Of Bonobos and Men. Deni Ellis Bechard
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and over the next few days I would see her checking budgets, writing grant applications, and contacting donors while fielding calls from Mbandaka to prepare the boats that would take supplies on the ten-day trip to the reserve, then following up with staff to make sure those supplies were ready: hand pumps and ultraviolet SteriPENs for drinking water; medicine for the reserve’s clinic and for BCI’s staff in case anyone got malaria; headlamps, machetes, and new rain ponchos for trackers and eco-guards; batteries for everything and everyone. The list went on.
Another concern was transporting fuel to the reserve. Because of its high price in the DRC, the fuel for the outboard motors and for a month in the reserve, where it would be needed to power generators, motocycles, as well as a Land Cruiser and a Land Rover, could cost $10,000. This was still cheaper than paying to take all cargo and passengers by bush plane, or buying fuel there, where it was marked up three times. The boats could bring more supplies and more people, but the time the trip would take depended on the water level. We were at the end of the dry season, when the boats often got caught on sandbars and had to stop at night.
As Sally spoke, I could barely keep up with all of the details. Skype beeped constantly on her computer, receiving messages from BCI’s office in Washington, DC.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just have to send a report. I’ll be right back.”
Both Sally and Michael worked the nine-to-five shift in two time zones, until the US office closed at 10:00 p.m. West Central Africa time, and when I said goodnight, they hurried back to their computers in different rooms, still calling out to each other. They had been a couple for ten years, BCI in its early stages when they met. Its current incarnation was in many ways the fruit of their relationship.
That evening, I stayed at the home of BCI’s national director in the DRC, Evelyn Samu, a statuesque woman with a still, appraising gaze and a sudden, at times wary smile. She’d been in conservation for over fifteen years and lived with her younger brothers, her granddaughter, and her niece. Her father had been a successful businessman under Mobutu and built the sprawling home off Matadi Road. Its pipes were a less reliable source of water than the swimming pool where insects skimmed the surface, so the maids filled blue plastic buckets and carried them on their heads to the tiled bathrooms. When the power failed, they switched to another network, from a different hydroelectric plant, and when both grids went down, they waited until nightfall to start the generator. Well-kept gardens surrounded the grounds, and the terrace by the kitchen offered a view of the western horizon, its rolling blue hills speckled with buildings, the setting sun spectacular over the savannah.
The night was pleasantly warm. Normally, in the DRC, the dry season south of the equator lasts from April to October, the opposite of the seasons to the north of it. There is little variation in temperature, with a yearly average high of 86 degrees Fahrenheit and an average low of 70. Kinshasa usually has a particularly short dry season, from June through August, but there had been almost no rain that February, and the dust and the lingering, acrid smell of smoke from trash fires had the Congolese wondering when it would rain.
The next morning, before departing for the BCI offices with Evelyn, I waited at the front gate of her home as she prayed near a wall-size shrine to the Virgin Mary. Michael had told me how much energy it took to get around and shop for basic needs, how demanding life was for BCI’s staff. Just traveling the four miles to BCI’s offices gave me a sense of the city’s pace, at once hectic and painfully slow. People rushed cars with an empty seat or trucks with space in the bed even as traffic stopped for minutes at a time. Vehicles crammed the street as far as I could see, the distance obscured in the smoke of burning roadside trash.
The only clear geographic marker for Kinshasa is a widening of the Congo River called the Pool Malebo, formerly Stanley Pool. On the map, it nearly resembled a bull’s-eye, an immense lake partially filled in with an island of sediment, around which the river flows. It separates the world’s two closest capitals, that of the DRC from Brazzavilla in the Republic of the Congo, a former French colony.
Kinshasa, founded in 1881 by the American explorer Henry Morton Stanley and named Léopoldville after the Belgian King, served as a trading post where the river’s navigable stretch ends. One of the challenges of colonization was that the river, though providing a route into the continent, began its descent to the ocean, just beyond the Pool Malebo, by rocketing down dozens of narrow cataracts. To link Léopoldville to the port, a railroad had to be built across Bas-Congo Province, a panhandle that attaches the country’s massive inland territory to its scant twenty-five-mile stretch of Atlantic coast.
During the colonial era, Kinshasa’s nickname was Kin la Belle, “the beautiful.” Now it’s referred to as Kin la Poubelle, “the trashcan.” Heightening the sense of disorder is the construction underway in many parts of the city, fueled by the postwar rush for minerals. During the recent wars, the borders the DRC shares with nine other countries were often less boundaries than sieves through which its wealth escaped. Now, with the growth of industry in India, China, Brazil, and Russia causing an increased demand for raw materials, the minerals are often still sold illegally through the DRC’s neighbors, notably Rwanda. The Chinese are renovating the capital and building highways into the Congo’s interior in exchange for mining contracts, and the country’s elite are profiting. Signs of commerce are everywhere, with new buildings going up helter-skelter even as those next door are collapsing.
The effect of all this was overwhelmingly claustrophobic, with a seventh of the country’s seventy million here, many from the provinces for work or in refuge from ethnic conflict. One in five adults is HIV positive, and, unable to afford health care, the vast majority resort to faith healing and magic. In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis suggests that among the world’s megacities, only the poverty of Dhaka, Bangladesh, compares to that of Kinshasa, where less than 5 percent of the population earn salaries, and the average yearly income is less than one hundred dollars. All along the street, young men in torn, colorless clothes sold goods or looked for work. They crowded into the road, trying to find rides. Six or seven at a time stood on a single rear bumper. They held onto tailgates or the back doors of vans, fingers hooked at the edges; at stops, they lowered a hand and shook it out, repeatedly extending it back to a familiar shape.
Group taxis crammed passengers in, many of them hugging baskets or synthetic gunnysacks. On my second day, I traveled without Evelyn, and it took me longer to get a ride. The Congolese barely had to gesture; they just leaned forward, revealing what they wanted with their gazes and postures. As I’d been taught, I lifted my arm and pointed my thumb or index finger to indicate the direction I would take at the next fork in the road.
Though I’d been told that the Kinois, the residents of Kinshasa, would work me over for every penny, on my first two rides, the drivers wouldn’t let me pay. One steered a rumbling Mercedes, its windshield split, its sunbaked paint cracked like pottery glaze. Passing a crowd, he swerved to the roadside and handed me a brick of dirty Congolese francs nearly the size of a cinder block, asking me to give it to a stooped old man in a brown button-down shirt who hurried over to meet us. Maybe the driver didn’t need money, I considered when he dropped me off, refusing my cash, telling me that he enjoyed the conversation.
Each time I visited the offices, Sally and Michael were finishing grant applications and ironing out plans for our trip. The staff rushed about, coming and going, making lists and compiling reports, their cell phones chiming and ringing, Skype beeping in the background.
As I spoke to Michael, he paused to rub his eyes and catch his breath, and I realized that what I’d been taking for exuberance may have also been the jitteriness of exhaustion.
“We’ve gone from being a small NGO to something a lot bigger overnight,” he told me. “We’ve hired new office staff in the US, and we had to delay our arrival here so we could train them. And we’ve expanded our staff here as well. We have grants for work in the field, but not enough of that goes to operating costs, so we’re struggling to maintain our offices.”
That evening, some of the BCI Kinshasa staff left quickly, careful not to go home too late, when gangs armed with machetes came out. Known as kulunas, a word from Angola, from the Portuguese coluna, “column” (used for soldiers on patrol), the thugs prowled outlying