Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
ally used bonobos for medicinal and ritual purposes. They ground the bones and rubbed the ash on
women's bellies for fertility. Educating the people would be much more challenging than elsewhere,
but BCI and ACOPRIK persisted. Gradually, with the aid of an Information Exchange team that
BCI sent in, André helped establish an accord with twenty villages that agreed not to hunt bonobos.
One of the people who most supported André, eventually becoming the president of the admin-
istrative committee of ACOPRIK, was his cousin, Michel Kitoko. Michel was born in Sankuru in
1967, and shortly afterward his mother left his father, abandoning him. His father was a doctor, but
he struggled to feed all his children from several wives, a task that became increasingly difficult
as Zaire's infrastructure disintegrated and he had to travel to distant towns and villages to make
money.
When Michel was eleven, his father acquired several hunting rifles from a German who was
leaving the country, as many foreigners were at that time. Michel's father taught him to fire them
and, impressed by his son's skill, sent him out each day after school to hunt. During school vaca-
tions, Michel left the house for weeks, living in the forest with the other men.
But as he got older, each time he saw his half siblings and friends with their mothers, he felt so
much pain that he hardly knew what to do. He'd never seen his mother's face, not even in a photo.
When he was seventeen, he asked his father's permission to find her. He knew only that she'd gone
to live with her older brother in Kivu, and so he walked two hundred miles through the forest. After
nearly a week on foot, he reached Kindu, a city where he'd heard his mother lived. The people
there told him that she was in Bukavu, so he continued another two hundred miles, by foot and
then by train to Lake Tanganyika, the longest lake in the world, where he took a boat, then another
train, only to discover that she wasn't in Bukavu. People knew of her, though, and said she'd moved
to Goma. He crossed Lake Kivu and searched in Goma, gathering clues from the people he en-
countered. Finally, in Rutshuru, he met his mother for the first time, finding what he'd hoped—that
she was joyful to see him.
During that reunion, he also met his cousin André, and by the end of his three-month visit, he
and André were close friends. His mother wanted Michel to stay, but he told her that he was in
charge of the hunt and that he'd promised to return home. And so he did, again on foot.
But his journey began once more not long after. He was a good student, and his father sent
him first to Kinshasa, then to Morocco to study. His older brother, who worked in Europe, paid for
Michel's education in law and political science. Michel then moved to France, where he passed ex-
ams to qualify for his degree. He was still there during the wars, and it was André who called to tell
him that his family was safe.
Michel didn't meet André again until 2005, in Kinshasa, at a small restaurant with plastic chairs
on the Boulevard de 30 Juin, named for the date of the Congo's independence. They discussed
the RCD, Michel telling André that the Congolese saw them as invaders, and André defending all
that he'd done to fight dictatorship. It wasn't their talk about the RCD that most shocked Michel,
however. Rather, he was stunned to learn of André's passion for conservation.
“He wants to protect the bonobo,” Michel recalled saying to himself. “I told myself that he was
crazy. He was protecting the animals I killed over there. That made me emotional. He's going to
defend the animals that we kill and eat! I thought he needed something else to do. So I started trying
to think up something that would help him find himself in life again.”
But when Michel returned to France, he began researching what André had said, and he was
startled to discover how right his cousin had been. Because he'd grown up in forests, he'd always
