Last Chance to See

residents because the Ugandan part of the Virungas only covers about twenty-five square kilometres, and is unprotected and full of people whom the gorillas, given the choice, would rather steer clear of.
    The drive from Goma takes about five hours, and we made the hastiest departure we could manage after two and a half hours of serious madness with a ticket agent, a hotel manager, a lunch break, and one of the larger national banks, which it would be tedious to relate, but not half as tedious as it was to undergo.
    Things hit a limit, though, when I was set upon by a pickpocket in a baker’s shop.
    I didn’t notice that I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals. Everybody else in the shop did notice, however, and the man was hurriedly manhandled away and ejected into the street while I was still busy choosing buns. The baker tried to tell me what had happened, but my Zaïrois French wasn’t up to it and I thought he was merely recommending the curranty ones, of which I therefore bought six.
    Mark arrived at that moment with some tinned pears, our gorilla permits, and our driver, who quickly understood what was going on and explained to me what had happened. He also explained that the currant buns were no good, but said we might as well keep them because none of the others were any good either and we had to have something. He was a tall, rangy Muslim with an engaging smile, and he responded very positively to the suggestion that we should now get the hell out of here.
    When people talk of “darkest Africa,” it’s usually Zaïre they have in mind. This is the land of jungles, mountains, enormous rivers, volcanoes, more exotic wildlife than you’d be wise to shake a stick at, hunter-gatherer pygmies who are still largely untouched by Western civilisation and one of the worst transport systems anywhere in the world. This is the Africa in which Stanley presumed to meet Dr. Livingstone.
    Until the nineteenth century this enormous tract of Africa was simply a large black hole in the centre of any European map of the dark continent, and it was only after Livingstone’spenetration of the interior that the black hole began to exercise any gravitational effect on the outside world.
    The first people to pour in were the missionaries: Catholics who arrived to teach the native populace that the Protestants were wrong and Protestants who came to teach that the Catholics were wrong. The only thing the Protestants and Catholics agreed on was that the natives had been wrong for two thousand years.
    The missionaries were closely followed by traders in search of slaves, ivory, copper, and suitable land on which plantations could be established. With the help of Stanley, who was on a five-year contract to open up the interior of Africa, King Leopold of the Belgians successfully laid claim to this vast region in 1885 and promptly subjected its inhabitants to an exceptionally brutal and ruthless form of colonisation, thus giving them a practical and convincing demonstration of what “wrong” actually meant.
    When news of the worst atrocities leaked to the outside world, Leopold was forced to hand over “his” land to the Belgian government, who took it upon themselves to do virtually nothing about it. But by the 1950s independence movements were sweeping across Africa and, after riots and appalling massacres in the capital of Kinshasa in 1959, the colonial authorities were shaken so badly that they granted independence the following year. The country eventually changed its name from the Belgian Congo to Zaïre in 1971.
    Zaïre, incidentally, is about eighty times the size of Belgium.
    Like most colonies, Zaïre had imposed on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function of which was to refer decisions upward to its colonial masters. Local officials rarely had the power to do things, only to prevent them from being done until bribed. So once the colonial masters are removed, the bureaucracy continues to thrash around like a headless chicken with nothing to do but trip itself up, bump intothings, and, when it can get the firepower, shoot itself in the foot. You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able to find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.
    Five hours of sleepy bumping in the van brought us to Bukima, a village in the foothills of the Virungas which marks the point where the road finally gives