CHAPTER 1 — HOUSE OF EARTH
There are two lines of poetry chalked along a beam in a simple, three-room house in the village of Yandoumbé, in the Central African Republic.
Here I lie in house of earth
Waiting for an upper berth
On any given night, at least five people lie within sight of that couplet — two on a low bed, beneath a tatty mosquito net, and usually three others on a naked foam mattress in the corner of a cement floor. Across the room, there are two plastic tanks of water, with contents pumped from a nearby well, and a couple of wooden chairs that tend to sit wherever they have been dragged by their latest occupants. The roof is made of palm fronds, tightly thatched, and many westerners, if they saw the structure at all, would call the house a “hut” or a “shack”, even though it is the largest and most solid construction in the area.
During daytime, sunlight spears through hatches swung open in the walls, while at night, the pitch darkness of the African rainforest is broken only by small fires smouldering to ruin outside, or a kerosene lamp and battery-powered torch-cum-lantern propped on a hand-made desk. If one looks closely, the light might also catch some writing implements and some pots of herbs and spices amid the clutter on the table, as well as a couple of book spines, including the Oxford Dictionary of Music, close at hand. There are some spectacles hanging from nails driven into the wall and a small set of speakers wired either to an MP3 player or a radio. The lines of poetry are often in shadow on the wall above, but even if they were perfectly illuminated, and even if they were rendered in block capitals rather than a scrawl, only one of the permanent residents of the house could read them, much less understand the sentiment.
Their author is Louis Sarno, who was born in New Jersey in the United States in 1954 but whose native language is rarely spoken in the village he has since made his home. Yandoumbé lies more than 500 kilometres from Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, and about a mile along what passes for a road from Bayanga, the nearest town that might, but not always, feature on a map of one of the poorest nations in the world. Yandoumbé is surrounded by the dense rainforest of the Dzanga Ndoki National Park, inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List in 2012 and, as yet, not depleted entirely beyond function by the international logging market. It is clinging on despite widespread destruction in the region, and remains a haven of tropical flora and fauna, including forest elephants and critically endangered western lowland gorilla.
With the exception of Sarno, who is a wiry, 6-foot-tall white man (albeit with skin darkened to an olive hue by his life within three degrees of the equator), each of some 600 residents of Yandoumbé are Ba’aka — or pygmies — a hunter-gatherer people indigenous to the Congo Basin. They include Sarno’s girlfriend Agati and the three children who occupy the foam mattress in his home. Nearly 30 years ago, Sarno was then something of a wanderer living between Amsterdam and Scotland when he first heard the polyphonic singing for which the Ba’aka have a reputation that travels far further than the rainforest canopy. He was lured to the music’s source clutching a microphone, a tape recorder and as many batteries and cassettes as he could carry. To all intents and purposes, he never came back.
Sarno has since been described by some as the “white pygmy of Yandoumbé” or “Ba’aka Louis”. Others have reached for the easy pejorative “Screwy Louis”. But to some musicologists, Sarno is regarded among the most significant sound recorders in the world, who has amassed a peerless aural document of some of the most sophisticated music produced by man. He is in demand in Oxford, Berlin and New York, and sometimes bows to the callings of academics or film promoters, making a four-day journey away from his home to some of the world’s most prestigious institutions. Day to day, however, where he feels most happy, Sarno fills the role of village doctor, schoolteacher, advocate, interpreter, archivist, writer and fixer. Although the reasons for visiting, staying and eventually settling in Yandoumbé have shifted throughout the years, they are now principally to be found sleeping on those two beds. Sarno is a doting husband and father, whose home has become a refuge to many.
Sarno will also, he concedes, most likely be elevated to his upper berth from this modest dwelling. He is 60 years old in a village where life expectancy is barely 40. Moreover, what he describes as his “beloved Centrafrique” is currently gripped by a bloody civil war that has, by conservative estimations, already cost around 3,000 lives and forced more than 400,000 people from their homes. In the past two years, it has meant that Sarno too has been a refugee, fleeing against his will to the country of his birth, as well as a reluctant mediator between his people and the generals of the lawless forces who have plunged the Central African Republic into its crisis. After a life taking photographs of smiling Ba’aka children, elephants, gorillas, forest canopies, butterflies and plants, Sarno’s most recent albums include images of him posing alongside generals of the Seleka and anti-balaka, the militant factions still committing a series of atrocities across the country. Sarno has found flattery and the massaging of would-be warlords’ egos to be an effective strategy in preventing them murdering his family.
The Central African Republic recently ranked 142nd of 142 countries on the 2014 Global Prosperity Index, with only 39 percent of people saying they can rely on others in times of need. That number would be significantly higher if researchers had canvassed Yandoumbé — thanks to the white man who arrived out of the blue one day and never showed any signs of heading off again.
“I’d found a place that I loved to be: I loved the people and the music was fantastic, and I loved the rainforest,” Sarno told me. “I can’t imagine I would have a life as rich as this anywhere else. I’m really lucky. I don’t know how I managed to do it. It was some kind of incompetence and just blind, stumbling luck.”
I got to know Sarno through a series of meetings in 2014, culminating in a trip to the rainforest in September and a chance to sample the richness — and the hardships — of a life among the Ba’aka. We met first in Oxford, where Sarno was the guest of the Pitt Rivers Museum, the institution at which his extraordinary collection of field recordings has created a buzz among ethnomusicologists. Over the past ten years, the Sarno collection of more than 1,400 hours of music and soundscapes from the Congo Basin has been digitised at the museum, offering future generations an unprecedented sonic insight into a bewitching musical world.
We also spoke in London, where Sarno was recuperating after a major health scare that required emergency surgery, and then months later in Berlin, where he had travelled in promotion of a new film made about him. I then accompanied Sarno on the tortuous journey back to Yandoumbé from Europe, during which he shared his countless tales and boundless knowledge accrued during his remarkable life.
Sarno shies away from portrayal as a sage. He is uncomfortable with the depiction of him dispensing worldly wisdom from a lofty moral perch beneath the rainforest canopy. But he has managed to make real what so many disillusioned westerners only sample in idle dreams: switching off, dropping out and creating a life immersed in one of the world’s natural paradises, surrounded by exceptional music and song. Almost everybody I talked with about Sarno, across three continents and countless walks of life, used the same phrase to describe him. “He’s the real deal,” they said.
