A Trip to the New-Old World, Part 6
Pre-human and human stories from Budongo Forest
Continued from Part 5— On Safari, going solo
Part 6 is my final story and reflections on the trip to Africa. This concludes the series as I prepare to embark on another journey in a far more foreign place to me — The United States of America. If you have read this far, you have dedication and my appreciation as a devoted reader.
We start where I left off, being dropped off at a random dirt road intersection and picked up by Sam — who would (hopefully) take me to the forest and the great, wild unknowns of pre-human habitats:
Everything was new and unfamiliar. Sam drove us to pick up his childhood friend Dale (the ex-ranger) in his village. His 80s box sedan wove down dirt roads. He barely slowed for the constant potholes and washboard ruggedness of the road. We moved past a huge sugar cane field and cut through a tractor trail.
As he drove with calm confidence, we spoke freely — and his story began.
Sam told me the chimpanzees come to his village. Twice a year, a chimp mother who has lost her baby, the baby died or was killed, looks for a human baby.
Once upon Sam’s childhood, a chimp stole a human infant. While the village slept in the early morning, the mother chimp carried the child into the forest. His friend Dale (my ranger guide) and the baby’s mother tracked the chimp to a tree where it rested, clutching the infant. The mom reached out her hands to signal she wanted the baby, and it was hers. The chimp stayed for a few minutes, looking back and forth from the infant to the mother. Then descended and laid the baby down at the base of the tree. The village mom picked it up. The child had some scratches from the long nails of the chimp but was other wise unharmed.
What incredible inter-species communication and compassion, I thought. It would have been just as natural to assume destruction, irrational chimpanzee behavior. Mother-to-mother, pre-human to human understanding.
We all like a happy ending.
The idealized and romantic outcome could easily have gone the way of nature.
I asked Sam on the hard times.
We had found a connection and comfort — the only reason I could ask. I had only the names Kony, the LRA, and a basic timeline of East African conflict.
My framing of what he shared:
Life here has not always been about serving tourists and Byzungas (whites). His tribe listened to the land and the animals with which they shared it. They had their own versions of essentials in food, shelter, or safety.
We were coming from the North side of the Nile, since the animals had been butchered in the south during the conflicts of the last decade.
The giraffes, elephants, rhinos — all the beautiful animals slaughtered during the senselessness of war — were exceeded in tragedy by the human loss.
Terrible images flooded my mind of the elephants, giraffes, lions being shot and stripped. They were one-upped by human massacre day-mares.
A strong sense of awareness and speciesism (human supremacism) rose in me. I once rebelled against it in my youth as a proud World Wildlife Federation supporter (carefully saving my ¢ towards the minimum suggested donation of $5). The white savior hypocrisy in animal-over-human rights in foreign lands clarified. They are not to be chosen between.
Support humanism. Support of all life follows.
I went silent and tuned in deeper to Sam’s worldview.
As the population explodes in Uganda, part of the new generation is replacing those murdered in villages and border zones where men lost their reason and humanity. Turned to a form of human we rarely acknowledge — the lost, angry, fearful, abused and abandoned children turned into rebels, or soldiers, or sadists — they were sold a purpose in destruction and conquest.
If the claim is political, who drew the lines across tribes and made the divisions relevant?
Lingering in the conditioned racism is the power-seeking of the 19th-century White man. A seeking and enslavement was only beginning in 1860’s Africa, as America signed Lincoln’s Emancipation. We Americans took a hard and tentative, weak step towards repair.
When the British gave up their colony, in 1962, the mindset had saturated entire generations.
Complex conflicts are not boil-downable. We find tragic simplicity only in the selection criteria to apply their immense damage.
During the conflicts of 10 years ago, the Northern people suffered greatly. Children came south and slept in front of houses or stores they came across. They were survivors — let go or escaped as their parents were slaughtered or consumed.
On a day among the escalation, Sam was driving a tracker who stopped for a giraffe. It gave him a signal of concern about something in the valley below. As with seeing a lion, it sensed danger and warned them. They left and found out later the rebels were stopping, killing, or otherwise robbing and disfiguring anyone in their way. Just a mile or so away, the rebels removed all possessions— ears, lips, fingers included — and killed a set of travelers.
We drove in silence, in reflection and contemplation towards the village to meet Dale, Sam’s friend and ex-ranger.
Peace is a privilege.
Dale and the Forest
“I found them earlier this month, and we will start where they were, where they may return.”
He wore his UGA uniform and proudly told of the 18 years he spent as a ranger and more recently to remove the wire snares which had trapped so many chimpanzees. After 3 years, there are no more snares in this area.
Beyond the sugar cane fields, miles from the village, we approached the edge of human civilization. The tall depths of Budongo Forest reached towards the sky, setting it’s canopy against or in respect of the high sun.
“This was once forest, it was cut during British rule, before any government preserved the forest.”
The dirt road narrowed and disappeared as we reached the limits of driving.
A local bushman-sort (Sam described him as a “man of the forest”) emerged from his lean-to to greet us. He spoke only in the local dialect and confirmed to us — he had heard the chimps in the area recently.
Dale warned me, “This is a real jungle, real forest, real danger.”
I did my best to copy his mindset — a mix between sharp, cautious awareness and confident purpose.
We stepped into the dense vines and canopy shade.
An hour passed without notice as we zoned in on the jungle sounds and navigating an ever-changing environment of hidden streams and thick plant-life.
Unidentified things shifted and stirred, slithering and fluttering — to test our purpose in their world.
Every few minutes, Dale stopped me with a raised hand. The intensity viscerally increased as we heard a few spots of crashing through the vines, about 20 feet above the jungle floor.
“Baboons” he whispered, pointing to the shuffling tree tops a few hundred yards away.
He motioned to stay put as he scouted just ahead, disappearing around the bend of vines.
My presence came back.
Simple checks of arms and neck for bites gave way to the realization, after 5 minutes or so — I was potentially alone in the forest now. I smiled in a strange way as the sounds of wild baboons moved closer, the calls of birds and monkeys sharpened, and the vivid details of the sun passing down through the canopy came into a deep green focus.
Where would I, where should I go as a vulnerable animal left to its own survival?
Why am I not scared to death?
I’m too excited to be scared.
This is too real. This is life.
When I was 7, I “borrowed” the special-feature Africa maps I found folded as a centerpiece in a National Geographic, discovered in our random basement’s collections. Immediately, my imagination had me running barefoot into the “wild” woods of Western Pennsylvania. It was not Pennsylvania to me, I was deep in a wild jungle, an African wilderness. The name of the sub-map was Budongo Forest.
Now I was actually in Budongo. Unknown creatures moved all around me. I was into the wild.
Rather than an agenda of a seeking, unaware Indiana Jones, Jane Goodall came to me as a reference point — what she must have felt, what compelled her to stay and study for decades. She must have stood, climbed and sat, watched and adapted to be accepted — all those hours, days, months in the jungle — patience and observation over conquest.
A series of small crunches moved closer towards me through the dense vegetation. A huge leaf parted from a tree a few feet in front of me — Dale face’s popped through, smiling.
He pointed to the ground. We crouched and examined what looked like handprint — it was the fresh footprint of a chimpanzee.
We continued with confidence and a fresh rush.
A series of shrieks let out just above us. My head jerked up as the branches shook in the high canopy.
“Colobus Monkey”, Dale whispered. He leaned closer,
“The colobus monkeys are eaten by the chimps.”
Suddenly, the baboon pack chirped and hooted loudly, moving backwards through the trees — a sign of being chased from an area, by chimps Dale said.
We moved a little faster, both aware of how close the baboons sounded. (these were not the habituated kind that casually stole snacks from tourists).
Dale shifted under a series of vines towards a small clearing. Then, just as I stepped over a low vine —
A huge male chimp bolted across the opening.
Was that a gorilla or a chimp?!? That thing was HUGE.
If I would have had any cortisol left, my adrenals would have dumped it. I stopped breathing, listening to its heavy limbs crash through the forest.
Dale looked back with an open grin. My eyes could stretch open no further.
I was in full flow like never before. A homo sapien using its cognition to process and react to nature. Each step and adjustment came without effort.
My focus was solely on the crashing fury moving away from us.
They were real. Real, wild chimpanzees.
The water seeping into my shoes barely registered, quiet steps mattered above all else. Another chimp scaled a tree a few yards ahead.
Another big male descended down to the forest floor — and I felt compelled to…move closer?!? We were in the midst of a band of chimpanzees.
It was a careful game of respectful pursuit and cautious perception.
Through an opening, a small face could be seen.
A pre-human child chewed its branch-toy and studied me as I lost myself in its innocence. The young chimp sat perched, seemingly alone, on a branch ~ 30 feet from us. I somehow raised my phone, hit record from memory, and never broke eye contact in the study. A fraction was captured:
After a mesmerizing locking of eyes, its mother descended. The baby latched on with ease. They swung up and away to the canopy.
Dale and I stood and took in the moment.
We followed the band for some time, catching glimpses of other family members young and old.
I floated through an increasingly comfortable forest dreamscape — slipping between disbelief and sharp clarity and raw understanding of evolution, pre-human instincts, where and from who we emerged.
The trivial nature of our civilization and constructed fears, priorities, our created suffering in the face of nature. It came in a series of out-of-body breakthroughs, like what I imagine a hallucinogenic trip might feel like.
The long hike back, the continuous dangers and wildness of the jungle — melted into an adaptive autopilot.
As the sun set, we burst from the boundaries of the forest into lower grasslands and quickly walked a few miles back to where Sam lay napping on hood of his sedan. He rose and insisted on a final picture as the sun dropped us into darkness:
We congratulated each other. We drove in exhausted silence, dropping Dale in his village late into the night, and me at a guest house in Masindi — the closest town.
The kitchen sat me down and brought some goat stew, greens, and matoke (green banana or mashed plantain). I ate quietly and they showed me to a small room afterward. Climbing under the mosquito net, I drifted into a series of exhausted dreams, recalling and exploring different moments of the forest and the captivation the chimps created.
In the morning, I walked to the local bus stop, buying a ticket back to Kampala. Over boiled eggs and African spiced tea, I made conversation with a local couple…the subject I cannot recall.
My mind was still lost in framing and processing the experience, which seemed to have stretched into some other dimension, across weeks or months within a prehistoric forest-scape.
A Peace Corps volunteer, Ivy, picked me out immediately after I boarded as the only other white person. She shared her experience as a teacher in a nearby elementary school for the past 2 years.
It was an off insta-comfort I felt myself rebel against. The 2 whites talking over the others seemed wrong. We soon broadened our conversation to include the smiling Ugandans around us, laughing at the low-budget (or high-budget for East Africa) music videos playing on loop in the bus’s old A/V system.
The other riders shared food excitedly — cooked fruit and roasted G-nuts (ground peanuts) — sold to us through the windows as the driver slowed randomly at various points from his 80+mph intensity to let certain riders off and on, or exchange random packages, bicycles, and bags of produce.
We moved through open valleys and descended into the ground traffic and horns of downtown Kampala.
Reflections
It will take me many more months to understand and process my African experience. I wish to return and explore. The world seems even smaller now. The wilderness and wildness of Africa, the nuance and radical cultural contracts have been accessed and left their seeds in awestruck mind’s humbled soil.
I will return to the continent and this series as I come to meaning and appreciation of my Trip’s full impact. From the “New” World to the “Old” — my humanism and adaptation is a work in progress. While I deeply pursue Sci-Fictions and futurism beyond earth and current human development— there is much to explore on this planet, within this species, and those creating the present from nature’s past.
My next journey involves the study of Americans, and the polarized land we (sometimes) call home.
