The Lioness and My Father’s Pride

The lioness fixed her eyes on us. We spotted the male belatedly. My father and I were in Congo’s Virunga National Park in a car with two of his Congolese colleagues. The young man and woman were escorting us from eastern Congo to Rwanda, where my father would be on a mission for UNIDO, the UN Industrial Development Organization. When the man slowed the car so that we could observe a lioness and her cubs, my father announced he would get out to take a picture. I stiffened, horrified. The only camera we had was my Kodak Instamatic. I hadn’t asked for a photograph. I didn’t want my father to leave the safety of the car.

I was sixteen and had flown a few days earlier from New York to visit my father in what was then called Zaire, where he’d relocated less than two years earlier to escape political persecution in his home country, Haiti. In the later years of the Baby Doc Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, my father, a U.S.-trained economist, would periodically be approached to take on a high-level government job. But in each position, whether it took one month or a year, my father would clash with corrupt officials, and his job and life would be on the line. The regime had locked him up twice when I was a small girl. In 1983, my father chose exile.

This wasn’t my first time seeing him in Africa. The previous year, I’d spent six months with him, his wife, and my two half sisters in their two-bedroom Kinshasa apartment before returning to my American mother in New York. I was excited about this visit because it was the first time I’d see the interior of Zaire. I’d see life beyond the concrete and crowds of the capital. Dad and I flew in a small plane from Kinshasa to Goma in North Kivu, on the border with Rwanda. After a night in a local guesthouse, the two UNIDO staff offered to drive us through the wildlife preserve.

The sky was soft blue, pocked with cumulus clouds. Tangled vegetation covered the earth. We made a stop by a muddy watering hole, where dozens of hippos wallowed like rocks, almost completely submerged. Our companions pointed out Mount Nyiragongo, the still-active volcano, in the distance. When we stopped at a river, I slipped out of my sneakers to cool my feet among the rocks. Dad took my camera and snapped a photo of me with the volcano in the backdrop, grown out bangs flopping over the left side of my face.

Further on, we saw meandering elephants and loitering monkeys, before we came upon the lioness and her four cubs in the grass. My father’s colleague slowed the car so we could get a good look. The male was off to the side, less than 100 feet away, observing our vehicle. When my father announced that he would get out and take a picture, our acquaintance at the wheel gave a half smile and said he didn’t advise it. The lioness might consider my father a threat to her cubs. Dad dismissed the warning, saying the park’s lions must be used to visitors. I recoiled when he reached for the camera in my hand.

“Dad, no,” I protested, wide-eyed.

My father’s face hardened.

“I don’t want the picture!” I insisted, my voice rising. We were safe inside the car. Why would anyone get out and approach lions? I didn’t want to sit and watch my father be mauled and torn to shreds.

But a fierce determination had come over my father. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want the photo. It didn’t matter that the camera was mine. I knew this side of him. This was the side that pressed harder on the gas pedal when my older sister Sonia or I expressed fear as he swerved around Haiti’s hairpin mountain bends. He pressed harder on the accelerator because he believed we should never doubt his judgment. We had learned to suppress our terror in the car, and I knew to suppress it now. It would only exacerbate his actions. My fear offended him. My father did not want his judgment questioned. He grabbed my camera and got out.

I faced front and looked down. I couldn’t watch as my father inched closer to the vigilant lions. In the front of the car, neither the man nor the woman said a word. They must have felt powerless to contradict this brash foreign executive. I sat terrified, barely breathing, my eyes averted. I couldn’t say a word to the acquaintances, with whom a short time earlier I’d chatted warmly at the watering hole. I glanced only once, just as my father stopped, defenseless in the grass, halfway between the car and the pride. His graying hair was combed neatly back, his buttoned shirt tucked into belted jeans. I didn’t dare look at the lions. I had time to see Dad lift my camera to his face and pause, before I turned my eyes back to the car floor. I heard Dad return triumphantly, but I didn’t look as he climbed in beside me. I turned my head to the opposite window and sat fuming, in stony silence, as the car continued to Rwanda.

When I returned to the States two weeks later, I developed my photos. There was one photograph of the lion and a separate photograph of the lioness and her cubs. They weren't great photos. There was little color contrast between the lions and the dry grassland. My father never asked to see them. I would have tossed them in a shoebox with other wildlife photos, but instead I put them in my photo album. They reminded me of a day that could have gone much differently. They reminded me of my father’s impenetrable pride.

My father has taught me many things in life. When I was three, he taught me to swim in a pool in Haiti, cheering me on as I paddled furiously while my stomach rested securely in his palms. In my teens, he gave me driving lessons, cautioning me to eye the wheels of standing vehicles, particularly tap-tap buses, to anticipate their sudden shift into traffic. He taught me about the Haitian revolution, about capitalism and Marxism, about integrity and about helping those with less. My father always made me feel adored, and I worshipped him. On that day in Virunga, he wanted to teach me not to question him. Instead, he taught me about human flaw. He taught me that there are aspects of people that are untenable—characteristics that make you want to run from them. And still, you can love them with all your heart.

The following year, my father sent me a postcard from Zaire of Virunga Park in North Kivu. On one side was a vivid, professional photograph of a golden lion resting in the grass. On the other side, my father wrote:

Dear Jenny!
Remember him?
Well, he sends you his Best regards and love.
Love Love. Daddy

I rolled my eyes, a half smile on my lips, and tucked the card away in a drawer.

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