Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
“Fear,” he told me, “makes you do bad things. Fear makes you do stupid things. My entire life I
knew I could go to prison or die, and I made peace with it. You made up your mind to fight for the
country,
la patrie
, and you elevated its value so that you could fight for it.”
But André's greatest challenge in the RCD involved Sankuru and its wildlife. Though he'd
dreamed of returning to his paternal homeland and seeing its animals, the only sign of them was
in markets full of bushmeat. He recognized the smoked carcasses of monkeys and occasionally of
what appeared to be a great ape, bodies dried whole, with faces intact and long human hands. He
knew that there were no chimpanzees south of the Congo River, and he'd heard that bonobos lived
only in Équateur, north of Sankuru; Pierre Kakule had described them. He wondered what these
apes were.
As he observed the steady flow of bushmeat out of the forests to feed the soldiers, he realized
the extent of the devastation, the degree to which his country was being pillaged. The Rwandans
and Ugandans were extracting mineral resources even as the local people were forced to hunt wild-
life to feed themselves. He spoke to other officials in the RCD, but they thought he was crazy.
Lambert Mende Omalanga, a former vice prime minister under Mobutu, the elected deputy with the
most votes in the Sankuru region, and the current presidential spokesman for Joseph Kabila, recalls
believing that André had an ulterior motive, that he was trying to gain power, or that he'd simply
lost his mind. When I met with Mende in his office in Kinshasa, he told me that at first he strongly
opposed André.
“But André was doing very important work. Above all, he didn't give the impression that the
interests of nature and people were in conflict, or that nature should be for the use of tourists who
come from outside. The idea is that it's necessary to integrate the people into nature's protection,
so they can make money doing it. And André put all that in language that was easy for everyone to
understand, so they could see that it was in their interest. There was much opposition, but he con-
vinced us, and we have become his partners.”
All across the Congo, the war was decimating wildlife. In the Kivus, militias set up camp in the
Virunga National Park, the oldest in Africa. They were exterminating thousands of hippopotami,
running a bushmeat and charcoal business with the nearby towns. Park guards were equipped with
high-powered weapons and fought low-grade wars on their territories, militias making reprisals by
executing gorillas after the guards tried to block their activities.
But in Sankuru's forests, there was no enforcement of laws protecting endangered species.
André learned that the great apes he'd seen in the markets were indeed bonobos, and as vice-gov-
ernor, he put out a military order against the killing of bonobos, elephants, and okapis, the other
flagship endemic species of the Congo, a relative of the giraffe with zebra-like markings.
The Kasai region had always been known for its diamond mines, which had contributed to Kab-
ila's—and now the RCD's—funding. But as he argued with the local leadership, he told them, “The
diamonds you have are nothing. This—the animals, the forests—is the real wealth.”
Over time, André felt his interest in politics diminishing. Amid the chaos, the dislocation and
exigencies of survival, he'd lost contact with what was most important to him. He wanted to be in
the forest and work with the villagers. What would happen to them if the soldiers and townspeople
ate the remaining wildlife?
His vision would focus increasingly on bonobos after a tribal chief gave him one as a present.
She was little more than a year old, an orphan whose family had been slaughtered by hunters, and
