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T H I S+W E E K > Gonzo Congo
Fetishes and fossils
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Redmond O'Hanlon hunts dinosaurs -- and discovers something much bigger -- in the depths of Africa BY DON GEORGE | redmond O'Hanlon pursues his passions with an awe-inspiring persistence. Seemingly oblivious to discomfort and danger, O'Hanlon ventures into remotest Borneo in search of a rare rhinoceros in his first travel book, "Into the Heart of Borneo," and into the impenetrable fastnesses -- cultural and physical -- of the Amazon to find an Amerindian drug in his second work, "In Trouble Again." In his new and most ambitious book, "No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo," the quest to investigate reported sightings of a water-dwelling dinosaur takes him through desolate, disease-ridden villages, swamps and jungles to a sacred lake in deepest Africa. In a summer when digital dinosaurs chomping on humans are boffo on the big screen, this quest takes on a special kind of resonance. But it becomes clear very early in the book that dinosaur hunting is not really the story, and if you read "No Mercy" simply to find out "did he or didn't he?" -- well, you're probably better off dropping 10 bucks for some popcorn and Jurassic jitters. For much as in Peter Matthiessen's wonderful "The Snow Leopard," finding the dinosaur becomes almost incidental to O'Hanlon's journey -- or rather, it becomes a vehicle for a journey of a much deeper and ultimately much more satisfying kind. "No Mercy" begins in the poor hut of a feticheuse in the town of Brazzaville in the People's Republic of the Congo. O'Hanlon has gone there with his American friend, Lary Shaffer, whom he has not seen for some 20 years but who has just arrived to accompany him on the first half of the journey. Throwing cowrie shells, the feticheuse says, "One of you is very ill, right now." "It's me," Shaffer quickly says. "I have this thing called multiple sclerosis." As if this isn't ominous enough, shortly thereafter she turns to O'Hanlon and demands, "Tell me, what is it that you really want? And don't bother me with anything else, don't tell me the story you prepared for your wives." "I hope," O'Hanlon says, "to go on a great journey through the far northern forests, by dugout to the headwaters of the Motaba where we'll abandon the boats, walk east through the swamp jungle and across the watershed to the Ibenga, take a chance on finding another canoe, and then, if we're lucky, paddle down to the Likouala aux Herbes and walk to the hidden lake, Lake Tele, where Mokele-mbembe, the Congo dinosaur, is said to live." It's a dramatic moment, but what happens next is even more dramatic. "No! No! No!" the feticheuse sings. "You are not an educated man. You don't speak your desires. You think them. I see everything." In this way, from its first paragraphs, "No Mercy" hangs heavy with magic, a sense of supernatural power and foreboding. Pitted against this specter of magic -- or actually, locked in a kind of awful, awesome dance with it -- is O'Hanlon's ongoing attempt to categorize the world he is moving through, to circumscribe it, contain it, by knowledge and naming and exposition. He will go on for hundreds of words describing a rare kind of bird or animal or plant he has seen, and will tell you much more than you thought there was to know about everything from the smallest insects to the grandest explorers. O'Hanlon divides his looping, weaving, spinning narrative into three parts, which he terms "books." Book One, "Upriver," describes the adventurers' preparations -- just securing the proper documents in Brazzaville entails a wild odyssey all its own -- and the first leg of their journey by steamer up the Congo and Ubangui rivers to an outpost called Impfondo. Part of the glory of the book is O'Hanlon's sheer descriptive powers. For example, see how he makes this steamer-side scene come to life: "At every fold in the slow-moving hills a stream supported a meagre twist of gallery forest, and by its outlet to the great river the huts of a fishing village would shelter beside a few giant Cotton trees, a few trees with high horizontally spreading branches like Cedars of Lebanon, oil-palms and fan-palms. Through the binoculars we sometimes saw women working in the plantations, among the wispy manioc shrubs on the lower slopes; and up ahead, hanging in the current upstream, paddling their dugouts standing up, were their menfolk. They thrust towards the floating city as we passed, and grabbed the fender of a timber-tug, the gunwale of a whale-boat, a rope thrown from the lower deck of the steamer or, most precarious of all, the side of an already tethered dugout emptied of its crew and cargo and slewing, bucking, lashing its tail, frantic in the slipwaves from several thousand tons of kinetic energy. The moment they tied up, bargaining began with the merchants on the steamer and the barges. The fishermen handed or threw up or carried aboard stacks of smoked fish, blackened carp-shaped fish; big fresh whiskery catfish; and zinc bowls full of little fish like whitebait. The booty would disappear into a pushing, shouting, gesticulating chaos of people." The vividly drawn details, the sense of movement, the background knowledge and precision, O'Hanlon's ability to make us smell, taste, hear, and feel his journey -- these make for travel writing of the most satisfying kind. But in Book Two, "Samale," these talents expand to encompass a reflectiveness, a tension and a spirituality that transform this tale into a travel narrative of the highest order. From Impfondo the company journeys by Land Cruiser, motorboat and finally foot into the little-visited northern jungles near the border with the former Zaire. As the journey proceeds, things get complicated. Bribes are required at every turn, and in some cases even they don't help. In one village the chief has designs on the group's equipment and provisions; the only way they escape is by getting him drunk and then slipping away in the middle of the night. And O'Hanlon discovers en route that the government official leading the expedition, Marcellin Agnagna, has incurred the wrath of one interior tribe they must visit -- so much that the tribesmen have sworn an oath to kill him. Combined with these are a ceaseless succession of daunting, depressing encounters and accompaniments -- from sweat-sucking bees that get into hair and eyes and armpits to virtually entire villages afflicted with diseases that could be cured if only the proper medicines were dispensed; cuts and bites that itch and swell; bouts of malaria; diets of monkey and manioc; and all the varied dangers -- named and unnamable -- of the jungle. At one point Shaffer -- who is portrayed as an extremely kind and quietly courageous character -- says, "I'm sick. I'm just sick of being terrorized night and day. I've been more frightened in 34 days on this trip than in my whole fucking life." But O'Hanlon doesn't dwell on these terrors. What he dwells on instead is the mind-expanding richness of the world around him. He spends pages on the history of the pygmies, for example, on exotic birds and animals and the explorers who recorded their appearances and habits. And in the course of this, the fanciful figure of Mokele-mbembe, the Congo dinosaur, takes on a jungly reality. Describing some animals caught in a village hunting net, O'Hanlon writes: "Farther down the line a small deer was struggling in the net. Its body was about the same size as the duiker's, but its legs were much shorter and its yellow-brown coat was spotted and striped with white, like sunlight on the floor of a thicket. I recognized it at once -- the Water chevrotain or Mouse deer, not really a deer at all, but midway in form between deer and pigs and much older than either, almost unchanged from its fossils of thirty million years ago, looking much the same lying on the grasses at our feet as it did six million years before grass itself evolved, 29.8 million years before Homo sapiens sapiens appeared." And a few days later, in a different village, he writes: "It was dusk; smoke from the fires inside the huts, stoked up in preparation for the dark, rose through the palm-thatch roofs; a pair of bats, as big as blackbirds, with broad, rounded wings, flew erratically between the diffuse little clouds of smoke. They certainly looked like Ur-bats, the original bats, the bats of prehistory, their slow, labored flapping interspersed with ungainly glides, and indeed perhaps they were a species of leaf-nosed bat, not much altered from their fossil ancestors of sixty million years ago and probably earlier -- seventy to 100 million years ago -- early enough to have been catching insects in the evening over a shallow lake full of dinosaurs." But what really comes to absorb O'Hanlon's attention is the African spirit world. In the village of Makao, the chief gives O'Hanlon a powerful fetish to ensure his safety, and later tells him about Samale, a three-clawed animal spirit that roams the jungle at night, protecting its believers and dispensing death. As the expedition continues, tales of sorcery twine from village to village. The tension between spirit and science propels the journey into Book Three, "Mokele-mbembe," where the adventurers (without Shaffer, who has to return to his university teaching), finally reach Lake Tele. Book Three begins in a village where a man is mourning the death of the last of his sons. Agnagna tries to explain to O'Hanlon what has happened. "He certainly killed his own children, but he didn't mean to do it. He visited a feticheur to get a fetish for his own protection, and that was all right; but then he asked for a fetish that would make him a great fisherman, and that was his mistake. 'Put so-and-so in a bottle,' said the feticheur, 'something that you really value, and then throw it in the river.' When his first child died he went to a second feticheur, who said, 'What did you expect? When you cut those locks of hair from all your children's heads and put them in that bottle and threw it in the river you threw away their futures. It's simple. All you have to do is get your bottle back at once, or all your children will die.' But it wasn't simple. The river here is a blackwater river and you can't see into it, and he spent three months trailing the mud with his nets and he found nothing. And now his last child is dead." "So what do you think it is really?" O'Hanlon asks. "Hereditary leukemia? Hemophilia? Something like that?" And Agnagna responds, "You and your white man's questions! That's not what we're talking about. You yourself -- you know very well. That's just the mechanism. That's not what really matters." This message resounds throughout Book Three. As O'Hanlon continues with his dissertations on antelopes and bats and crocodiles and chimpanzees, they start to sound increasingly desperate -- a kind of scientific rope that seems to be unraveling, string by string. And near the end of the book he really does come undone in an absolutely remarkable feat of writing, all his Western knowledge futile against the spirits of the Congo. Clearly, "No Mercy" is not light summer beach reading. It is an epic journey, and in some places it seems very much the literary equivalent of O'Hanlon's own gritty slog through swamp and vine. To enjoy the book, you have to abandon your prior sense of pacing and purpose -- much as, no doubt, O'Hanlon himself had to let go on his journey. But if you can do this, the richnesses the book reveals are extraordinary. Part of this richness is O'Hanlon's encyclopedic knowledge of the world -- history, biology, nature. Through him I've encountered life forms that I never otherwise would, and I feel somehow the richer for that. And part of it is his bouncy, self-deprecating humor, which punctuates the narrative throughout and allows the reader -- not to mention the author -- to overcome whatever disasters may occur. But an even more important part of this richness is O'Hanlon's lively and sympathetic portrayal of his expedition mates and the people they meet along the way. O'Hanlon's abilities to capture the descriptive telling detail and to present dead-on extended dialogues are amazing, and people the narrative with a fully fleshed range of characters -- from bureaucrats and missionaries to pygmy guides and tribal sorcerers. He is especially brilliant at capturing the humanity of his fellow travelers, Western and African -- their fears and their passions, their generosity and their greed, their foibles and their heroisms. And this is what ultimately impressed me most about this extraordinary account: the humanity at its very heart. Beyond the bureaucrats and the bugs, the fetishes and the facts, the diseases and the dinosaur dreams, O'Hanlon touches on some even larger mystery that intimately concerns us all: How can we humans, at the tail end of the evolutionary trail, accept and overcome our differences? How can we understand and appreciate what unites us all? This is what O'Hanlon discovers on his jungle odyssey, a clarity of vision that he could not have reached without enduring the vines and the mud and the sweat and the exhaustion and all the rest of it. And this message -- messy and half mad and mostly discernible between the lines -- is so moving that the final pages of the book left me literally breathless, with tears swelling my eyes. "No Mercy" is a big, big book whose resonances run deep -- all around the planet, in fact, from soul to soul and dream to dream. Like all great travel literature, it is ultimately about two journeys -- one into the African interior and the other into the interior of the self. And it is about the place where those journeys come together -- call it connection, growth, transformation. Call it the heart of the Congo.
- - - - - - - - - - - - NEXT PAGE | Redmond O'Hanlon talks about cave writers, cult biology and spending three years without a social life. No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo
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