Investment Biker Page 25

  Like a roomful of six-year-old humans, each orphan had his own personality and antics with which to gain attention. Henry told us that research on chimps had shown them to be 99 percent genetically related to humans. Watching these gorilla orphans, I could believe that they were closely related to us.

  One slapped me on the bottom and ran off, only to do it again when I wasn’t looking. Several were shy. Some were playful and others show-offs. They interacted so strongly with us it was almost as if they were talking to us, letting us know their personalities, unlike, say, a roomful of cats, which wouldn’t let us know what they were thinking.

  The goal of the twenty-acre camp was to prepare these orphans for life back in the jungle. Henry assured us that despite their camp existence, they retained their instinctive ability to learn jungle ways. I remembered that dried gorilla hand back on the barge. I shuddered as I wondered if one of these orphans’ hands would wind up for sale on a witch’s table.

  One two-year-old climbed all over me, making something of a pest of himself. Henry scolded him and he pulled away, patting me on the back to make sure I wasn’t offended.

  Kinshasa, Zaire’s capital city, was the first major city we’d been in since Algiers, but nothing seemed to work. Upper-class Zairians walked around with walkie-talkies and mobile phones because their hard-wired phones were useless. At the hotel many prices were in United States dollars. Those in the local currency, the zaire, were raised daily, even the prices of newspapers. Restaurants didn’t list prices on the menu; they inserted a new price list with every meal.

  Two days before we were to set out, a BBC shortwave broadcast informed us that intense fighting had broken out along the route we planned to take through Angola.

  We struggled again with our decision: drive through Angola or Zaire. What a choice! An active war or a trek along roads that by every account were far worse than Siberia’s. Even the main road that went south to Lubumbashi, capital of the southern region and through which we had to pass, was described as a river of mud.

  At the American embassy we explored our options with an officer, Phil Cowan. We asked what was going on in Angola, just down the road. Knowing that UNITA, the combatants the U.S. favored, were being supervised from this embassy, we knew he wasn’t allowed to say much.

  “Just tell us what to avoid,” I said, having come to understand how much embassy officials hated to see citizens from their countries. “Don’t tell us any secrets.” Embassy personnel had wonderful jobs at good pay in fabulous locales. They were honored in the exotic countries in which they were posted. But then in came their bedraggled citizens with problems, requests, complaints, and grievances, spoiling a perfect succession of perfect days.

  Even though Angola was only a few miles away, he airily waved his hand and said, “I have no idea.” He promised to call a friend at the political section to see what he could find out.

  When we came back the next day, however, Phil was cooler, downright icy.

  “Nobody here knows anything about Angola,” he said with a straight face. “But don’t go there.”

  I gathered this meant he wouldn’t go out on a limb with information that might get us hurt, or that he and the political section thought we might be spies. We were on our own.

  Over the next twenty-four hours the BBC reported that the heat-up of the Angolan war was increasing, but I still resisted driving through fifteen hundred miles of jungle mud to Lubumbashi.

  Everybody who had ever been through Zaire had horror stories to tell, and I wasn’t eager to supply more.

  On the other hand, even if the Angolan roads were better, I didn’t want to be shot or taken hostage. Every traveler warned us of Angolan land mines. More one-legged people were said to live there than any other place in the world.

  Each time Zaire seemed more attractive, I shuddered. It was the model of the post-colonial disintegration of African nations.

  The second-largest country in sub-Saharan Africa, Zaire was the size of California, Texas, and Alaska combined. Potentially, it was rich, with large deposits of cobalt, copper, diamonds, tin, manganese, zinc, silver, cadmium, gold, and tungsten. Coffee, rubber, palm trees, cocoa, and tea grew easily there. Its vast system of inland waterways provided access to the interior and was the foundation for a major part of the hydroelectric potential of Africa. Despite all this, its per-capita income was one of the lowest in Africa. For years its economy had hovered on the brink of disaster because of corruption, depressed prices for major exports, massive foreign indebtedness, capital flight, and inflation.

  In short, it was a potential economic giant reduced to one of the world’s ten poorest countries.

  The currency rate was three thousand zaires to the dollar and depreciating daily. Zairians went to the bank every day to check the rates. As I write this, the rate is several million zaires to the dollar, up from seven hundred thousand a few months ago. This is hyperinflation, usually a last step before political, economic, and social collapse.

  Besides the fall-off in commodities’ prices, Zaire and many African regimes were disintegrating because the Americans and the Russians were no longer propping up the thugs running them. Back in the Cold War, the two superpowers had spent tens of billions of dollars currying favor on this continent. Like many African dictators, Mobutu, Zaire’s dictator, had played both sides against the middle until he realized his diamond, copper, and cobalt mines were more valuable to us than to the Russians.

  He now had become so afraid of his own people that he spent most of his time on a barge in the Congo River, protected from them. President Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, which meant “the always victorious warrior who is to be feared,” was one of the richest men in the world, his personal fortune estimated at $6 billion to $8 billion. He had ruled for twenty-six years. We heard nothing about him but stories of his corruption, thievery, and abuse of his native land.

  When he moved around the country, he was surrounded by secret police and accompanied by suitcases full of money. Everywhere he doled out zaires to his subjects to curry goodwill. All enterprises of any economic importance had been nationalized; in other words, Mobutu had stolen every decent business. As the government, he had spent no money on the country’s infrastructure except to pave a road through the village in which his family lived and to prop up the national airline. Even the greediest colonialist would not have treated his plantation in such a sorry fashion.

  He had forced the country to spend more on him than it did on its schools, hospitals, roads, and social services combined. During his years of rule, he had built eleven lavish palaces. He owned a sixteenth-century castle in Spain, a posh town house in Paris, a thirty-two-room mansion in Switzerland, and twenty-three other estates around Europe. According to The New York Times, he spent five thousand dollars every couple of weeks to have his hair cut by a barber flown in from New York.

  He wasn’t the only corrupt official in Africa, but he was the continent’s worst. In Togo, General Gnassingbe Eyadema, its military dictator, had billions stashed in foreign bank accounts. The list of guys who got rich as African dictators in the past thirty-five years is endless. The Western press disclosed that Nigeria, its national treasury systematically looted over the years by thousands of government officials, was poorer by more than $30 billion, which had been socked away in Switzerland. Six Nigerians were reported to be billionaires, six thousand were multimillionaires, and fifty-five thousand were millionaires, while 22 million Nigerians earned less than ten naira, or $1.50, a day.

  The United Nations reported that 40 percent of all children under age five in Africa suffered malnutrition so severe it caused mental or physical damage. Estimates of what greedy African rulers had taken out of the continent ranged well over $100 billion—nearly all of it from foreign aid—enough to have established an infrastructure that would have staved off immense suffering by tens of millions of people.

  So much for these assorted socialists, Communists, and fathers of their countries.<
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  The tiny elite who ran Zaire cruised the decrepit roads in new Mercedes-Benzes. To them the rest of the country hardly existed. They shopped and educated their children in Europe.

  For the rest of Zaire’s 35 million people, life was very hard. The railroads, built back during colonial times, ran infrequently because of a lack of fuel. Most of the roads had fallen into ruin. Schools had no books and paper and few capable teachers. There was very little equipment, labs, or drugs in the hospitals. Commerce had come to a virtual standstill. Zairians along the Congo River were lucky that they could still trade. We passed falling-down barns, houses, and water towers, and large inland rubber and cotton plantations turning back into jungle. What little rubber and cotton that was raised often went unharvested because trucks could no longer reach the villages. No one dared to dream of a better life.

  Zairians knew they had a rich country and that the elite had stolen everything from them. They suffered and saw all their neighbors suffering. They knew damn well they were a good people trapped in a terrible system.

  We saw this reflected in the street. There were dealers for Mercedes-Benz and BMW cars, but none for motorcycles and bicycles, the poor man’s efficient means of transportation, nor for inexpensive cars like Toyotas and Fiats.

  …

  The fighting intensified in Angola. It was drive through Zaire or fly to South Africa, but that would violate the spirit of my dream.

  We would drive. We set out south for Lubumbashi, our first stop Kikwit.

  To our relief, the road wasn’t bad, mostly hard, packed earth. The first day we made three hundred miles. Not too happy to leave behind the pleasures of civilization, Pierre followed along. As the slow, clumsy truck held Tabitha and me back, we sometimes pushed on ahead.

  Having taken a wrong turn and left the main highway, we came across a village of Pygmies, which we discovered were the underclass of Africa, regarded as uncivilized. About four-and-a-half to five-feet high, they were perfectly proportioned. Shorter than average myself, I felt an affinity for these small folks. For once, I was a giant towering over other adults. As a souvenir I bought a Pygmy crossbow.

  Although in towns a few blacks had Pygmy servants, for the most part these people lived in the jungle without clothes, not migrating to the cities like other tribes. Why go to a city and be subjugated?

  I was surprised to find gas was only $2.50 a gallon. I couldn’t figure out if the government sold it cheap to keep people happy or if the currency had collapsed too fast for the price to be raised to keep up with it.

  “Come on, Jim,” Pierre begged in the village of Mukoko, “you have money. Give me a little for tonight.”

  “No, I’ve given you all I said I would,” I answered. “No more.”

  From the way he ground his boot heel in the dust I thought he was going to say more, but he spun away. I was sick and tired of his wheedling more and more money out of me. I figured I was playing some role from his Parisian childhood, a remnant of unfinished business with his father. Well, this was the real world, not the Paris of his pampered youth.

  Sullenly he agreed to meet us at the Catholic mission in Mapangu. All day Tabitha and I sweated along Zaire’s main highway, little more than a pair of deep mud ruts.

  At sunset we stopped, worn out, at the compound of the Mapangu mission. No hotel; we considered ourselves lucky to find hospitable missionaries. Monsignor Francis allowed us to use the guest house to the right of the main building. With a number of empty rooms, this was a low, square building nearly surrounded by a wide, covered porch whose roof was supported by arches and columns. Unlike in many other missions, only Africans were present.

  We’d had a hard day on the road, but Pierre had had an even harder time. He arrived two hours after us, having been stuck in mud for several hours. He was exhausted, sweaty, and covered with dirt. Soon after he arrived, he confronted me, again demanding money. I refused. Hell, I didn’t owe him a nickel.

  I’m told that one of the many fatal flaws in my character is that when anyone pushes me, I push back. Back home in Alabama, we were brought up properly and played by the rules. I never had any reason to push anybody. But once I moved to New York I met people who broke the rules, and I’ve become far more assertive.

  I suppose there’s more to it than that. There’s an anger in me I’ve seen in my parents, siblings, and grandparents, too—all these smart, spunky people who kept missing opportunities and ending up with little. My grandmother Gladys was a wire-service reporter in Hugo, Oklahoma, during the 1940s and 1950s. She’d been a maverick in that macho, frontier society, a tiny little lady—no more than five feet one—who was always marching down to the sheriff’s office to interview murderers. But she’d married a man called Dutch, who’d reached his peak when he was student-government president and captain of his college football team. By the time I knew them, their years of early promise had become no more than faded memories, and both knew it.

  Grandmam, as I called Gladys, had missed all her best chances. She understood life had had much more to offer than she’d ever gotten or would get. There was a frustration in her—a fury—that I’d seen even as a boy. Much as I loved her, I didn’t want to end up like that. That’s another reason I don’t like it much when people try to take away what’s mine.

  So I refused to give Pierre any more money than I’d promised, knowing it would never stop once I gave in.

  We stood on the driveway, with people from the mission all around us. He kept demanding money, drawing closer, and I kept refusing. He got mad enough to throw a punch, making me stagger backward. He was a lot bigger and stronger than me. Several of the natives pushed us apart. They talked me into walking away. Rattled and angry, I left Pierre to camp out on the front porch, while I went around to the opposite side of the building, where Tabitha and I had been given a room.

  Hyped up by what to do about Pierre, I didn’t sleep much that night. Instead, I experienced my first all-out tropical rainstorm, with thunder loud enough to knock you out of bed. The rain caused so much flooding that the ground eroded from under Tabitha’s bike, toppling it. I had to go out in the middle of the night and wrestle the two five-hundred-pound bikes up onto the porch outside our bedroom door. The storm continued until almost dawn.

  I’d hoped to drive away before Pierre woke up, leave him here to fend for himself. No such luck. He hadn’t slept, either. First thing in the morning, Tabitha and I went around to the front of the building where we’d left most of our gear. Ten or fifteen other people, all Africans, were gathered there, gabbing in French with Pierre.

  He came up and asked, “When are we leaving?” He looked even more exhausted than the night before.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing,” I replied. “We’re going on, but you’re not coming with us.”

  As I packed, he mulled that over. Then he reached into his backpack and took out his bowie knife. I’d seen it many times before, but now it frightened me.

  Knife in hand, he slunk toward the rear of the mission. I instantly knew he was going for the bikes, our only way out of here.

  Instead of following, I raced around the building in the opposite direction. By the time I turned the last corner, Pierre was already leaning over my BMW. He seemed to be looking for something to slash—maybe the tires, maybe the fuel line. You can’t stab an engine, but there’s a hell of a lot of other damage you can do. It looked like he was going to demolish my motorcycle.

  As loud as I could, I shrieked, “Get the hell away from that bike!”

  Pierre looked up, startled. Then he came after me, knife raised.

  “Jeemee, I kill you!” he shouted.

  As I ran away from Pierre and his knife, splashing wildly through mud and puddles, I couldn’t help thinking he was calling me Jimmy just to piss me off, because he knew I didn’t particularly like it. It was sure working.

  When your life is at risk, you think fast. I didn’t want to fight him, not with that knife of his. I did want to lure him away
from the bikes, and I figured the jogger in me ought to outrun him even though he was twenty-five years younger. He smoked cigarettes, and I’d never seen him do a lick of exercise. So I ran full-tilt toward the front of the building, hoping to beat him there. I prayed that somehow those other people would save me.

  While I ran, I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure he was following and not going back to the bikes. I kept screaming, too, in English, “Help me, he’s got a knife!” Pretty dumb, since everybody in Zaire spoke French.

  They may not have understood my words, but the men hanging out in front of the mission realized something was wrong. By the time I was halfway around the building, four or five of them were running toward me. I ran right past them, and kept running until I saw them stop Pierre.

  I’m not sure how they did it. The men had him outnumbered, and more people soon joined them. Somehow they calmed him down and got his knife. They took him inside the building and sent for the police.

  To my satisfaction, the police were soon there. I told the ranking cop, a captain, the full story. He asked Pierre for his side of things, which came out as my refusing to pay him his wages. I’d brought him this far into the jungle as his employer, he said, and now I ought to put up the money for his passage back to Paris.

  That wasn’t the deal. He had tried to kill me, I explained, and I wanted him held. We wanted to go south, and we didn’t want him following us. As far as we were concerned, he could be released in a couple of days.

  The captain’s smooth, dignified face was troubled, as if a dispute between unruly foreigners wasn’t something he knew how to handle. About six feet tall and with a bushy mustache, he weighed a couple hundred pounds. Yet even with the crowd of spectators milling around and yelling, he was calm and unflappable, as if he often adjudicated disputes in the midst of commotion.