Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
soldiers to the apes and were beaten. After the soldiers killed a cluster of bonobos to collect
an infant, Kano's chief tracker put himself between soldiers and another group. He said they
would have to kill him before they could kill any more bonobos, and the apes were saved.
“Kano's” chief tracker is Nkoy (which means “leopard”), and despite having been beaten and
threatened with death, he remains nameless. Rather, he is described as an extension of Kano, an ob-
ject on the scene. In the eyes of the Congolese who spent years in the field, tracking, keeping notes,
and risking their lives while foreign researchers came in for relatively short visits and then received
praise for their courage in going to the Congo, this kind of omission is not insignificant.
Albert experienced this dynamic himself when Conservation International's Senior Director for
Central Africa, an American, traveled to Kokolopori in the company of a British reporter for
Time
magazine. After the creation of the immense Sankuru Nature Reserve in northeastern Kasai-Ori-
ental Province in 2007, the reporter contacted BCI. He visited Kokolopori because it was more ac-
cessible, and when he penned his April 21, 2008, article, “Eden for the Peaceful Apes,” he referred
to the visiting CI director frequently, although the man had never been to Kokolopori before. The
article doesn't mention Albert, and a photograph's caption describes the visitor from CI as “per-
suading,” “seated, being introduced during a conservation campaign in Yalokole.” He sits at a table
while Albert, unnamed even here, stands, speaking to the people he has worked with for years. And
while the article mentions André Tusumba, who led the effort to create Sankuru, there is no photo
of him. A reader might think that the reserves owe their existence to the visitor.
In many ways, prestige and the celebrity status of the Western “big man” seem to be greater im-
pediments to effective conservation than the Congo's poverty and lack of infrastructure. A more in-
spiring send-of than any we've seen so far would be the end of
Demonic Males
, in which Wrangham
and Peterson meditate on the violent potential of the human intellect and on what we can learn from
bonobos.
If we are cursed with a demonic male temperament and a Machiavellian capacity to express
it, we are also blessed with an intelligence that can, through the acquisition of wisdom, draw
us away from the 5-million-year stain of our ape past. . . .
Temperament tells us what we care about. Intelligence helps generate options. And wis-
dom can bring us to consider outcomes distantly, for ourselves and our children and our
children's children . . . and perhaps even for the minds in the forest.
If bonobos serve our culture well as a symbol of peace and coalitions, it's not because they are
perfect; they are simply more skilled at maintaining harmony, aided by the fortunate fact that they
have adequate resources. As Peterson and Wrangham make clear, changing human behavior is es-
sential to the success of our species, and this requires a change in how we manage and share re-
sources. The importance of transforming ourselves may also be why Sue Savage-Rumbaugh found
herself among
Time
's one hundred most influential people: she not only discovered how bonobos
can communicate using human language, but also conveyed what that says about how both they and
we can adapt.
The failure to use our symbols to their fullest potential lies entirely within human culture. The
myths of Western culture are as great a challenge as any notion of power among the people of
Équateur. We have our own deeply entrenched complexes of prestige and territoriality, to which we
are often blind. If we want to succeed in conservation, the solution sounds trite, though it is in fact
