Africa addio Page #3

Animals injured by poachers are cared for

by the Wildlife Society's blood bank.

Teams of veterinarians and nurses

carry out tests, administer medicine,

check the temperature

of huge injured elephants,

and keep them happy

with several pounds of tranquilizers.

On February 18, 1964,

a Wildlife Society helicopter

surveying an area on the coast of Kenya

and the Tanarive area

found the carcasses of

a full 750 elephants.

The poachers were surprised

by the helicopter

while they were still

cutting out the tusks.

They ran and hid among clumps of grass.

It was the first inspection operation

after more than a year of total anarchy.

The governments of Kenya,

Tanganyika and Uganda

following serious disorder

and the rebellion of the Armed Forces

urgently requested the return

of English troops.

The old laws that had lapsed

came back into force.

The former Anglo-Saxon administration

retook control of the game reserves.

A brief interlude of order was opened up

which, however, would be closed again

after only one month.

But the level of damage

suffered by the fauna is shocking.

In a first round up,

the police capture 410 poachers.

The great massacre

comes to a standstill.

The police discover

hundreds of caches of ivory and furs

hidden in the underbrush

and dry stream beds.

The gangs of poachers

have used grenades

to kill over 300 young elephants

without tusks

just to get the tails

to make bracelets and necklaces

to sell to tourists for a few coins.

Large tents set up by police

house 82 tons of confiscated tusks.

An even more frightening number

if one considers

only one-fifth of slaughtered animals

are usually found

by the game warden patrols.

In a valley in Semliki,

the police find 2800 skins of zebra,

leopard, gazelle, lion and cheetah

that the poachers left to dry

in the sun.

The underbrush is strewn with carcasses

that foul the air

which the alarmed vandals

did not have time to skin.

In the ancient breeding grounds

that are the richest in the world

columns of acrid smoke now rise

and flames crackle at the pyres.

While the police chase the poachers,

other patrols comb the savanna

to aid the injured animals.

The initiative,

clearly based upon good intentions

is certainly not adequate

for the amount of damage and butchery.

Africa is afflicted by a hundred evils

and no one

vigorously combats their causes.

Only a few, here and there,

do their best to heal the effects.

There's nothing to do.

They won't give us permission to land.

We decide to try it anyway

on an old landing strip further north.

We're preceded by our sister plane,

rented by three German journalists.

We've flown here together

from Tanganyika.

Neither they nor we want to turn back

without first having done

everything possible

to document the worst genocide

in the history of Africa.

It all started last night

when an African named Okello,

backed by Russia

overthrew the thousand year old

government of the Sultan

and, naming himself

revolutionary general,

ordered the massacre of

the entire Arab population of Zanzibar.

All communications have been broken off.

The radio is silent

and the airports are closed.

The only way to know anything

about what's happening in Zanzibar

is to come in person,

as did we and our German colleagues

whom we glimpse for a moment as

they are hauled away by the insurgents.

For today, it's better to skip it.

That cloud of smoke down there

rising from the runway

is the Germans' airplane that's burning.

At least we know

there's no one on board.

We try again a day later, January 19,

with a helicopter.

We waive a red flag

to confuse the rebels.

They direct us toward

the interior of the island,

where it appears that during the night,

Okello has distributed 850 guns

that mysteriously arrived on the island

which the Africans

do not yet know how to use.

It's open hunting season for Arabs.

The propaganda tells the new generations

the Arabs are cursed slave traders

who sell Africans to slave merchants

along the coast.

It, of course, omitted that

this all happened ten centuries ago.

This footage

is the only existing documentation

of what happened in Zanzibar

between January 18 and 20, 1964.

Entire villages destroyed,

trucks filled with corpses,

testimony that's uncomfortable

and embarrassing for all...

for those in Africa today,

spreading false promises,

fomenting a new African racism

and for those

hastily abandoning Africa to itself

in the false modesty

of antique colonialism

authorizing a new Africa

flooded with misery and blood.

Look at these images.

Look at them with pity.

But above all,

look at them with shame.

Endless lines of prisoners marching

toward the site of the massacre.

Hundreds of motionless Arabs,

waiting for death

wrapped in their white sheets,

already more similar to ghosts than men.

Muslim cemeteries transformed

into fields of imminent extermination.

Women and children

trembling under the threat of guns.

Enormous common graves

already half-filled with corpses.

Perhaps the most pitiless mass shooting

in the entire macabre anthology of death.

The exodus toward the sea

of entire villages.

The desperate boarding of boats

stuck in the sand at low tide.

The hopeless run

toward an impossible salvation.

Then, the day after.

These were the national parks

that the mystical

Anglo-Saxon love for animals

and regulations written with the fervor

of an inquisitor

had transformed into

real-life sanctuaries of nature.

Man, who in the text of the English law

protecting national parks

was classified

among the harmful animals

did not even have the right

to set one foot on this land.

He could walk around the edges

in absolute silence

under the watchful eyes

of the game warden

and in full respect of a code

that did not tolerate ignorance.

The most ancient Africa,

the Africa of great navigators

and great geographic discoveries,

is awaking from

a sleep of four centuries.

At the fortresses sown by Vasco de Gama

along the coast of Mozambique

nothing has passed

except for time.

The glory of past centuries puts up

a decrepit resistance against new times:

Battlements in ruins,

bastions eaten away by centuries

silent bronze cannons

and an act of faith

in humility and resignation.

Just on the other side of the walls,

in the invisible guerrilla camps

is the new reality

still draped with the morning fog

where the soldiers move hesitantly

like ghosts of the past.

Wherever man is present,

nature is silent.

The silence of the animals and birds is

the unequivocal sign of a human presence.

The rebels in Angola

avoid forests that are too quiet.

They know that Portuguese patrols

are inside them, lying in wait.

The cleverness almost always works.

Animals and guerrillas

rush to the call of the magnetic tape

and in one moment, the forest is

filled with life and death.

This is the destiny of a people

who wanted to ignore the color of skin.

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