Chinko Adieu – By Brooke Chilvers
First published in Gray’s Sporting Journal
I’ve been known to tell newlyweds I only cried during the first 20 years of my marriage to a French hunter. Even my husband admits there have been fewer tears the last 17. But the years since Rudy retired have been pure bliss.
I don’t miss the black flies harassing your face the moment you arrive in the bush, much less the tsetse flies that get you right there. Or checking your shoes for toads, or worse. Or the client’s rifle case going astray somewhere between America and Europe. Breakdowns, airline strikes, and the President kicking everyone off the only flight to Paris, stranding our businessmen and investment bankers on the tarmac in Bangui. Or the interminable stamps and signatures for shipping hunting rifles into — and Lord Derby eland and bongo trophies out of — Africa.
I don’t miss that part of safari life one bit — a life that started by accident, in Paris, in 1984, when I met a man with a job in a country I’d never heard of: Rudy Lubin, professional hunter in the Central African Republic.
We met at a dinner party given by my colleague in an international advertising agency. Perrine was the mistress of Rudy’s safari client, Patrice, a journalist for a left-wing newspaper with all the perks of the right – what the French call la gauche caviar – including a costly paramour. Except she was also married and lived at the same chic address, so nobody ever divorced or moved. They’re all dead now, so I can finally set the record straight.
I fell for Rudy before I ever met him, because Perrine had been on safari with Patrice and brought back photos of the handsome, never-married Breton. Surely with my background in natural sciences, my months of birdwatching from Mexico to Newfoundland, my camping and casting skills acquired from a Special Forces “ex,” I was a more suitable match for a PH than the other two candidates Perrine had also invited and whom I quickly elbowed out.
Insanely quitting my well-paid job, I landed with Rudy, four months later, in chaotic and colorful Bangui. The first night, in order to knock us out and rob us after cutting through the iron bars of the window, our watchman and his accomplices burned, next to our air conditioner, the same grass that puts honeybees to sleep while stealing their honey. It worked! Gone our duty-free booze, the imported gear, the precious carton of books! The second night, my future husband handed me a .357 and locked me in the bedroom while he slept on the sofa with a .416 and an ax.
To reach our safari camp along the Chinko River, 1,000 kilometers (km) away in the uninhabited stretches of northeast C.A.R., only 60 km from the Sudanese border, required 10 neck-breaking days of driving. Apart from the first 180 km of ruined tarmac, what looks like a national highway on the map is really just a deeply rutted track.
But first, we shopped for the five weeks it took to rebuild Chinko Nord and reopen the overgrown hunting trails, plus supply a dozen safaris — as in, four kinds of jam times four per safari times 12; 50-kilogram (kg) sacks of flour, five-liter jugs of cooking oil; 60 bottles of liquor, demijohns of Portuguese table wine, crates of Mocaf beer, and stacks of tins of whatever was available. Table salt, taxidermy salt, coffee, tea, sugar. Plus a tiger-striped kitten named Lucky, and a crested mona monkey named BauBau who proved to be the very definition of monkey business. We carried our own diesel fuel, our own drinking water.
Some days we averaged 10 km an hour. Some bridges were so bad I had to walk ahead, never looking back, as Rudy navigated the Land Cruiser across the tired timber. More than once we had to rebuild them entirely, the locals simply awaiting our annual arrival.
Along the way, we made camp in bone-bare village churches and schools, wide-eyed children following our every move, including the time I marched out of town seeking a discreet place to throw up my rare steak, unwisely wolfed down before Bangui was cordoned off for the return of former Emperor Bokassa for trial. For dinner, Michel, the cook, would negotiate the exchange rate for a scrawny chicken from the locals and baste it with pili-pili sauce over the fire, while Rudy led me by flashlight to a place in the river where the water was clear enough in the starlight to bathe.
You knew you’d reached the 1.5-million hectare hunting concession when you entered a sea of eight-foot grass. For five days and 250 km, we knocked down and burned the dried and dusty stalks — by tossing lit twists of pink toilet paper — to induce the return of leafy spring, and coax grazers like buffalo and roan.
I didn’t know anything back then — not the difference between a shotgun and a rifle, nor a hartebeest and a kob. But I had brains and curiosity, patience and heart, and every moment in Africa embraced me. There were desperate moments, including a terrible plane crash. But Charles Dickens, Larry McMurtry, and Tolstoy came to my rescue. At 200 pages a day, Africa is a good teacher.
It’s hard to explain the bond that sometimes develops between black and white women in the bush, when you’re the only females and face danger together but alone, like the camp waitress Marcelline and me. We climbed the rafters in the dining hut once, when roaring lions got too close. And sat through the long hours before dawn, monitoring a hippo boxing match, hoping the two angry males wouldn’t spill into camp. Once, taking my bath in the river and my head full of shampoo, a hippo popped out of the water beside me, and I ran naked up the beach, yelling for Marcelline. Laughing her head off and shouting out the story in Banda for the entire camp to hear, she poured water over my head. And when Rudy didn’t return to camp one evening, she brought her bedroll to our boukarou (straw hut) and set herself up on the floor, singing sweetly until the crippled vehicle rumbled into camp in the night.
No, I don’t miss the eternal waiting that is Africa: Waiting to cross a river with a ferry that may never arrive; waiting for the fellow with the key to the last gas pump between Bria and Yalinga to be found in his field; waiting for the whisper of singing on the breeze, announcing a successful safari and a happy client. And the first hum of the airplane engine to take him away.
Yet when you are beautiful, Africa, you are heartbreakingly beautiful, and we pardon you all your sins, even if you make us pay with an arrow through the heart for the privilege. The golden calm in late afternoon, when the team is trimming a freshly thatched roof; the promising smell of bread baking in the old termite hill we call an oven. I hear the axes fall and the hadada ibis screeching as they fly up the Chinko River. I walk a little slower in the glow, knowing the ice cubes and whisky are just a shower away. But the chimes of Big Ben on the BBC announce the same bad news: Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan…
And the river. The lovely Chinko River. I shudder to think how much time we spent, unharmed, soaking in the river after a sweat-drenched siesta, or Rudy laying catfish lines at night with an 18-foot croc living nearby.
Then the poachers arrived…and it ended. How could men with guns, donkeys, and camels devastate the wildlife of a country to the utter indifference of… all?
And when it was gone, it was gone forever.
***
Rudy moved his safaris to the Bamingui-Bangoran region, near Chad. The end there came swiftly with the news, just before Christmas, 2012, that Muslim rebel groups, called Séléka, had taken over the hunting concessions in the north. The staff was robbed and beaten. What wasn’t carried away was destroyed. Rudy’s last stop was Cameroon. And then it all ended.
Brooke Chilvers-Lubin thanks her childhood friend, W.W., for declaring that Meryl Streep, in Out of Africa, did a good job imitating her.
Writer Brooke Chilvers-Lubin and retired French PH Rudy Lubin divide their time between the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and a cottage in Brittany not far from the sea.
