Tote bag
Medicine, a car battery, three kilos of rice: this mandrill tote bag carries Ndong's portrait, a mandrill who spends his whole shift hauling errands that aren't his own. It's from my Animal Kinhood series, where animals dress and live like people, and it serves exactly the same purpose he'd use it for: fitting in whatever the day calls for.
Foto: Y S (@santonii) / Unsplash (Unsplash License)Mandrillus sphinx
Show me the light, and I'll stop.
Tropical lowland rainforest across west-central Africa: southern Cameroon, mainland Equatorial Guinea, Gabon — home by far to the largest population — and the southwest of the Republic of the Congo. It favors primary forest and dense ginger thickets, and also turns up in forest-savanna mosaics like those of Lopé.
In his story, Ndong drives the local that crosses Gabon, and behind the cab seat he piles up whatever people hand him: medicine for a house in Ndjolé, a battery someone needs in Booué, a package a woman left him on the Owendo platform for a relative he doesn't know at all. He lines them up in drop-off order, so he doesn't have to search for anything at three in the morning. Nobody pays him for it, and nobody has ever asked him to in writing.
Between Abanga and Ndjolé there are places with no platform and no name on the schedule. People stand at the edge of the track with a kerosene lamp or a phone flashlight, and he stops. He waits while they climb aboard with their bundles, counts who's gotten on, and pulls away. Mandrills, by the way, carry their food in pouches in their cheeks that reach down the sides of their neck: they load up fast and eat later somewhere else.
