Wild Spirit by Annette Henderson

at sundown.
    I wondered if he would be more forthcoming about the Roux house. ‘Who were the Roux?’
    Kruger raised tired-looking eyes from his glass and focused on some point beyond the ceiling. As he spoke little English, he answered in French.
    â€˜Old Roux was a prospector. Came in after the gold. He was a young man then. Came to Africa to seek his fortune.’
    â€˜Was there much gold around here?’
    â€˜Not here. Up the river.’ He inclined his head towards the Ivindo. ‘He struck it rich – alluvial gold. Went panning for it up on the Nouna River near the Congo border, and around Camp Six. Made a fortune, they did.’
    â€˜Who are “they”?’
    â€˜He and Carmen.’
    â€˜Carmen?’
    â€˜His wife.’
    â€˜Where did she fit in?’ His brief responses gave little away, but I sensed a good tale.
    â€˜Carmen? Well, there’s a story! What a woman! Beautiful! Still is.’
    â€˜Go on.’ Getting him to elaborate was like pulling teeth.
    â€˜Roux had been here a few years on his own. She was back in France. It was all arranged that she would come out and marry him. But he got leprosy. So he wrote to her, breaking the news and telling her not to come, that he was dying.’
    â€˜And still she did?’
    â€˜Couldn’t stop her. Said she’d agreed to marry him and marry him she would. Came out here, a young girl. They got married, and in the end he was cured by Albert Schweitzer. She worked with him in the business – remarkable woman. Learnt all the dialects, knew the Gabonese by name, handled the money. Old Roux died a millionaire. She’s back in France, but she comes here sometimes for a visit. It’s her house you’ll be sleeping in tonight. We rent it from her, but it’s old now …’
    Before we’d planned our African trip I had never heard of Gabon, but I had heard of its most famous historical figure, Albert Schweitzer, at primary school. Schweitzer’s mythological status in western civilisation, as a musician, doctor, theologian and philosopher who had sacrificed his comfortable European life for a struggle with tropical diseases in the swamps of Lambarene, had been unassailable for decades. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1952. In later life, he had had his critics as colonialism met its demise, but the fact that his leprosy hospital at Lambarene still operated impressed me as a heroic achievement. Listening to Kruger, I had the sense, just as I’d had at the Roux house, that we were being drawn into a time warp where little had changed in decades. Kruger lived alone. ‘How long have you been in Africa, Monsieur Kruger?’
    â€˜Thirty-four years. I’m one of the old hands.’ He spoke in a monotone, barely moving a muscle of his heavily veined face.
    â€˜What did you do in the beginning, before you came up here to SOMIFER?’
    â€˜I was in the timber camps. There was only timber in those days – Gaboon wood, okoumé – it was big business, till the bottom fell out of it.’
    â€˜And after that?’
    â€˜Oh, I knocked around.’ He must have been getting fed up with my questions.
    â€˜How long have you been in Makokou?’
    â€˜Six years now. Too long.’ There it was – his confession of boredom and frustration. This was the man who would be our link with the outside world once we moved to Belinga. I wondered how that would go.
    Win was only following snatches of the conversation. Itried translating, but it proved clumsy and ruined the flow of the stories. He told me not to worry, he’d try and get the gist his own way.
    Even though I didn’t particularly like the aniseed taste of Ricard, I accepted a second glass: I wanted to prolong the encounter. Kruger had a repertoire of anecdotes of African life, and once he realised I had an insatiable appetite for them, he loosened up.
    â€˜What about traditional beliefs and