I looked from one to the other and back again. There was no doubt that it was a settled thing, so I shrugged and asked what they needed me for.
They visibly relaxed, and Ishmael said, “How do you imagine such a thing would be managed, Julie?”
“Well, I don’t suppose you can just book a first-class seat on an airplane.”
“That’s certainly true. But working out the details of transportation is the easy part. The first eight thousand miles, from here to Kinshasa, is nothing. The next five hundred miles, from Kinshasa to a point where I can be released, couldn’t be organized by any travel agent or shipping agent in the world. They present problems that can only be solved by someone on the ground in Africa who can command cooperation and assistance at the highest levels of government.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s because Zaire is not Kansas or New Jersey or Ontario or England or Mexico. It’s because Zaire is utterly beyond your experience. It has achieved a level of corruption and organized chaos beyond anything you can imagine.”
“Then why go there, for God’s sake? Go someplace else.”
Ishmael nodded and gave me a ghostly smile. “There are certainly easier places to get to, but not many where lowland gorillas are an expected sight, Julie. Only getting to the wilderness is a problem. Once I am there, Zaire’s corruption will be left far behind, as least for the near future. Under Taker rule, there’s ultimately no place in the world where gorillas have an assured future forever. Besides, Zaire recommends itself because we have someone on the ground there who can command cooperation and assistance at the highest levels of government. That’s something we have no place else.”
Obviously, I thought, this had to be Art Owens, and I looked at him to get the story.
“I don’t suppose you know anything about Zaire,” he said.
“Nothing at all,” I admitted.
“Briefly, Zaire won its independence from Belgium thirty-one years ago, when I was five years old. After an initial period of chaos, the reins of power fell into the hands of Joseph Mobutu, a vicious and corrupt strongman who has held them ever since. My real name is Makiadi Owona. My younger brother, Lukombo, and I hung out with Mokonzi Nkemi, another boy our age. All three of us were dreamers, but with different kinds of dreams. I was a naturalist at heart and wanted nothing more than to live in the bush and learn. Nkemi was an activist who wanted to free Zaire not only from Mobutu but from the insidious influence of the white man. Luk was born to be a right-hand man. He thought of me as the Africa that Nkemi wanted to save, and that made us both people he worshiped. Does that make any sense to you?”
“I think so,” I said.
“When we were in our teens, Nkemi began to argue that we owed it to ourselves and to the people of Zaire to beat the white man at his own game, which meant getting the best education we could. It just wasn’t going to be good enough for me to live in the bush and play at being a naturalist. I had to go to school and study botany or zoology. He had to go to school and study public affairs and government, which would not be a bad thing for Luk to do either. This is how it played out. With a lot of hard work and determination, we all ended up at the university in Kinshasa. Then, with some more hard work and determination, Nkemi and I managed to get to Belgium to study in the early eighties. That’s where Makiadi came to be shortened to Adi. After two years I was eligible for Belgian citizenship, and I took it. I eventually worked my way to the United States, where I studied rainforest resource management at Cornell. That’s where Adi eventually became Artie, and Artie became Art. While at Cornell, incidentally, I met Rachel Sokolow and was given the first hints of her relationship to a gorilla named Ishmael. Meanwhile, Nkemi, back in Zaire, was elected to the local urban zone caucus in Bolamba, where he began to build a power base, with Luk at his right hand, where he’d always intended to be.
“I returned to Zaire in 1987 with a head full of dreams of wildlife preservation in the north—our part and the least heavily inhabited part of the country. That was the year Nkemi attempted his first big move into national politics, making a bid for election to the National Legislative Council. But his ideas were too radical, and Mobutu cut the ground from under him. Nkemi returned to Bolamba, a virtual exile, and the three of us—but mostly Nkemi, of course—began to plan our own breakaway revolution.”
Art paused to gaze at me thoughtfully, as if to gauge how much of all this I was actually taking in. I gazed back steadily, and he went on.
“Any vision would have been an improvement in Zaire, which is just a chaos that everyone’s used to, with corruption and bribery the only things you can count on from one day to the next. But Nkemi actually had a marvelous vision. The north had long been a stepchild of the more ‘civilized’ central portion of the country around Kinshasa. Mobutu wanted foreign currency, which meant he wanted the north to produce cash crops for export. Since the farmers were growing crops for export, they had to buy food to eat. This made life very difficult.” He paused, stuck, and looked to Ishmael for help.
“Imagine that you’re a cobbler with a big family,” Ishmael said. “You’re a cobbler, but you can only make shoes for export, you’re not allowed to make shoes for your own family. You sell your shoes to a distributor for five dollars a pair. The distributor sells them to a retailer for ten dollars a pair. And the retailer sells them to the public for twenty dollars a pair. This means you have to make and sell four pairs of shoes in order to buy one pair of shoes at the shoe store for your own family.”
“It’s even worse than that, Ishmael, because the shoes you buy in the store are imported shoes, so they cost forty dollars a pair. You have to make and sell eight pairs of shoes to buy one pair at the shoe store.”
“I get the drift,” I told them.
“That was the cornerstone of Nkemi’s revolution. The people were going to take care of the people first. We had to stop looking toward Kinshasa, because Kinshasa was looking toward Paris and London and New York. We had to look toward ourselves, toward traditional village life, toward tribal values. We had to get rid of outsiders trying to focus our attention elsewhere—missionaries, Peace Corps workers, and foreign merchants with their surrounding flocks of servants, shopkeepers, tavern owners, and prostitutes. All the outsiders had to go, and the people loved the idea of getting rid of them. They loved all of Nkemi’s ideas.
“On March the second, 1989, we seized
control of the governmental compound of Bolamba and proclaimed the Republic of Mabili—a name referring to an inspiring east wind that draws people together. As is always the case in these situations, there was a lot of confusion and disruption at first as the haves fought to hold on to what they were used to having. I won’t go into all that. Our real concern was Mobutu. It would take him three or four weeks to move troops to our position, but we didn’t doubt that he would do it. Even though we represented an unimportant and remote section of the country, he couldn’t afford to let us break away without a fight. Practically overnight, arms were pouring into our hands across the border from the Central African Republic, north of us. It seemed that André Kolingba, the dictator of that nation, was delighted with our naive little enterprise.
“We braced ourselves for attack. When it finally came, in mid-April, it was surprisingly halfhearted. Mobutu’s troops shelled a few villages, executed a few rebels, burned a few fields, and then went home. We were stunned. Was Mobutu ill? Was he being distracted by unrest in some other part of the country? Isolated as we were, we couldn’t know for sure. Another possibility was that he meant to lull us asleep. Without anything like a regular army or military discipline, Kolingba’s arms would soon be gathering dust and rust. A well-planned secret attack in a year would be devastating. We tried to keep people in a defensive frame of mind, but ordinary citizens thought we were being needlessly cautious.
“There was a Nkemi-type agitator named Rubundo who was trying to unite the Zande tribes in the region to the east of us. He came to say that his followers were ready to secede from Zaire to join the Mabili Republic if we’d let them. Nkemi told him that this was exactly the opposite of what we wanted, and he was right in that respect. Rubundo said he could understand that—but would we at least agree to support them in their own breakaway revolution? Nkemi hemmed and hawed and finally told him he’d think about it. He thought about it and thought about it, and Luk and I watched him think about it, and Rubundo kept calling and sending messages, and weeks went by. Then one day in November we got word that Rubundo had been assassinated. The second I heard that, I understood it all. Nkemi had made a secret deal with Mobutu: Let us break away, and we’ll keep all the other tribes in the north in line for you. This was the only way to explain why Mobutu had let Mabili go with only token opposition. When I brought this out into the open, there was no doubt that I’d hit on the truth. Luk hadn’t seen it any more than I had, but he thought the deal was a good one—just ordinary, practical politics. Since I didn’t agree, Nkemi asked me what I intended to do.
“I said, ‘Do you expect me to keep quiet about it?’
“He said, ‘Only if you want to go on living,’ and I left Bolamba that night. I was back in the United States by Christmas.”
I thought about it for a minute, then said, “I’m groping to understand why you’re telling me all this. You said you had someone on the ground in Zaire. Is that the person you call Luk?”
“Yes, that’s right. My brother.”
“Okay. Then I’m still groping. Why have you told me all this?”