Master of the Bush

The hero seemed unlikely enough--an obsessed French dentist named Morel with a passion for elephants. The creation of French Novelist Romain Gary, in his novel The Roots of Heaven, Morel had brooded in a Nazi concentration camp, conceived such a blazing reverence for life that, once freed, he took off for Darkest Africa to become a self-appointed protector of wild beasts threatened with extermination by onrushing civilization.

Living Character. Shortly after Gary's novel first came out in France in 1956, Gary had a long letter from a game warden living in the Ivory Coast territory of French West Africa. Raphael Matta, a Frenchman of Italian descent, seemed Morel sprung to uncanny life--though Gary and Matta had never met or heard the other's name. Like Morel, Matta had undergone a shattering World War II experience. An exploding land mine almost took his life, and left him totally deaf.

Then one day he visited the Vincennes zoo. There he learned that 600 varieties of mammals are facing extinction; no species have already disappeared from earth just since 1800. Matta was relatively young (30), making $280 a month in an export-import firm in Paris, and marked for advancement. But he never hesitated. He threw over both present prosperity and future prospects to take a $160-a-month job as superintendent of the 2,000,000-acre Bouna game reserve, 500 miles upcountry from Abidjan.

Accompanied by his chic French wife Christiana, Matta set up housekeeping in a native hut. A slight (barely 100 Ibs.) man with bristling black hair and piercing eyes, he had a strange way with the wild animals--antelopes, buffaloes, lions, elephants--that were his charges, walked fearlessly among the wildest and greatest beasts. He always refused to carry a weapon against them. "If I did," he said, "even not to use it, the charm wou'd vanish, for I would have the overwhelming conviction of having committed a betrayal of the animals' trust." He bathed with hippos, swam with a pet crocodile. Once he came upon a lion about to give the coup de grace to an antelope, spoke sharply and stared the lion back into the bush.

The Master's Voice. In awe, the surrounding Lobi tribesmen referred to him as "Kongo Massa," or "Master of the Bush." But the Lobi men are hunters, and Matta's hippos and antelopes meant meat to them. Skins could be sold to white trophy hunters, and tribal Africans pay high prices for elephants' sexual organs for use in fertility rites. Matta had only nine men to protect an area twice the size of Long Island. He begged the chiefs to restrain the poachers. That failing, he appealed to his own French superiors in Abidjan for more money to hire more guards. They refused on political grounds: in modern Africa, the breech-clouted poacher may well be a duly registered voter. Whatever the provocation, the authorities warned, Matta must do nothing to injure or otherwise upset the Lobis, especially near an election.

After a new check of the animal population revealed that poachers had drastically reduced their numbers, Matta became more and more fanatic. Buckling on a carbine, he began raiding poachers' villages, confiscating arms, and talking vaguely of a world parliament to protect wild things. He sent wild letters to his French superiors in Abidjan: "It is now no longer possible to drive me from Bouna without bayonets and unpredictable consequences. I am all-powerful because my faith will rise above mountains."

The Limits of Faith. When some Diou-las complained to Matta of some slight inflicted by the Lobis, Matta took them in tow and set off for the Lobi village.

It was a time dedicated to ceremonies initiating young warriors and honoring the dead, and outsiders were forbidden. But at an imperious command from the Kongo Massa, the Lobi warriors laid down their arms. Just then a Dioula lunged for the pile of weapons. Already worked up to a religious frenzy, the frantic young Lobis shouted, ''Kongo Massa has betrayed us." In an instant Matta fell, his head laid open by a native hatchet, his back porcupined with poisoned arrows.

Last week, in Abidjan, twelve warriors were offered up by the tribe to stand trial for murder. Dutifully two Lobi men who could most easily be spared by the tribe, one undersized and the other clubfooted, confessed that it was they who had killed Matta. The court sentenced them to death, but they seemed scarcely to care: by confessing that they had shed blood in the holy season, they had violated a taboo that would have ostracized them from the tribe forever.

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