Of Bonobos and Men. Deni Ellis Bechard
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human interactions, I was ready for bed.
She laughed, her voice a little hoarse. “Sometimes it gets to be a little intense, but I enjoy talking to people. And it makes things happen here. It’s what’s got us this far.”
We stayed with the administrator for an hour, introducing ourselves and discussing regional projects, from those on the reserve to initiatives in Djolu and at the technical college. Even hours later, after we’d returned to the Vie Sauvage headquarters and the generator had roared to life, people came to the door, pausing at the edge of the light, looking in, letting their eyes adjust as their smiles took shape and they called out Sally and Michael’s names.
Several of them ran their own conservation areas that they had modeled on Kokolopori, getting trackers and eco-guards to volunteer with the promise of eventual employment once there was funding. Whenever possible, BCI had supported them with modest amounts.
Michael showed them photos he had downloaded of eco-lodges around the world, explaining possibilities for bringing tourism to the area. Local conservationists and villagers gathered around the table, staring at the computer screen. He told me that many people here believe a drab, American ranch house with tiny windows would appeal to vacationing foreigners, and he wanted to dispel this. He brought up images of open-air bamboo buildings, elevated bungalows with wooden floors and palm-thatch roofs. It might take another decade, but if the communities protected their forests and bonobos, ecotourism could fund them far better than agriculture or logging. As the men hunched around Michael’s laptop, two teenage boys lingered in the door, listening and watching.
The headquarters doubled as a guesthouse for BCI and reserve visitors, and I went to my room, hardly bigger than its cot. Eight large cockroaches clung to the wall, as well as two gray spiders as big as my palm, with eyes that glinted like a single diamond when I shone my headlamp on them. I asked the building’s keeper about getting a mosquito net, and he told me there were no mosquitoes at the moment, but I insisted, not worried about mosquitoes either.
I crawled inside the net, tucked its edges under the thin foam mattress, and lay down. I was exhausted, but the day’s images kept coming back: the battered Land Cruiser, the fragile, makeshift bridges, the dire poverty. I wondered how much worse it must have been after the war, and how much effort must have been required to work in a place where the human need felt this suffocating. Many of us imagine carrying out dramatic changes in impoverished places, but few have the patience for the small, time-consuming, and seemingly endless details that make it possible.
I forced myself to stop thinking and drifted in and out of sleep for hours while Michael and Sally stayed with the others, their talk and laughter resonating late into the night.
Roosters woke me. They began at dawn, echoing each other’s cries from across the town. My sleeping mind seemed to unravel, pulled little by little back into the world. Occasionally there were lulls and I dozed off, but then the crowing started up again.
It took me a moment to remember where I was. When I’d first moved to a city in my early twenties, to downtown Montréal, I lived in an apartment whose windows faced an inner courtyard. I sometimes awoke at night, disoriented, and had to go out to the street, to stand on the sidewalk in my socks, just to find my bearings, to see which direction was north. I wasn’t sure what startled me awake those nights, at two or three o’clock—if I was used to freedom and big spaces, to sensing my place on the earth.
I often had a similar experience during my travels, a desire to look at a map and see how the landscape made sense, where the rivers originated, whether the mountains I was seeing were the beginning of a higher, more dramatic range, or just ragged, stony outcroppings stripped of earth by millennia of wind. The rises and curves on the map, and the winding human paths that conformed to them, remind me of something I once read, that the ancient Greeks perceived knowledge as a means of expanding the self, of feeling connected to existence. I couldn’t name the African trees, the ferns and flowers and reeds, or say how they interacted, which roles they played within the ecosystem, but I was sure that if I could, my world would have seemed larger and more open.
Now, as roosters crowed and I woke up in a room the length of my too-short bed, I tried to connect this landscape with all I’d learned about it, to make sense of this spot on the map—Djolu, mud huts and dusty footpaths, a town harder to reach than the vast majority of places on earth. It lay at the heart of the Congo River basin, an immense territory covering more than 1.4 million square miles, its tributaries draining from Gabon, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Congo-Kinshasa, and Congo-Brazzaville. Half of the basin’s territory is rainforest, nourished by the tributaries on their way to the Congo, the fifth-longest river on earth carrying the third-largest volume of water. Djolu lies to the south of the Congo’s arc, just north of the equator, near the Maringa River, in the middle of a landscape that has been forested almost continuously for millions of years.
Long before my first trips to Africa, from numerous photographs, I’d sensed something different about the continent, so visually unlike anywhere else: its high, rolling plains, its undulating landscapes and gradual, expansive basins, all unmistakable.
It hasn’t been shaped in the same way as the other continents. Though it separated from South America about 126 million years ago, Africa remained largely unchanged for 100 million years, with virtually no rifting or volcanism. By 65 million years ago, erosion and the lack of volcanic activity had turned it, as geologist Kevin Burke writes, into “a low-lying continent with widespread deep weathering.” I liked this image and found it easy to picture the endless, worn-out ranges of ochre dust, the landscape wind-scarped and cut with rivers.
This erosion continued until thirty million years ago, when Africa collided with Europe. The African plate ceased to drift, pinned possibly by its collision in the Mediterranean, or by the giant volcanic plumes that rose through the earth’s mantle to create the Cape Verde and Afar archipelagoes. Only once Africa became static did the continent we know begin to take its shape. This large, flat expanse of deeply weathered land rested above a hot area, a convection circulation in the underlying mantle. Like a sheet of metal slowly warping above a flame, the continent changed its shape over millions of years. Plumes of less dense material rose from the hot mantle, pressing against the crust, at once thinning it by partial melting and pushing it up, warping its surface, initiating volcanic activity, and reactivating ancient faults.
The old Africa of low, eroded plains lifted into the landscape that geographers and historians have remarked on since Herodotus’s time, a continent of long swells and basins. Whereas most continents have areas of extremely high elevation and others almost at sea level, very little of Africa is extremely high or low. The continent bulges from ocean to ocean, rising and falling in successive sweeps 125 to 1,250 miles in length. On the resulting tablelands are peaks, ridges, and escarpments created by millions of years of wind and water erosion. The elevation drops to both the north and west, marking the paths of the Nile and the Congo, the continent’s two largest, though dramatically different, rivers.
The Congo is unlike other rivers in Africa. The gradual slope of the landscape usually results in slow drainage and immense deltas, as with the Nile, Niger, Zambezi, and Limpopo, all of which carried large quantities of sediment down from areas of the continent that were lifted. But Africa’s basins and swells also cause internal drainage. As the continent was reshaped, water that was unable to reach the ocean formed immense lakes, then spilled out into a new river, to another set of lakes, slowly working closer to the coast.
At first glance, the Congo basin fits this description, draining internally. For millions of years, it most likely formed a massive inland lake as the result of a geologic swell along the coast that blocked access to the ocean. But at some point in the last thirty million years, the Congo River cut through the highlands beyond the Pool Malebo and created an outlet, a 220-mile descent of narrow, violent rapids that possess, Adam Hoschchild writes, “as much hydroelectric potential as all the lakes and rivers of the United States combined.” Over millions of years, the water rushing out from the land created the world’s largest submarine river canyon, 497