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veloping it. For more information on BCI's approach, see L. Alden Almquist et al., “Kokolopori
and the Bonobo Peace Forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo,” in Painemilla et al.,
Indigen-
ous Peoples and Conservation
.
167
There's a saying
Turner,
The Congo Wars
, vii.
167
Gérard Prunier's meticulous account
Prunier,
Africa's World War
, 214.
168
The Congolese memorize his songs
Young men who make an art of the way they dress are
called
sapeurs
. For a disempowered society, this vision, modest as it might be, gives young people
something for which they can be respected.
Michela Wrong offers an excellent account of
sapeurs
in
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz
,
178-84. For an excellent photographic study of
sapeurs
, see also Daniele Tamagni,
Gentlemen of
Bacongo
(London: Trolley, 2009).
169
BCI's vision has always been
Michael described a similar experience with a field researcher
named David Mikwaya Yamba-Yamba, who was working for the Japanese when he contracted a
severe gastrointestinal illness. He and his fellow CREF researcher, Norbert Mbangi Mulavwa, rode
several dozen miles on their bicycles to Djolu, where the small hospital didn't have the right medi-
cine for him. As his condition worsened, Mbangi contacted Sally in Kinshasa. She called Doctors
without Borders, who had a plane scheduled to fly to Djolu from Mbandaka, and arranged for them
to bring the medicine that would keep him alive for a while longer. Then Sally contacted Michael,
who was in Kokolopori, and told him that a motorcycle would be bringing Yamba-Yamba to Be-
fori's port. Michael quickly had the boats prepared and recalled, when he arrived, seeing Yamba-
Yamba on the riverbank, lying under a mosquito net, skeletal and barely conscious. The boatmen
broke their record and returned to Mbandaka in three and a half days, and were able to get him
better medical attention.
“The medicine kept him alive,” Sally told me, “because our team could mobilize. We had
good communication between a number of different groups. Every person involved is necessary
for things like this to work, from the guys on the ground in Djolu to the boatmen, to our people in
Mbandaka and Kinshasa.”
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor,
Primitive Culture
. (London: John
Murray, 1871).
171
If we feel that culture
Adriaan Kortlandt, “Spirits Dressed in Furs?” in Cavalieri and Singer,
The Great Ape Project
, 138.
171
Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham
Peterson and Wrangham,
Demonic Males
, 256.
171
They are right that
Stevens, Vervaecke, and Elsacker, “The Bonobo's Adaptive Potential,” in
Furuichi and Thompson,
The Bonobos: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation
, 33.
In
Kanzi's Primal Language
, Segerdahl, Fields, and
Savage-Rumbaugh write:
The seemingly unimportant fact that we did not develop the Pan/Homo culture by design will
be a recurrent theme of this topic. Spontaneity is expounded as a central mark of culture and
language. . . . We began to interact more spontaneously with the apes, we did things that both
humans and apes found exciting and we began to improvise the research on the basis of how
our interactions actually developed. In some sense, we became ourselves the subjects of a re-
search that no one controlled in advance. Gradually we discovered that we developed an
inter-
mediary
culture with both human and bonobo features. . . .
The term 'culture' has two aspects. The first, increasingly emphasized in biology, is the
transmission of information non-genetically from animal to animal and from one generation of
animals to another. The second aspect of culture, which is more important for us, is the content
of a culture: a shared way of living containing characteristic activities, tools, environments,
communication means, social relations, personalities, games, gestures and so on. What is cul-
turally transferred is itself a culture, or 'way of life', as Frans de Waal . . . says in his definition.
