects along the shore? while the occasional dove and noisy flocks of Gray Parrots broke from their perches in the trees. I grew somewhat depressed when I was unable to take an afternoon siesta to escape from mild respiratory congestion and a general weariness. It was impossible to rest because I sleep in a cramped public place without privacy.

I put down Democracy in America to read Alone by Richard Byrd who spent six lonely? dangerous months manning a weather station in Antarctica. It was a nice relief from the often dry book by de Tocqueville. At about 8 PM? I drank a cold Primus? gave Aim£ a glass? and then began another? the last of my treasure. While drinking? I watched the rats playing in the corner of the room? under the steel door jamb and found it difficult to think pleasant thoughts. My life’s irregular rhythm demands occasional “down” periods? which are remarkable for the incredible dullness of experience and the lack of faith I feel about any ultimate meaning or importance to anything. I’ve learned to patiently wait for these somewhat morbid moods to pass. Amazingly? they always do. I then finished the night by taking £5mg of benadryl which accomplished two things: cured a runny nose and drove me into a sound sleep? rats? depression or no. I awoke a bit later this morning? showered? and lost the nose trouble and depression.

Before I began losing spirit last night? I had a chat with the twenty year-old “student” whom I’ve mentioned before. He appears several times a day? and interrupts my reading and writing by staring at me? wanting to talk. Last night? he came quoting Martin Luther King in French? and wished to talk religion. He also asked me why I continue to call myself a tourist? I’m loath to discuss religion with him? and his question about whether I’m a tourist or not is hardly worth an answer? particularly when I’m depressed and want tell him I’m a living piece of crap? if he can’t believe that I’m an insipid tourist. I failed to understand what he was saying about Dr. King? even after asking him several times to repeat? so he shouted. He embitteredly wanted to discuss racism in America? but I really couldn’t understand his French. I told him that it’s true? America has always been a racist nation. I told him that I didn’t have a hearing problem? but he kept shouting incoherently? spitting his words at me for emphasis. I finally called him impolite? insisting my comprehension wasn’t good enough to understand him. He then asked for my French/Eng1ish dictionary? so I listened for an hour to his lousy pronounciation of incoherent English. The traveler often meets the most aggressive and rudest people because these are usually the ones who presumptively introduce themselves from the shy masses? but this guy? I think? had something interesting to say. I felt sad for ending up so rude myself. Under better conditions I might have redirected him to a simpler topic? but I was utterly

incapable of doing that, given my rotten mood. For all I know, the entire ship may have been in foul humor last night. After this incident, I went into the cabin, and lacking supper, read Byrd and drank beer until I got sleepy, then watched the rats grow brave and noisy with their hungry anticipation of the night.

In the captain’s toilet is a product that the reader might find interesting: Curd’s Happy Man Spray-IDC Chemie AG, 8807 Freienbach, Switz. Indication: Ejaculato praecox. Composition: Lidocain, Aroma, Exip. ad solut. Application: “Push back the penis foreskin and spray glans penis approximately 10 to 15 minutes before intercourse. One spraying= moderate effect; several= complete happy man.” It comes with a leaflet stating the above in six languages. Aim£ recommends it for pleasure, while I recommend it for pain; it possibly works for both.

Another commodity sold in Zaire is Tod Society (“As used in top societies”) skin lightening cream, found in a toothpaste tube colored with an American flag, point of manufacture unknown. The flattering association of the U.S. flag with top societies amused me. But this product was not U.S.-made, being from either Nigeria or an Asian nation. Famous Old Glory helps purvey diverse products world-wide, something more difficult to do by sporting an obscure Taiwanese or Nigerian flag on the label. People identify with a winner.

At noon, the deck has cleared somewhat. Add smoked snake and wiggling palm grubs in a bowl of dirt to the boat’s rarefied cuisine. I can’t eat that yet, even though I’m half-starved. I’ve given Aim£ 1000 Zaires for sharing some of his food with me. The commando captain refused my offer to pay for the coffee that I drank with them.

The pirogues continue to come and go. The youths and children in the gliding pirogues are often quite playful, showing off.their strength by paddling furi.ously, or boys exuberantly exhibiting their swimming skills by backflipping into the river and rapidly swimming after the dugouts. Some Africans might think that Whites are physically weaker and inferior to themselves, but not without good reason.

Africans typically have a finer grace of carriage than other races. African daily life demands a lot of physical dexterity, lacking all the tools and machines that people use in the North. Just standing, paddling a pirogue, and landing it against a moving ship, then hoisting oneself aboard, is a considerable physical task that many other people might be fearful of successfully completing.

I’m eager to get my feet landed again and feast on cold Primus.

The gangway is a long, ten-inch wide plank requiring more than a bit of attention when getting off or onto the boat, a nice little test for somewhat wobbly boat-legs.

I’ve not seen a hippo on either the Ubangi or Zaire Rivers. Hippos generally prefer smaller streams, shallow ponds and quiet backwaters, but they, like large crocodiles, have been heavily culled for food by people living along both rivers.

2:30 PM: A sudden thunderstorm cooled off what had been a hot, sweaty day. The man in the GIANTS shirt is sweeping the water off of the deck left shining from his work. I stood out on the deck to cool off, and again watched parrots fly over the trees and the straw-hut villages; the huts appearing flimsy and more poorly made than before,

erected on short elevated platforms with roof and siding made from sticks and straw.

Today, like yesterday, a pirogue arrived with fresh palm wine, which grabbed everyone’s attention and relieved some of the trip’s tedium. I bought a pint for 50 Zaires, swizzled away the drunk and drowning bees and delightfully sipped the refreshing potion. The milky toddy was mild and in perfect condition. The palm wine improved everyone’s spirit as the drinkers cheerfully chatted with each other. Crewmen descended from the bridge to drink while one man bought several liters to take back to the steerage. The commerce also picked ups one man brought aboard woven baskets and ceramic jars to sell; someone else was selling six dead cane rats, and another man was selling several live lung-fish—long eel-like creatures with slithery dual appendages near each end of the body.

Near Lisala, there is an abrupt uplift of the landscape above the north bank, contrasting with the several hundred kilometers of mostly flat swamp and low forest we had just passed. Then electrically lighted buildings appeared on shore, the first seen since leaving Mbandaka. The Nkoy 12 stuck on a sand bar only about two kilometers from Lisala’s port, and then took about one half-hour to rock itself free, switching its gear between forward and reverse. A cup of palm wine and some tiny, sweet bananas tasted wonderful as the freed boat finally cruised into a port. ¹

July 26: Last night, we landed at Lisala against a small, derelict passenger barge which also housed a transient sailor’s bar amid-ship. The bar sent an electric cord over to the Nkov 12, which got free, reliable power to run its fridge and lights, and its boom-box which blared music almost before we were docked. I descended down the stairs from the captain’s cabin, and while walking on the deck anxious to leave ship, I made a tactless error.

A young cigarette vendor had jumped aboard and met me instantly? wanting to sell cigarettes. I declined because I don’t smoke, but he insisted that I buy some cigarettes, and closely pursued me, as I barged past him to the gangway, simply eager to get onto land once again and stretch my legs. The scruffy vendor, perhaps in his late teens and dressed in dirty rags? carried a wooden tray of tobacco products suspended by a strap around his neck and stood about six feet tall? my size. When the vendor got in front of me again? within a few inches of my chest, I took both hands and shoved him back, giving him a more emphatic answer. He glared and angrily rushed back at me, asking where I was from and telling me that I was in Zaire, his country, and that I couldn’t do something like this to him here. I quickly regretted my mistake and tried to ignore the furious youth by walking away. Finally some commandos, who had spotted the trouble, interfered on my behalf, lecturing the salesman in Lingala while I honestly apologized to him, and that was more or less it.

I got off the Nkov 12 onto the gangway into the bar where there was the boom-box, two large speakers, and two ten-foot long steel tables with long benches—dance where one pleases. I counted about twenty-five men and one woman, already drinking. A pair of commandos danced with each other to modern Zairois music. I felt exhilarated after five quiet days on the boat, and everyone else seemed in a mood

to party. The grinding commandos did a lewd and sexually suggestive pub-dance, beautifully rhythmic and captivating. At one point, a dancer deviated from the general theme and imitated a hunter looking for prey by crouching and shading his peering eye with a hand, slowly turning his body and bending his knees to the cadence, as in a more traditional dance. I bought Aim£ a beer and then I quickly gulped down two warm bottles. Lisala’s power went off at nine PM, but the dancing and drinking on the boat continued beyond that, and it was still going on when I returned to the captain’s floor to sleep.

This morning in the rain, I climbed the hill and walked into central Lisala, about one kilometer from the port. Lisala is another quiet, former colonial town with empty concrete streets and many brick buildings, some with dates like 19E4 or 19E5 imprinted on the cornerstones. On top of the hill, off a bit from the town center, is a cluster of brick buildings and a beautiful Catholic church built from tan bricks and has stained glass windows. The church-can’t be more than seventy years old, but already looks several hundred years old, with ferns and moss growing in the crumbling masonry.

I walked through the old European neighborhood of well-tended homes, inhabited by Africans now, that stand between the port and downtown. The Belgians did more to develop the old Congo than the French did in CAR. Whereas CAR was little more than a colonial backwater in a vast French empire, Zaire, rich in natural resources, was Belgium’s sole possession in Africa until gaining tiny Rwanda and Burundi from Germany during World War I. During the intense period of European colonization, lasting less than 100 years over much of Africa, both the French and Belgians controlled much more land than they could effectively exploit. But, Belgium did very well in the Congo, in part because of its vast system of navigatable waterways which allowed relatively fast, cheap and easy transport to and from the interior.

I went to the rickety downtown market for coffee, beionets» and provisions: beautiful multi-hued dried beans, rice, sugar, coffee, peppers, garlic, bread and dried milk. The tinned milk is imported from Europe, but gives no country of origin. I wondered if I might be drinking a contaminated surplus, ruined by the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Africa is a dumping ground for inferior products, largely exported from Europe, some even banned for sale there. No effective laws stop foreign companies from unloading poor quality goods, frequently outdated medicines, in Africa.

Lisala is only about 4-00 kilometers by a passable road from Bangui, CAR. We are supposed to stay in Lisala one day, and leave for Bumba, the next sizable town, in the morning. Bumba is only a day’s sailing from Lisala. Aim£ has been expounding about the sensual pleasures of carousing with the sirens of Bumba.

I read Admiral Byrd’s Alone; his gentile spirit, archaic stoicism, ethical decency and dedication to a selfless cause spring from a faded era. Will people ever again have enough courage to overcome fear, after idle decades spent bowed and numb before the growing public intrusion of the corporate-government combine, their police and tv, all inferring to stay off empty streets and safely at home, afraid and alone?

Rats ate my bananas last night, but left two others untouched.

Rats are many things, but they have never struck me as gluttons. Highly

specialized animals often compete within specific niches and most intensely within their own species for survival» while at the same time facing an evolutionary dead end if their particular niches abruptly change or disappear; but generalists, like mutualistic humans and rats, successfully dispose of everything world-wide for their shared food. In this mutually beneficial relationship, rat society largely enjoys human association because humans destroy the rat’s natural predators like snakes, mongooses and ferrets, wild cats and birds of prey. A few stupid rats culled off here and there by people, who always need to regularly kill something anyway, has meant nothing to the rat’s survival as a species. In times of plenty, we would never completely rout them from their secure homes in the inumerable dark holes in the things that we have made. Indeed they thrive and travel with us everywhere. But during famine, when things fall apart, we will destroy what we’ve made to eat the rats. When human numbers have gotten out of hand, the rat’s fleas gave us plague and heaven, and their ramblings through our corpses and filth spread other diseases, all acts of rat self-defense. Would we be ever so fastidiously tidy without them? Or so secure, knowing that we always have a secret cache of fresh meat for hard times. Like agents of a mysterious protection racket, could rats be saving the world from worse things than themselves?

July 27: Because of yesterday’s rain, the ship didn’t get fully unloaded, so we remain in port. Last night, I visited the curious Catholic church on the hill, searching for some peace and quiet, but unfortunately a Mass was being prepared, so I couldn’t meditate in peace as I had intended. I listened to an almost full church of parishioners erupt into liturgical chorus, their voices filling the dank interior air with pleasing harmony. I stared at the rough lumber braces supporting the tin roof and trompe l’oiel painted pillars on the walls. Above the simple altar was a wicker—like vaulted ceiling, sheltering the tabernacle and a gilted chalice. Africans seem very spiritual and it’s not surprising to find a good audience for a Tuesday evening Mass.

I relaxed enjoying the musical voices until the priest arrived and then I left to find Aim£ and Mois£ at a bar in central Lisala. As I walked away from the church, I remembered the Catholics once telling me that the better part of life, even eternity, is found inside oneself, one of the few kind and generous clues they ever uttered about life which made sense. But the person who looks inside oneself and sees only a person finds loneliness and forgets the world. Discovering the internal self and knowing that lonely ghost, one can dispense with both country and church. The egotistical pomp of the Vatican with its scary, narrow-minded pedantry combined with religion’s corrupt and violent history eventually put me off, but I recalled what a good Catholic once said about the corruption, “More than vain Rome, the church is a peacestriving community of common people, including compassionate laity and clerics, who act and pray for everyone’s salvation from suffering.,’ I’m no better than the singing people in the church. So what do I search for or deserve that they don’t—a ludicrous divinity of self? And what do I do that is superior to them? What poor or sick folk do I tend? And what lonely hymn can I sing that equals the comforting splendor of choral harmony? The more we are hopelessly punished, the more we want

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to know why and when it will end, until we lose our senses and grovel in submission. And Africa suffers from an incurable worldly pain that challenges all human understanding and hope.

In the bar, the captain and crew were loaded and having a good time. Many of the commandos were also there, as well as a number of prospective concubines. The sizable Nkov IE entourage occupied several of the tables in the bar, and clearly governed the otherwise dead action; people wildly shouted over the blaring music. The mischievous cigarette vendor was sitting there, with a couple of friends and from time to time he stared at me. I could could safely ignore him, with all the familiar soldiers here. I soon caught up with the drinking and affectionate atmosphere and drunkenly danced several times with a spirited woman.

Mois6 merrily danced with a young woman who dutifully poured drinks for everyone when glasses got empty, opening the bottles with her flawless white teeth from the side of her mouth. Mois6 seems very gentle and polite with the women. He dances well, despite his limp, and I think that he can see more than a little from his spoiled eye.

As Mois6 and I prepared to leave the still crowded bar, Aim£ instructed me to make sure Mois£ got safely back to the ship and not stop for another drink. The ship had to be ready to sail in the morning. Aim£ was cautiously protective of the captain, which was part of his job. When Mois£ clumsily stood up from his table, a half dozen drunk commandos instantly errupted out of their chairs and ruthlessly shoved tables, chairs and people aside, clearing a path for us to stagger out of the bar.

We walked down the dark, quiet street to the Nkov IE, babbling about past drinking bouts and ports of call. Mois& knew all the river towns, and he had sailed for many years on Lake Kivu, in the east, between Goma and Bukavu. Lisala was a favorite stop, the first bar after the long stretch of wilderness between here and Kisangani. He grinned and constantly repeated his favorite phrase: “Zaire has three cities: Kinshasa, Lubumbashi and Kisangani.”

Why is it that it’s so difficult to properly recount the full glory of a florid alcohol high causing a night of fine mischief? All of the wondrous antics are crudely washed away with sleep, a headache and a tentative, waking sobriety. Marvelous things were afoot last night, now lost to eternity; the celebration of sailors freed from the restriction of the river. Even the rats celebrated by eating holes into the baguettes that I placed on top of the dresser in the cabin.

Early this morning, I awoke with a profound hangover, in the familiar near-psychotic state these illnesses take. I recalled that the ancient Egyptians had even incised hieroglyphics about curing hangovers, which means to me that they were considered important.

Anyway it was impossible to ignore. The ship still wasn’t ready to sail so I walked back to the downtown market crazily humming the song Sloop John B like a carefree beachbum on Le Fleuve Zaire.

From the port to town, one can follow a long, steep brick stairway up Lisala hill. The top of the stairs offers a beautiful view of a great loop in the Zaire with its islands, and looking across the river to the south, the forest stretches endlessly into the humid vapor of the horizon. The stairway is crumbling, but I enjoyed climbing it, as

it reminded me of San Francisco’s pedestrian stairways over its hills. The stairs rise to meet a fine, concrete road lined by Royal Fan Palms which run on into to the center of town. The tropic air was vibrantly blessed with hordes of swallows and swifts, flying around the trees and gliding over the houses and yards of the old town. Lisala is almost silent in the morning and its center is a lumpy cross of dirt roads— the concrete worn away. Here are a few small general stores and other merchants selling things from sidewalk tables. Behind the main row of shops is the shabby market, with stick and board tables of foodstuffs under bent tin roofs. The market stalls are run almost entirely by women and children, none very busy.

Attempting to eat my way out of a stupor, I breakfasted on coffee, peanut butter, bread, a lemon, beianets, and a piece of old, fried fish at the market. The wrinkled coffee mama chatted merrily with another customer, stirring her potion by swirling a stick into a metal caldron over the wood fire. I handed my plastic cup over to her for more, while a shy pot-bellied child clung tD her skirt and smiled.

As I drank the coffee, I once again noticed the grace and elegance of certain women in the market who were dressed in clean, colorful native cloth, doing their normal routines. It seemed that their dutiful responsibility combined with a skilful repetition of familiar market tasks somehow gave them a special, self-assured beauty. The difference between these women and Muslims couldn’t be more pronounced. The vigorous Zairoise enjoy more personal liberty, and are infinitely more flirtatious. The women have intelligent, attractive and expressive faces, and their hair is artfully cut, and finely combed and plaited, sometimes with beads woven in. Many of the younger women are rather tall, with an excellent strong bearing, shape and posture. There was an awakening within myself of a sensuality that I suppressed months ago in the Muslim countries to the North and even long before that in America. Zaire is a sensuous place, and it takes a bigger deadbeat than myself to fail to appreciate it.

My French, while improving, is far from fluent so I tend to be quiet. Sometimes I feel excited and get inspired, doing quite well, while at other times I’m lazy and avoid conversation. But, for the most part, bad French dribbles from my mouth <as the French say) as from a “Spanish cow.” But the Africans speak more slowly than do the French or Belgian cows, and patiently pause when I grope for words. People speak French with varying degrees of accent and fluency, but women, unless they have completed primary school, speak it poorly, if at all.

During my first attempt at college some years ago, I would sit to study French at night, but the rare, blissful peace of my room or the library would quickly make me drowsy. The following morning, I regularly failed to have sufficient motivation to attend the eight o’clock class, or even get up out of bed until I had done full, noble justice to sleep. I fell hopelessly behind in the lessons, having had no more control over my destiny than a rabbit has over its own, but I greeted my eventual school dismissal with a genuine silent apathy and ignorant depression. For the next few years, all roads led to public libraries and private orchards.

Returning from the market, I stopped for several hours at an outdoor tavern and sat under a straw oai1lote, drinking, reading and

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writing, all the while listening for the horn of the Nkov 12 which would sound several times before it sailed. Several people, envying my worldly success at having the ability to afford the time and money for an afternoon beer, passed and cheerfully gave me a thumbs up.

Getting restless, I left the bar and was startled to see a dozen young Whites, all relaxing on a shop’s veranda. They were British Commonwealth ecotourists doing a lorry trek from London to Kenya. I met a young Australian woman whom for some reason I fascinated and who managed to elicit some intimate life history from me. She unnerved me by coming to tears several times, as I unfolded my life story before her! She sympathized with my greatest sufferings. I began thinking that if this wonderful, vagrant soul is crying, then why hadn’t others? I told her how I enlisted in the navy one winter because I was destitute and homeless. She replied that it must have been very painful for someone like myself, at age twenty-six, to enlist in the military and spend the next three years in an organization that harbored more sociopaths and petty criminals than dozens of San Quentins. She was dead right because the buggering navy was bitter medicine indeed.

Australia, with its cushy welfare schemes generously doling money to any needy citizen who asks, does not cause itself the same quantity of penniless vagrants commonly found in the United States. But given a generous, reliable welfare system in the U.S., I never would have worked, nor reluctantly have entered the navy. What bizarre stories drifting Yanks collect while pursuing liberty in the land of the free.

For the Australian, on an arduous journey herself, I was just another moving part of the strange African scenery, she couldn’t have cried otherwise. I verified what she had seen on the news, and had read and had been taught about the American experience. 1 merely added sugar to the pudding, but grimly realized that my life was really more pathetic than I had ever considered it to be, sadder than anyone before had ever led me to believe.

A South African, using a British passport, traveled with the group. Having hitchhiked around America, he remarked how parochial and naive Americans are. The Americans knew next to nothing about the rest of the world, yet were among the most hospitable people, generously sharing with him their food and housing while selflessly doing him many favors by eagerly going out of their way to show him sights. Also, he spent three days walking on a beach in Oregon with an ignorant tramp from Texas. He claimed that the drifter spoke an unintelligible English dialect and lived like an uncivilized proto-mans dirty and scrounging for food, each night sleeping outdoors in a different place.

July 28, 10:40 AMs We are supposedly leaving Lisala. Yesterday, the cigarette vendor stepped out from a crowd at the port to offer his apologies for his role in our incident and I gratefully returned mine. His poignant act of humility made me feel much better for my impatient behavior, but sorry for his privation. Negotiating the narrow plank to shore is easier after a few drinks; nothing to it at all.

When I think I must wait four days, it becomes eight; when I think we are stopping for one day, it becomes three; and now I realize what I thought would be a one week voyage from Mbandaka to Kisangani, could last two or more weeks. Everything is as slow to unfold in Africa as we are to leave Lisala, as the vendor and I were slow to make accords, as

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the workers were slow to unload the boat of its bags of cements flour and steel pipes; as the boat plugs upstream at the stupendous pace of six kilometers per hour and lucky not to get stuck in a sandbar. With the languid pace of eventSs I’m impatient and pressed to cover my irritability. The general mood aboard ship seems tense. The horn sounds a second calls but the wooden gangway is still in places and the Nkov IS remains moored by its cables to the port.

After the third horn blasts the Nkov IS got underway towards Bumbas a great party town as described by Aim£s with plenty of looses pretty women and a good disco. He keeps teasing me about how I can get laid there for only 1000 Zairess less than five dollars. Eighty kilometers to goal.

Something happened! A moment agos Aim£ rushed into the cabin and grimly strapped on his pistols which he kept under his mattresss and then went onto the main deck. I’m nervous because I know that the soldiers also have weaponss and if his problems involve one of thems then the situation is potentially dangerous. Before we left port there was a lot of angry shouting between him and somone else on deck. But I didn’t pay much attention to such a typical emotional outbreak.

After a few moments of yelling and screaming on decks Aim6 returned to the cabin and carelessly dropped the gun on his foam pads and then left again without saying a word. The gun looks like a stage prop and is distressing to notice. I’m cooking rices peppers and beans in the galleys my nose and face aching from the pepper-tainted steam arising from the boiling concoction.

A steward came into the galleys so I asked him what was going on. He said that the insouciant pilot had been out drinking all night and had returned to ship late this morning still drunks delaying departure. The pilot’s carelessness especially provoked Aim£s now sitting and cooling off on deck after being talked out of arresting the negligent pilot by some crewmens because numerous sandbars and low water make this stretch of river difficult to navigate. The pistol lies cold on the mat in an old black leather military holster attached to a belts idle as a rock.

When Aim£ returned to the cabins he ate some of the awful food that I had made. Afterwardss he relaxed^ calmly stating his case for wanting to make the arrest. The Nkov 12 had valuable cargo to deliver and was on a tight schedule. The men were going to be away from their homes in Kinshasa for as long as six or seven weekss too long already.

A crewmans particularly the pilots should not put himself beyond his duty and obligation to the ship. While it was all right to get drunk last nights it wasn’t proper to be both late for sailing and still drunk this morning. Aim£ wrote a report on the drunk pilot in his charge books and then poorly hid his guns stuffing it under his mats leaving the belt exposed.

The Nkov 12 chugs to Bumba under gray skies through the endless forests and it seems like I have been floating forever. We passed a barge with a huge Superman logo painted on the side of the bridge.

Above the black Superman’s outstretched fist is a balloon with the word Karambas the brand name of a Zairois chewing gum.

A love affair ended last night when I switched from Primus to Skol which comes in a slightly larger 75 cl bottle of sacred potion. No

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raves, just a decent and different swill. I’ve stopped craving morning beer but as it is now half past noon, I wish I had a lager.

July 29, 3:30 PM: The boat pushed all night and arrived at Bumba about 3 AM today. We started to unload after daybreak, but another edition of the grand bateau arrived and pushed us from the quay. We’re now quietly moored along a grassy bank in front of an avenue of colonial houses and shops, with nothing happening. Today, my sotted patience is thin and I want to be even beyond Kisangani, and move until I find a cure for nervous tedium. One month adrift in Zaire and I’m less than four days by road from Bangui, but then again, I guess I just wanted to ride the river. In the kitchen a rare stew is obscenely smoking, emitting noxious pepper fumes which are so powerful that I can’t breathe.

Today I’m at at last finishing the stuffy, long-winded (even in abridgement) Democracy in America. Now it can be tossed overboard, making my pack lighter; splash. I’m left with two lengthy collections of Melville and Dostoevsky’s short stories and novelettes. Billy Budd is next. I’m going to shower, eat a pineapple, hit the ignobling suds and meditatively brood about the world’s great mistakes and injustices, maybe even get laid later tonight.

July 30, 5:20 PM: The boat left Bumba today at 3:30 PM We have several more stops before reaching Kisangani, one at a Chinese-built sugar factory. Aim& happily bought a baby monkey in Bumba, giving it much affection. The tiny monkey, which fits nicely into a coat pocket, has an old man’s face and chirps constantly like a cricket.

Last night I drank beer with the crew at an open air beer garden set around a circular cement-slab dance floor, listening and dancing to recorded soukous music. Aim6 likes Tabu Ley, saying that he was Zaire’s number one crooner. Mois6 got completely sotted and silly while having a boisterous good time. Aim£ insisted that I dance, so we chose an acceptable-looking lady from the crowd for honors. After dancing, she sat at our table pouring drinks. I initially wanted to get a hotel room and spend the night with her, but lost interest the longer we waited and the more I drank. Eventually I left the bar alone, passing a man outside the door selling tavern snacks, white palm grubs smothered in red pepper sauce. The woman followed me into the street from the bar, upset because I had declined her business, and screamed obscenities at me before letting me part in peace. As others returned to the boat there was much shouting and furious arguing on deck about something, but I soon fell neatly asleep.

Three of us are now sleeping in the cabin: Aim£, and a meek, quiet teenage girl on the floor next to me. I saw her before, sitting on deck and often reading a French grammar text or a bible. She prepares food in the galley for Aim6. I gave her some hot coffee and two bananas this morning and she reciprocated with a small coconut.

Yesterday, I had an interesting chat with a 50-year old commando, looking much younger, who had been in the military since Zaire gained independence. He made patriotic comments about Zaire’s chaotic struggle for independence and unification during the 19&0’s, and then we turned to the subject of AIDS. He thought that AIDS was caused by the power of suggestion. People die because of their imaginations and if they don’t think about AIDS, it can’t get them.

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People continue to ask for medicine. I issued some Tylenol to the chief mate who later praised me for having caused a miracle. Some of the complaints may seem frivolous or psychosomatic, but people frequently experience headaches and fevers from sporadic exacerbations of malaria, which kills many people, especially children. The fevers can also cause depression and other intense psychotraumas.

After a walk around Bumba and foraging for food in the market this morning, I returned to the boat completely exhausted, suddenly falling asleep and having a vivid dream. I dreamt that I walked out of Bumba and came upon a strolling American who was reading a newspaper.

Although too busy to talk, he handed me the sports section of his paper. I checked the baseball standings to find a favorite team a full seven games ahead of their division, a cinch for the playoffs. I walked on until I met my mother driving a car with my sister riding inside. I got in and we rode past the farms to my hometown, stopping at their house where I was raised. I was amazed at the ease of getting there, so far from the middle of Zaire where it was so difficult just to get to the next town. I dutifully checked the mail to find nothing, and then called upon a friend to chat, always having in my conscious dream-mind the strong intention to return to Bumba and reboard the Nkov 12 before it left without me. I walked a block uptown, stopping at the old gas station on the four-corners and gabbed with some old farmers and idle loafers hanging around in dirty bib-overalls, one of whom said that if I lovingly read books, I would never be lonely. I awoke sober, refreshed and relieved of a weary hangover, receiving a balm for my homesickness and becoming self-apologetic for my recent excesses.

I ate sparingly and read Billy Budd, Sailor. The Zaire merchant seaman, whose slow journey is invariably delayed longer by technical mishap and weather, must peaceably tolerate the communal stress caused by boredom and cramped quarters. The only people seemingly immune to the tension are the always-smiling captain and the hustling steward wearing the GIANTS shirt. In the dull river towns,, the soldiers and crew stretch their legs, eat, and hit the whore bars. The best part of the cruise is to see the boat constantly push against the mighty current and the brown water splash blue against its prow cutting through the ubiquitous wafting clods of fragrant hyacinth and jungle turf, but like sailors now and before, I’m a prisoner of the ship, doing all that it wants, unable to know privacy, physical liberty or diversion from monotony—except in dream. As a prisoner, I am now chiefly reduced to the hollow state of patiently awaiting parole.

July 31, 12:20 PM: The boat tied up early last night at 7 PM and got underway late this morning, about 8 AM, due to thick fog that has now lifted revealing a mixed sky of blue and cloud. I again read from Billy Budd this morning, as good a missal for a Sunday afloat that I know. Mois£ brought aboard two women and a child at Bumba and they are staying with him. They now control the kitchen and rear deck outside the entrance to the cabin. One woman speaks a shrieking tribal language while constantly ranting at somebody or thing, and is apparently bereft of all personal inner peace? the ship’s noisy engines only encourage her to shout louder. The shrieks ring from the cabin to a roost on deck where I’ve secluded myself to read, write and relax.

Last night, I sat in the cabin listening to the 9th inning of a Red Sox/Brewers baseball game, getting the standings after the game, I slept poorly while the little monkey squeaked all night with the rats.

Aim£ is cooking “fresh” monkey, but it smells acrid stewing in the pot. I finished Billy Budd precisely at noon, as if by mystic sentence, and was left thinking about the conflict between sanctity and villainy, and how both survive, despite their dynamic opposition. One bad person can senselessly destroy another life when he or she seizes the upper hand, and can even be rewarded for dutifully acting in valor by a distant, uncaring power that his or her sin serves. I don’t know, perhaps the lamb’s reward is to be mercifully spared the rigors of an earthly hell, but its death leaves more beasts, and a vacuum for what remains. And likewise, one bad word can ruin another person’s day.

August 1, 4 PM: The boat parked at a timber yard last night, leaving about 7:30 this morning for our next stop at Basoko. The only excitement today was the surprise arrival by pirogue of a palm wine vendor. I bought a pint which was poured from a gourd into my plastic cup, and after scooping out the,drowned bees, joyfully swilled the creamy nectar. I continued reading Melville’s short stories, including the twisted tale of Benito Cereno about an African slave mutiny on a ship off the coast of South America; almost frightening under current circumstances. The white slavers eventually restored order to the ship’s chaos, but I’m left to bleakly consider the white man’s cynical burden, which I suppose I’ve been considering all along. I’m now left with 700 pages of Dostoevsky which, after reading, will exhaust my portable library. A huge electrical storm is brewing over the jungle south of the river.

August 2, 9:15 AM: The boat pulled into Lokutu last night about 7:30, just across the river from Basoko where we are docked now. As the cabin is now cramped with the sleeping and milling bodies of two men, four grown women, one teenage girl, one crying baby and a small chirping monkey, I jumped ship as soon as it docked. A barefoot man with a machete escorted me a kilometer or so up a hill to the nearest bar where I quickly thrust down two bottles of Skol, which I shared with my guide. I returned to the boat somewhat satisfied and almost buoyant, walking in a steady rain. The cabin was even more crowded because of the rain, with guests invited in to stay dry.

I read Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground before giving it up, having poor concentration, and fell asleep. A short while later, I awoke hearing the squish-squish of the human reproductive mechanism stemming from Aim6 and his companion from across the kitchen-size cabin.’ Sleeping on straw mats between them and myself, squashed against a corner, is another woman and the teenager.

Before I left for the bar, everyone had been lounging around the cabin discussing the Bible, which contributed to my anxious need to find a drink and I returned after dark to a small orgy! I tried to ignore it, but afterwards Aim£ turned on the light and chatted with his girlfriend, passing around family snapshots and smoking cigarettes, relaxing in their post-coital bliss, oblivious to everyone else supposedly sleeping on the floor. I slept badly to be awaken by Aim£ at 5:45 AM, asking me for coffee. The rats must have been pissed as well.

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This morning at 6:30, the boat untied one of its barges to be unloaded at Lokutu and steamed across the river to Basoko where the crew disembarked to visit a favorite bar. By 7:30 AM everyone; commandos, Mois6, Aim£, pilot, et.al. were enjoying rounds of Skol or glasses of fresh palm wine during two hours of intense, excited drinking, sitting outdoors around large tables in the pleasant morning weather. Mois£ bought all of the drinks because whatever funds the Nkov 12 gained by taking on passengers went into his booze kitty.

We pulled out of Basoko about 9:^5 AM and returned to Lokutu to pick up the other barge, then continued steaming the channel to Kisangani, about 200 kilometers further upstream. I declined drinking this morning because of a foul mood from not sleeping well. I bought some tea, bread and bananas, and returned to the boat just before the crew came back to find the little monkey, small enough to be stuffed into a pint beer mug, feebly trying to climb down the stairs. The monkey desperately clings to whomever picks it up. I put the critter on a shelf about eight feet above the deck where it liked to perch; comfortable enough, but when it straight-away set to spring back at me, I moved, and it fell splat against the deck, looking for a moment like a sloppy flying squirrel! The monkey is now sleeping peacefully upon Aim£’s mat. I suspect that when the baby loses it’s newborn cuteness, it will end up in someone’s cooking pot. Hey reader, it’s an ugly, hungry jungle out there.

As we pass numerous small settlements, people come out to wave at the boat passing and notice me because of my skin. Women beam and flirt, beckoning me ashore, giving ‘‘come on down” or “I’ve got nothing” signals with their hands. Perhaps they simply wanted gifts or money, but today I flirted back, returning the same gestures and adding a few bawdy signs that would be considered a tad ill-mannered someplace other than Zaire. The pantomimes encouraged more signals from some of the women and generally caused wide smiles both aboard and ashore.

August 3, 9:30 AM: We left Lokutu at 1:30 yesterday afternoon, after I rushed to a bar and gulped down a Skol, buying another to go. Last night I watched the boat get lost in pitch darkness, futilely searching for a channel marker. I admired the pilot’s skill in avoiding shallow water. Finally reaching shore, the boat tied to a tree for the night. Mois£, Aim£ and I drank some Skol before we all fell asleep.

I have spent two weeks aboard the Nkov 12, much more time than I bargained for. Yesterday’s highlight was again the arrival of a palm wine vendor, selling pints for 20 Zaires a blow. The wine settles me down for a couple of hours. The broad river is still studded with large and small forested islands, but the current is weaker than it was further downstream. Sand cliffs, maybe 10 meters high in places, often form the riverbank.

The crowded boat now has about 150 people. The cabin resembles a nursery, hosting more mothers and infants. The people come aboard carrying everything necessary for survival: heavy pots and pans, five-liter containers of oil, firewood, charcoal, dried fish, manioc, sheets, mats, chairs, clothing, umbrellas, small stoves, etc. With these things, people claim a space on deck and make their camps.

I awoke to find a shirt missing from where it was hung to dry.

Aim6 got upset, saying, “I don’t like to see your things stolen because

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they might be a gift for me.” I read Notes From Underground this morning. Dostoevsky Mould have problems publishing this distressing little story today, being largely irrelevant for the majority.

August 4-, 2:30 PM: Last night at nine o’clock we arrived at Lotokela, on the river’s south bank across from the town of Yangambi. Lotokela has a Chinese-built sugar factory, but has almost no food for sale, not even coffee, despite a few old coffee trees growing in the immense canebrakes which engulf the tiny town and its landscape. Sugar cane production helped destroy the Caribs, ruin Caribbean nature, and intensified the slave trade to hideous proportions because Europeans were too sickly or lazy to do their own brute work and too intent upon gaining immoral profit. The discovery of the Americas brought nutritious new foods to Africa: chiefly maize, beans, manioc and groundnuts which gave the slavers better provisions with which to feed themselves and their cargo. These crops also allowed some African tribes to quickly expand their populations into depopulated areas once the centuries-old violence of the triangular trade became unprofitable and finally ceased in the new-found morality of the 19th century.

The jungle’s surplus water, second largest flow in the world after the Amazon, tumbles into the Atlantic after cascading through a long, narrow gorge of unnavigatable rapids that must be portaged by people for almost a hundred miles. This impassable barrier on the river, along with disease, hostile natives and terrain, prevented Portuguese colonialization of the Congo. The Portuguese intimidated coastal tribes into bringing them slaves and natural riches from the interior in exchange for European goods. Portugal and Spain had used African slaves in their canebrakes in the Madeira and Canary Islands before the discovery of the Americas. The Portuguese, Europe’s original slave-merchants in Africa, had established trading posts by the late 15th century both on the island of Sao Tome and near the mouth of the Congo where an African kingdom of the Kongo already existed. The Portuguese craving commerce and slaves, needed to convert the Kongo to their religion to cement subjugation and free trade. The Portuguese killed the Kongo king in 1665, getting their way for a long time after.

The Portuguese eventually colonized Cabinda (north of the narrow strip of present-day Zaire at the Zaire’s Atlantic outlet) and the healthier coastal areas and savanna grasslands of Angola southwards (convenient for trading slaves and goods with Brazil) and Mozambique in southeast Africa. Portuguese peasants and convicts settled depopulated areas, and caused lasting conflicts with the Africans, whom they murdered or subjugated. Portugal’s colonies were considered provinces and were not given up freely during Africa’s rush to independence. Today, thoroughly Africanized Portuguese merchants own general stores in many Central African towns, forming a close-knit trading network and a distinct Central African society. Angola and Mozambique’s tragic legacy, after many bloody generations, is the Africanized Portuguese and a bitter, chronic feud between them and the original natives.

I get too much attention in town, people yelling at me and asking for things. Men walk about with machetes carried flat behind their heads, on their shoulders, and held with each hand at an end. Cripples hobble on the red dirt lanes, clinging to crooked staffs. Waiting in port is dull, and I woke up this morning feeling spent, thinking that

if my mood doesn’t improves I will quit Africa. A balanced sense of humor is essential to traveling wells including the ability to laugh at oneself. Without humors even sardonic or black humors everything is adversity. The traveler occasionally faces embarrassing or potentially dangerous incidentss and needs a sound coping mood to prevent all hell from being unleashed. Alsos nothing is more stupid than to travel and not enjoy precious libertys and delight in curiositys interaction and discovery.

I took a walks then a nap, and after that drank a cup of strongs milky tea. I shared a juicy pineapple with the amiables studious teenage girl who angelically sleeps on the cabin floor next to me. She attends high school at Kisanganis staying with relatives there. Mois£ and some of the crew went to Lotokela’s dance bars partying as the boat was supposed to be unloaded.

At the markets a small crowd of children followed me as.if I were the pied-piper of Hamlin. House sparrows took dust-baths on the lanes. Not really sparrowss but finch-like seedeaterss native to Africa and Eurasias and now familiar virtually world—wide. House sparrowss like rats, associate with humanss eating grains and picking seeds from our manure, but they nest in the more airy, elevated cavities in our constructions. Some native flocks still know how to nest in the odd palm or another trees and the intricately-woven straw nests are beautifuls wrapped amidst the leaves in the open air.

After reading several of Melville’s short storiess I can’t help feeling that he essentially had one great work of fiction in him: Moby Dicks and for that alone he might be considered America’s finest novelist. To read Mobv Dick is to suspect that Melville sold his soul to the devil in order to write its and then got it back to pen a number of insipid short stories which have all the meaning and depth of a vapid television programs written by an unaffected and fully normal mortal. Melville depressively stagnates after writing Mobv Dick» almost seeming to forget his previous brilliance and near-perfect artistry, enduring a gnawing bitterness towards society and beating his wife. Melville’s imagination failed after writing Mobv Dick; his great, singular mind having only one song to sing on one great ship to sail. Everyday life ashore in New England and New York, no matter how he tried to color it with his splendid prose, was unprofoundly petty, tedious descriptions of the mundane. The later stories are repetatively perforated with nostalgic remembrances of the pleasures of lost, libertine bachelorhood, mere fragments of a story already told from a man whose meaningful experience of life died when he quit the sea. But then, near the end of his life, he somehow reached deep inside once again, through all prior distraction, to write Billy Buddi adding an austere, brilliant period to Mobv Dick.

7:20 PM: One of the soldiers asked me to go to the bar where everyone is drinking, but I didn’t wish to end the day just yet. I showered and walked out onto deck where it is perfectly cool under the rich, black sky showing all of equatorial heaven. A woman, staying in the cabin, approached me with an empty beer bottle saying, “Mund£l£, buy me a beer.” She was married, so I told her to ask her husband for beer. If you want to be a smash in Zaire, come with plenty of gifts and be willing to buy oceans of booze for everyone. Many people expect it.

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after years of guilty White apologists who have descended on Zaire with their token gifts and favors. The thirst of poverty in Africa is insatiable and I fee1 like I’m staring into an unfathomable abyss each time anyone requests something. Universal justice, if ever it exists, will demand that everyone exchange fates. I’m now off to the bar, Aim6 is insistent because there is a live band.

Mois£ bought everyone several drinks at the bar. For the equivalent of two American dollars, a table is neatly furnished with four bottles of Skol, about three liters of beer. I bought a few rounds as well. It’s impossible to drink alone for very long—the Zairois don’t stand for it. I remember ranting some time ago about the virtues of sobriety, but there is no grandeur there. I admit that drunkeness is fleeting glory, but why choose loneliness? Dostoevsky and beer, alone, is a commitment to the imaginary lunatic brig of the Nkov IS.

August 5, 1 PM: I was very drunk again last night. People just hate to see an empty glass in Zaire. I danced with a young woman named C£lestine who later walked with me back to the boat. As we held hands, it became effortless, under the bright, flickering stars peering through the dark sky, to stop on a footpath through some shrubbery, instinctively embrace and comfortingly kiss. She felt wonderfully soft and warm, as battered, stifled emotions emerged, unearthed from within, arriving from long ago, from another time on another world. C£lestine declined coming on the boat with me, saying that she would find me later in Kisangani.

I returned to the cabin alone, finding it empty because everyone was still out drinking, so I lay on the floor and prepared to sleep. Reclining there in the dim light, hearing the idling engines humming, I reflected serenely for a few moments about my uplifting sensations on the footpath until my gentle musings were broken by the dark profile of C61estine silkily walking into the cabin and supplely collapsing down on the floor next to me, making me feel human once again.

This morning, an angry wage dispute took place between the stevedores and the Chinese manager of the sugar factory about unloading 1,500 fifty-kilogram bags of Japanese-donated fertilizer. The Chinese wanted to pay a stevedore six Zaires (about three U.S. cents) per sack, while the workers struck for twenty Zaires, but finally an agreement was made to pay ten Zaires per sack. It should take about eight hours to complete the unloading and each stevedore should have enough money for three or four bottles of beer for his sweat.

After the dispute, a Chinese man was pushing his shabby bicycle up an incline at the port when a woman, with several children, began harassing him about something, probably asking for money. The man struck her repeatedly with his hands, before he pushed on. The Chinese may not be adept at mingling with their hosts, but their massive sugar factory satisfies a pressing addiction in Zaire. China has also built African railroads, highways and other factories. The TAZARA railway from coastal Tanzania to landlocked copper-rich Zambia (also serving nearby Southern Zaire’s copper mines) is a wondrous achievement by any standard. In particular, the laborious stone-work for the bridge supports and the shewn rock lining of the sturdy ditches along the track are beautifully hand-made. Almost all Lotokela’s heavy goods seem to come from China: trucks, tractors, cranes, wagons, etc.

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The best thing about an ugly, monotonous plot of sugar cane are the tail, white plumes rising up like creamy flags from the stiffly pointed leaves. The chlorophyll rapidly photosynthesizes in the humid heat₉ despite the layers of dust that the leaves collect from the roads running through it, giving the brakes an almost perceptable shimmer in the heat. Slinky mongooses scurry across the paths through the thick cane, in search of snakes and rats. People compulsively destroy the wild trees looming over themselves, stirring up dust, and find security in partial shade under the open sky, amidst its own tame grasses and herbage which covers the dust and prevents the dim jungle from returning. And if Zaire ever prospers enough, the spent land can be buried beneath the concrete of a completed civilization. One young man, loafing about town without a machete and with nothing to do, has transformed himself into a coolie, donning a Chinese cap and a shiny, Chinese-made polyester jacket, and wearing an imitative ponytail, two strips of black cloth dangling below his shoulders, with a neat bow tied above its mocking bob. The Chinese should know something about sugar; they were once indentured in Cuba to break their own backs harvesting cane.

There are few banks in Central Africa because there is little surplus money. Economic development is difficult because there is no stable pool of funds from which to obtain money for investment. An unreliable currency, no tax base, no taxable income, no jobs and no savings. Central Africans aren’t in the habit of saving money and wisely cling to their more reliable gardens and local trade to secure survival. They own their own homes, but not always the property, and grow their own food. Family and relatives still look after one another, but hard work is expected from everyone who is able. Families can earn a little money selling crop surpluses or goods at the market, but unless the money is turned over rapidly for something else, inflation destroys their gain. The tradtional family is an economic, political and social unit. Nations need to utilize human potential in order to create economic capital, wanting more tax revenue, and they persuade all available souls to participate in the game of money, often to the family’s detriment. The individual quest for money negatively modifies the essential, intimate sensitivity and understanding among interdependent kin and their society without replacing the loss with insight or anything as meaningful. Ready and essential resources are transformed into capital and then become locally rare, unavailable or too expensive for common people, and instead are owned by an elite who sell or hoard them to suit themselves. Wealth, flowing to government and its few, sanctioned individuals and institutions, is inevitably squandered—first nourishing the recipients and their favored dependents, then destroying them when competing schemes and economies fail with reoccurring environmental and social stresses. History shows all such plots eventually going wrong in catastrophes of war, disease and famine. Something, arising from animal or natural forces, or resulting from rampaging human emotions and desires, always wants to consume or alter whatever is accumulated in stores.

Without faith in paper money, nations are failures. Without the transformation of material into capital, and without the breaking of communal families into separate individuals working for big business

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and government, African nations will always have deadbeat economies. Zaire’s economic instability is ready-made for exploitation by richer countries that harbor wealthy corporate investors, traders and industrialists with the ability and compulsion to profit. Africans will continue to find it extremely difficult to effectively compete in a world economic order dominated by clear-sighted materialists from Europe, America and Asia. World trade does not share profit equitably and leaves many more losers in the poorer economies. Lacking the educational and economic traditions of the North, Africans are destined to be burned in whatever economic schemes that involve them with the so-called “global economy”. Very simply, nations nurture uncontainable greed and aggression in humans.

The modern transition from traditional values to economic ethics in America has freed people from the contraints and tedious conformity of family life. The American family is a shattered remnant of our past, rather than a positive social model for the future, and indeed relatively few Americans can even afford to create one now. The decline in the family follows, among other things, a rise in government and corporate control of daily life. If America wants to flamboyantly go to Mars and beyond with its ill-gotten wealth, then blessed be its extravagance because that seems a wise, naturally coherent goal to transcend all earthly madness and suffering. Democracy, dictatorship, society and family—all depressive tyrannies. While living as a rootless, solitary individual often feels lonely, without meaning, or purpose, it’s just as often, in some perverse way, somewhat wonderful not to be obliged.

My great African adventure seems to have died from lack of wind. I keep asking Mois£ when are we going to sail on to Kisangani, the next stop a few klicks upstream where I get off for good. Mois£, noticing my unease at having endured so much idleness on the Nkov IE, tells me to have patience. The captain is pontifically right,.but then he stays drunk and keeps two concubines for intimate fun.

The little monkey hangs on to Aim£ for dear life, now going everywhere with him. Last night at the bar, he set the beast loose on me. The monkey then made a series of frantic chirps and curious squeaks before making a mad springing leap across the table until it was again crawling peacefully about its mother, Aim£. Aim£ said the monkey didn’t like me because of my white skin, so I grabbed the thing, and put in on a woman sitting next to Aim£ and in a flash the animal sprang back to Aim£ as if attached to a piece of elastic. The animal’s clinging instinct, refusing to be even momentarily separated from Aim£, helps its own chances at survival. Aim£ gives the monkey no milk, but this is not what this animal most needs: it wants security, something familiar and warm to clutch, beyond any desire for food. The immature monkey would starve rather than leave Aim£.

I’m reading Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, a wild story that makes me want to stay sober. Today’s bad news is that the stevedores have quit working early, so they have more to do tomorrow. If it rains then, I’ll cry. What might have been a four-hour job in America takes three days in Zaire. The stevedores work hard, but management is inefficient, and tools and equipment are in poor repair or lacking entirely. The port has no warehouse so bags must be directly loaded onto one of two or

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three trucks. The trucks deliver the sacks to the factory where they’re unloaded and then straggle back to the portj where everyone is idly waiting in the shade. Meanwhile, the boat is rendered dead and other business along the river is further delayed.

August 6, 11:30 AM: The stevedores arrived at 6:30 this morning, beating the rain and unloading the barge by ten. It’s raining as we leave the toe-jam town of Lotokela and my labile spirits were lifted as soon as the boat stirred. We are now meant to arrive at Kisangani tomorrow morning, barring any unforeseen disaster. As it’s Saturday, when I walked to the market to look for food this morning, much of the town was busy cutting grass, sweeping roads and cleaning yards around public buildings, as the salinoo law requires. I didn’t drink last night, feeling very solid for this morsel of abstinence, but already I’m looking greedily ashore, hoping a palm wine seller will appear in a pirogue. Dostoevsky’s wild, cynically humorous story The Gambler was delightful.

August 7, 9:20 AM: Last evening about 7, the Nkov 12 pulled ashore to an island which has an abandoned mission, surrounded by ruined buildings. Trying to sleep last night, I was again awakened by squealing rats eating bananas on the table. I once caught a rat in the glare of my flashlight, silently freezing the animal under a cabinet a few feet away. A slingshot or a chucked book could have killed it. When I extinguished the light, the raucous squealing would start all over again. So I switched the light on an off, refreezing the rat each time until I got tired of it and dragged my sleeping bag out onto the deck.

I read The Eternal Husband, A Gentle Creature and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, finishing some 500 pages of Dostoevsky in the past few days. Dostoevsky’s message is simple: imperfect Russians are cursed to misdeeds and tragic folly, and suffer in the image of a perfect person, Christ. They must eventually look to Christ for salvation from their sins because there is no better example of earthly intention than his love and compassion, best met through their repentance and remorse.

I need a new library at Kisangani, looking to trade or beg additional books from travelers. Today it’s White Niahts» The Double and A Disgraceful Affair and that’s it for F.D. on the Nkov 12. We are supposed to reach Kisangani in a few hours. I’m a new man!

The river is narrowing and still grandly rimmed by forested shores. I’m wasted and burned out. Nonetheless, I now possess a great sense of accomplishment, having executed an insistent dream to float the Congo.

Last night Aim£, Mois6, the pilot and several of the crew split the remaining pool of money that they had extracted from people riding the boat. It was Captain Moist’s sole decision to have spent so much of the collected fees on beer, showing one and all the worth of pleasure over saving petty cash. Aim£ complained to me about Mois£ sqandering so much money on booze, but I hid a smile because the old chief was too sapient to cause a miserly crew who might miss the traditions of plying the river.

The soldiers, who previously lounged aboard ship in shorts and thongs, are now proudly decked in felt berets and pressed green field uniforms with shirt-sleeves neatly rolled above the elbows on their muscular arms, holding automatic weapons and standing at guard stations

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on deck, looking uncharacteristically fierce. Aim£ smartly More his uniform as well. Kisangani’s old, moldy homes and mansions sprawled along the north bank. Pirooues were tied ashore under tall, spreading trees growing in the antique yards fringing the river.

Before reaching the port, the Nkov 12 pulled close ashore letting off its hitchhikers and campers, leaving the deck empty. The discharge of passengers took no more than a half-hour, and then on a hot afternoon, we pulled into Kisangani’s port about one o’clock.

Aim£ asked me to stay in the cabin until he had gone ashore and talked with the port authorities. After a short wait, Aim6 returned telling me to grab my pack and then personally escorted me off ship, past the police and others who normally might have checked my passport or caused other delays trying to extract some form of bribe. I said a temporary goodbye to everyone, thanking Aim6 for his comradeship, and as the boat was going to be in Kisangani for several days, I knew that I would be seeing them again in town and at the bars. After 18 days pent afloat the Nkov 12, I burst free to walk away.

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KISANGANI

At Kisangani, the river traveler hears more frequently the poetic cadences of Swahili, a legacy of Arab slavers like the fearsome Tippo Tib who had his own Central African slaving empire in the 19th century, when Stanley passed through- It stretched from Kisangani south and east to Lake Tanganyika. Centuries of successive Arab slavers who penetrated the Congo from Zanzibar brought both Islam and Swahili with them. The Arabs continued slaving virtually into the SOth century, also entering Central Africa from Sudan. The Europeans, after banning their own slaving as they lost their colonies in America, used suppression of the Arab slave-trade as a moral excuse for themselves and their armies to remain in Africa.

If you are white and happen to trek through the remote jungle southeast of Kisangani, along an old Arab slaving route, on an arduous journey following the weedy footpaths and overgrown tracks that connect one poor, isolated hamlet with another, mothers might appear at the doors of their mud homes, hold up screaming children and point at you, as if to warn their children that the sweaty Mund£l£ (foreigner) might capture them and spirit them away, forever. And the gnarly, elderly women that you meet, looking ancient beyond all history, solitarily straggling into the villages, bent over from heavy loads of hacked firewood or raw produce upon their heads, are startled to see you. They gasp and step off their path, out of your way and passively bow their heads in habitual submission, as if suddenly paralyzed and subjugated by a frightening ghost. As you wait for them to relax and lift their heads, so as to reassuringly smile, they crudely wave and move off, without really facing you, not wanting to know what demon they’ve seen.

Shady, landlocked Kisangani is a degree above the bulging equator and over a 1000 miles, in each direction, from Libreville, Gabon on the Gulf of Guinea and Kismayo, Somalia on the Indian Ocean. As the kite might stray, the city is about 2,000 miles south of Cairo and more than 2,000 miles north of Capetown, South Africa. If a paved road connected Kisangani to Cairo, it might be a four-day ramble instead of a four-month ordeal to get here. And if the Europeans, leaving their crow-ridden, over-populated and wai—ravaged land, had remained, anyone might have comfortably come that way someday, on a long, leisurely game-drive, packing picnic boxes and tea caddies. If the British still had Sudan, there would be paved roads and red, double-deck buses, and each pink, sweating bureaucrat would carry a riding crop to prod the idle, and Sudan would still have its wildlife and few would ever die from starvation. If the French had kept their Congo and CAR, that rusting train in Zinga would regularly pull tourists sipping their fresh, cold beer through the luxuriant countryside in gentile serenity, and luxurious pleasure craft would stop at its dock for champagne. Bangui would have a great zoo of well-fed animals that would never have tasted human flesh, and vast herds of big-tusked jumbos would still saunter peaceably on the outskirts of N’d616, as they had for untold eons, and all of those sloppy, moonshine—drunk officials would be licking the spit-polish from some legionnaire’s shoes. If the Belgians still had

their Congo» a businessman could phone Brussels or Washington at his convenience} and get a five-course meal with cold cheeses and vintage wine in every remote outposty with clean linen and hot bathsy and grovelling servants to boot. And all of these countries combined might be the finest and largest natural reserve in the world. But Africans never needed that crap shoved in their faces from invasive} ostentatiously selfish guestsy especially after losing a world to them which was shipped away and subsequently disposed of at their own dubious pleasure. Nobody who ever saw Central Africa had a sane idea about it being a primeval paradise for humansy despite any myth and legend. But yety admidst the depravityy there is fresh hope reborn with each wide-eyed chi Idy however briefly livedy who awakes each day to breath the sultryy magical air of this splendid continenty that child inhaling so much beautyy creativityy vitalityy courage and love. The jungle’s river began to teach me something along the lines of what Mois6 demonstrated to his crew; transform one’s evily feai—ridden money and hard-won liberty into fun_s then be happy to be alive and patiently share that love with somebody. Something keeps trying to succeed in the Congoy but who knows what that is. If the Congo could ever be buried into the darkness of whatever mysterious universe from which it arose} then that would be best. Close a heavy book on it and continue to Mars. Central Africa can capably limp or swim to wherever it needs to go on its noble own.

I checked into a popular tourist lodgey L’Hotel Olympia, which has a longy open garage covering an informal camp-site where I set up my tent. Within hoursy I met Danny and Dave_y the two Australians whom I had left at the port in Mbandaka 18 days ago. They had taken the grand bateau to Kinshasa to receive mail, where Danny was forcefully robbed of some money by policemen who jumped out of a car. After thaty they bribed their way onto a plane and flew to Kisanganiy arriving a few days ago.

L’Hotel Olvmpia has a relaxing bar that prepares good food. I spent the first two days in Kisangani eatingy drinkingy or walking around town. I also traded books with other travelers. Each morningy I went to the large central market for boiled coffee made with hot peppersy even though the hotel offered proper caf6 au lait. A good breakfast was fresh peanut butter on bread or bananasy and a pineapple or papaya. One day₉ Dave carried a small military handbag with him to the muddy market and exposed from the bag a very lifelike greeny plastic snakey about a meter long. This caused a starty sending screaming children for cover behind stallsy but soon giggling children would cautiously return to get a second look} only to be again sent away screeching when Dave made the snake reappear. From that moment on at the markety Dave was famous; when he pet his bagy children jumped.

Patrice Lumumbay the Congo’s first prime minister} had been a postal clerk here in colonial Stanleyville. Lumumba had protested colonial racism and had demanded an end to colonial rule. He had been imprisoned by the Belgians for embezzlement} but was released in time to enter the murderous internal struggle for political control of the new nation. The Belgiansy denying the Congolese education} did nothing to prepare the Congo for independence} despite the fact that the gale of imminent political transition in Africa had been howling in the

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Europeans’ face for years. When Belgium belatedly conceded that the Congo’s independence was a foregone conclusion? it held a conference in Brussels in February 1960 for Congolese political activists to discuss the future. King Baudouin gave a rambling speech to the activists praising Leopold II for having created a mighty empire from the wilderness? more or less wishing the Africans well for their good fortune to have been rescued by him from slavery and ignorance.

Later in 1960? after intense competition for power between newly-formed political groups? Lumumba was elected prime minister. The CIA then tried but failed to kill Lumumba after President Eisenhower decided that Lumumba was not going to be a correct third-world lackey. But with persistent CIA help? Lumumba was arrested in 1961? and murdered by a political enemy.

Two thousand or so Europeans still remained in Kisangani as late as 196^ despite Zaire’s political instability? clinging to their exalted lifestyles and possessions. Foreign businesses and property owners were not readily going to abandon their investments without compensation from the Congolese who had no money. That year the city burst into chaotic violence. Lumumbist Simbas (secessionists) overtook the city? killing and publicly disemboweling Europeans. Rumors of cannibalism abounded. The raging mutineers murdered as many Whites as they could find? as well as many more Africans suspected of not supporting the Simbas. The violence finally culminated with a massacre of European hostages? before barricaded survivors were rescued by a successful U.N. paratroop attack on the city.

By 1965? Mobutu had gained control of the Congo by putting down widespread revolt and attempts at secession? killing and exiling political rivals from the many political factions. Mobutu later changed his new nation’s name to Zaire (a putative corruption of the Portuguese word “rio”) ? rightfully proclaiming himself the unifier and founder.

The 1960’s were a gloomy? violent era for Zaire. Only someone like Mobutu was ruthlessly cunning enough to finally emerge from a pack of irate political upstarts who all fought with each other. Each of the numerous political causes represented various tribes or federations spread across a vast land having over 800 ethnic groups with poor links of communication. Zaire’s post-colonial price for peace has been suffering Mobutu? now personally worth several billion dollars? who has focused the people’s fear of chaos upon himself? bestowing upon them an uneasy peace in which to endure. The terrifying violence following colonial rule resulted in at least E00?000 African deaths.

One day? I went to mail letters at the massive old post office where Lumumba may have worked? near an unkempt park where Europeans had been publicly tortured and executed by Simbas in 196A. I passed a new city bus turned over on a street? gutted for all salable parts and stripped of its tires. The post office was as quiet as a vacant church? absolutely devoid of business? save mine. After I purchased stamps? a well-dressed man appeared from behind the counter? introducing himself as postmaster. I complained about the stamps not having glue? which had sweated away in the humid heat. So the postmaster walked outside? broke a twig off a shrub and returned to apply the milky sap that drained from the stem onto the stamps and affixed them to my envelopes. The postmaster then said that he had almost a dozen children? but was too

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poor to feed them because his job paid him next to nothing. Could I help him with some money? he asked? I told him to stop having children. We had a good laugh over that one and I posted my mail and left. I returned another time to find the stamp window closed. The postmaster again emerged saying that he couldn’t sell stamps in place of the postal clerk but that I could pay him for the postage. He would see the letters mailed? meaning that he was going to affix used stamps to the letters? then carefully recancel them. I trusted him to post the letters? which indeed he did.

C61estine visited the campsite once. She was staying with family? awaiting a lift to her village? some distance from Kisangani. We sat on the dirt floor in the garage? beset by the busted junk stored there? awkwardly chatting in front of my cheap? Chinese-made pup-tent? now with holes in the floor that ants had chewed. She wore a beautiful swathe of clean? native cloth and a colorful scarf over the top of her braided hair? while I? unshaven? was draped? as normal? in a shabby? sweat-stained shirt? and wore dirty? tattered shorts and plastic thongs. We drank beer and I enquired about renting a room for us at the hotel? but none were available. I gave her some money for medicine and a meal before she left? seeming unhappy about something.

Around town? I saw some of the Nkov 12’s soldiers and crew? mostly at a bar near the port and I had drinks with them several times. One day? Mois£ and a concubine came to drink with me at the hotel. They were each giddily drunk? almost incoherent? passing another shoreleave as best they could. The Nkov 12 was indefinitely delayed in Kisangani waiting to find something to take back towards Kinshasa.

L’Hotel Qlvmpia employed several sentinels (watchmen) who patrolled the grounds with primitive-looking bows and arrows. The arrows were fletchless sticks? tipped with sharp metal points. Doubting whether these toy-like weapons were very powerful? I challenged a scruffy guard to draw an arrow and let fly. He gave a savage glare while sitting on a stool and placing down his beer? picked up his weapon and in one smooth? rapid motion turned and impressively buried an arrow in a tree thirty feet away? then laughed and drank his beer.

Meanwhile? Danny had met a solo-traveling English woman? Karen? and late one night they drunkenly awoke me asking to borrow my tent for some privacy. I refused? so they moved into a junked Chevy? permanently marooned in the garage? and amused themselves and a sentinel who sat nearby ever ready for thieves and trouble. U.S. automakers once sold many cars and trucks in the old Belgian Congo. These old ruined heaps are often seen covered in lianas with other plants and saplings growing through the busted windows. More often however? the metal has been beaten into machetes? garden tools? pots and pans? and the chassis used to bridge a gully or support a building. Zaire’s romance was brazenly infectious for the white monkeys who had unearthed a familiar clod of their native habitat.

I was determined to fly from Kisangani to either Bukavu or Goma? cities on Lake Kivu at the Zaire border with Rwanda. I purchased a ticket to Goma from a travel agent who wrote my reservation down on paper? assuring me that I had a seat. When I asked if he could phone the airport to double-check? he replied that the phones didn’t work? so a messenger would take the list to the airport.

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A -few days later when it came time to fly, I packed my bag and took a taxi to the airport after again saying goodbye to Danny and Dave who had been looking for a truck through the Ituri forest to Uganda. Karen had just passed this way, riding in the back of a dump-truck from Bunia, but she said that the roads were a muddy quagmire because of the rain and an important bridge had collapsed, stalling traffic indefinitely. I wished the Australians good luck, the flight was a treat that I had promised myself some time ago.

I arrived at the airport to join a disorderly mob of screaming people, jamming the terminal with bags and cardboard boxes. I reckoned that the chaotic mob was fighting for seats, but felt secure because I already had a reservation.

When the alleged boarding time came and passed and I hadn’t been called aboard, I approached the crowded reservation desk to check the the score. I was then told that the flight had been delayed, and to be patient. Several hours passed, while I periodically enquired about the flight. Finally, I was told that it had departed! No explanation was given to me, but I later found out that a wise mob had ignored the ticket desk entirely and had charged the departure gate when the plane arrived. People ran onto the tarmac, storming aboard the plane as if it were a bus; those not finding a seat were thrown off, and the plane left for Goma. This sweaty misadventure was too much, so I got mad. I stomped around the hot airport s.wearing to no one in particular, saving a few irate words for the poor, harried ticket clerk. Any politician, military officer or influential person can bribe or intimidate their way onto any fully-booked plane.

Livid with rage, I taxied back to the travel agency. I demanded a refund, having seen enough at the airport to ever want to waste another day trying to fly out of here—I would walk if I had too now. I barked at the clerk about Zaire’s backwardness “How could you work for an airline like this…and the corruption; Zaire was the most corrupt nation on the planet…did I forget to bribe someone? And to straighten Zaire out, then hang every politician and petty tyrant…get computers and the old phones working again, gut the jungle and dam the rivers and vow to the maxim: the customer is always right!”

The patient clerk let me finish my tirade, and I realized that she had heard all of this before, from other arrogant tourists, and that she was only part of a masquerade, selling air tickets which she herself knew were almost bogus. I knew that she and many others were doing their best under Zaire’s impoverished, chaotic circumstances, but I needed to rant at someone and surely she was used to that, so I let her have a full, sweaty fusillade of complaints until she introduced me to her apologetic and diplomatic boss who expeditiously refunded my money, getting rid of my row.

I returned to the hotel and again set up my tent, where I met a solo Japanese adventurer who had bravely peddled a bike from Tanzania to Kisangani and now planned to buy a pirogue and paddle to Kinshasa— to the moon and back. The Australians were trying to dissuade him by telling him frightening stories of pirates, hippos and crocodiles. He nervously told me about his plans to paddle down the river, almost getting white in the face, his hands and lips slightly trembling because he had seen quite enough of Africa already to know that these

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dangers were not entirely impossible. He had pushed his bike over a jungle footpath for some ISO kilometers, starting some distance outside Bukavu and finishing near Lubutu, perhaps 150 kilometers southeast of Kisangani.

From Bukavu it was an easy bus-ride to Bujumbura) Burundi, and from there, take a Lake Tanganyika boat to Kigoma, Tanzania and then a train to Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean, with ready connections to Nairobi, Kenya and the known cosmos from there. This was a sure, efficient way out of Zaire. The Australians were game for the hike because they were frustrated in trying to find a lift to Uganda.

That night Dave, Danny, Karen and I went to hear music at a popular nightclub called Le Transfer and drank mightily. We had realized a certain route out of Kisangani and looked forward to an exciting walk. Find a lift to Lubutu which was connected to Kisangani by a new, German-built road; then truck on to their construction camp and pirogue across the Lowa river and start walking on a derelict colonial road, now a footpath because the bridges had long since rotted and decayed into the streams. Germans and Chinese were building a new road from Kisangani to Bukavu, each starting at opposite ends.

I was elated, but more so when I found Mois6, Aim£, some of the commandos and a number of women sitting around several tables in the disco, everyone drunk and having a tremendous laugh. I danced with all them: the captain, his concubines, and the soldiers, crafting a wild, raucous time. The sotted dancing transformed me into the Egyptian god Anubis, standing stone stiff and having stood forever, with human arms at the side of the torso, fists solidly clenched, taking one slow step forward then one step backward, sometimes collapsing on the floor, then drifting up and over again; a slow-motion dance, done so that the world briefly stopped. And when it did, everything was dead, ready to be embalmed and scoot on to the next world, which came alive suddenly. I felt slick like polished, black granite, even when pliably writhing on the floor. After a long bout of dancing I returned to the table to sit with the two Australians and Karen. I gulped another beer, feeling giddy, mindless and wasted. Danny glared weirdly at me and asked if I was all right. I told him to look after himself and his girlfriend. Hadn’t he ever seen anyone happy before, I thought?

I ordered drinks for the captain’s table and ambled back onto the dance floor where again I was the stone jackel, Anubis, but bouyant, almost weightless, and fluttering in a familiar underworld. My unsteady boat—legs were gone and I celebrated. Mois£ danced with me, clutching a bottle of beer. He was beaming, hopping then flopping on the floor, and again I was too, each knocking down tables and spilling drinks, startling, then angering some people. It didn’t matter because this was a robust dance of freedom; of faith in the unknowable; a splendid trance. I couldn’t worry about the tiny consequences of smashing tables and spattering drinks, so I slithered and squirmed until Danny dragged me away from under a table, again asking if I was alright. ’’Look after yourself mate,” I replied.

He somehow convinced me not to dance anymore, so I sat down silently drinking more beer, getting as blithely blitzed as I could, becoming incoherently lost in another time, marooned on a forgotten world. C£lestine materialized, relaxing beside me. She said something;

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I don’t remember. Speechless, I stared back into her serene brown eyes, set deep into her elegant face and at the bright, shining teeth behind her soft smile, which stirred within my soulless self some timeless, obsessive ravings which I silently evoked: “Enslave me, I’ll do anything for you. I hate you, no I love you more than myself. Take my money, take everything. I’m a miserable drunk and beggar without you I’ll kill for you. I’ll kill myself. I’ll destroy of spite and lies. I’m sorry, I’m sick. I want to No, run. I’ll go—no, I’ll stay—no, I’ll fall on your feet, I beg you to enslave me.” My nervous mind worked like a potato-powered clock running on small voltage in steady jerks… Kisangani’s streets are for walking, the river for cruising, the trees for birds, the vines for snakes, the insects for sunsets, the jungle for Zairois…Last night I had a dream in which a man vomited two snakes, one large and one small. The small one struck, growing big and flabby…C^lestine, this is death. We’ll tramp through all of this sultry, stifling crap, and drift in the one virtuous sky, river and soil that sustains. I promise you a garden because America is an empty, fertile land. We’ll grow potatoes in the free earth—tons of them, make

everything. I’m full lay down and sleep, my knees9 let me kiss

beer vats of it, read books—libraries of them and love—yes we’ll

love and I’ll shed this solitary, banal thinking—love—that’s the genuine life for us.

“Ross, are you all right?” C£lestine disappeared. It was Danny again. Drinkers, dancers and lovers loped and undulated en masse as crazy dream-like flotsam wafted and careened in my twisted mind, I was disoriented, overlooking where I lay and forgetting why I remained.

“No, I’m not all right. Danny, I can’t walk; help me.”

the weapon But without treading into

Danny, saying goodbye to Karen, arose and took my hand, leading me out of Le Transfer into the dimly lit streets of the city. We swayed around a corner, then lurched down the center of a littered, potholed lane to abruptly freeze when a ragged man emerged from the shadowy forefront, advancing towards us with a pistol. He held loosely with both hands, anxiously pointing it onward, stopping or saying a word, the African quietly passed, the murk behind us, bent upon his own enigmatic ends.

The End

Russ Bright

Box 4-60152

S.F., CA. USA 94146

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