Of Bonobos and Men. Deni Ellis Bechard
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There were so many daily challenges for the staff and so many varied discussions in the offices—of landing strips in the rainforest, grant proposals for new vehicles, rural clinics running out of medicine, celebrities contacting BCI in hopes of seeing bonobos in the wild.
Sally joined the discussion, coming in from the next room to tell me that BCI was experiencing a sea change, a make-it-or-break-it moment. She worried about money, and in my short time there, I’d noticed that everyone in the Congo seemed to be asking for it, calling the offices and demanding it. Each time this happened, she explained deliberately to the caller what BCI could and couldn’t do, when certain funding would arrive, that she and Michael were working on new budgets, more grants, and to be patient. She told me that BCI was barely managing to fund the people on the reserves, that she and Michael almost never paid themselves, and when they did, they ended up putting the money to an emergency somewhere in the field.
Over the next week, the BCI team decided to push back our flight to Mbandaka once, then again. Normally, they ran their trips separately, one staying in Kinshasa or DC while the other was in the field, living in mud huts for months at a time to support their Congolese partners as they established or oversaw programs. But they hadn’t been to Kokolopori in over six months and had a lot to do. They chartered a bush plane from Mbandaka into the rainforest with Aviation sans Frontières and sent the boats loaded with supplies to meet us at the reserve. Two of the Kinshasa staff, Bienvenu and Pitchen, were on board, as well as BCI’s boatmen who were based in Mbandaka. After a month in Kokolopori, we would all return together to Mbandaka by boat.
Two days before we were to leave, and three after the boats’ departure, Sally got a phone call: two outboard engines had died and the boatmen couldn’t find parts in Basankusu, a town on the Lulonga River at the confluence of the Maringa and Lopori, a day or two from the Congo. Eric, who had just arrived at the offices freshly shaved, a blue oxford shirt tucked into his jeans, set out to find replacement parts and put them on an upcoming flight to Basankusu. All day the Kinshasa staff bustled about, Dieudonné getting our photography permits since it is illegal to take photographs in the DRC without governmental permission.
We delayed once more, Sally and Michael repeatedly working until after midnight. Then, a week and a half after my arrival, we were ready. We loaded the bed of a white pickup with large yellow duffel bags printed with the letters BCI and drove back toward the airport as I stared out the truck window, taking in the city’s turmoil. Women paused between four lanes of rushing traffic, plastic tubs the size of laundry baskets on their heads. Shirtless men broke old concrete with sledges, piling chunks on the median, each muscle in their torsos knife-thin and close to the skin. Further on, boys played soccer in an empty lot among the scorched hulks of old trucks and heaps of smoldering trash. There were merchants in sooty storefronts, peddlers by loaded handcarts, students waiting for buses, office workers, men and women in pressed suits and skirts, climbing into taxis with mismatched panels, holes drilled along their edges, wires knitting them together.
As we were about to climb the steps to the CAA jet that would take us to Mbandaka, a police officer and Dr. Nicolas Mwanza Ndunda, BCI’s scientific director, ran from the N’Djili Airport terminal to give a package and contracts to Sally. Mwanza is a tall, jovial-looking man in his sixties, with a paunch and a small mustache. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and the sun had us squinting, the heat off the tarmac so palpable I could feel it in my muscles.
The other passengers hurried past us to claim seats as Sally read the papers, a subcontract for a grant that would employ staff from the Congolese Ministry of Scientific Research. She signed and handed them to Mwanza, and the officer began to lift his hand in an imploring gesture. She gave him the equivalent of five dollars in Congolese francs for letting Mwanza meet us.
After we took our places, not a seat remained in the narrow Fokker jet, the last six rows of which were loaded with bags and cardboard boxes heavily sealed with brown tape. It was hot inside, the passengers sweating, though we cooled down once we were in motion.
We left Kinshasa, crossing inland away from the Pool Malebo, heading east over Bandundu Province. Below us, forested rivers scored savannah plateaus, giving the landscape the look of interlocking puzzle pieces. Équateur was just above, bordering Congo-Brazzaville to the west, the Central African Republic to the north, and Orientale Province to the east.
Équateur is known for being the most heavily forested province in the DRC, and forty minutes into our trip, as we neared Mbandaka, I stared out the jet’s window at the rainforest curving against the horizon. A distant plume of smoke rose from the endless rippled green, calling to mind a war photograph I saw years ago: a burning ship far away on the uniform ocean.
Before this trip, I’d studied the DRC on a map. Its lopsided bulk, in its place at the center of Africa, looked—just as the hackneyed metaphor says—like a heart. But maps don’t do the Congo justice. The Mercator projection—which transposes the globe onto a cylinder or flat surface—misrepresents the area closer to the poles, expanding it. Relative to North America and Europe, the Congo is far larger than it appears: at 905,355 square miles, it is 3.37 times the size of Texas, the eleventh-largest country on earth and the second largest in Africa, after Algeria. As of 2005, nearly 60 percent of it was forestland.
Though little of it was logged under Mobutu because of lack of transportation infrastructure, by the 1990s, 37 percent of the country’s forests that could be exploited commercially were officially designated as timber concessions. With the war now over, much of the region has become more reliably accessible for systematic exploitation, so deforestation, which has been occurring at a rate of about 1 percent a decade, is likely to speed up.
When trees are cut down and decay, and especially when they are burned, they release CO2 into the atmosphere. This carbon then absorbs solar radiation, warming the planet. Already, global deforestation emits more carbon dioxide than all of the transportation on earth—automobiles, airplanes, trains, and boats—combined, and nearly as much as transportation and industry together. Furthermore, each tree cut down has a double negative impact, not only releasing carbon but no longer assimilating it from the atmosphere. Through photosynthesis, trees create carbohydrates from CO2 and water, synthesizing the carbon molecules with water and releasing oxygen as a waste product. In the process, the world’s remaining tropical forests sequester 20 percent of global carbon emissions from fossil fuels, a number that decreases with logging and the clearing of land even as manmade carbon emissions rise steadily.
So dramatically have humans transformed the earth that in the early 1980s the American scientist Eugene F. Stoermer proposed the name Anthropocene for our current geologic epoch. Zoologists Guy Cowlishaw and Robin Dunbar write: “Not since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago has this planet witnessed changes to the structure and dynamics of its biological communities as dramatic as those that have occurred over recent millennia, and especially in the past four hundred years.” Humans have devastated millions of square miles of habitat, and since 1600, eighty-nine of the planet’s approximately five thousand mammal species have gone extinct, with 169 others critically endangered. More recently, agricultural and industrial revolutions have reshaped the world, changing the composition of the soil, water, and air, and the estimated current rate of extinction in rainforests alone, for all organisms—insects, plants, bacteria, and fungi—is 27,000 a year. Despite the severity of our impact, the entire 250,000 years of human history hardly compares to the damage we have done in the last fifty years, and given our current rate of expansion, hundreds, if not thousands, more animal species are expected to die off within the century.
In a way, the asteroid strike that most likely ended the dinosaurs’ rule 65.5 million years ago and our current age are bookends, containing a long, largely continuous span of evolution and diversification of life that created humans, bonobos, and the rainforests as we currently know them. After the asteroid’s collision, dust and ash filled the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and disrupting the food chain by killing off photosynthesizing organisms. When herbivorous dinosaurs could no longer graze, the carnivores that preyed on them also died, eliminating all top predators. The only creatures that endured were those that could subsist