CHAPTER 3 — THE ROAD TO THE JUNGLE

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One of Louis Sarno’s earliest, aborted trips to Africa foundered when he was denied passage across what is now South Sudan by the outbreak of the second Sudanese war. The frustrations of the naïve young traveller, denied the opportunity to travel up the Nile into the Ituri rainforest, prefigured almost all more recent attempts to cross northern and central Africa, as a series of conflicts have brought vast swathes of the continent to its knees.

Sarno’s most recent journey home to the Central African Republic originated in Germany, where he and his eldest son, Samedi, had undertaken a whirlwind tour of the country to promote a new documentary. The film, also named Song From the Forest and directed by the German journalist Michael Obert, was framed around Samedi’s first trip out of Africa in 2011, when he was 13, to visit his father’s former life in New York. After a drawn out post-production process, the film had its premiere in Berlin in late summer of 2014 and Sarno and his son had been the guests of honour.

I met Sarno and Samedi at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, finding them sitting in the row closest to the boarding gate for a flight to Yaounde, the charmless capital of Cameroon. Overland travel out of Bangui is now impossible and the safest route in the direction of Yandoumbé, Sarno’s tiny village close to Bayanga, demands a drive along the solitary road crossing Cameroon’s southern districts. The Foreign Office is unequivocal in its advice against all travel to the Central African Republic, but the Dzanga-Sanga National Reserve, which occupies the far south-western corner of the country, flanked by Congo-Brazzaville and Cameroon, has avoided the very worst of the bloodshed. I had been assured by Sarno and other locals that militia had not been seen in the area for several months and that a delicate peace was holding, thanks to the presence of a handful of guards from the Central African Armed Forces (Faca).

For Sarno and Samedi, of course, their reason for travel was simple and non-negotiable: after three weeks on the road, they were finally going home.

Samedi looks younger than his 16 years. He was wearing a grey, long-sleeved T-shirt, blue jeans and blue-grey sneakers when we met at the airport and nobody in the departure lounge could have identified him as a pygmy, particularly when accompanied by his father. Sarno is tall and lean and at times can also pass for younger than 60 despite hair now reduced to grey wisps, and weary eyes. He wears a thin moustache along his top lip and props spectacles on his nose to read. He alternates seamlessly between what remains recognisably an accent from the east coast of the United States and Yaka, the dialect of the pygmies, which is not recognisable at all to western ears. However, he chuckles often in a manner that somehow recalls influences from both regions. His voice and throaty laugh bears similarities to the comedians and raconteurs of New York, with whom he was immersed for his college years, and the master storytellers and singers who rise to prominence among the Ba’aka, his more recent friends and family.

A seven-hour flight to Cameroon was the easy part of a four-day trip. Samedi and his father watched films to while away the hours, with translation services provided by the latter. After a night in a grotty hotel in Yaounde, Sarno and Samedi had to pay a visit to the German consulate to confirm Samedi’s return to the country. Sarno adopted Samedi after his natural father was gored by a bongo, a rare but dangerous antelope indigenous to central Africa, in the kind of accident that can be a daily hazard in the rainforest.

“He was running from it,” Sarno told me. “He tripped and it ripped his stomach out, stomped on his head. They can be quite vicious.”

Sarno was in a long relationship with Samedi’s mother, Gouma, and is named as Samedi’s father on his birth certificate, obtained for the first time when Obert’s film took them to the United States. However, the German authorities had required written permission from the boy’s mother that he could undertake the journey to Europe. In common with almost all Ba’aka, Gouma can neither read nor write, requiring alternative arrangements to be made for the trip.

Eventually, after a swift visit to the market so that Samedi could buy a football, we hit the road east in the direction of the town of Bertoua. It had recently been identified as a transport hub in the illicit ivory trade but was pinpointed by Sarno through our narrow prism of concern as the place where the tarmac ran out.

The roads in southern Cameroon, particularly east of Bertoua, exist only to service the lumber industry that tears away approximately 1,800 square kilometres of rainforest per year. Small villages have grown up alongside the road, but the men sitting beneath communal shades and the women crouched over cooking pots or scrubbing laundry in creeks seem of secondary concern to the never-ending convoy of trucks trundling metres from their homes. Each typically carries three enormous trunks of African mahogany, 30 feet long and six feet in diameter, towards Douala, Cameroon’s western seaport. All traffic caught behind has little option but to sit in the dust clouds spewed in the trucks’ wake, else swerve aside when they appear on the horizon ahead — and then pray to be out if proximity should they jack-knife and spill their cargo. I passed the time during the early parts of the trip producing a list of western football teams whose replica jerseys adorn almost all villagers in central Africa. I also thought how easy it would be to produce a photograph of a group of young children, who sometimes wander in hand-holding chain-gangs along the road, watching poignantly as the monstrous vehicles terrorise past, their insatiable demand for tropical hardwood carrying away the region’s future prosperity.

Although Sarno’s location has been remote for 30 years, he is not a recluse. In the past few years he has travelled away from his home more frequently than during any other period: to the United States for filming Song From the Forest, twice to Oxford to work on his collection of recordings, then back to Germany for the film’s promotional tour. He also fled the Central African Republic during the worst of the troubles in early 2013, and that journey in particular, much against his will, has since made him an tetchy traveller. The long hours in the front seat of our car, passing vast areas of scarred wilderness, or clutching at the dashboard as another truck careered past, was a cruel torture. We were stopped frequently at checkpoints manned by gun-toting gendarmes, first saluting but then scowling beneath their red berets, growing gradually more lawless and severe as we progressed east. Our patient driver, who suffered the worst of the inquisitions, knew simply to wait it out until what Sarno called the “little dictators” grew bored. The remaining three of us sat, gradually baking, in the car and Sarno frequently cursed the names of the director and producer of the film, on whose request he had made the journey. He had been paid expenses, and the film-makers had also bought him a new laptop and arranged a medical procedure in Berlin. But there is no business class route to the jungle.

By some margin, the calmest member of our travel party was Samedi. At one point he plucked from his backpack what I assumed to be a pair of sunglasses, but which turned out to be 3D specs from the cinema in Germany in which he and Sarno had watched Guardians of the Galaxy. Samedi was in the same sneakers, jeans and T-shirt he had been wearing when we met in Istanbul, which meant that for long periods of the journey he looked exactly like any other 16-year-old boy would while sitting in the back seat of a 4x4 edging across Cameroon, wearing 3D glasses pilfered from a Berlin Imax and flicking idly through the pages of a Turkish Airlines in-flight magazine. “He’s stoic,” Sarno said.

As we were stopped and harassed at checkpoint after checkpoint Sarno talked of some of the methods by which he used to bribe his passage past the similarly corrupt road guards of the Central African Republic. He said he used to buy a stack of newspapers in Bangui, which he would then offer to the gendarmes to alleviate the extended tedium at their posts. He said that one gift of the dense Jeune Afrique was remembered many months later by a guard, who stopped the subsequent journey only to offer his gratitude for the magazine. This time around, many years later, there was again the feeling of having entered a different era. The guards seized on any perceived infractions in our paperwork — I had to cough up 10,000 Francs (about £13) as a bribe because of the absence of proof of a polio vaccine on my medical forms — and Sarno was taken aback by a guard near the border’s plaintive appeal, “Didn’t you remember anything for me from your trip?” Sarno explained that his priorities were with his family, but parted with a soundtrack CD from Song From The Forest, a few copies of which he was bringing home for personal consumption.

“Make sure you tell Alex and Michael about this,” Sarno grumbled, in reference to the producer and director of the film. We were tired from nights in dilapidated hotels and frustrated by the continual dusting down by the gendarmes — and worse was due to come. We had heard along the road that the border patrol officer in Libongo, on the Cameroon side of the Sangha River, and who would need to stamp our passports to allow passage to the Central African Republic, had recently been fired for punching a white man.

As we trundled into Libongo, however, Sarno’s mood brightened. We pulled up at a shop owned by a Mauritanian friend and Sarno immediately saw that his current girlfriend Agati, with whom he has been in a relationship for three years, had come over the river and had waited in the shop to meet us. We went through the formalities with the new border patrol officer with a minimum of fuss (nobody was punched) and, as dusk began to fall, stepped into a long, narrow pirogue that would ferry us to the real rainforest.

The first rain of the day duly arrived as we made our way across the water. The gods of travelogue cliché also delivered a rainbow stretching above the wall of forest that lined the eastern banks of the river. Another canoe appeared alongside us, paddled by a fisherman wearing an orange T-shirt and with a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip. He offered us two limp creatures; either the last of his haul from the day, or its total. Suddenly, though, he halted the sales pitch to bellow, “Monsieur Louis!”

“Here we are! This is my country now,” Sarno said.

Sarno transformed miraculously from grouchy traveller to effusive tour guide. He pointed to a monkey hanging in the forest canopy, then discussed the water hyacinth, an invasive species that had prospered in the Sangha River. “It’s a favourite haunt of the anaconda,” he said. He joked at the credulous first-timer’s expense about hippopotamus, giant crocodiles and giant pythons that had been known to pluck prey from the canoes. (All the claims were fabrications.) He said proudly that the Central African Republic has the least light pollution of any country in the world. “When you fly over, it’s like the paleolithic era,” he said. “Almost no electric lights, just the glow of little fires.”

Darkness fell as we clambered from the boat, and Sarno shook hands with four bored Faca guards, shotguns resting across their knees, whose presence had been enough to keep the brutal but disorganised anti-balaka militia from the region. He expressed his gratitude by handing over a couple of banknotes: the first guards not to try to extract money were rewarded for their restraint. We then squeezed into another 4x4 for the final three hours of our trip: a lurch through more puddles than road (it was the rainy season) and with undergrowth whipping either side of our vehicle. The headlights flickered out at every puddle, but remarkably our driver kept us gradually inching forward. We stopped at what I later discovered was a Ba’aka village so that Sarno could buy a bundle of marijuana from a friend — all Ba’aka smoke prodigious amounts, and Sarno is a keen consumer — and eventually arrived in pitch darkness to Yandoumbé. Sarno, Samedi and Agati hauled their bags and suitcases from the boot, lit only by a couple of hand-held torches and some distant fires. But it was obvious we were now surrounded by an excited and populous welcoming committee, who swept their returning friend into his home.

I was due to be staying at a lodge around nine kilometres away, but our car’s engine had apparently run out of miracles and now threatened to leave me stranded agonisingly short of the finishing line. After seven or eight unsuccessful attempts to get us started again, we could gradually feel ourselves being shoved backwards out of our rut. Eventually, the engine caught and its diesel growl was accompanied by a chorus of delighted cheers. The headlamps also came on for the first time since we had stalled, suddenly illuminating at least 30 triumphant faces crowded in front of us. We were deep among the forest people.

← CHAPTER 2— THE HEART OF AFRICA
→ CHAPTER 4 — THE FOREST PEOPLE