Читать книгу Somebody to Love - Matt Richards - Страница 9

Everything has a beginning.

Our beginning is in the Belgian Congo, deep in the heart of Africa. The year is 1908 and the country is attempting to rebuild itself following the brutal regime of King Leopold II.

This was the year the Congo Free State was abolished and annexed as a colony of Belgium, to become known as the Belgian Congo, an area 75 times larger than Belgium itself. King Leopold died a year later, having never once set foot in the Congo region.

Before long the Belgian Congo had become, to many, a ‘model colony’ and the transfer of responsibility to Brussels had ensured much of the wealth produced in the Congo was reinvested within the region. Missionaries arrived and built hospitals and clinics and the Church ran schools. An infrastructure of railways, ports and roads underwent construction and mining companies provided homes for their staff as well as welfare and technical training.

But while this had great benefits for the citizens of cities and towns such as Boma and Leopoldville¹, for those inhabitants deep in the rainforest, the tentacles of progress barely touched them. These tribal people continued to exist as they had done for thousands of years, surviving through hunting and gathering before heading to a nearby village or town to trade bush meat or the prized honey they had collected from the rainforest’s canopy. A number of tribes existed within the vast Congo rainforest. The most famous were the ‘Pygmies’, known as the Mbuti of the Ituri Forest in northern Congo, but there were also the Aka, the Twa and the Baka tribes and their taller and more dominant neighbours, the Bantu. And among the Bantu tribe lived a young hunter.

Our hunter lives deep within the Congolese jungle as part of the small ethnic Bantu group that inhabits the upper Sangha river basin. Nomadic in nature, the Bantu survive by hunting bush meat within the forest. Being young, fit and muscular, he is one of the best hunters within the tribe and, not only does he hunt, but he has been entrusted to take the bush meat, carcasses and furs upriver to the city of Leopoldville to trade for the manioc root from which to make cassava bread for the rest of the tribe. However, first he has to catch his prey.

Armed with a long spear, a cast-iron knife and a wire for setting traps, he had crept into the forest the day before to set his snares. He used a twig to pin a lethal loop of wire to the ground, then covered it in leaves. A living sapling bent over by another wire provided the spring that pulls the noose tight. Now, a full night and day since he set his traps, he checks the snares to see what, if anything, he has caught.

Drawing near to his first snare, the hunter hears a disturbance in the undergrowth ahead. He approaches slowly and silently, wary of disturbing the lethal green mamba, bright as blades of grass, who lurk on the rainforest floor and in trees. Finally, he gets close to the snare and, peering through the vine-like tangle of lianas, he sees that he has snared a young male chimpanzee. The animal, once energetic and full of life, now appears exhausted and almost dead.

Moving closer, he notices that it has gnawed off part of its own leg in a struggle to free itself from the snare. He rushes towards the chimp and spears it quickly, but not quick enough. The chimp’s teeth sink into his left hand. He recoils as the sharp pain flows up his arm. With his full force he pushes the spear deep into the chimp’s chest. It is enough: the chimp releases its grip on life.

He examines his wounded hand. The bite is not too deep as the creature was weak from loss of blood. He cleans up the wound as best he can, then cuts open the dead animal and discards its entrails with an iron knife. Once this job is done, he hoists it across his shoulders and heads back to his boat. The warm blood from the chimp mingles and mixes with his own blood from the open wound.

Unbeknown to him, the chimpanzee he has hunted and killed is carrying a virus. It enters the hunter’s bloodstream at the wound, and the virus, in that moment finding his blood to be not so different from the blood of the chimp, takes hold. He is the perfect host, given that chimpanzees and humans share more than 98 per cent sequence identity across their genomes. The virus immediately begins to replicate aggressively. Oblivious to his new infection, the hunter throws the dead chimp into his boat, on top of a pile of carcasses of various animals he has already hunted, species such as pangolins and small antelope, and pushes out from the riverbank. He makes his way on the current towards Leopoldville, a three-day journey down the Sangha river.

Around this time, Leopoldville was a thriving, bustling marketplace with a booming population. While Boma, over 200 miles to the west, was the capital city of the Belgian Congo and residence of the Governor-General, Leopoldville was a sprawling town with single-storey shacks down to the banks of the river Congo, a mighty 3,000-mile expanse of water that curved north and east to Kisangani, more than 600 miles away. Once a fishing village, the recent completion of the Matadi-Leopoldville portage railway meant that it had become a commercial centre. Consequently, it was to Leopoldville that traders, hawkers and hunters from throughout the Belgian Congo would descend to sell their wares. And where there are traders, hawkers and hunters, there are also prostitutes.

After three days on the river, our hunter arrives in Leopoldville. He has made this journey many times before, usually with the same species that he has tracked down and killed in the jungle. This time appears no different. The carcasses he has transported, including the chimpanzee that bit him, are cut up to be sold, cooked or smoked. As a result of this cooking, the chimp meat will likely not infect anyone else. The skins and hides he will exchange with other traders for maize and cassava. But for the bush meat, he manages to make a few Belgian francs – enough money, in fact, to celebrate with a drink and a visit to one of the many prostitutes parading up and down the streets. Either on this, or subsequent visits, the hunter will pass on the virus that lingers unknown within him and that’s all that’s needed for the virus to begin its spread throughout mankind.² The transmission of the virus from chimpanzee to hunter was likely the one and only time this one strain of HIV passed across the species boundary, from chimp to human, and then successfully established itself to become the pandemic we still face today.

In the densely populated Leopoldville, where the ratio of men to women was high and prostitution rife, our hunter’s virus was relatively easy to spread. Even more dangerously, the period from infection to death could be, and often was, some years before it compromised the immune system of its host, allowing it ample time to pass silently from the first human victim to the next. The prostitute the hunter spent the night with in Leopoldville, along with other prostitutes he visited on subsequent trips to the city, passed it on to their clients, who then returned home to their wives, girlfriends and partners, and so the fatal cycle slowly began.