Beef

Gerald Durrell in Bafut and beyond

The Bafut Beagles by Gerald Durrell

We meet Gerald Durrell — naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist — mid-way through this book, teaching the conga to a room full of African tribal leaders. Their band is keeping time admirably in the middle of the room. They are all clutching each other’s waists, snaking around the floor of the dancing hall. And — because Durrell was trying to give them helpful instructions all the while — they are shouting out, as if it is a song, ‘one, two, three, kick! One, two, three, kick!’

The Fon of Bafut, the king-like ruler of this part of the world, thinks the dance is a very fine European tradition. He is very pleased to be able to partake of it.

The human comedy is much of this book. Durrell must deal with the Fon, who is an obliging type of ruler (able to insist his people give Durrell specimens, to great effect), but quite difficult to satisfy — at least so far as his constant taste for imbibing goes.

The two of them are endlessly emptying bottles as Durrell tries to get his very best friend the Fon to arrange for the capture and transport of particular organisms that the collector would most eagerly like to see. And there are also, Durrell keeps telling us, seventy-odd stairs (the Fon says seventy-five; Durrell makes it seventy-three before seeing the wind’s direction and recalculating) between Durrell’s bed and the outside world. After the night hunts, he must stumble up the stairs to bed. After a night drinking with the Fon, head already aching, Durrell must crawl up the steps to rest and oblivion.

We have the dramas of Bafut. So many of the domestic travails of the people.

The behaviour of a cook called Jacob who seems to be in many of Durrell’s stories, usually as part of a very elaborate ironic episode in which he is the joke, but occasionally distinguishing himself in bravery or in intelligence prompted by, sustained by, his greed.

And the manoeuvring of the Bafut hunter men (Durrell’s Beagles), competing to win the prizes and to collect the money for finding and capturing animals — what they call ‘beef’ out there.

In one of the mountain outposts to which Durrell and his boys trek to capture fine, rare beef, the local children contrive ways to watch the Englishman bathe. Some of them even pay Jacob, acting as tout, for the privilege of staring in through the holes in the wall. Durrell soon discovers that all of this is because they have made bets, never having seen a white man before, on whether he is pale all over, or whether the pinky white colour is just on his face, his hands and arms and lower legs.

There is much drinking and dancing and feasting in this book. One special event is a kind of national day, and the Fon feasts his whole kingdom with great, elaborate ceremony. It is here that he makes the proclamation that will bring much beef, possibly too much, to Durrell’s door each morning.

Durrell comes to enjoy his time in Bafut very much, and not only because it affords him the chance to collect animals. When Durrell leaves and his drinking buddy the Fon says goodbye, it does seem as if Durrell has left a place where he could have stayed a long time, a place where he could have remained and remained happily. The Fon appears truly to be sorry to see the collector man go.

Much of the colour in this book is still of the animal sort. We have the devious chimpanzees who are rascally banana thieves the one minute, sinned-against saints the next — living martyrs 'dedicated to philanthropy and self-denial.'

Baby apes who guzzle milk with such alacrity it seems every surface in sight gets a milky sheen.

We have flying squirrels of some kind, who have to be smoked out of the great rotting hollow trees in which they live in large squadrons. And from the trees, they float and glide and dive when Durrell first tries to capture them, moving great distances using their immovable ‘wings’ without a breath of wind.

We have hairy toads — who are toads but are not, in fact, hairy.

Beautiful so-called golden cats — a cross between the big predatory kind and the kind you might have in your house as you read this essay.

We have snakes who turn out to be venomous at precisely the moment they sink their teeth into the author’s thumb. We have butterflies in great hazy clouds in the clearings cut into thick, high canopies.

We have the particular skink — a kind of lizard — of whom the locals are deathly afraid. It is said to kill, with agonising pain, anyone who handles it. But Durrell knows it not to be venomous, and not to have teeth sharp enough to slit open skin. He handles the skink, shows his hunter companions, none of whom want to touch it, and he tells them a little lie — that the white man has medicine that will prevent the touch of the skink from being fatal.

The Fon, rather bravely, is the first local to handle the animal, after Durrell administers a placebo antivenom to his hands. After that, the native hunters are off to the races: they collect as many skinks as they can. They proudly tell everyone who would listen that they have been given some of the mysterious treatment, the foreign powder, that grants invulnerability to the attacks of this particular species.

Of all the animals in this book, my favourite is possibly a squirrel called Sweeti-pie, who is continually contriving to escape. The squirrel endlessly gets out of captivity, makes breaks for freedom, and so on. But Durrell eventually learns that more than trying to get home free and to escape mankind for ever, what the squirrel really wants is to be chased by humans.

When it is tired of the game, it is more than happy to go back to its cage long ahead of its pursuers and to sit there, grooming itself and eating sugar cubes, until the panting, perspiring chase party return and discover it there, unbothered, amused.

This is a very enjoyable book.