I was not looking forward to the  next leg of my journey  getting to Bunia, the capital of
RCD-ML. Prior to my departure the UN's IRIN bulletins (an invaluably detailed source of day-to-
day conditions in the DRC) reported that  inciviques believed to be NALU rebels and/or ex-FAC
deserters were assaulting vehicles traveling from Beni to Bunia at Mufutabangi and abducting the
female passengers into the bush. And there was also heavy banditry by a band of mixed deserters
along the 60 km. stretch from Mambasa to Lolwa, which is particularly abim‚e. A kumba kumba
had had his dried fish and his bicycle stolen a few days earlier, and a woman had been abducted
from a motorcyle. Plus 400 UPDF soldiers coming west on the road from Bunia, perhaps to
reinforce Bemba in Equateur, and they would certainly not let such a windfall as a mundele
(lingala for white) on a motorbike pass without relieving him of at least some of his goods.
Mapilanga thought it would be safer  to return to Beni and fly to Bunia, and he didn't get any
argument from me. Getting in and out of RFO in one piece is a serious problem, and I am with
Karl that the airstrip should be reopened. But the strip has to be controlled by the park. If
undesirable parties like Kabila's soldiers are trying to land, empty oil barrels can be rolled out.
Terese is worried that the reopening of the airstrip would require the presence of RCD soldiers
who could cause problems,  that it could be used to get resources like coltan and ivory out like
the five strips in and around PNKB. The security on the ground from Beni and Bunia, she argues,
is a personal problem, not the park's. But sooner or later somebody is going to be not just robbed,
as Karl was a few weeks after I left, but killed, and that will not be huge loss. It was Karl who
said, "And if I die, just bury me somewhere in the forest." 

      Karl instructed me how to behave should I be waylaid : in one pocket, you have your first
offering. If the bandits are not happy with that, you produce your second offering. If they still
want more, you let them have it. Under no circumstances should you resist. They would have no
qualms about killing you on the spot.

      Passing back through  Mambasa, I called on the interim administrator of the territory, 
Nyamabaku-dudu Marc. After telling him that I did not appreciate being shaken down by his
colleague Fredu, I asked if he thought the existence of the  RFO was a positive thing.  "We can do
nothing," said Nyamabaku-dudu. "It is an organism that has been around for many years." As for
the UNF's project, he assured me, "We are here to cooperate. We are open." Are there any plans
to do something about the poaching ? (I was sworn to secrecy about the joint operation with the
Ugandans. Colonel Angina had said if word gets out that the RCD command in Mambasais going
to be removed it could backfire badly, and the deal is off.) "We hear some chefs coutoumiers are
involved and we are investigating," he told me.  "The population and the deserters of Mobutu,
Kabila, and Wamba are hard to control, because we don't have much of a unified strike force, but
we will send a report to our superiors and they will  tell us what to do. Why hasn't the
conservateur sent us a report on the coltan mining in the park ? It's been going on for six months.
The miners are possibly put up to it by les exterieurs." Who told them the stuff was valuable ?
"Maybe buyers in Mambasa, Bunia, and Beni. The miners say they have no alternative, and it's
true."

        On the trip back down to Beni we passed fifty pygmies dancing.  At Luemba the RCD
commandant for the region, or so he identified himself, flagged us down and commandeered two
litres of our gas for his motorcycle. He made me open my bag, hoping there was ivory in it that he
could confiscate, and instead found my small traveling guitar  which he took a fancy to. I said I
need that and you can't have it and it you bug me any more I'll tell Wamba, whom I'm on my way
to see." "Don't threaten me with Wamba," said the commandant. "He does nothing for us. Kabila
gave us $100 in the beginning, but Wamba has never given us anything. On se d‚brouille."

        In the end, he contented himself with the gas, and we sped on until we reached Kambale
Kisuki's house. A dozen women were sitting on the back porch, knitting silently, the Beni knitting
club.  Rosie Ruf had taught them. 

        Kisuki's gave me some hard-hitting questions to ask Wamba, and in the morning, just as he
was about to take me to the airport, some Ugandan soldiers came in a truck and took him away.
"It's good that you're seeing this how we are treated," he said as they drove off. His driver
explained,  "Wamba ordered all the ministers to Bunia where he can keep an eye on them and
Kisuki refused." Kisuki was in the camp of Mbusa Nyamwisa, Wamba's former prime minister
who was now trying to overthrow Wamba along with his former finance minister, John Tibasima. 
Mbusa controls Beni, Tibasima controls the Ituri district.  A few weeks earlier Tibasima had
fomented a mutiny of the Third Battalion, which is mostly Hema, a tribe of Nilotic pastoralists
whose 70-year-old land struggle with the Bantu agriculturalist Lendu has for the first time turned
genocidal, with 7,000 killed last year, perhaps in an aftershock of the big atomic genocide in
Rwanda six years ago. The battalion went to the forest demanding Wamba's removal, accusing
him of being tribalistic and anti-Tutsi. Wamba dia Wamba is a Mukongo from Bas Congo. Kisuki
spent a few days in jail and was released. A few days later Mbusa and Tibasema launched a putsch
against Wamba with some of the local Mayi Mayi, but were beaten back by the UPDF.
Subsequently they all appeared to have kissed and made up, but the latest (as per Oct. 25 IRIN
bulletin) is that the situation is spiraling "out of control" according to Wamba . Colonel Angina
has been transferred to Wamba's chagrin (and what does this means for the operation in RFO ?),
and Ugandan officers supporting his rivals and erstwhile deputies Mbusa and Tibasima have taken
the airport and the radio station. 

NO GAS IN BUNIA

      I flew to Bunia that morning, the 27th. The taximan had no gas. We ran out after a quarter of
a mile, then his battery gave out, and finally the whole vehicle started rattling violently and it took
an hour to get to Morgan's, the European-style guest house.  Morgan (a Congolais who was
adopted by a Belgian named Morgan) had had four Toyota 4/4's, with which he had taken tourists
to Epulu, but had been looted by Mobutu's soldiers, and the guest house was trashed. He was
rebuilding his life little by little. "We live dans un pays Western," he told me.

Morgan is a useful contact and ready to be of help. He introduced me to his cousin, Thomas
Luhaka, the RCD's gentle young vice-commisar of defense, who  came from the diaspora like
most of Wamba's entourage. He was teaching law at the University of Paris II. Luhaka went to 
Wamba and returned with the news that "the professor will see you at 16:00."

      Luhaka had no gas, either, so we walked to the sparsely furnished mansion, out on a spur,
where Wamba stays. Wamba knew my work. "He says you are a grand journaliste who writes
things that are justes," Luhaka told me. I had given an enthusiastic blurb to his son Phillippe
Wamba's book, Kinship, about Afro-Americans' quest for their African roots, and had sent word
through Phillipe that I hope one day we would meet. I found Wamba to be much as Robert
Mwinyihali described him :  "calm and  very intelligent. He understands problems intellectually
and puts them in their theoretical context, but he is an academic, not a politician. He says he who
kills the environment is committing suicide, but  he has no means to intervene. Most of his
entourage thinks the forest is there for quick enrichment." Wamba struck me an ivory tower type
who is surrounded by warlords. He would make a great rector of the university but will never be
president any more than Ilunga, a weak puppet of the Rwandans, will. He spent from l981 to l998
as a professor at the University of Dar Es Salaam teaching African historiography and the history
of  imperialism worldwide, including colonialism and neocolonialism. He was the chairman of the
meeting that created the RCD in August 98, but by the following May he was eased out by a
putsch in Goma and created his own faction. We talked for four hours.
I left with the impression that he has no illusions about his presidentiality and is genuinely
interested in promoting an inter-Congolese dialogue in which everyone sits down at the table and
works out their differences and decides what the new state will be. "Congo's traditions are
democratic," he told me. "The Bakongo king was elected by a small college which chose one his
predecessors numerous nephew, so it's wasn't hereitary in a sense. Where there wasn't a king, the
villages had palavers. There wasn't a real chief with real power, it was more egalitarian. Everyone
sat in the baraza and had their say, and the elders empowered the chief to take action. But then
the Belgians made the chiefs the executors of their corv‚e and other exactions, and they became
petty tyrants." What Wamba wanted to see was two parliaments. One would be an ethnic
parliament, in which each of 450 ethnic groups, no matter how big or small, had the same vote,
which could decide on how to resolve ethnic questions like  the Hema-Lendu problem, for
instance, could rule who came first and who is entitled to what. Then there would be an elected 
chamber for matters of national scope.

       I observed that  the UNF project offered a golden opportunity for the three rebel factions to
collaborate on an issue of mutual concern, which might lead to greater cooperation and
reconciliation, and for their soldiers to channel their energies into something positive and
patriotic. Wamba agreed. I pointed out that the forests of Haut Congo are some of the last
relatively intact primeval rainforests on earth, and that it would be a mistake to exploit them
prematurely, because they were money in the bank. The trees would only keep growing and
become more valuable, and the next generation of reserachers would have much more
sophisticated means to decode the DNA of the plants, etc.; perhaps the cure for AIDS or cancer
was waiting to be discovered in some fungus. "We have to discover a way of living where we are
not disturbing much of the forest and at the same time are living allright," Wamba said.  What
practical modalities do you plan put in place to support the UNF project ? I asked. "We will give
guns and training to the guards and control the illegal arms circulating and reintegrate the
deserters. We need Uganda for a while. In Lusaka [the accord of August, l999, in which the
belligerents except for Kabila agreed on a plan for ceasing hostilities and in the case of the foreign
allies, withdrawing from the country],  they have responsibility for maintaining security until we
resolve they should go. Once a liberation movement takes power, if it doesn't change the politics
of armed struggle the tendency will be to resolve problems violently. Once you have soldiers
outside their country for a long time and no politicians on the terrain to keep them in line the
temptation to steal by force is very great. This very tempting area. There has  to be some political
element that emphasizes the duties of soldiers." 

       I praised  Kambale Kisuke to the skies and asked Wamba what he thought of him. "Kisuke is
one fellow we want to keep in the new circle," he said. "Usually we have somebody who deals
with the dossier. If need be we could appoint a specific person to liaise with UNF and the parks.
Kisuke is fine with me. We could appoint some high officer to investigate the d‚gats of the
soldiers. That we could do." I should point out that Kisuke was not angling for such a position,
nor did I suggest him. The idea just came out in conversation, but it may not be a bad one.

      I told Wamba about a recent discussion I had had with Al Gore about Africa. Gore told me
about a physicist called Prirogine who won the Nobel prize for a new law of thermodynamics
which pertains for open systems (in which the energy flows in and out). When the energy becomes
more than the system can handle, it breaks down, and simultanously  a new, more complex system
starts to develop. This process of "creative destruction" is what Gore thinks is happening in the
environment (excess co2 is wreaking havoc with existing climate regimes and weather patterns),
and in Africa, where the "state," an invention and an imposition of the Europeans, is breaking
back down into smaller, more meaningful ethnic and tribal groups. Wamba found this take
intriguing. "One has to consider what form this principle of themodynamics expresses itself  in
terms of society," he said. "If you look at the breakdown of Mobutuism : his notion of geopolitics
was that each group can gather its  fruits and nature, which gives the fruit, will deal with the
maintenance. But here an open system needs feedback and maintenance. In places where there is
not enough space or resources for everybody, the notion of who was here first becomes the ruling
principle, so the 'Banyawranda' have become the cause of everything, and the tribal units Gore
may be thinking of are not really there."

       Even Wamba's car had no gas, and another one had to be brought around to take me back to
Morgan's. 

***

     Lusaka came to see me in the morning. He, like Kisuki, is a very good guy, the most sensitive
African minister of defense I've ever met and someone the project can work with. Lusaka
remarked that the Congo's civil war was a relatively soft one, and were it not for foreign troops
intervening and in fact coming to blows themselves [viz the UPDF and RPA's embarrassing
firefights in Kisangani] it wouldn't be lasting so long. "The province of Ituri is unique because it
has all four ethnic groups, Bantu, Sudanic, Nilotic, and pygmy," he told me. "The Tutsi  can be
Congolais, Rwandais, Ugandan, Burundian, or Tanzanian. We call them all Banyawranda. The
Banyamulenge Tutsi were massacred by Mobutu and since the state didn't protect them they feel
they have to control the apparatus of state. But we say to them you should support the republican
Congolais who considers nationality a juridical, not a biological notion. All Bantu are not
Congolais just as all Tutsi are not Congolais. They are a bit everywhere. That is Wamba's notion.
The RPF should help us reestablish the authority of the state, the army, and the administration,
and at that point the Republicans can guarantee the rights of all Congolais. Fred Rwigema (the
founding leader of the RPF, who was killed on the first day of its invasion of Rwanda, in October, 
l990) was a republican. He was for le Rwanda pour tout le monde and he was killed by extremists
in his own movement.

     "The replacement of the corrupt RCD command in Mombasa must be accompanied by a big
campaign of sensibilization of the population, and this where we need your help," Lusaka
continued. "To sensibilize them about the importance of protecting nature and conservation. The
population doesn't understand that okapis constitute a great treasure for them. Kenya, Egypt, and 
Turkey exist in great part thanks to  money from tourism. If we have peace and the roads are
rehabilitated tourists will bring much money to Epulu.  I am privileged to be a Congolais because
I will leave to my children an inheritance that neither Rockefeller nor Onassis nor Picasso have left
to their heirs. Neither Rockefeller nor Picasso left them okapis, white rhinos, and mountain
gorillas. It's inestimable as a heritage. If I can make these animals multiply I will be proud of my
life."

      I called on Faustin Lola Lapi, the Commissar of Agriculture, Rural Development, Fishing and
Forests, which also deals with tourism and the environment. The Commisariat occupies the first
floor a former commercial building partitioned into small cubicles and is obviously sans moyens.
Then I met with the governor of the province, Ernest Uringi Pa-dolo. "We're behind UNF 100%
if you're coming to protect our richesses," he told me. "We will protect your security and the
biens you are bringing. We deplore the absence of a radio-phone at Epulu. It would be great if
some coop‚rant brought the means for us to communicate with them." I said it would be great if
the insecurity along the roads from Mambasa and Beni could be taken care of. "We have one
jeep," lamented the governor. "And our other vehicles can't leave the city, so there is not much
we can't do about it." The funds that could have purchased more 4x4's were absconded with by
Mbusa and Tibasima. The coffers of the RCD-ML are empty. 

GARAMBA

     Morgan's son drove me to the airport at 3:00. Kes and Frazer Smith, who were coming from
Nairobi, were right on time in their single engine what kind of plane belonging to the Frankfurt
Zoo. With them were their children, Doungu and daughter's name ?, and their British friend
David Simpson, a freelance editor who works mostly for UNEP and couldn't have been nicer. (It
is Simpson who calls elephants "ellies" Frazer had brought along some mosquito canopies which
he distributed to the customs and immigration people in return for their not inspecting what else
was in the plane. Even so, it took 45 minutes of haggling and palavering before they let us out of
there. Frazer, a short, stocky South African in his forties wearing shorts and sandals and a khaki
shirt with epaulets, was obviously a pro at this.

     Just as we were becoming airborne, two tanks with  Ugandan soldiers in their cockpits,
looking ultra-cool with shades and with cigarettes dangling  from their mouths,  patched  out of a
hangar adjacent to the passenger building and took off at full tilt down the road into town, tearing
it to pieces. Looking back on it, the coup against Wamba may have already been starting. We got
out of Dodge none to soon. 

     Just of Bunia are the Blue Mountains, where serious inroads are already being made into the
valuable timber (Entandrophragma sp. and Khaya ), and there is I believe some extremely
interesting geology, and after them the landscape is almost undisturbed by humans. There are only
a few huts and shambas and purposeful tracks through the ecotone where the eastern edge of the
Ituri Forest gives way to savanna, and the more numerous, less purposeful tracks of ellies and
other large mammals, meandering through a jumble of granite knobs, koppis as South Africans
call them. We flew over pure rainforest of some stature frothing over a rangelet and along a
gleaming ribbon of water meandering beneath it I spotted a clearing with maybe half a dozen little
domes of thatched mangungu leaf and no shambas   a pygmy camp deep in the forest. Then
Watsa appeared off to the west, where there was recently an outbreak of Mahrberg virus at 
Dodo, the main gold mining camp. 

      "We're lucky we don't have the same kind of human pressure as Virunga or Kahuzi Biega
do," Kes said over the headphones. The tsetse fly is a large part of the reason why there is still a
lot of wildlife in the savannas of central Africa.  Kes is a reserved, intense, extremely capable and
focused and determined red-haired  Englishwoman without an ounce of body, a real-life Katherine
Hepburn, definitely a femme de fer, and the down-to-earth, supremely practical  Frazer is her
Spenser Tracy.  I could see why Frazer and Karl have a great friendship. Kes and Frazer met in
Botwsana, where Frazer was a ranger in one of the parks. 

      Kes started out in Africa as a zoologist examining slides of hippo flesh for parasites, then she
participitated in Ian Douglas-Hamilton's continent-wide elephant survey, in the course of which
she realized that the rhinos, being far less numerous, were  urgently in need of being located and
protected. She originally thought that she would work in the national parks of southern Sudan,
where there were several hundred northern white rhinos, Cerototherium simum cottoni 
 left. But by the time her grant money, from WWF Holland, was in place, the civil war between
the SPLA and Khartoum spread into the parks and all the rhino were completely wiped out, or
there could be one or two left. So Kes switched her field of study to PNKB, where the last viable
population of the subspecies is hanging on. 

      We crossed the Kibali River, which runs into the Nzoro, which is in the Congo drainage; the
Congo-Sudan border follows the divide between the Nile and Congo basins. North of the Kibali
begin PNG's domaines de chasse, where the local people-- Logo, Azande, Baka, Mondo, Kakwa,
and Lugwara   are allowed to do subsistence hunting with traditional methods  spears, snares,
nets. If they use a firearm, which not a few of them do, it becomes poaching. In the old days,
European and American trophyhunters paid big bucks to bag a buffalo or a hartebeest in the
domaines de chasse. There are some shambas in the domaines. They are technically not allowed,
but tolerated.  The three domaines of mixed savanna-woodland are zones tampon, buffer zones,
for the park itself, which begins  north of the Nagera River. A 4600-km2 island of long-grass
savanna dominated by the Loudetia arundinacea and Hyparrhenia species, with no trees except
the occasional Combretum or sausage-tree that has taken root in the bare circle of a washed-away
termitarium and the gallery forest that lines that crevices and fissures of the well-watered, spring-
rich open plain. This was the very geographical center of the continent, "the bright heart of
Africa," as Alan Root calls it in his splendid documentary of PNKB, to counter the negative
stereotypes (Conrad's "heart of darkness," Stanley's "darkest Africa") that have taken hold in the
Western imagination. Big herds of large animals roam in the grass which was now 6 feet tall. 
. The reason for the existence of this island of grass in a sea of trees is debated : is it natural, or
was it cleared by fires set by the local people in the past, or due to the high ellie density which
keeps  saplings from getting anywhere, or a combination of the three ? There are now roughly
6000 ellies, give or take a thousand. In l983, when Kes started working in PNKB, there were
7,500. There was a big wave of elephant and rhino poaching throughout Africa from 1973-84,
and by l985 the PNKB ellie population had hit an all-time low of 4,500. By l995 it had rebounded
to 11,000. Then the civil war came, and it was cut in half. Now it is growing again. Similarly the
buffalo, 25,000 strong in l995, were reduced to 8,000  in early l997, and are now back up to
13,000, (there wasn't as much poaching in the second war), and the hippos have gone from 3,500
to 800 to 1000, and the rhinos have gone from 29 to 26 to 30. The giraffes have gone steadily
down, however (from 178 to 144 to 118), as have the waterbuck (1700 to 1400 to 1100),
hartebeest, kob, warthog and roan. The animals have been poached out of the northern part or
driven south  by mostly Sudanese poachers. The worst moment was when tk when Kes and
Frazer flew over the Nagera and it was choked with the carcasses of machine-gunned hippos with
their feet in the air in rigor mortis.

        We landed, were greeted by Mbayma Atalia, the conservateur en chef, and taken to park
headquarters, an impressive compound of buildings built to last by the Belgians. PNKB was
created in l938. Before that it had been a station for domesticating elephants. King Leopold's
dream had been to use elephants for heavy work, like tractors, to build the infrastructure of his
private kingdom in the Congo. He tried unsuccessfully to introduce ellies from India, and the first
local elephants were captured by Lt. La Plume in l901 and a station was set up at Gangala da
Bodio, how many km west of Nagera. In the early days the mother would be shot, and her calf
trained.  There are old fotos of 100 ellies parading with military precision. The ellies were a big
tourist attraction. In l987-8 Kes tried to revive the domestication program, but Mobutu heard
about the two young ellies she was training, Kwanza and Ruby, and requisitioned them. Kwanza
died in the Kinshasa Zoo, the sorriest zoo I have ever seen, and Ruby died in a crate in Isiro, in
which she had spent a month while arrangements for her to be flown to Gbadolite dragged on. By
l998 there were only 3 regularly handled ellies; the others had been set free. One had a baby but
both died, so now there are two. Kes envisions some day elephant-back safaris to tent camps in
the savanna, but it's hard to get sponsors for that sort of thing, and she has other, more urgent
things on her plate.
 

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