Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
For many Westerners, it would be hard to travel to the Congo without confronting the way our cul-
tural narrative portrays it: through a media rap sheet of barbarism so long it predates Joseph Con-
rad's
Heart of Darkness
. But what our fear blinds us to is that these descriptions say less about how
the Congolese traditionally lived, and still live, than about the result of their living in one of the
most fertile, mineral-rich, and strategically important nations on earth.
Before Western colonization, the area that now constitutes the DRC was home to dozens of
complex societies. Over four hundred years ago, the Kongo Kingdom had ambassadors in Por-
tugal, Spain, and the papal courts, as well as organized and trained militaries. The slow rise of
the Portuguese slave trade—in conjunction with the spread of cash crop plantations in the New
World—eroded the kingdom. In the late nineteenth century, rather than export the Congolese, the
Belgians enslaved them at home, further disintegrating the social fabric. From there, the story of the
Congo is one of constant exploitation: of humans, rubber, ivory, lumber, cotton, coffee, copper, co-
balt, gold, diamonds, and now coltan, used in computers and handheld electronics. Since the colo-
nial period and all through the Cold War, the West has fed the country a steady flow of weapons and
bought its raw materials, whether from the regime of Sese Seko Mobutu, its president from 1965 to
1997, or from Belgium, Uganda, and Rwanda, usually to the detriment of the Congo's people. Even
the recent wars have had less to do with the Congolese than with the outside world, with Western
industrial and military interests, rivalries between developed nations, and the increased global de-
mand for minerals. And yet, though the ambitions and material needs of other nations have charted
the Congo's decline, we often misread
Heart of Darkness
, telling ourselves that the darkness is in
the Africans.
Being familiar with the West's fears, I tried to consider the situation from the African point
of view and realized that the obvious question was, what are the Congolese afraid of? One an-
swer—being exploited and manipulated by outsiders—makes clear the challenges of large-scale
conservation here. Building trust is no easy task. Africa's most brutal colonial history and its most
corrupt Cold War-era dictator have left the Congolese both wary and desperate. After the United
States ceased to prop up Mobutu and he lost power in 1997, war killed as many as five and a half
million people, the majority from disease and starvation. Soldiers, whether those of the Congo's
government or the numerous rebel forces, pillaged and raped, often as a means of controlling local
populations, and spread HIV into even the most remote areas. Villagers abandoned their fields and
hid in forests to protect their families, hunting for survival and decimating the wildlife. By 2011,
the DRC received the lowest rating on the UN Development Programme's Human Development
Report, which tracks progress in health, education, and basic living standards.
For conservationists to work successfully here, they have to understand the people well enough
to build trust and at the same time harness their desire for change. In our conversations, Sally
Jewell Coxe of the Bonobo Conservation Initiative distinguished between two basic conservation
