Of Bonobos and Men. Deni Ellis Bechard
of miles on bicycle, all the while asking villagers where the bonobos lived. He found that few remained in the west of their habitat, where they were hunted. But when he crossed east of the Luo River, where Kokolopori is located, he entered the territory of the Bongandu, and learned that there were numerous groups of bonobos lived in the forests.
Bongandu literally means people of the Ngandu culture (“bo” signifying “people,” and “mo,” as in Mongandu, referring to a single individual of the ethnic group). The Bongandu believed that bonobos walked on four legs only when watched, but otherwise went about like humans. Unlike the Congolese in neighboring areas, they saw bonobos as distant ancestors and had a taboo against hunting them. Consequently, there were large numbers of bonobos, and they were relatively unafraid of people. Kano established his first research camp in an area that, nearly two decades later, would become the Luo Scientific Reserve, not far from where the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve has since been established.
The work done at Kano’s research camp from the 1970s on set the foundation for our current understanding of bonobos, how they bond socially and sexually. Essential to their nonviolence, the Japanese researchers realized, is the stability of their groups. Since chimpanzees have to forage over great distances and expend significant energy to find limited food supplies that are patchily distributed, they travel in small groups to prevent competition among their own members. However, the bonobos have more varied diets and can remain in larger, more stable social groups that allow females to bond. Such coalitions, which tend not to exist in the chimpanzee world, permit female bonobos to limit the aggression of males and even prevent some from mating. Recent studies theorize that bonobos may have essentially domesticated themselves, females selecting those males best for group cohesion and thus gradually eliminating aggressive traits from the gene pool. Not only are the statuses of males determined by those of their mothers, but they will always side with their mothers during conflicts. And, even if the highest-ranking bonobo male attacks a female, all of the females will gang up on him and defeat him.
One of the mysteries of these coalitions, however, is why females forge such strong bonds when, as adolescents, they leave their family groups and travel to new ones to prevent inbreeding. How can unrelated females not find themselves competing for resources and male attention? The research of Takayoshi Kano and Gen’ichi Idani offers an explanation. When adolescent females come upon a new community, they each select an adult female in that group. Each one lingers nearby, observing the older female, attentive to her needs, and if the older female is welcoming, the adolescent approaches to groom, sit close together, or have sex. Though scientists have labeled the latter genito-genital rubbing, or GG-rubbing, Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham write that this term “hardly captures the abandonment and excitement exhibited by two females practicing it.” They suggest using the Bongandu’s expression for it: hoka-hoka. The older female reclines and opens her legs, and the adolescent climbs on top. Wrangham and Peterson describe the act as resembling humans in the missionary position.
Their hip movements are fast and side to side, and they bring their most sensitive sexual organs—their clitorises—together. Bonobo clitorises appear large (compared to those of humans or any of the other apes) and are shifted ventrally compared to chimpanzees. Kano believes their location and shape have evolved to allow pleasurable hoka-hoka—which typically ends with mutual screams, clutching limbs, muscular contractions, and a tense, still moment. It looks like orgasm.
Though sex among the females establishes a bond that likely strengthens the overall female coalition of the group, there are other factors that prevent male aggression. For instance, chimpanzee females emit an odor when ovulating, causing males to go into a frenzy and compete to breed with them, whereas female bonobos neither show clear signs of ovulation nor limit sexual behavior to their fertile period. The result is that males have no notion of individual paternity, and all males are caring and nurturing with infants. This strengthens the bond between males and females, and reduces the competition among males, supporting a social order that, compared with that of chimpanzees, is highly stable, based as it is around dominant females who maintain power until their deaths.
On our first trip to see the bonobos, we got up at 4:00 a.m., ate and dressed rapidly, then went out into the dark, to BCI’s Land Rover this time. Michael had brought a new axle for it, but the reserve’s mechanic had mistakenly asked for a rear one. Michael and Jean-Pierre had returned in the Land Cruiser to Djolu and had the broken axle welded. They’d also picked up Alan Root, who’d arrived by bush plane. One of the most influential figures in the history of nature documentaries, Alan had moved from England to Kenya shortly after his birth and spent his life there. His work had been syndicated worldwide for over thirty years, in the course of which he had been bitten by numerous animals, among them a python, a hippopotamus, and a puff adder. When a leopard bit him twice in the buttock, the Serengeti’s chief park warden jokingly told him, “You know you’re not allowed to feed animals in a national park.” A mountain gorilla also bit him while he was filming in the Virungas for the Dian Fossey biopic Gorillas in the Mist. In her book by the same name, Fossey describes how Alan drove her from Kenya to her first research camp site in the Virungas and helped her get set up. Sally had coordinated his arrival so that he could evaluate how well habituated and accessible the bonobos here were for the ecotourism company Abercrombie & Kent. At seventy-five, he was tall and strong-looking, with gray-white hair, a goatee, and glasses.
The trackers as well as Sally, Michael, Alan, and I crowded into the Land Rover together, and it took us through the forest, going slow because of Alan’s back, which had titanium rods in it from two helicopter crashes during his years of filming. The headlamps weren’t working well on this vehicle either, so one of the trackers held a flashlight out the window. After fifteen minutes of grinding our way uphill and rolling through deep ruts, we stopped in front of a village and got out. There was a faint smell of woodsmoke as we walked past the dark mud huts, embers glowing beyond a doorway.
When we came to the edge of the forest, the head tracker took the lead. In his forties, Léonard Nkanga Lolima was a slight man, with a round, faintly feline face. Though he was not imposing, his gaze was unwavering, and he directed the trackers with reserved, almost imperceptible gestures, his quiet authority reassuring. He moved silently as we followed him into the smothering dark of the forest, along a narrow path. When I first met him a few days before and sat down to interview him about his work as a tracker, I was nervous. Having read Paul Raffaele’s account of visiting Kokolopori in Among the Great Apes, I knew that Léonard believed Raffaele to be a sorcerer and feared him. The book offered no indication as to what Raffaele might have done to appear that way, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to do the same. I must have come across as excessively polite and cautious, since Léonard later made efforts to speak to me on a number of occasions, as if to reassure me. Finally, I couldn’t resist asking about Paul Raffaele, and when I did, a cautious, angry look came into Léonard’s eyes. He and the others explained that Raffaele showed them a photo of himself holding a large snake. I knew the image; it was his book’s author photo, in which an anaconda is wrapped around him. But for the Bongandu, nothing could be worse, as snake venom kills people, especially children, every year. They could conceive of no reason for a man to toy with snakes in this way, or—worse—to reveal his power to them, as if threatening them. The explanation surprised me and made me realize how easy it is to overlook a foreign culture, to project one’s own values on another and speak before getting a sense of the person spoken to. Raffaele is an experienced traveler, and it’s a mistake anyone could make.
The foliage on either side of the trail was nearly impenetrable, and I kept my headlamp aimed just before my feet so as not to trip on roots or branches. It had rained all night, the first rain since our arrival in Djolu. A nimbus of mist hung about tree trunks, and after half an hour, the sky began to pearl, dawn infusing low clouds.
Only when we passed small slash-and-burn tracts along the path could I see the outline of treetops. Often, where the dense forest had been cut away, oil palms, native to West and Central Africa, grew in the openings. One nearly blocked the trail, its wet fronds brushing my shoulders. Then we were back in the dense forest, mushrooms along a rotting log like a line of white disks in the dark, vines as thick as my arms dangling from trees.
For a while, the footpath was deep and narrow, cut by years of rain, no