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The system by which Zaïre works, and which this card [a card urging Zaireans to be helpful to foreigners] was a wonderfully hopeless attempt to correct, is very simple. Every official you encounter will make life as unpleasant as he possibly can until you pay him to stop it. In U.S. dollars. He then passes you on to the next official, who will be unpleasant to you all over again.

I began to feel how patronising it was of us to presume to judge their intelligence, as if ours was any kind of standard by which to measure. I tried to imagine instead how he saw us, but of course that’s almost impossible to do, because the assumption you end up making as you try to bridge the imaginative gap are, of course, your own, and the most misleading assumptions are the ones you don’t even know you’re making.

It was hard to avoid the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was missing the point. I couldn’t even be sure it wasn’t me.

The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realised that it was a system at all and that it wasn’t something that was just there.

I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings.

So the question really is this: How do you persuade a young Yemeni that a rhino horn dagger is not a symbol of your manhood but a signal of the fact that you need such a symbol?

Like most colonies, Zaïre had impose on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function of which was to refer decisions upward to its colonial masters. Local officials rarely had the power to do things, only to prevent them from being done until bribed. So once the colonial masters are removed, the bureaucracy continues to thrash around like a headless chicken with nothing to do but trip itself up, bump into things, and, when it can get the firepower, shoot itself in the foot. You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able to find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.

I believe in traveling light, but then I also believe that I should give up smoking and shop early for Christmas.

But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we’re driving.

I didn’t notice that I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals.

Up until that point [the extinction of the dodo] it hadn’t really clicked with man that an animal could just cease to exist. It was as if we hadn’t realised that if we kill something, it simply won’t be there any more. Ever. As a result of the extinction of the dodo we are sadder and wiser.

I watched the gorilla’s eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don’t listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn’t been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.