Of Bonobos and Men. Deni Ellis Bechard
of his arms was thinner than that on his head and back, and his large pale testicles and thin pink penis showed between his thighs.
He studied us for a long time, occasionally glancing off, presenting his profile. He was an adult, but there was something particularly youthful about him, lighthearted, as if he hadn’t taken on responsibility for his group yet, or simply knew that we were no threat.
The light through the clouds brightened, glittering against the moisture in his hair and fur, giving him a silver nimbus. He seemed so pleased looking at us that if he’d broken into laughter, I wouldn’t have been surprised. He shook his head and reached up, his body not much smaller than a human’s but more pliable and dynamic, and then he climbed out of sight.
These bonobos had been habituated by trackers who monitored them daily, but they were far from tame. I had observed chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island sanctuary in Uganda, and their muscular presence and aggressive gazes gave me little inclination to go near them. Signs warned that if one of them escaped the enclosure all visitors should stand in the lake, since chimpanzees are afraid of going into water. Alan had told me that chimps made him feel as if he were passing a street gang and had to avoid eye contact. This aggressive, dominant attitude appeared absent in bonobos, only the older females somewhat authoritative. They showed little interest in us even as the adolescent males watched us with wide eyes.
Following the Ekalakala group, named for a nearby stream, we wandered through the forest, taking pictures. Léonard knew their patterns. Each time he took me aside and told me to wait somewhere, I didn’t know what to expect. I sat and watched the forest. Nothing moved. The others had wandered off, and I became convinced that Léonard was mistaken, that he was telling me to sit there for no good reason. Then, sometimes fifteen or twenty minutes later, a bonobo appeared almost directly before me.
At one point, Léonard suggested that Alan and I wait near a fallen tree, which had created an opening in the undergrowth where the sun shone into the forest. We crouched for at least twenty minutes before two bonobos came through the canopy. One swung himself down to the log and scampered across. But the other made a more dramatic entrance. He hugged the top of a thin tree and let it bend under his weight until he was upside down and his head was almost to the log. Then he flipped himself to his feet and released the tree, letting it snap back up. He sat, assuming pose after pose, looking at the sky, the ground, over his shoulder and back, then just stared off as we clicked photos.
He appeared deep in contemplation, though I had the sense that he knew exactly what we were doing, and wanted to be seen in his best light.
The next morning, I was in one of the smaller huts in Yetee, sitting across from a village elder, a lean man whose muscled jaw and broad, veined forehead seemed tempered by years of authority. He’d taken off a straw hat and held it in his hands, and with each question I asked, he hunched a little, his French good though he searched for words. I wanted to know how his community felt about the work being done here for conservation.
“It’s not enough,” he said. “We need corrugated metal roofs for the schools. We need more schools. More clinics. More trucks and motorcycles and better markets.”
“So you aren’t satisfied with what the conservationists are doing?”
“It’s not enough,” he repeated, a comment that I imagined everyone in nearly every country would voice, often reasonably, for many situations in their lives.
“And if the conservationists left tomorrow and stopped their work forever, would there be something else that would allow the people to get money and medicine?”
He sat a long time, staring at me, chewing slightly, his jaw lopsided.
“No,” he said, shaking his head faintly. “No, there’s nothing else.”
Yetee lay just within the reserve, a dusty expanse with a few dozen huts clustered off the road. Below, a small river curved around the slope skirting the village, and narrow paths descended to the various bathing and water-gathering points.
Though many people here wore newer clothes than the inhabitants in the villages along the road to Djolu, most had only one outfit. Shortly after Sally began paying salaries, a merchant arrived on foot, a bundle on his back. He put down a tarp just outside the camp and began selling Chinese-made soap, underwear, safety pins, hand mirrors, and batteries. Young men came through, leading goats tied at the neck with vines, or herding ducks. For dozens of miles in every direction, the reserve offered the only source of cash.
Guy Cowlishaw and Robin Dunbar define conservation biology as “a scientific discipline that aims to provide the sound knowledge and guidance necessary to implement the effective conservation action that will be necessary to maintain in perpetuity the natural diversity of living organisms.” However, there are a number of views as to how this goal is best achieved, from setting aside parklands to establishing reserves like Kokolopori. National parks usually displace human populations, creating situations in which the former inhabitants lack a stable means of livelihood. With an estimated fourteen million conservation refugees in Africa alone as of 2005, some indigenous delegates have listed major conservation groups as more destructive to their ways of life than industrial corporations. “The battle for conservation by exclusion” has been lost, Cowlishaw and Dunbar write, and developing nations have been unable “to set aside huge tracts of land for conservation unless they were prepared to risk civil unrest.”
As conservationists have turned away from national parks as a model reminiscent of the colonial period, they have begun to see local communities as their allies. Community-based reserves attempt to create distinct areas for wildlife and others that can be used by local people for farming or, at times, limited hunting and trapping. This approach also allows people to sell their goods to conservationists and ecotourists, and to work as trackers and ecoguards. Benefiting from the conservation economy is essential for local communities, given that otherwise “the external and internal pressures for the exploitation of natural resources will simply overwhelm the good intentions.” By fostering a conservation-based economy and a new sense of stewardship, conservationists move toward the eventual goal of the local people fully managing the reserve. Critics of this approach point out the danger of local management in such unstable, impoverished nations, with so many external pressures, and they generally favor a degree of outside support, not unlike BCI’s role in developing Vie Sauvage and advocating for them internationally.
In the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, the conservation accords that BCI and Vie Sauvage have created with the people allocate certain areas of forest for protection and other areas for agriculture. Slash-and-burn farming techniques are usually done a short walk into the secondary forest that surrounds the villages. Trees are cut down and burned, and the land is farmed. People use the patch for two to three years, until the soil is depleted, and then they leave it fallow for at least ten years. They rotate their fields within a certain area, and so long as the population density remains low, the cycle leads to little deforestation. Some hunting is allowed within the reserve as well, of duiker, buffalo, and small animals, though wire snares are prohibited.
In my conversations with Sally, I had learned how contentious the use of the forest can be. The people here see it as their birthright, as the source of their livelihood and nourishment, and they are reluctant to put it under the custodianship of outsiders. Conservation has to work carefully, aware of the ancient human relationship with the land, spiritual traditions, and tribal boundaries. It must also recognize how local people have for centuries endured exploitation by foreigners. The conservationists’ vision for the forest must coincide with that of the Bongandu if they expect to attain their objectives. In the name of economic development, the West devastated much of its own forests, and conservationists must remind themselves of this when the temptation arises to take the moral high ground. The daily struggle for sustenance overshadows all talk of protecting wildlife. In working with the Congolese to preserve their forests, conservationists must know exactly what they are asking in each instance, in each distinct place and community, always being conscious of the economic stakes for local people, and they must forge common goals with them if conservation