Of Bonobos and Men. Deni Ellis Bechard
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social fabric. From there, the story of the Congo is one of constant exploitation: of humans, rubber, ivory, lumber, cotton, coffee, copper, cobalt, gold, diamonds, and now coltan, used in computers and handheld electronics. Since the colonial period and all through the Cold War, the West has fed the country a steady flow of weapons and bought its raw materials, whether from the regime of Sese Seko Mobutu, its president from 1965 to 1997, or from Belgium, Uganda, and Rwanda, usually to the detriment of the Congo’s people. Even the recent wars have had less to do with the Congolese than with the outside world, with Western industrial and military interests, rivalries between developed nations, and the increased global demand for minerals. And yet, though the ambitions and material needs of other nations have charted the Congo’s decline, we often misread Heart of Darkness, telling ourselves that the darkness is in the Africans.
Being familiar with the West’s fears, I tried to consider the situation from the African point of view and realized that the obvious question was, what are the Congolese afraid of? One answer—being exploited and manipulated by outsiders—makes clear the challenges of large-scale conservation here. Building trust is no easy task. Africa’s most brutal colonial history and its most corrupt Cold War–era dictator have left the Congolese both wary and desperate. After the United States ceased to prop up Mobutu and he lost power in 1997, war killed as many as five and a half million people, the majority from disease and starvation. Soldiers, whether those of the Congo’s government or the numerous rebel forces, pillaged and raped, often as a means of controlling local populations, and spread HIV into even the most remote areas. Villagers abandoned their fields and hid in forests to protect their families, hunting for survival and decimating the wildlife. By 2011, the DRC received the lowest rating on the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Report, which tracks progress in health, education, and basic living standards.
For conservationists to work successfully here, they have to understand the people well enough to build trust and at the same time harness their desire for change. In our conversations, Sally Jewell Coxe of the Bonobo Conservation Initiative distinguished between two basic conservation approaches: one that the Congolese often see as colonial in attitude, whereby outsiders come with money and impose change, and the other whereby outsiders integrate with local communities, respecting their values and supporting their leaders in order to achieve shared goals. However, conservation often requires a quid pro quo: the local people taking the pressure off the forests and wildlife in exchange for new means of survival. Conservationists can foster trade, health care, education, even law enforcement, and yet if they want to build a deeper sense of community investment, they need insight not just into the problems that arise but into how those problems came to be. Part of finding a new way of relating to people, Sally suggested, lies in seeing how much damage was caused by the old way.
In telling me about BCI’s projects, she spoke of the Bongandu, the Congolese ethnic group with whom she’d worked primarily. She described their respect for bonobos and their knowledge of the rainforest, emphasizing that we must not equate poverty with ignorance. As for bonobos, they served as a flagship species, a concept that elevates the profile of one animal to protect the biodiversity of its habitat. The bonobos’ charismatic nature made it possible for BCI to rally support around them as a symbol of the rainforest.
Through 2010, I researched rainforest and bonobo conservation, and on several occasions, I interviewed Sally by Skype. I listened carefully, trying to determine if BCI’s projects could create lasting change, and what could be learned from the solutions they were finding. In mid-2011, I proposed accompanying them on an expedition to a bonobo reserve. I wanted to understand how their model differed from those of other NGOs, and how building coalitions and social capital could make up for a lack of funds. Sally told me that such a trip could be a stunning experience, but she also emphasized that the reserve was set up with only the bare minimum, for the purpose of work. And she warned me to budget well. Just getting to Kinshasa would be expensive since so few airlines served it. Then we would have in-country flights, and because there was little infrastructure for trade, food and supplies would be costly.
BCI had been going through a difficult period, struggling to fund its operating costs. The continuing aftershocks of the global financial crisis had diminished the flow of charitable donations. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq exhausted the US economy and political will, and with the Arab Spring, then the tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan, the media’s attention wasn’t on conservation. Not until late 2011 did BCI have the funds for its next expedition into the rainforest.
But in November, the DRC held its second free multi-party elections since not only the end of the Second Congo War in 2003 but the country’s independence in 1960. The Congolese were dissatisfied with their current leaders, and the media anticipated violence and conflict over ballot rigging by each candidate’s supporters. Given that we would be as far off the grid as possible, we needed to be careful not to get caught in the rainforests if conflicts reignited. BCI’s contacts in the reserves said that the atmosphere was tense, with local politicians looking for ways to leverage power, and they warned us to postpone the trip.
I was already overseas, and I flew by way of Doha, Qatar, to East Africa. I took my time in Uganda and Rwanda, learning about conservation efforts there. Election results were announced in December, and Joseph Kabila, the incumbent president since January 2001, was reelected to a second term despite allegations of fraud. Though the DRC’s security forces killed at least two dozen protesters, and residents of the capital stoned a Westerner’s car, blaming the election results on foreign intervention, the peace held. The Congolese, it seemed, were sick of war.
Finally, on February 3, 2012, the day after my arrival in Goma, and after two trips to the offices of the Compagnie Africaine d’Aviation (CAA) to make sure my flight to Kinshasa would be departing, I took a taxi to the airport. One side of it was heaped with broken chunks of volcanic rock, and a few junked planes had been shoved off the runway, brown with dust, their noses to the sky.
Beyond security, a man at a desk again recorded the details of my passport. I noticed a single bullet hole in the top of the window behind him. He interrogated me on my reason for being in the Congo just as another agent would do when I arrived in Kinshasa, as if the sky above the DRC were a different country and each return to earth required a new visit to customs.
The plane was on time, and as it took off, I stared out the window: a military helicopter parked in the distance, khaki cargo planes, a cannon and a tank, both draped with dun tarp, set back in the trees. A narrow neighborhood of clustered homes with tin roofs passed beneath us, then the city of Goma with its wide avenues and desolate roundabouts, and the shore of Lake Kivu, the dark volcanoes of the Virungas to the east. Soon we were above hills, the unbroken thatch of the forest, before we lifted through a bank of clouds.
For a while, we glided just above them, working our way into a dense, otherworldly terrain. Dozens of cumulonimbus rose above the white plain, casting long clefts of shadow over it. All across the glowing horizon, at the luminous blue line between the clouds and the sky, further cumulonimbus soared, red at their edges, flattened by the cold air above, like mesas in a primeval vision of the American Southwest.
Though I fly often, I’ve never tired of cloudscapes, and I’d never seen one like this. It seemed an expression of the Congo basin, 695,000 square miles, approximately 20 percent of the planet’s remaining tropical forest, spanning Gabon, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well as its similarly named neighbor, the Republic of Congo. We were crossing over its edge, thousands of feet down, heat and humidity boiling up as it breathed dense air into the atmosphere.
It’s hard to imagine forests like this vanishing, though farmland and plantations have replaced them in most of the world. What makes the impact of deforestation difficult to grasp is that it’s at once gradual and rapid. Humans have cut down much of the world’s forests, including the vast majority of old growth, and we can no longer fully comprehend how they influenced regional climates, regulating humidity, preventing drought, and protecting rivers, watersheds more likely to dry up if exposed to the sun. The vast quantity of carbon released from felled and burned trees escalates climate change and is absorbed into the oceans, gradually acidifying them.
Even now, massive swaths of forests are vanishing. In