He moved his head and eyes slowly and unbelievingly. He opened his mouth but could say nothing.

Every smallest sign of mirth suddenly left his face. “When Kenge topped the rise, he stopped dead. When Henri told him it also turned solid at that height, Kenge gave him a long steady look and said, “Bongo yako!” (“You liar!”) Henri said that it was water that turned colour when it was high up, but Kenge wanted to know why it didn’t run down the mountainside like any other water. I tried to explain what the snow was – he thought it was some kind of white rock. “Kenge could not believe that they were the same mountains that we had seen from the forest there they had seemed just like large hills to him. It also shows how obdurate we can be in the face of new information, or new realities, which we had no idea existed before they are pointed out to us: Turnbull’s fascinating description of Kenge’s reaction to the expansive views of the high, snow-topped peaks of the Ruwenzori Mountains and the plains below them is illustrative of how all of us are shaped by our environment.

It is Kenge’s very first journey outside of the cloistered jungle. There they are met by an African park ranger named Henri. There is a poignant scene near the end of the story when Turnbull and Kenge, his Mbuti friend, leave the confines of the dense tropical rainforest and arrive by jeep to the edges of an expansive grassland and wildlife reserve below the Ruwenzori Mountains near the Uganda border. Turnbull’s The Forest People which documents his three years living among the Mbuti pygmies of the Belgian Congo (modern day Zaire) in the late 1950s.

The forest people by colin m turnbull