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Much is still to be learned about the area's geology, animal and plant life. It is a zoologist's dream: highland chimpanzee, giant forest hog, Ruwenzori leopard, Ruwenzori hyrax, the unique colobus monkey, sunbirds, crimson-breasted turacos, scarlet-tufted malachites. It is a botanist's dream too: lobelias and groundsels never less than 20 feet in height when fully grown; giant heathers of 40 or 50 feet; old man's beard; giant ferns; Stair's purple-pink orchid; a riot of mosses and parasites at 40 feet. 'What makes for this giantism?' asks Tom Stacey, 'Have I not yet said? It is the consequence of a climate comprising summer by day and winter by night, fed - or tormented - by vast rainfall and a diurnal dose of infra-red and ultra-violet from a sun immediately overhead whose rays are filtered by negligible atmosphere. No other massif on earth matches this.'

Such is the Bakonzo tribe's heartland, indeed their Olympus.

'Peer, then, from out of this story as if through a high window. You will see a white man writing about black men, and about his English self in Africa among Africans, across almost half a century. As your eyes strain for what more may be seen from that window, so has my own account of events strained beyond its own locus and narrative - beyond the specificities of what I have been witnessing in Ruwenzori this past half-century towards what the study of tribe may show the student to be generally true of men at any place in any time: a straining out from multiplicity towards a certain universality.

'You who have been beside me for so long will have grown familiar with what I claim to be a constant in man's presence on his planet, namely the holiness of ethnicity. Race and place, I say, belong to one another not just inexorably but righteously: the proper sense of his ethnicity feeds Man the conviction of his identity and a glimpse of his grandeur. No substitute exists for that food. For a man to be deprived of it in the context of his grandeur is as for a man to be deprived of his childhood in the eye of his maturity. He is a man without root: without root he is without leaf.

'This ethnicity is a protean reality - an allegiance implied by every combination of blood and language, territory and history, culture and inheritance, cosmology and ethic: a reality on the change by the decade, the year, the month, the day, the hour. It will be today broad, tomorrow narrow. It will mutate, shift, merge, mix, be willfully adopted, or consciously assumed, or parasitical upon another. It will misrepresent itself, misread itself, dishonour itself; and it will inspire, uplift, and rally. It will be subject to exploitation and corruption; it will be conducive to glory and sacrifice. It will be a source of war and a source of peace.'