Jane Goodall, page 78
Etha and Adeline, coming back down the trail now, saw some lights and then heard the boat race away. They stopped. Etha said, “Oh, my God!” and started crying. Adeline said, “Okay, Etha, cool down, cool down. Let us go.” So she stopped crying. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.” And they went down to meet with the others, to verify who had been taken, to account for the safety of everyone remaining, to find the staff people and their families, to talk to Jane. Jane wrote a note asking for police help and sent it via the park rangers, who had a boat at Nyasanga and could run into Kigoma; and then, as everyone concluded, there was nothing else to do but stay alert until after dawn, when the Parks people and the police would be awake and receiving calls on their radios.
Carrie Hunter, Barbara Smuts, and Steve Smith had been dropped into a dark pool of cold water in the bow of the boat, along with various supplies and dead chickens. But Carrie and Barbara were untied now and able to move, while Steve, still bound tightly, was sinking into the water and becoming seriously chilled. Carrie and Barbara began pleading with their captors in French to untie Steve. In response, they were beaten with guns and told not to talk. Emilie was in a drier place, propped farther back, and during the seven-hour ride to the other side of the lake, she traded a few words of French with some of the men around her, enough to confirm that she and the others had been kidnapped for ransom.
Next morning and on the other side of the lake, they were forced to climb up a steep cliff to an encampment anchored precariously on the mountainside. A small army was spread out on a high ridge there, and below that, in a steep and narrow valley, isolated, guarded by soldiers, were three bamboo huts, two for the captives, the third for their guards.
On their third day, the captives were escorted to another bamboo hut and made to sit down in a small anteroom. Looking around, Carrie soon discovered in a random pile of things a book by Niko Tinbergen, The Herring Gull’s World. It may have been the only English-language publication in the entire camp.
The four students were taken in to meet the generals, six of them. The generals sat up high; the students were placed down low. The generals seemed confident and well-fed, and they wore clean and sharply pressed uniforms theatrically overadorned with clusters of medals and ribbons. One of them explained methodically in French that they were leaders of a Marxist rebel army, the Parti de la Révolution Populaire (PRP), fighting under the supreme authority and inspired leadership of Laurent Kabila. Their goal was to remove President Mobutu and his entire government and army from Zaire and establish a Marxist society, a social paradise where wealth would be distributed equally and where all citizens, from the highest to the lowest, men and women alike, would become comrades in the revolution and have the same access to everything important, such as education, medical care, and shoes. The students themselves would soon be educated in the tenets of revolutionary Marxism, and they would be fed and cared for. But they were captives, after all, and no one would have the slightest hesitation about shooting them dead in an instant. They were there to serve the revolution as valuable hostages, and the PRP was going to make certain demands: for money (half a million American dollars in small bills or the equivalent in British pounds); weapons, including large-caliber guns, and ammunition; and the liberation from jail of certain political prisoners being held in Tanzania. Also, although it was not a demand, the PRP intended by this bold act to reach a better understanding with President Nyerere, a socialist himself, after all, who should give them the right to travel through his country and trade in the Tanzanian markets. Finally, since the students knew proper English, they were going to write out their own ransom note, articulating clearly all of these demands, and if that note should give even the tiniest hint about where they were being held, they would be killed instantly. In any case, the demands had a sixty-day deadline, after which they would be killed anyhow. Were there any comments or questions?
Speaking in French, Carrie and Emilie protested. They were nothing but impoverished and lowly students. They were not famous scientists. They were not important people. No one cared about them. No one would miss them. And therefore the PRP, as enlightened as it might be in most significant things, was not going to get far with its demands for a big ransom and guns and the plan for leveraging President Nyerere. The generals’ spokesman asked if there was anything else they wanted to say, and Carrie said, “I want that book,” referring to The Herring Gull’s World.
On the other side of the lake, Jane, operating the two-way radio, reached Parks headquarters in Arusha by seven o’clock in the morning on May 20. Thirty minutes later she was talking to Derek in Dar es Salaam. Thirty minutes after that, Derek was meeting with the Tanzanian minister for home affairs, who immediately informed the defense and security ministers of the kidnapping and ordered the inspector general of police to fly by helicopter to Kigoma. Derek then flew in a Parks plane out to Kigoma, arriving by 4:30 that afternoon, to be met at the landing strip by Jane.
Five students had been on holiday from Gombe at the time of the kidnapping. A sixth had left for home two days earlier. Therefore, only eight white students and researchers now remained. Since the kidnappers had deliberately taken only wazungu, those eight students and researchers plus Jane, Grub, Grub’s tutor, Simon, and another British citizen who had recently come to replace Simon were evacuated to town for their own safety. The next day the students and researchers were allowed back to Gombe, under heavy police escort, to gather their personal belongings and any important records. Jane and Derek, meanwhile, spoke by telephone to the U.S. embassy in Dar, and then they flew in the small Parks plane across the lake, scouring the green hillsides and cliffs and half-hidden villages at the eastern edge of Zaire, desperately hoping for a glimpse of some kind of military encampment down below and perhaps the sight of four white captives. They found nothing.
Derek and Jane returned to Gombe, which by then was crowded with police, and spent the next two days alongside the other displaced wazungu, disconsolately packing and meeting with the remaining Africans—including Etha Lohay, who bravely agreed to stay on as Parks administrator for the time being, and the Tanzanian student, Adeline Mrema, who said she would remain a while longer as well. Many of the supporting staff—carpenters, night watchmen, kitchen workers, messengers, and so on—were no longer needed and were now unemployed. But the field staff, roughly a dozen skilled, tough, very astute chimp and baboon watchers, declared that they were ready to carry on.
By Friday, May 23, Jane, Derek, and the other wazungu were back in Kigoma, where they opened a message from Dave Hamburg and the president of Stanford University, instructing all the Stanford students to leave for supposedly safer quarters in Nairobi and declaring that they were no longer authorized to do further research in East Africa. Most of the students and others from that group decided that they would go to Dar es Salaam instead—they could stay in the guest cottage adjoining Jane and Derek’s house—expressing solidarity with their kidnapped friends and hoping they might help in some way. They set off by train, while Jane, Derek, and Grub took off in the Parks plane.
Back in Dar, Derek phoned the American and Dutch ambassadors and invited them to meet with him and Jane at their home the next day to consider strategies. It was during that meeting, on May 24, that a message was brought in to the American ambassador, a distinguished and imposingly tall African American named William Beverly Carter. Ambassador Carter relayed the news to everyone else in the room: one of the four kidnapping victims, Barbara Smuts, was in Kigoma. Members of the PRP had trans ported her across the lake during the night and deposited her on the shore just before dawn, whereupon she had walked into town and located the police. She was physically unharmed and would be flying to Dar es Salaam on a chartered plane the next day.
Sunday evening at the city airport, the twenty-four-year-old American graduate student, utterly exhausted, wearing faded jeans and a plain white cotton blouse, climbed out of a small private plane, was surrounded by a swirl of reporters and bulb-flashing photographers, and was then greeted warmly by a small crowd of people who included Jane and Derek, the American ambassador, and others from the American embassy. Barbara and Jane, according to a reporter for the Times, “hugged each other emotionally.” And then the fatigued student was “whisked” off to the American embassy, where Ambassador Carter had insisted she should stay. As everyone soon learned, she was carrying letters addressed to President Nyerere and the U.S. and Dutch ambassadors, as well as to Jane and the parents of the remaining hostages, stating that they were all in good health and being cared for appropriately, more or less, but that they would be killed if demands were not met: for money, arms, and the release of certain political prisoners.
At the end of the month David Hamburg arrived in Dar, officially representing Stanford University and bringing with him Carrie Hunter’s and Steve Smith’s fathers. Jane had been allowed to spend a couple of hours with Barbara Smuts and her mother, and as she reported in a letter home, written probably on May 31, Barbara was “much better, and was able to tell us all sorts of details about the rebels,” including the fact that they frequently shook hands with the students, fed them three meals a day, and talked a good deal about “the rights of women,” which meant partly that whenever the PRP took over a new area, any soldier who raped a woman was summarily executed. Jane went on to say that Dave Hamburg had retired to the Kilimanjaro Hotel to recuperate from jet lag, exhaustion, sore throat, sinus trouble, and some kind of stomach ailment, but now he was feeling better and describing himself as “mentally . . . much, much better.” Indeed, Jane thought, she could sense “quite an atmosphere of hope”—although there were still various odd problems she could only hint at, such as the fact that the American ambassador, who was six feet seven inches tall and “like a character from Graham Greene,” had so far “handled the whole thing in a most peculiar—and utterly foolish—way.”
It was still unclear what anyone in Dar es Salaam could do, and the leaders of the PRP had apparently not given much thought to the logistical problems of negotiation and communication over long distances. At the same time, various parties in Dar were experiencing their own problems in negotiation and communication.
To begin with, soon after Ambassador Carter had “whisked” Barbara Smuts off to the American embassy, a conflict developed over political sovereignty and responsibility. According to Derek’s confidential report, President Nyerere had been allowed to meet for a short while alone with Miss Smuts; as a result of that meeting, the Tanzanian president concluded that the American ambassador had not been forthright about some details of the situation. Nyerere thus became, in Derek’s words, “very angry with the U.S. ambassador.” At the same time, the American embassy issued a statement declaring publicly that (according to a reporter’s paraphrase) “the primary responsibility for coping with the kidnappers and effecting the safe release of the students . . . rested with the Tanzanian government.” In quick response, the official position of the Tanzanian government was published in a government-owned newspaper: that although Tanzania maintained a serious humanitarian concern for the welfare of the students, its leaders would “categorically reject any responsibility for their release or whatever happens to them.” As a Reuters news report neatly summarized, “Tanzania Washes Its Hands of Students’ Kidnapping.”
Nyerere had decided, officially at least, not to negotiate with the kidnappers. Meanwhile, the U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, sent explicit instructions to Ambassador Carter not to negotiate with the PRP either. The United States was at the time encouraging President Mobutu to back a war against a Soviet-oriented Marxist regime recently established in Angola, on the western side of Zaire, and thus could not afford to associate with Marxist rebels on the eastern side. By the time David Hamburg arrived on May 30, there had been such a serious breakdown in communications between the U.S. embassy and the Tanzanian government that Derek, complaining about a “virtual boycott” of information from the American side, asked David to intervene.
Derek and Jane decided to try on their own initiative to contact the kidnappers. Jane had composed a personal letter to the three captives, reassuring them that everyone loved them, that their parents and other family members were arriving, that their fellow students were all very concerned and sent their love, and that they should have hope. “Please try not to worry about your future,” she wrote. “Everything is going to be all right. All the world feels certain that your captors are humane people. We are doing all that we can do. Please believe us and have faith.” The letter would naturally be read by the kidnappers as well, and Jane obviously intended it as an opening in communication with them, sending indirectly their way a few vaguely positive comments, such as “Surely they must know that this is their chance—that by treating you well and by returning you safely to your families, the world will be most impressed in their favour. On the other hand, if they harm you, the world will be shocked and the whole operation could bring them to a much worse position than they were in before they started it.” The letter went on to detail the developing situation at Gombe, and it optimistically suggested a few mental projects having to do with research that Emilie, Carrie, and Steve might wish to consider as they waited for the help that would most certainly come. “We send all, all our love,” it concluded. “And we’re telling you not to worry. It’s all going to be okay.”
The letter must have been difficult to compose—and now, how to mail it? The general location of the PRP encampment was known by then, and on June 1 Jane and Derek flew to Kigoma intending to hire a freelance courier. With help from the head of the Kigoma police, they finally found someone who agreed to take it (plus some Dutch cigars for the PRP from the Dutch ambassador), but then the irrationally bold man rationally changed his mind.
On the other side of the lake, meanwhile, the nights were wet and surprisingly cold. At first the captives slept in individual bamboo cots, each covered with a single light blanket and with a small fire smoldering beneath. They would turn over, facedown to the fire, to get warm, but soon they would be smoky and choking and unable to breathe. They would flip over and become unbearably cold. They would flip over again, warm up again, and start to think about the fire below and worry about going up in flames. After Barbara left, the remaining hostages were placed together in a single hut. Steve by then was using a sleeping bag that had been taken in the raid on Gombe, and Emilie’s mattress, also taken, was now placed on a cot that Emilie and Carrie shared.
The kidnappers had raided the storeroom at Gombe partly to get food for their captives, so in addition to small rations of ugali, a cassava root paste, they ate a good deal of canned tomato paste, occasional potatoes, a little rice, and periodically a small piece of chicken—a wing or a leg, which they would split three ways. The chicken was extremely tough, and Emilie preferred to crack the bones and suck the marrow, leaving the bits of meat and gristle for Carrie and Steve. Once every couple of weeks they were given a single cooked egg, which they split three ways. Twice during their captivity they were brought hot coffee sweetened with milk—a great treat.
Their days were taken up with hours of reeducation, during which one of the generals, Alfred Nondo, lectured and hectored them in Swahili, covering such subjects as Marxist-Leninist thought and the history of Laurent Kabila and his PRP. They were told to contemplate their French-language copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, and they were required to read a few small treatises that had been printed in Swahili. Paper was in short supply, and the hostages were each given a sheet of onionskin paper and a pen, then told to sit at bamboo tables and write out, over the wavy ridges of the bamboo, notes on their reading.
During this time of daily reeducation, they also looked around them to learn more about what the Marxism of Kabila and the Parti de la Révolution Populaire really meant—and noted that among other hypocrisies, the frequently stated concerns about the rights of women were seriously contradicted by stories from the three African women who brought them hot water in the mornings and food at mealtimes. Those women were themselves captives, two from Zaire, the other from Tanzania, taken from their villages and forced to serve a few privileged members of the PRP as sexual slaves. But one of them was stealing food meant for the hostages, and since the students needed to maintain their strength for an escape attempt, they decided to risk reporting the thefts. They followed established procedure for complaint-making and were told reassuringly that such pilfering would cease and the offending woman would be given a period of reeducation, which soon was revealed to consist of imprisonment inside a suspended cage for twenty-four hours.
It was important to establish some control over the details of their lives. Thus, when instructed to study their printed pamphlets, they sat out in the sun on the little pad of earth supporting their hut and held the pamphlets upside down. At the same time, The Herring Gull’s World became an important source of solace. They each read it privately, but they also read it out loud to one another, and they found themselves profoundly absorbed by the world of herring gulls, and consoled too by one another’s presence and voice and the music of familiar English words spoken aloud, like poetry.
