Of Bonobos and Men. Deni Ellis Bechard
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everyone wore threadbare clothes—T-shirts disintegrated at the shoulders, hanging from their seams, and pants tattered beneath the knees.
Again, the Congolese took charge, villagers helping under the direction of Marcel Falay. Tall and broadly built, with a perpetually jovial expression, he was BCI’s regional director and agronomist. He’d worked with BCI years before on a project. Afterward, when he was with another employer, he broke his foot in a motorcycle accident, and BCI had paid for his treatment. Later, when his contract finished, he returned to work for them, staying on even during the periods when they lacked funding.
As men and women who had been involved with BCI over the years shook my hand and introduced themselves, others loaded our bags into a Toyota Land Cruiser more battered than les esprits des morts in Kinshasa. BCI bought it from a dealer in Dubai in 2006, secondhand but in perfect condition, and had it shipped to Kinshasa, then upriver. As part of BCI’s resource-sharing agreement with the people of the reserve, it had served for many community-development projects as well as tree planting. But a driver flipped it over an incline, and that, as well as constant use hauling people and goods, had left it dilapidated, the bumpers collapsing, the panels loose. BCI’s other vehicle was stranded in Kokolopori, a Land Rover with a broken axle.
Michael climbed into the passenger seat with BCI’s new photographic equipment. He would be documenting their work for the purpose of fund-raising. Sally and I each got on the backs of the two motorcycles driven by BCI staff.
The road through the forest was as narrow as a footpath, so sandy that my driver briefly lost control and had to slide to a stop. I expected the land to be largely flat, but it rose and fell, and following the path was like going through the hallways of an old mansion, one moment closed in and the next entering a large room. This was how I felt when the forest opened suddenly into a village, a dozen houses of mud daubed on woven branches, children in underwear running out to wave. Then the forest closed in again, the path winding between hillocks and declines, before we entered another room: this time a clearing around a stream.
The bridge consisted of seven narrow fifteen-foot logs laid side by side, the gaps between them wide enough to break a leg. Sally and I dismounted, and our drivers picked the flattest, straightest log and drove across. Then the Land Cruiser arrived. Everyone got out but the driver.
A young man walked across the bridge and turned. He lifted his arms, his index fingers raised, and with tiny movements of his fingers, he directed the driver. The Land Cruiser inched forward, front wheels on two of the logs. He kept motioning, a little to the left, but halfway across, it began to go too far, only an inch of its right front wheel still on the log, the rest over the water. The young man urged it back. The driver corrected, and as soon as the front tires touched the dirt, he fired the engine and raced onto the path, the wheels crushing the grass alongside it.
Ten minutes later, we came to a similar bridge and went through the same process, but the third one was longer, at least thirty feet, with planks laid across its logs. The Land Cruiser inched forward, the wood groaning beneath it. The young man directed with his fingers as the bridge swayed and creaked. Nearby, a fisherman sat in a narrow boat carved from a small tree trunk. Beneath high reeds that were reflected around him, he floated, watching without expression.
After climbing a rise from which the rainforest spread out, immense treetops rolling on to the horizon, we arrived in Djolu. To my eye, the only thing that distinguished it as a town was the absence of dense forest. With a population of ten thousand, it was without running water, electricity, or phones. At first glance, it resembled an agglomeration of small farms, the mud houses set far apart, separated by trees and gardens, colorful clothing and blankets drying on thatch roofs. Ducks, chickens, goats, and pigs wandered about. The occasional concrete building with a corrugated roof and crumbling, water-stained walls stood out, each belonging to a different regional leader and likely dating back fifty years or more to Belgian colonial rule. Wending everywhere, between trees and hedges, behind houses, were numerous sandy paths like arroyos. The beaten dirt roads were often sunk well below the surface of the land, the clay sculpted by running water. When the rainy season came, the town must have as many waterways as Venice.
We drove in front of the stade, the stadium, a raised stone foundation the size of a hut, with eight brick pillars, a metal roof, and some benches and concrete steps, all crowded with boys and girls. On the athletic field on the other side of the road, a ragtag bunch of boys were kicking a soccer ball. The children forgot about the game and pointed at us instead, screaming, “Mundele, mundele, mundele!”
This word, meaning “white person” or “foreigner,” would be the mantra in Équateur. The children stared, wide-eyed, shouting it as if calling our names, and it took me a moment to realize that they were screaming it to draw other Congolese. They were announcing a rarity, many of them seeing their first white person in months, and farther out, in the villages, possibly their first ever.
Just past the stadium, we came to a six-room mud-brick house, the Djolu headquarters of Vie Sauvage, literally “Wildlife,” the local NGO that BCI had spent years developing as their primary partner in the region. A fifteen-foot-high termite hill hid the building from the road, and children scaled its sides, gathering at the top to get a view of our activities, or reaching down to catch the hands of their friends and help them up. In the yard of beaten dirt was a paillote, a word that literally means “straw hut,” though in the Congo it indicates a communal open-sided building with a thatch roof.
After some discussion with the Congolese staff, Sally and Michael decided to sleep in Djolu, at the Vie Sauvage headquarters. The forty-five-mile drive to Kokolopori took four hours if all went well, since the road was rutted, often with trees fallen across it and drop-offs on the sides. If we got a flat tire or broke down, we’d have to finish in the dark, holding flashlights out the window since the Land Cruiser’s headlamps didn’t work. Sally also didn’t know the condition of the camp; she hadn’t been there in over six months, and termites and insects were quick to devour rafters and the roofs of buildings.
We ate a dinner of cassava, rice, avocado, fried banana, and spicy stewed chicken in a red broth that was delicious poured over everything else. I dabbed a little of the pili-pili sauce on my food, the crushed hot pepper making me break into a sweat. We finished the meal with rainforest honey brought down from the trees, dark and liquid, poured into glasses to sip, or to be mixed with lotoko, a type of moonshine made from corn, cassava, or plantain.
Everyone appeared to know Sally and Michael, and stopped to speak. They discussed projects, people’s families, and the reserve, then, inevitably, the diminished funding and financial difficulties. All seemed to be involved with BCI in some way, doing odd jobs for Vie Sauvage or working at the Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural (ISDR), the technical college that Vie Sauvage and BCI had founded.
Josephine Mpanga, a petite woman in her late thirties, stopped by, and I learned that she ran the biggest NGO in the territory after Vie Sauvage. Several years back BCI had jump-started her work with a microcredit loan and a few sewing machines, and she had since expanded a sewing cooperative into a program to employ women on a number of development and conservation projects.
With a straight spine, her posture authoritative if somewhat fatigued, she sat across from Sally and described how she hoped to spread her work to nearby villages. Sally listened, nodding or asking questions. Later, she told me that she wished BCI could support Josephine more, that Josephine was among the most determined leaders in Djolu.
Marcel came inside to tell us that we had to visit Djolu’s newly appointed government administrator, and we followed him out. The sun had already gone down, the sky a deep blue that suggested the density of the darkness to come even as it silhouetted the palms along the road. Djolu is built on higher ground, and as we walked we had a view over the forest, the dark, misted curves of immense treetops set against the distance like mountains.
“Part of building social capital,” Sally told me, “is maintaining good relationships with chiefs and officials, and showing them that we respect their authority. If they understand our projects and goals, then the community is more likely to understand and support us.”
“It must get tiring,” I