Meeting the gentle, magical spirits of the African rainforest

Gorillas are outrageous. Nothing prepares you for meeting one on the green-dripping, moss-covered, butterflied equatorial forest floor. They look up at you from their wrinkled black leather faces and it’s … well, it’s extremely difficult writing about mountain gorillas.

Words seem woefully unable to convey the emotional impact of the experience. When one first locks on to your gaze with its beautiful, wise, hazel-brown eyes, your ears ring. It’s a sort of First Contact – it thwacks you in some ancient corner of your animal brain and comes out as tears. When the gorilla looks away, you feel instantly lonely.

I didn’t know that about gorillas until I met one, of course. What I was thinking about when I headed for Entebbe was people. I’m not sure when it first occurred to me that human beings might be an evolutionary mistake: probably while watching CNN news. Sure, we’ve taken over the place, but judgement about the path we’re on right now depends on whether you rate success as the ability to loot, burn and land-grab or live in harmony with Earth’s other life forms.

There’s heated debate in some scientific circles about whether hominids stepped on to the savanna and stood up because the forests receded and the grass was high, or became a semi-aquatic, hairless, dolphin-like creature able to hold our breath because the forests flooded and stranded us on soggy islands. But, either way, we probably began the stooping march to cellphones and lattes along the southern Cape coast eating mussels and hunting animals on the Palaeo-Agulhas Plain.

Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. (Photo: Unsplash)

We left Africa, colonised the planet, conquered space and invented paper clips. But gorillas and chimpanzees stayed put, almost unnoticed by the human world until fairly recently. With logging operations and banana shambas hacking away at their ancient forest home, however, these distant cousins of ours are now under terrible threat.

Before leaving home, I wasn’t sure if looking into their eyes would count for much, but I wanted to visit them in the wild before we turned their habitat into a coffee plantation – to somehow say sorry and to see if, maybe, it was they (and not we) that had taken the more sagacious road.

The families

There are three subspecies of gorilla: western lowland, eastern lowland and mountain gorilla. The last – Gorilla beringei beringei – is by far the rarest with only about 600 in existence, and is found only in the high, Afromontane rainforests around the Virunga volcanoes in central Africa.

They were “discovered” when two were shot by a German army officer, Oscar von Beringe, on the slopes of Mount Sabyinyo in 1902. Now, ironically, the subspecies bears the name of its assassin.

Their habitat, overlapping Uganda, Rwanda and the Republic of Congo, has been politically volatile with thousands of refugees and soldiers trampling through the forests, exposing gorillas to gunfire and human diseases. (Gorilla DNA is 97.7% human, so they’re susceptible to most of our ills.)

Gorilla trekking. (Photo: Don Pinnock)

Their lowland cousins, though more numerous, are increasingly falling prey to the effects of mainly European-based logging companies, which cut roads into the virgin forest, and to hunters who use the roads to access their habitats. “Bush meat” is the main source of protein for people in the region. This virtually amounts to cannibalism. It’s like eating your grandparents.

Situated in Uganda, however, Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is a safe haven. There, in relative security, the great, lazy primates wander, rest and sunbathe between bouts of eating and sleeping. Apart from the occasional luxury of ant hors d’oeuvres, gorillas are gentle vegetarians, nibbling the leaves and stripping the bark from about 58 plant varieties, then belching luxuriously as they rest their bloated stomachs in supine majesty.

For most local communities that have shared Central Africa with gorillas for centuries, the creatures are seen as spirits protecting the vitality of the forests. They’re treated with reverence and caution, sometimes seen as humans who chose to turn their back on humanity, or shape-shifters who could become either species at will. Killing a gorilla would be unthinkable.

Not so the European who first encountered gorillas. In 1856, the French explorer Paul Belloni du Chaillu was in the equatorial forests of Cameroon and Gabon and came across tracks his porters described as gorilla. The meeting would set the stage for a long history of exploitation and cruelty.

Du Chaillu tracked the family for three days until confronted by the silverback who’d clearly had enough of being followed.

“The underbrush swayed and before us stood an immense gorilla … with fiercely glaring, large, deep grey eyes and a hellish expression of face which seemed to me like some nightmare vision. He reminded me of nothing but some hellish dream creature – being of that hideous order, half-man half-beast… We fired and killed him.”

This portrayal of gorillas as aggressive monsters would make them prize trophies captured for zoos and scientific research.

Later, surveying the unbroken jungle from a hilltop, Du Chaillu dreamed colonial dreams that still threaten the existence of gorillas to this day: “I began to think of how this wilderness would [be] if only the light of Christian civilisation could be fairly introduced among the black children of Africa. I dreamed of forests giving way to plantations of coffee, cotton and spices; of farming and manufactures; of churches and schools.”

Sketch from a book by Paul Belloni du Chaillu. (Photo: Supplied)

Forest tracking

After formalities with permits and the selection of trackers, our small group of trekkers meet with our guide, Richard Magezi, at the entrance of the park. The Mubare group has been spotted in the next valley the day before and we make for that point, following the machete-swinging trackers through impossible-looking tangles of branches, leaves, ferns and wicked stinging nettles. At times we are moving on packed foliage up to a metro above the forest floor.

From there the tracking begins in earnest and I soon discover the good sense of walking on your knuckles: where gorillas have passed with ease, we humans slash and curse, get caught by vines and are smacked by overhanging boughs. In the jungle, bipedalism is bad news.

“Shh! The gorillas are here!” whispers Richard suddenly, and everyone freezes. I detect the movement of a dark shape ahead and stare fixedly at it. Then, glancing to my left for no particular reason, I find myself in the gentle gaze of the most thoughtful brown eyes I’ve ever seen.

The female gorilla is sitting like a silent, furry Buddha only a few paces from me, exuding a peacefulness which offsets any possible fear I might have in the presence of such a powerful, near-mythical creature. Then she tips on to her knuckles and lopes to the base of a giant ebony tree, lies on her side and begins fishing for termites, licking them off her fingers and grimacing comically when they bite her.

“Come quickly,” hisses Richard after a few minutes of trying to tiptoe through underbrush with the consistency of newly boiled spaghetti.

We peer round a bush and encounter the silverback comfortably scratching his broad buttocks with an expression of complete contentment. Beyond him are three females, another young male, some adolescents and two babies.

A youngster – looking for all the world like a cuddly toy – bounds towards the scratching patriarch, sits down beside him and pounds his little chest, then looks up at pop for approval. Having secured that, it leaps for a branch, hangs by its feet with its arms dangling and offers us an upside-down grin.

I remember Richard’s instructions to crouch down and not to make eye contact if the silverback charges. But I can’t drag my gaze away from him.

Beneath his huge topknot are two penetrating eyes, a shiny black leather face, enormous air-scoop nostrils and a mouth you’d have to describe as quizzical. His muscular arms remind me of Popeye and his chest would be the envy of a sumo wrestler. My startled gaze is drawn to his fingers: they are the size of huge, tropical bananas.

I realise then that Paul Belloni du Chaillu, in pursuit no doubt of future book sales to a credulous European readership, had cruelly misrepresented the gaze of a gorilla. They have the gentlest, kindest eyes I’ve ever seen. The silverback looks at his gawking audience with not a trace of interest – we could be forest butterflies for all he cares – then rolls on to his giant knuckles and is gone.

Our paths have parted. By the time we’d bone-lurched our way back to the howling madness of downtown Kampala, however, I had no doubts about which branch of the family tree I would like to be on, given the choice. DM

Dr Don Pinnock is an Our Burning Planet and Daily Maverick journalist.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.