“How to describe the sensation of awaking inside my novel? To watch Mbuti gather wild honey and mushrooms in one of the few major forests to survive the last ice age?”
The northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the massive Ituri Forest rainforest, and the fifty-three hundred square miles of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve—in addition to being home to nearly ten thousand hunter-gatherer Mbuti Pygmies, this tropical sanctuary supplies crucial habitat for numerous imperiled wildlife species . . . such as a beast that many Victorian-era naturalists, in considering vague rumors of an elusive, horse-sized quadruped inhabiting the region, referred to as the “African unicorn.”
My first trip to the Okapi Wildlife Reserve occurred in the spring of 2010. For two years I had been writing a novel about a man abducted from the Ituri in the nineteenth century, then brought to North America as a slave. This was my chance to encounter, however briefly, the forest my protagonist had been stolen from. My chance to visit with Mbuti still residing there—members of indigenous Pygmy bands which had served as the inspiration for his fictional tribe. I can only ever know the Ituri and those who live there as an outsider, of course, but I wanted to learn what I could.
For those two years I had forced myself to wait, planning and preparing—contemplating US Department of State “avoid all but essential travel” warnings that spoke of infectious diseases and poor infrastructure, corruption and kidnapping and bloodshed . . . some of the advice helpful (“Ensure that medical insurance includes medevac coverage”), some less so (“If stopped at a roadblock, remain cautious”)—and letting the pages of my manuscript stack up as I accomplished what research I could from afar. Eventually I had a rough-draft hypothesis of sorts, and I hoped, by treating it as such, everything I would witness and experience in the Ituri might somehow be more manageable to process. What had I gotten correct? What had I botched? What layered details, revisions, and brushstrokes could lend the novel added luster and truth?
After days of travel I arrived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo city of Bunia, base for a UN peacekeeping force that is among the largest blue-helmet operations in Africa. The Ituri commences fifteen miles to the west, along the high, ragged edges of the Albertine Rift, and the next morning a pilot/missionary flew me over a plateauing undulation of pastureland and savanna to the hardwood canopy of the Ituri and, finally, the Okapi Wildlife Reserve. An hour later the Cessna bounced down a grass runway, then I spent a week hiking from Mbuti camp to Mbuti camp on trails dimpled with the pugmarks of leopards—and, once, the cloven tracks of a foraging okapi.
How to describe the sensation of awaking inside my novel? To watch Mbuti gather wild honey and mushrooms in one of the few major forests to survive the last ice age? To hear the crashing rumble of fleeing forest elephants and the roars of baboons?
Yes, I had come to a sacred place. But a place threatened for many of the reasons such forests are typically threatened, in addition to reasons more unique to the DRC: the collateral damage of tribal divisions created generations ago by European colonists; the enduring inability, dating back to Congolese independence from Belgium, to establish a functioning government in the tumultuous northeast; the recurring presence of various militia groups and warlords.
Five years ago I returned to the Okapi Wildlife Reserve with the idea for another book in my head. A true book. I wanted to perhaps write about the history, and the present, of this beautiful and tragic place. “From a Forest of Marvels” (NER 43.3), I thought, might make for an appropriate first chapter. An account of how the okapi came to be “discovered”—opening, in essence, with the beginnings of the end.
Skip Horack is the author of three books: the story collection The Southern Cross, and the novels The Eden Hunter and The Other Joseph. Horack is director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University—and would like to thank the Okapi Conservation Project (www.okapiconservation.org), and its founder John Lukas in particular, for inspiring and informing the essay “From a Forest of Marvels,” which was originally published in New England Review issue 43.3.