By Foot to Gombe

by Geoffrey Clarfield (July 2012)

We then drove off into the opposite direction, up the road into the interior for we were not going to Gombe by boat. We were heading north towards the Burundian border where we would stop at one of the inland villages and then cut west across the hills through the villages around Gombe, by foot, until we reached the research station by the lake.

As we drove up the road we left a column of dust behind us, indicative of the massive soil erosion, which was everywhere to be seen, and which is partly a result of the massive population explosion that has overtaken the region during the last forty years.

A generation ago, the hilltops were covered in forest that went down to the lake. Now, as far as the eye can see, there is no longer uninterrupted miombo woodland, only evidence of slash and burn farming, dense clusters of palm oil trees and then clusters of houses in villages along the road.

It is as if, in this remote part of what is really Central Africa the deforestation of the ancient Mediterranean is once again taking place. Hilltops and valleys are being stripped of their natural forest and clustered plantations of domesticated palms can be found here and there among the fields of the villagers.

He and Anton exchanged the news in Swahili as he told us of the comings and goings of his many family members and of other researchers. His three wives came into the room holding a number of young children under the age of five, one or two who had just recovered from bouts of malaria, which is endemic in the region.

Although Hilali had a tin roof, a sign of wealth and advancement, there was no evidence that anyone in the house slept under a mosquito net. Nor was there any hint that he had any understanding of the germ theory of disease, so no matter how many admonitions he might have received from his friendly Western employers, it is unlikely that he would exchange belief in the invisible germ for the time honored, ancestrally sanctioned, invisible power of witchcraft and its ability to inflict disease.

At least in witchcraft, one can find the source of the disease and do something about the person who caused you to get sick in the first place, restoring the balance of life as it has been lived for centuries, if not for millennia.

As we sat talking a tray of bread was laid on the floor but first water was poured onto our hands from a plastic jug, Arabic style, and then we drank our coffee and ate our bread. The rhythm and deliberation of these activities was preindustrial, harking back to a time, perhaps from before the nineteenth century, before German and British colonialists brought their quick way of doing things to East Africa as sons of the industrial revolution.

As he greeted me in Swahili he bowed slightly and touched his hand to his heart, giving me the old kind of salaam that was common across the shores of both sides of the Indian Ocean and which I had read about in the books about the Raj but had rarely witnessed, as the custom has died out in the middle east from where it came. Perhaps it still survives in the Yemen or in Oman.

Yet these men were not Swahili or Zanzibaris although they dress and spoke Swahili like them. They were Muha, the local Bantu tribe whose ancestors were converted to Islam by the slave traders and who retain a fair amount of their traditional African culture, exemplified by the fact that Yayha is well known as a traditional sorcerer and the local people are scared to death of him, despite his good humored attitude and winning style-perhaps this demeanor adds to his locally perceived power.

We left our driver on the main road that continues to the Burundian border and turned off by foot on a path through a village. Kernels of palm nuts lay strewn across cloth, drying in the sun. Within a few minutes we were walking along the banks of small streams that meandered through large plantations of palm oil trees.

Hilali and Anton, having known each other for years kept up continuous banter in Ki Swahili. Hilali pointed out where he and his family members farmed or had farmed in the past. Crossing a stone strewn sunken riverbed we saw an open aqueduct to bring water to a field, made up of banana leaves, piled in an overlapping line, an interesting form of local technology. On either side of us were large hillsides, partially denuded with various miombo trees surviving on the higher slopes.

As far as the eye could see the land had been robbed of forest, the land had been burned and farmed and here and there palm trees had been planted where miombo once had been. The land was curiously devoid of livestock and only here and there did we meet a few goats and one long horned Ugandan cow, his horns looked like an animal off a Pharaonic wall paining.

We continued for about an hour through these valleys and paused at a large mango tree where Hilali told us that many years ago chimpanzees had lodged there and once attacked a woman walking by with her baby.

Looking at the hillside you could literally see how local population growth and a swidden farming pattern that first originated in the Neolithic, was now transforming the landscape from what was once forested hills and valleys filled with wildlife and primates and with a few islands of people carving out a life from the forest, to a near desert where the hand of man was everywhere upon the landscape, and nature had retreated to just above us at the highland border of Gombe national park.

We sat for a few minutes longer looking across the lake to Kivu in the Congo and with the near full moon on our right started down the steep path towards the forest. The drop on one side was more than 90% and given the fact that my legs were tired and stiff from the climb I was more than a little anxious at times, for I feared that a false move here or there could send me tumbling down the mountain side. I later found out that some years ago a foreign visitor, taking this path to Gombe, had fallen and did not live to tell the tale.

There was no grass on either side as the Park wardens had burned the ground to make sure that the park edges did not ignite in natural fires. So, after what seemed like ages we made it down the steep slopes into the forest and onto paths strewn with rock and gnarled tree roots. The last two hours were spent moving through forest paths by moonlight, never knowing whether that black patch in front of you is a dark bit of earth or a hole in the ground where you could slip and twist your ankle.

As we went through the forest we began to hear the water falls of Gombe, baboons calling in the night and the noise of the waves lapping on the sandy beaches of the Lake. Anton told me that by now chimps would have made their tree nests and most would be sleeping, adding thoughtfully, that they did a hell of a lot of farting throughout the night.

By nine in the evening we entered the research camp, we poured ourselves some whiskey and sat down. I explained to the various researchers and administrators who had been waiting for us that the reason we were delayed is that we were trying to enter the Guinness book of records for the longest walking time from Bubango to Gombe.

They told us that since they we had been passed by numerous peasants on the trail who had arrived hours before us they had had constant news of our slow progress and my pre geriatric pace. Nevertheless, I had taken this walk as my 49th birthday present to myself and they had not forgotten to bake me a cake.

Bill has developed an archive of chimp footage that is unrivalled in the history of nature photography. He is a fit, good-natured former Peace Corp volunteer with a knack for nature videography and has spent most of the last ten years filming the chimps of Gombe. I felt like I had just dropped in on a digital version of Tarzan and Jane and spent much of the next day watching their footage and listening to them talking about chimps. During the previous year Bill had filmed unique events such as tree ant fishing in the Kasakela community, two sequences which illustrate the behavior of infants who have temporarily lost their mothers in the forest, a long rain dance display, a streambed display, and a long waterfall display by Wilkie then Frodo.

One of the most interesting sequences that he had shot was one of Titan standing bipedally, repeatedly striking at Fanni with a long branch while Frodo sat within a few meters of Fanni as Titan tormented her.

On a darker note he told me that chimps and baboons continue to frequent the staff camps which subject them to the possibilities of disease transfer from humans. I pondered that evolution is still raw in tooth and claw here at Gombe.

As Bill talked on about all and every aspect about chimpanzee life I wondered whether this kind of behavior was partly a result of the scientists having discontinued banana feeding to the chimps for fear of human infection further reducing their numbers.

The next day we took the boat trip back to Kigoma. It was a long wooden contraption, modeled on the Swahili dhows that the coastal slave traders had brought the Lake when they set up their slave trading station of Ujiji. We sailed by a beach within Gombe national park where Livingstone himself had made camp on his journeys around the lake.

The slave trade ended one hundred years ago, but the wars in the Congo continue and it is the animals who are now the final victims of these wars as soldiers penetrate the forest and eat the last chimpanzees of central Africa. The chimps of Gombe have been saved by the efforts of Jane and her people, but their numbers dwindle, poaching is a constant threat and within a generation, they may all disappear. I spent more than a year working near them in the hope that some will survive. Only time will tell.

Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at large.

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