Kinshasa, The Heart Of Darkness, And The Olduvai Gorge - Lions An Incidental Backdrop For A Widow Filling Time

Barbery Byfield was past the age of sexual conquest and even farther afield in her much later years when her only goal in life was filling time. 

She had been married to Harper Byfield for many years - a rather dour but successful marriage. They had remained together despite infidelities and irresponsibility, and when Harper died and Barbery suddenly found herself alone in a house which once had company but now was as empty and echoing as an abandoned church.  

'I wish there were bells to ring', she mused as she wandered from room to room wondering what to do with it all.  She wasn't about to rattle around the old museum, using each room in organized but purposeless fashion, her goal of filling space just as she was beginning to realize the importance of filling time. 

It had come to that, after all, a rather sad coda at the end of an active life.  Boardroom, playroom, bedroom...that last a sore point, since there were many bedrooms on both sides of the aisle, his and hers, with his jealousy intruding on her desire to escape from the barebones sex of their marriage...and many other 'inner rooms of the heart', as pulp romance novelist Emily Carver Blount described the secrets of the female heart. 

Barbery was no romantic and happened upon the Blount book by accident in the waiting room of her dentist; but it was one of a kind, a novel that jumped out of the genre and actually made sense.  Her inner rooms had indeed been neglected for so long that they were now musty and cold, but it was too late for any Mr. Right to open them. 

She was resigned to her age, her passed pull-date, and her consignment to routine.  At least Harper got her out of the house on occasion, the occasional evening at the Old Ebbitt Grill for martinis and oysters, the Edgar bar at the Mayflower (named for J. Edgar Hoover who used to go there late at night with his longtime lover, given a quiet table in the corner, and Kentucky Bourbon on the house), and the occasional weekend on the Bay, and now she was on her own.  

A woman of certitude, will, and ambition, she now found herself pondering the menu at the Four Seasons unable to decide between the veal hops and the flounder and was very angry at herself for her indecision.

'Why not a Danube cruise?', said a friend and former Vassar classmate also recently widowed and already an experienced traveler.  'The Harvard one is good, but so is Southern Comfort, a Lindblad cruise of the Mediterranean.  Smart docents, good food, interesting people';  but for Barbery that would be the last straw - a depressing, floating widow's walk with each widow pacing the deck like the old whaling wives of Nantucket waiting for their husbands' ships to come in.

As time went on and the NY Times crossword puzzle became tedious, her excursions to the East Wing and the Corcoran dutiful and boring, and her walks along the C&O Canal only vaguely reminiscent of real woodsy outings, she reconsidered the cruise idea, but refused to consider the Danube or the Rhine, cattle-car excursions with their stops at the most ordinary and predictable places. 

No, if she was going to travel, there had to be some oomph in it, and when she saw a brochure about a trip to the African savannah, she thought she might have something.  Wild animals held no particular interest for her.  She had always been inattentive at the zoo when taken by her parents as a young girl.  It smelled bad.  The animals never did anything, and there was nothing to eat.  She could take them or leave them and accepted them and zoos as part of her education,.  So an excursion to Africa just to see them? 'I don't think so'. 

 

But Africa is not a neutral place and raises interest and passions in all comers. Barbery's graduate school classmate and former World Bank senior official was on one side of the fence.  Africa was a pestilential shithole, a tribal, primitive, lawless, and corrupt place he was glad to leave. Her progressive friends said going there was a transformational experience, seeing the black man, the heir to humanity's original creation, a sensitive, highly evolved being attuned to the forest environment from which he came. And the few acquaintances who knew Africa only through the filter of tooth and claw couldn't stop themselves from singing the praises of the plains, the veldt, and nature wild. 

The travel agency whose brochure Barbery saw was 'an alternate site' which catered to the adventurer, the path less travelled, those with the spirit of Burton, Mungo Park and Rene de Chaillu, those willing to take a chance in the Dark Continent and to 'see its secrets revealed.'

'What have I got to lose?', Barbery asked and proceeded to sign up for the trip.

The trip would be a mix of urban and rural - the 'real' Africa said the brochure, Kinshasa, a river trip up the Congo, Nairobi, with a final three days at the world-famous Treetops Lodge. 

The trip began in London where the tour was to meet at Gatwick, not Heathrow, and the flight was not a non-stop but due to fuel considerations and union rules would make a short stop in the Azores and then proceed to Kinshasa.   The plane was a reconditioned 737 with passenger instructions written in Arabic, and old Sudanese Airlines boarding passes in the seat pockets.  There were two crew members who had been seconded from Sudan until the tour company could recruit and train their own staff. 

Kinshasa was a nightmare.  The airport was a chaotic, malarial, miasma. Touts, hawkers, cab drivers, facilitators, and fixers shouted for attention, bullying their way to the arriving passengers, grabbing hand luggage, promising safe passage through immigration, customs, and security, shoving, pushing, clearing a path forward through sprawling families, tethered goats, guards with automatic rifles, and inoperative luggage carousels. 

The tour agency Kinshasa man who was to meet them had been detained by airport police and could be seen, handcuffed and cossetted behind the glass partition between the arrival lounge and the outside concourse, his hand-painted sign, N'GOMO TOURS, ripped and held like a standard by one of his police handlers. 

The hotel Far Horizons was a fleabag, an old wooden three story structure built over a sewage drainage canal and on the commercial street beside it.  The rooms were airless, windowless, and unairconditioned, the bed linens grey and unwashed, and the locks on the doors had long ago been broken off.  

There was nowhere to turn, not one European in sight, the N'Gomo tour representative, released from custody in time to rescue the group and take them to the hotel in an old Bluebird school bus, had disappeared.  They were alone, desperate, frightened, and anxious. 

'I am here', said Alphonse, the tour guide who appeared in the lobby early the next morning, 'and off we go'. 

The passengers huddled on the foredeck of the steamer as it made its way up through the choking tangle of water hyacinths, its 1960s-era diesel hammering away, smoke belching out of the single stack amidships.  It was Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn on the African Queen all over again, and for all intents and purposes they were heading into the heart of darkness. 

Engine trouble, a stop or two at village outposts, manioc and monkey meat ('Our traditional, local cuisine'), and bitten alive, was the routine; and no group of travelers was more happy than Barbery and her fellows when they returned to Kinshasa. 

For most World Bank officials Lagos and Kinshasa were considered to be the very worst places in all of Africa. Like the N'gomo Tours passengers, all arrivals are met at the airport, accosted, harassed, intimidated, and bullied; and the only survivors were diplomats met by embassy armed guards and carried off in armored convoys. 

Little did the credulous and naive Barbery know of this, and so desperate was she to shift her life into another gear and travel down unexplored roads, meet unusual people, and experience life in the raw, that she found herself in the hands of a fly-by-night, sham agency, in one of the most pestilential hellholes on earth, and with no sign of respite or relief. 

She looked up at the wall-sized poster of the Chief of the Congolese Armed forces pasted high on the riverport customs house where they landed and began to cry. 

Somehow they made it to Nairobi and were settled in a new cement block hotel in the center of town.  The N'gomo guide told them that they were not to go out of the hotel for any reason, for gangs of Sudanese ex-combatants, Houthi gunrunners, and common carjackers and kidnappers ruled the streets at night. The sound of gunfire, sirens, and shouts from every direction kept them awake all night. 

Thinking that a tour-ending stay at the Treetops Lodge, one of Africa's famous wildlife preserve hotels, would be the place retained in the group's memory more than any of the other more challenging parts of the tour, they arranged through tribal connections and dash, a few rooms in the new, yet unfinished wing. The annex was an afterthought, a kind of Quonset hut/trailer park, and management had already decided to tear it down as unproductive, and so the tour spent another uncomfortable, hot, stifling, and mosquito-ridden night. 

Despite Barbery's indifference to wild animals, she delighted in the giraffes, wildebeests, antelope, elephants and tigers they saw on the Serengeti. She still didn't care about them per se, but it was all so clean and pristine, a Disneyland theme park preserved and isolated from the 'real' Africa.

'So, how was it?', asked her Vassar classmate, a well-turned out Georgetown matron used to Nantucket and St. Bart's and had never given even an idle thought to setting foot in the jungle. 

'Were the black people there anything like ours here?'

What more was there to say?

Competition vs The Collective - Darwin vs Marx, And There Still Is A Doubt?

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved 

 

A rule of Natural Law, said Darwin - an incontrovertible, irremediable fact of animal life.  Competition, Survival of the Fittest, the natural order of winnowing, sorting, vetting, sussing to assure that only the strongest, most intelligent, capable, healthy, and agile will continue to people the earth. 

It seems hard to believe that there are many who reject Darwinism, and insist that the nature we share with the animals - ferociously aggressive, territorial, self-interested, and self-defensive - is not innate, hardwired from birth, a legacy of our descendance from the first living organisms all fighting for purchase, advantage and superiority. 

We are above all that, progressives say. Life has made us into kinder, more compassionate, more considerate, and tolerant beings.  We are not only far from our earliest animal ancestors, we are well on the way to a Utopia, a world were our best instincts, inspiration, and spiritual essences will become universal. 

There has not been a scintilla of evidence for this idealism.  War has been the most central, perpetual, and universal expression of human society since the Paleolithic. The first Homo Sapiens battered each other with clubs and animal jawbones right from the start.  They were suspicious of The Other, the outsider, the interloper; and well before The Unknown had a chance to raid, war parties were sent out to kill, to slaughter, and to leave not one trace of life. 

From these small, tribal, territorial fights came larger, more well-organized, armed, and led forces.  Then battalions, phalanxes, legions, and armies and the carnage continued but on a grand scale.  Wars were fought for decades, were constant, and became a part of civilized life.  The wealthier a group became, the more defiantly it had to defend itself. More commonly armed forces left their castles, redoubts, and military fortifications to engage the enemy in a first preemptive strike. 

Wars of conquest were part of the evolution of the civilized world. Access to land and sea routes to secure trade were not agreed upon by codicil and contract, but taken.  Wealth was appropriated, slaves were taken, territory occupied. 

Genghis Khan and his 50,000 Turkic and Mongol horsemen never stopped once as they marauded over vast lands from Asia to Europe, leaving a trail of devastation and establishing one of history's most extensive and impressive empires. 

Europe was always at war, with sides and alliances changing but with the same territorial intent.  No kingdom, dynasty, shogunate, or empire was ever stagnant, settled, complacent, and satisfied. 

This survival instinct - the innate, inherent, permanent, and central feature of human nature - can be seen up and down the phylogenetic scale.  Every time there is more than one individual, there will be a fight for dominance.  Siblings fight for parental favor and attention.  Husbands and wives fight for parity.  Civil societies vie for prominence. City states, regions, nations, and international alliances either fight, prepare to fight, or if defeated reorganize to fight again. 

The Taiping Rebellion cost 30 million lives.  The Ming-Qing War, 25 million. The Thirty Years War, 10 million., the Hundred Years War, 5 million.   Modern wars have been even more deadly - WWII resulted in 85 million dead, WWI 20 million dead. 

The Twentieth Century was the most deadly in all of history.  Evolution toward a more compassionate, considerate, peaceful world? Hardly. 

Communism, the brainchild of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and put into brutal practice by Stalin and Mao, was one of the darkest period of subjugation, oppression, and persistent brutality, all in the name of equality that the world has ever seen.  Individualism, private enterprise, and opportunity - the bywords of human society since the age of cowrie beads and barter and the commercial expression of human nature - were deemed anti-social and dangerous, threats to the establishment of a universal communist regime.  Gulags, prison cells, and summary executions were carried out in communism's name. 

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the social economist and historian Francis Fukuyama declared 'the end of history - the world without the perennial threat of nuclear war and without the hegemonic communist empire, the world would be at peace. 

How wrong could Fukuyama have been?  Once the Soviet Union and its client states were disassembled, minor wars began.  The Balkan wars were just one example, and Islamic jihad became international. 

One could only conclude that war, violence, territorialism, nationalist ambition, and hegemony were here to stay.  Even a cursory glance at history would confirm this assumption. 

Yet, progressivism, the post-Soviet commitment to socialism, has become a political force in America and Europe.  Although recent conservative victories in the United States, France, Germany, the UK, Italy and Eastern Europe have challenged socialists and pushed back on their Marxist-Leninist opportunism, the Left has not lost its voice, and is more committed than ever to a remaking of European and American society in the image of Soviet utopianism. 

American progressives insist that human society can progress towards a more verdant, peaceful, consensual, and considerate one.  Biology does not determine destiny, they say, for given man's infinite capacity for good, and the willingness of human collectives to work together for a better world, any residual Darwinian traits will disappear. 

In America the creation of a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive society will provide the foundation for the universal values of good which will lead to utopia.  Black and white, Anglo and Hispanic, gay and straight will all live harmoniously in a world which values difference; and when wealth has been redistributed so that there are no longer rich and poor, the goal of a perfect world will be reached. 

These progressives, however, refuse to respect the lessons of history.  America is now more than ever a divided, divisive, and increasingly intemperate and intolerant place because of this forced, engineered social experiment. A country without a mutually accepted ethos, a set of universally respected codes of morality and ethnics, and a patriotism borne of genuine subscription to these principles will come apart and cannot survive. 

Affirmative action - an important piece of the socialist concept of communal harmony - has forced long-suppressed racial suspicion into the open.  Black students from the inner city are simply not up to academic par, and when they take places from more deserving applicants and then taunt, object, and flaunt their blackness in the face of those whites who ignorantly sponsored them, the populace becomes angry, resentful, and hostile. The waves of unwanted illegal immigration is no different.  Forced diversity is far worse than no diversity at all. 

 

Socialism dies hard because idealism dies hard.  It is not easy to accept the fact that we are still basically animals, and that in the few thousand years since the emergence of homo sapiens, we remain as savage, uncivilized, and territorial as our animal forbears.  It is more comforting to believe that human beings can overcome the residual competitiveness within us and march to a different drummer; that progress is actually possible, that a better world is in fact possible. 

Darwinists are far more settled, for the universality and immutability of the idea reduces the anxiety suffered by social reformists.  Life is as it is and will always be, a lot of nasty, unpleasant bits but all there is, so better enjoy it.  We have not been given the choice to be born into a morally vacant world, but those who see the possibility of competitive advantage make the most out of being dealt a bad hand.  

Harpies, Vixenish, Feral Women, And Social Justice - No Goody Two Shoes Wanted In The Fight For A Better World

'I really don't know what will become of her', Bracken Knight's mother said to her father, both worried about their daughter's incorrigible nasty mean streak.  Despite all the love and affection showered on the little girl, she was insufferably ungrateful, and added insult to injury with some unkind, untoward remark. It was as though instead of reading A Child's Garden of Verse, Robert Louis Stevenson sweet and innocent book bedtime poems for children, she had read from the liturgy of some Satanic cult. 

Not once did she giver her despondent mother a hug or even a smile.  It was as though the woman were a leprous, warty crone or the Patient Zero of some hideous avian plague. 

Robert and Priscilla Knight were attentive, caring, and loving parents, and so were beyond belief at their daughter's complete lack of empathy, kindness, or concern.  In desperation they looked at their family tree for some genetic clue to her misanthropy. Her rude dismissal of her parents and older brother was just a warmup for the cruelty of her school years.  Fellow students kept their distance and teachers hesitated to call on her for fear of what she would say. 

Mr. Phelps, the math teacher, had an ever-so-slight lisp.  His S's never quite made it past his lips, but years of childhood training enable at least some sibilance.  When he called on Bracken to explain the mathematical use of quadratic equations, the girl did a sadistic mimicry of Phelps' speech, turning the classroom into a raucous, howling den only quieted by the principal who happened to be in the hall. 

As she grew into late adolescence and early adulthood, she had become even more ambitiously ruinous.  She was shrewish and witchy, and there would be no taming this bolus of distemper and animus.  There would be no Petruchio who saw in her a woman of intellectual means, enviable will, and a heart of gold beneath her Sturm und Drang. 

 

In college - one of the Northeast's premier Ivy League universities - she lived alone in Mather House, one of the few dorms with single rooms.  She had answered Harvard's rooming questionnaire honestly, and even her first few entries convinced the administration that everyone would be better off without her. 

College can be a gloomy affair if one spends one's nights alone while everyone else is either sharing ideas about Kant and Heisenberg or carousing on Dana Street, and even the penitential, meanspirited Bracken had her moments of jittery unease.

And so it was that she joined the Students For Social Justice, a campus group which had become notorious for leading student protests against the school for its racist support of Israel and bloody oppression of the Palestinians. Her classmates in this group were not just protestors but as meanspirited, hateful, spiteful, and insatiably angry as she was.  

There was a viral, feral antipathy to their demonstrations where there was no room for colloquy, interchange, or exegesis.  These women were vixenish harridans who stopped at nothing to vent their vile hatred of anything to the right of Marxist-Leninist Maoism. 

Without a doubt this was the place for Bracken.  She had no interest in Israel, Palestine, the black man, transgenders, immigrants, or Wall Street - the shibboleths of the movement; but the venomous hateful disposition of those marching on Widener Library was appealing.  Birds of a feather. 

One can only imagine what these cabals were like on the inside - a hundred of the nastiest, most rabidly spiteful women on campus all in one place.  What would they say to each other when they were not at the barricades.  'What shall I cook for dinner? Did you turn off the lights before leaving?'

Yet Bracken slept well, like a baby.  Pleasant dreams was not in her repertoire.  In fact she could not remember even one that suggested pleasantness or a babbling brook; so it was an enviable, dreamless, restorative sleep. 

Sex was on her mind as it is for most young women of her age, yet the thought of being slobbered over and penetrated by some man was disgusting, and the idea of dildoing and eating out one of the dykey trolls of Hadley Hall (Harvard, thanks to aggressive lobbying by the Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender advocacy groups on campus decided to create a safe space for 'women of alternate means') was unthinkable. 

During the halcyon years of affirmative action and diversity, the university recruited as many lesbians as possible who could pass the academic admissions standards required - standards that had been lowered to assure minority representation on campus. 

The admissions office, anxious to make a political statement, did not just base admission on stated sexual preference but wanted women who looked, acted, and behaved like men-hating dykey trollops.  The whole nine yards - E-boots, chains, leather, and recent dog-leash experience at the San Francisco Folsom Street fair. Over the top, perhaps, and playing on caricature certainly; but a point had to be made. 

The very suggestion that Bracken should roll over for one of these women was unconscionable.  As a result, she was a sexual no-show, a state of being which simply wouldn't stand. 

So she did a volte face and channeled Laclos' Les Liaison Dangereuses where she played a feminine Valmont, a woman with no interest in men whatsoever, but for whom conquest, humiliation, and abject repudiation would be worth the effort.  She became Harvard's version of a femme fatale - serious minded, well dressed in a casual offhand way with only a touch of eye shadow and mascara with an outstanding sexual allure, the bait in the trap. 

One might assume that such a ferociously misanthropic woman could not be in the least attractive, let alone alluring; but that would be to misjudge our Bracken who was actually a beautiful woman, Hollywood ready if she had ever set her compass in that direction. No one had ever said that a succubus had to be as ugly as one of Macbeth's Weird Sisters 

And so it was that she seduced Harvard's best and brightest.  Not the Asian geeks squirreled away in their carrels and laboratories until well  midnight, but the aristocratic legatees who were now a minority, but still very much a presence.  Beacon Hill, Nantucket, the Vineyard, St. Tropez, and skiing at Gstaad were de rigeur. 

'Find 'em, fuck 'em, suck 'em, and leave 'em' was the old adage popular even at high-end, socially sensitive universities like Harvard who at alumni insistence kept Deke, DKE, Delta Kappa Epsilon jock fraternity known for drunken football players stirring martinis with their dicks and having their way with any woman brave enough to party. 

Bracken would be the Deke female equivalent.  Nothing quite so crude of course.  One must know one's audience, environment, and prey; but predatory as any jock on campus.  And so it was that she met up to her expectations, had Harvard seniors mooning over her, showing up at her dorm room at all hours of the night, begging for just a goodnight kiss. 

The sex was just what she needed of course, and after a few semesters of this was as full and satisfied with male cock as any woman could be.  Then came graduation, graduate school, and a career in Washington. 

I jump ahead so quickly because Bracken had simply acted true to form in the years after Harvard, and it was only in Washington that she found her home.  The radical progressive wing of the Democrat party was right up her alley.  From the lowest intern to the most senior Senator, these politicians were the most meanspirited, hateful, ignorant men and women she had ever been around.  Harvard was pre-school compared to this vaporous, hysterical animus. 

Her colleagues never demanded anything more than biliousness.  No policy papers, no logical exposition of contrary notions, no thoughtful discussion pieces, no nothing except polemics and apoplectic, political St. Vitus' dances. 

It was the Trump era and no holds were barred.  The most heinous, ad hominem, scurrilous, intemperate accusations were encouraged.  The man and his evil empire must be destroyed and left to fester and rot.  What a riotously good time for Bracken!  She had never been happier - and that was something for a woman who was always thought to have not a drop of happiness in her. 

Eventually she returned to New Brighton, bought an independent pharmacy, catered to the West Enders of the town, and was embraced by a community who had known her when she was an irreconcilably horrid girl.  God moves in mysterious ways, they said, as they waited patiently for Bracken to compound their drugs.