Africa – Page 8

The Genocide Memorial …

This is Kigali, a city of about 750,000 people, capital of Rwanda and a city in transformation. Like Rwanda generally, it’s hilly. The photograph is taken from outside the Genocide Memorial. Inevitably a view point from which Rwanda as a whole has to be examined.

The memorial was opened in 1999. It is the final resting place of more than a quarter of a million people killed in the genocide. It is one of several memorials. The total number of victims of the genocide is imprecisely known, but is somewhere in the vicinity of a million. The total population of Rwanda now is only a little more than 11 million.

As the genocide unravelled 2 million Hutus fled to Zaire (now DRC). Any portable wealth went with them. The country was essentially in ruins.

Whatever the situation was before, whatever the reasons may have been, in just four months of 1994, just 23 years ago, this country tore itself apart on an almost unimaginable scale.

The Memorial has a souvenir shop and a cafe. These provide employment for people directly impacted by the genocide. This is a noble objective, if you visit I suggest you go to these establishments on the way in, you may have other things on your mind on the way out.

The galleries take you through time from life before the genocide, the genocide, the aftermath. There are separate spaces where you can sit and watch video accounts by survivors, there is a children’s gallery and a gallery to remind you of other genocides.

What, in my view, the Memorial does well is to present the horror that can come in the wake of social division. Women were raped, tortured, murdered in front of their families. People were forced, alive, into pit latrines, men were hacked to pieces, children were slaughtered, children were orphaned. Individual bodies, groups of bodies, mass graves were being found long after the carnage was over.

Survivors then needed to drag themselves forward without their partners, without their children. There were tens of thousands of households headed by children. No one escaped untouched by these events.

Many visitors will have considered the implications of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong ethnicity on their ID card. How many have asked themselves what they would have done if they had the opposite ethnicity on their ID card. There were heroes who risked their lives to provide shelter and there were nuns who incited the Hutu militias to greater fury.

If the visitor hasn’t already come undone, and I had, the Children’s Gallery will certainly test your composure. Innocent of everything but their supposed ethnicity, slaughtered for what?

After leaving the Memorial our next stop was a souvenir market. I hadn’t the inclination and was soon back at the car. We had grown to enjoy the company of our driver, a lovely man. He asked me if I was troubled by the Memorial and I admitted that I was. We talked for a while. He was seven at the time of the genocide. His father was murdered, his mother had raised the family on her own. At school, prior to the slaughter, Tutsis had been made to sit apart from the rest of the class and were vilified.

I asked him why such a thing could happen. His answer surprised me. It was nothing more than party politics, he said.

Wild Kigali …

Although we were now in the big city our quest for wildlife isn’t quite at an end. The city boundary is, in part, formed by the Nyabaronga River and just over that is the Bugasera Swamp. The river is home to Hippos which you can find with diligent searching, they are just around the next bend. And although the banks are intensively cultivated the birding is excellent.

Perhaps because the farming is mostly labour intensive by hand implement the birds permit quite close approach, a chance to sort out some Weavers, generally a challenging group …

Other denizens of the marsh include …

Whilst in a vegetated area we encountered two of the African Babblers …

and along the river some Herons …

To keep the hippos out of their crops the locals dig a trench between the river and their field. It only needs to be about two feet deep and two feet wide to keep the hippos out.

Country Life …

Rwanda is quite a small country just south of the equator. It’s hilly, all of it is above 950 metres (~3000 feet) and in the west it’s positively mountainous. Mt Karisimbi is the highest point at 4,507 metres (14,787 ft). The Nile/Congo divide runs north south. About 80% of Rwanda is in the Nile basin, its contribution to the Mediterranean goes via Lake Victoria.

The divide crosses the Albertine Rift between Lake Kivu and Lac Edouard (shared between the DRC and Uganda). Edouard drains north to Lake Albert, collects reinforcements from Murchison Falls and gives rise to the White Nile.

Lake Kivu, on the other hand, drains to the south into Lake Tanganyika through the Ruzizi River. Lake Tanganyika then drains into the Congo River via the Lukuga River and heads for the Atlantic.

The source of the Nile fired the 19th century imagination in a big way. A rough and ready definition of “source” is the furthest point from the mouth where a river is still recognisably a water course, which might be a spring, a marsh or a lake. Uganda would have you believe that Lake Victoria is the source of the Nile, perhaps on the grounds that it doesn’t have Nile in its name until after it leaves the lake. The DRC could mount a similar claim to Lac Edouard. However there is a lot of river running into Lake Victoria. The Kagera River is the longest feeder, so which is its longest tributary? Burundians will tell you it’s the Ruvyironza, from Bururi Province, Burundi. But my money is on the Rukarara River from the Kamiranzovu Marsh in the Nyungwe Forest in Rwanda.

We drove past the marsh (where we had been walking a couple of days before) first thing in the morning, headed over the hills in the general direction of the capital, Kigali.

The journey gave us a little chance to see some real life in the countryside …

Our starting point is Gisakura with Lake Kivu in the distance. As you can see the road is of a good standard.

Before long we were passing tea plantations. This and coffee are important exports from Rwanda, tourism is another major earner of foreign exchange.

Much of the agriculture, though is subsistence farming. There are gardens on terraced slopes at every turn. It is a densely settled country, most of the surface area has been transformed by human activity. Many of the trees in the landscape are eucalypypts, fast growing and handy for construction and cooking fuel.

Most of the people have access to safe water supplies but the majority must carry it home from communal pumps.

When you meet children in Rwanda they will almost certainly ask you for money.

Because of the altitude Rwanda isn’t oppressively hot. There are two wet seasons and two dry seasons. In mid summer the sun is overhead the Tropic of Capricorn whereas in mid summer it is overhead … the Tropic of Cancer. No, it’s true.

It’s overhead Rwanda in spring and autumn, these are the wet seasons. June to September is especially dry, December to February less so.

By evening we were in Kigali but we stopped on the way at the National Ethnographic Museum. It is a well presented collection that follows the course of human society in Rwanda from stone age through the iron age to modern times. One striking absence is any mention of ethnicity.

Our tour there finished with a performance of drumming and traditional intore dancing.

Stirring rhythms and graceful movement.

More monkeys …

Nyungwe National Park is home to at least 13 species of primate and in our short time there we were able to add four new ones to our monkey trip list.

There was a baby in the group that we encountered, and just like little humans it was overactive and keen to get some attention …

fortunately for mum they come with built-in reins …

They are initially all white, one of the reasons that mum doesn’t want it exposing itself in the canopy is that they are easy pickings for Crowned Eagles which are monkey specialists and their main predator.

A Mona monkey was feeding on the fringe of the Colobus group.

Next up were l’Hoest’s monkeys that had found an abundant supply of unripe fruit.

A troop of Johnston’s Mangabey also put in an appearance but were far less cooperative when it came to photography, keeping their distance and staying well back in the foliage.

Old friends like Chimps and Olive Baboons are also present. There are a couple of nocturnal primates here as well as some other hard to find species.

Nyungwe …

The largest single block of montane forest in Africa lies at the southern end of Lake Kivu protected by the Nyungwe National Park, a little over 1000 square kilometres in area and ranging from 1600 to almost 3000 metres above sea level.

It is stunningly beautiful. From a high point such as at Uwinka you can see range after range receding into the mist …

and once you get into the folds between the hills you find streams and waterfalls,

flowers and treeferns,

We would have three nights here. The place to stay is the Gisakura Guesthouse. This is situated near the forest edge and the garden is planted with flowers that are attractive to the various sunbirds of the area. One can take tea on the lawn and tick off Albertine Rift Endemics from your chair.

Despite the fact that we’d booked and paid for exactly that we found ourselves checking into the Gisakura Family Hostel half way up a dusty hill with not a native tree in sight. You’ve got to love Africa. The hostel was clean and comfortable, the staff extremely friendly but Pied Crows are no match for Sunbirds.

We had a day of birding with the local expert, Klaver Ntoyinkima, and a day chasing mammals. Klaver took us for a higher altitude walk from Uwinka in the morning and to the Kamiranzovu Marsh in the afternoon. Both extremely productive, more time would have been better.

We also had good views of Rwenzori Sun Squirrels, a fleeting glimpse of a Black-fronted Duiker and the odd monkey …

Stay tuned for the next episode featuring the primates of Nyungwe.

Death of a Toenail …

After breakfast it was time to leave the boiling lava lake of Mt Nyirigongo and head down hill.

As always walking steeply down hill is easy on the lungs but hard on the legs and also the feet. Long before reaching the park headquarter it was evident that toenails would be lost . As we reached the car park we passed a group about to make their ascent, a gaiters and glove brigade … must have been gorilla trekking.

Back through Goma with its busy noisy streets and wooden bicycles (Chukudu), used for transport of whatever goods can be balanced on them) …

Our driver suggested that we only take photos from the moving vehicle (and only when it was likely to keep moving).

White vehicles with UN in big black letters were prominent among the traffic.

We had East Africa multi-entry visas which you would expect granted multiple entries into the three country East Africa bloc, Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. It does not. It allows a single entry into the bloc, you can then wander from member to member until it expires. Visit DRC and you must buy a new visa $30.

And then you can emerge from the border post into the relative safety of Rwanda, perhaps casting a nervous look at Lake Kivu straight in front of you.

So what about all that gas. There isn’t a top on the bottle. Why doesn’t it just bubble out all the time. Well some of it does but it’s complicated …

There is a pressure gradient in the lake, well of course there is, every diver knows that. In sea water that amounts to one atmosphere every ten metres. Lake Kivu is fresh, well the surface waters are, they are recharged by surface run off. The deep springs, of volcanic origin, are saline. Saline waters are heavier, the fresh sits on top producing a stable stratification.

Gasses are more soluble at high pressure and low temperature so carbon dioxide, of volcanic origin, injected into the cold deep waters is quite happy to stay there. Bacteria convert some of it to methane, also derived from the breakdown of organic debris and a little hydrogen sulphide is also produced. The upper and lower waters aren’t mixing so the gasses just accumulate until the lower levels are saturated or an earthquake, landslide or volcanic eruption stir the waters enough to bring saturated water to a depth where the gas will no longer remain in solution. The water bubbles as though it were boiling bringing about more mixing and a catastrophic outgassing, a limnic eruption.

What if you pumped gas laden water up a pipe to the surface, extracted the methane as fuel to generate electricity, vented the carbon dioxide, returning the waste water to the lake? Great idea, but the waste water is salty and the lake has a delicate ecosystem and an important fishery. Not only are they at risk, if you bring enough salt into the upper layer the stable stratification will break down and the day will come that the limnic eruption happens anyway.

Solution, return the waste water to the deep zone.

The KivuWatt power station is doing exactly that. Here’s a link to an excellent article on the process <MIT Technology Review>. It was written in 2015, the power station has been commissioned since then and is currently producing electricity. It’s rated to produce about 26 megawatts. If all goes to plan the system should be able to provide 100 megawatts of capacity in perpetuity. It is agreed that the gas will be shared equally with the DRC, although they haven’t as yet built a power station to make use of it.

The only alternative fuel for thermal power stations in Rwanda is imported diesel. Although, even that is cheaper than electricity in <South Australia>.

The <Paradis Malahide> is right on the lake shore. The accommodation is nice, the ambience is very nice, the service is even nicer, the gardens are lovely. If pulling the top off a beer reminds you of a limnic eruption drinking the contents helps to dispel the resulting anxiety.

We took breakfast the next morning on a little point jutting out into the lake. A Spotted-necked Otter swam past. Kites, cormorants and herons put in an appearance. A White-browed Robin-Chat approached boldly …

and the fishing boats returned from their night’s work.

At that moment all was right with the world, and it remained so until I had to get up and walk.

Nyiragongo …

To say that the Democratic Republic of the Congo has a troubled history is an understatement.

It is a vast country with immense natural resources. It could be wealthy but internal division made worse by instability in neighbouring countries has led to a civil war that has cost the lives, directly or indirectly, of about 6 million people.

The warning signs are obvious, the word Democratic is on the label and if that doesn’t tell you there’s a problem the presence of a UN Peace Keeping Force surely does. And whilst that tells you there’s a problem the UN presence gives no reassurance, their track record is abysmal.

You’d have to be nuts to visit.

Since I’m nuts, why not visit Virunga National Park where 150 Park Rangers have been killed by insurgents in the past decade <National Geographic>. Five more would be killed in combat shortly after I left <defenceWeb>.

And let’s throw in the ascent of an 11,000 ft volcano sometimes called <The most dangerous volcano in the world>. Why so dangerous? Because of the active lava lake, the height of the mountain and the fact that the lava is much less viscous than lava elsewhere. In the 1977 eruption the lava traveled at speeds of up to 60 km/h (40 mi/h) the fastest lava flow ever recorded. Typically lava flows at about walking pace.

In 2002 …

A 13 km fissure opened in the south flank of the volcano, spreading in a few hours from 2800 m to 1550 m elevation and reaching the outskirts of the city of Goma, the provincial capital on the northern shore of Lake Kivu. Lava streamed from three spatter cones at the end of the fissure and flowed in a stream 200 to 1000 m wide and up to 2 m deep through Goma. <Wikipedia>

About 15% of Goma, a city of about 1 million people, was destroyed and has since been rebuilt (about 12 feet higher than previously).

The group assembled at the Virunga National Park office at the foot of the mountain where some old shell cases had been cutely recycled.

Nous vous souhaitons une *agréable* ascension

There would be twelve tourists, about ten porters and two well armed rangers to reduce the risk that our “agréable ascension” would be to heaven.

Five hours later I was counting 50 steps before allowing myself ten deep breaths. Then fifty more steps. Our accommodation was in sight …

The last few steps were accompanied by a miracle. It was repeated every time a new person arrived. The haggard face of an exhausted mountaineer (we’d earned the title, I’m sure) would turn to wonder, their eyes would light up and an expletive would tumble from their lips.

You could warm your hands on it.

Let’s pull back on the focal length for a wide-angle view into the crater …

The hot spots played across the surface, geysers of hot lava occasionally spewed into the air, the smoke became denser or lighter. If you’ve ever lost yourself in contemplation of a fire it was a fraction of the experience that Nyirongongo’s crucible has to offer.

We dragged ourselves away for our evening meal. It was cooked in pots that had been carried up, on charcoal that had been carried up and eaten off plates etc. And tomorrow everything would be carried down again. The huts and mattresses on the floor was all that stays on the mountain.

After dark it was back to the crater rim to shoot a time lapse …

It was a cold night but the sleeping huts were not as well ventilated as the kitchen hut.

The morning brought some mist

and a beautiful sunrise over Mt Karisimbi …

Lake Kivu …

The end of our hour with the gorillas was approaching, taking a last photo became urgent.

The hike down to our vehicle was a lot easier on the lungs although still an interesting experience for the legs. Porters were tipped, souvenirs resisted. Then it was a drive to the south. Our destination was Gisenyi on the northern shore of Lake Kivu.

Lake Kivu’s 90 km long axis runs approximately north south, its maximum width is about 50 km but it’s mostly narrower. The Rwandan – DRC border runs roughly down the middle giving DRC slightly more than half the lake.

It has a maximum depth of 475 m and a mean depth of 220 m. And the deeper waters are supersaturated with carbon dioxide and methane, the result of being situated in a tectonic hotspot,

Just like Lake Nyos in Camaroon.

On 21st August 1986 Lake Nyos degassed. If you shake a carbonated drink prior to handing it to your friend the resultant surprise is a small scale model of the event. The trigger in the Nyos event is unknown but it resulted in the release of about 1.2 cubic kilometres of gas. Being heavier than air the gas cloud hugged the ground as it flowed away. It suffocated people and livestock as far as 23 km away.

1,756 people were killed.

Lake Kivu is about 2000 times larger than Lake Nyos, about 2 million people live around its shores, many make their living from fishing. Geological evidence suggests that catastrophic outgassing occurs about once every thousand years.

As I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep …

In the evening the local fishermen paddled their three hulled vessels out in pursuit of sambaza, small fish that are reputedly delicious. A choir could be heard from a church as they left. A beautiful scene, beautiful music and a seemingly timeless way of life.

After dark there was an orange glow in the northern sky, the erupting Mt Nyiragongo, 20 km away in the DRC.

Gorilla …

We left the Golden Monkeys and returned to the Muhabura Hotel. It was the first time we’d seen it in daylight. On the wall was a painted sign inviting the world to sleep in the same room that Dian Fossey had been in the habit of using on her trips to town for supplies. It had been kept just as she’d left it.

Fossey was born in San Francisco in 1932 and murdered in the Volcanoes National Park in 1985. She left a career in occupational therapy to become a primatologist, and became the world’s leading authority on Mountain Gorillas. She wrote the famous book Gorillas in the Mist. and was celebrated in the movie of the same name.

She loved her gorillas and if they didn’t love her they should have, she fought tooth and nail for their protection and for the preservation of their habitat, often against what was once a corrupt park service and foreign zoos.

Her research began in the Congo. When that became too dangerous a place she moved to Rwanda. As a person the word enigmatic barely begins to not describe her! She smoked and drank heavily and was reputedly extremely racist. Some how she has become the patron saint of Gorilla tourism to which she was utterly opposed. On the other hand there is no doubting her courage and conviction.

The final entry in her diary was …

When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.

There would be no future for her but she has played a major part in securing a future for the gorilla.

I didn’t get to spend the night in room 12. But I did get to look into these eyes …

My friend Mark Antos has described the gorilla as the thinking man’s primate. I think that fits nicely with their mostly quiet demeanour. They seem to manifest sincerity, a stark contrast to chimpanzees who seem noisy and selfish. These guys are watching us and I can’t help wondering whether humans are the thinking gorilla’s primate. I doubt it.

It has been a two hour hike on a very steep hillside, to reach the group. Almost all the walk was outside the park where the forest has been cleared to make way for subsistence crops and pyrethrum cultivation.

Along the way we have passed children begging for money, one little boy with a very swollen abdomen and a fever was clearly ill, our guide urged his mother to take him to a doctor.

It was a group of eight tourists, three Australians and an American family, Mum, Dad, a daughter in her early teens and two older brothers. They are dressed, like a lot of the tourists visiting the park, in gaiters and gloves. The gaiters are brand new and they hadn’t a clue how to put them on. By the time we reached the forest the gloves had been put away and the gaiters were falling apart .

The last few hundred metres was off trail, a tracker cutting the way with a panga (a Swahili word , machete from Spanish has found wider use). Stinging nettles were abundant, this is where the gloves would have saved some discomfort. (The Swahili for gloves is kinga).

Arriving at the gorillas the Aussies settled down and studied gorillas. Our American companions pulled out their mobile phones, turned their backs to the gorillas, pulled faces, made signs with their fingers and took selfies. The admission fee is $1,500 each. A family of five = $7,500, about a dollar a neurone. It kept them busy for all of five minutes after that they fidgeted and talked about golf.

Nonetheless, for me it was a magnificent hour.

The gorilla group consisted of two silver back males, a female with a very young baby, and some younger males and females. They were resting after an encounter with a neighbouring group that had resulted in a fight. Most of them were lying together in a clearing. The alpha male was laying on his back with a female resting her head on his belly. The secondary male seemed to be taking things badly, he had lost some fur from his shoulder, had a bleeding wound on his back and had an injury to his left eye (although possibly an old injury). He was keeping to himself at the top of the slope. The female with the baby also remained separate a few metres downslope from the group with the baby clasped to her belly.

Volcanoes …

We spent the balance of the night at Musanze (formerly Ruhengeri) and dragged ourselves out of bed to get to the Volcanoes National Park head quarters by 7 am. So that we could hurry up and wait.

The capital of Rwanda is Kigali. Volcanoes N P is about 2 hours drive to the north-east. The first impression we had of Rwanda was the road quality, way better than Uganda. This impression would be reinforced on our travels by encountering a lot more road construction in progress.

The park has an area of about 160 square kilometres in mountainous country on the border with Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The scenery is spectacular but the major drawcard is the Mountain Gorilla not the volcanoes.

The waiting was made a little easier by free tea and coffee and the appearance of a troop of drummers and dancers who put on a spirited performance against the rather incongruous back drop of eucalyptus trees.

We were then marshalled into groups and briefed on the habits of Golden Monkeys before setting off to find them.

Then a short drive. A queue of uniformed would-be porters awaited us. We could hire one to carry our day pack if we wanted. Walking sticks and attention were lavished upon us.

It was steep going but not a long hike, the monkeys are found only in the bamboo zone which circles the mountain at an altitude not much above our starting point.

Our guide was not only knowledgeable he was also very likeable. He had studied Golden Monkeys for his honours research. Once we found them we could enjoy their company for one hour.

They live in male dominated hierarchical groups and mainly eat young leaves. There is precious little in the way of fruit available to them in their habitat. Perhaps to broaden their otherwise narrow diet this group were very interested in tadpoles in a small pond.

They intently followed the tadpoles’ every movement and would occasionally lunge at them. From time to time they would eat what they’d grabbed but it wasn’t possible for me to determine if this was tadpole or leaf.

Let me leave you with a quote, to which I hope to return …

When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.