Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
miles away). Iyondji Community Bonobo Reserve, African Wildlife Foundation website,
ht-
178
Some of the employees were
On another day, he shut the generator off shortly after Sally, Mi-
chael, and I showed up, and asked us to buy gas. Sally agreed, and only later, when I checked the
price of gas on my way out, did I discover that he'd charged much more than the going rate. Of
course, BCI struggled with skimming as well, with a culture that learned, over Mobutu's three dec-
ades in power, that the only way to survive was theft. And we were grateful to use the Internet.
When their generator broke down, BCI brought their own, the man who had been skimming sud-
denly sheepish and their offices crowded as everyone there tried to get online.
178
I got the sense that
Phila Kasa Levo said that in their area, habituation was coming along well,
though at AWF's other bonobo conservation site, Lomako, one of the oldest in the Congo, it was
failing, the bonobos returning to their old habits of fleeing people. He explained that at Lomako,
AWF had built modern accommodations, but that the work on the ground hadn't been very ef-
fective, and hearing him say this, I recalled my first impressions of Kokolopori, my feeling that I
had expected more by way of construction—a modern eco-lodge, for instance. The idealist in us
often wants to see a tangible achievement, an image of success that the mind can easily identi-
fy, rather than the daily management of rudimentary camps, the trackers, and the villagers' needs.
(Lomako is one of the oldest bonobo research areas in the Congo, established in the mid-seventies
by Noel and Alison Badrian. Francis White and Randall Susman, the first person to publish a topic
on bonobos [The
Pygmy Chimpanzee: Evolutionary Biology and Behavior
, Plenum Press, 1984],
worked there as well. The Lomako site was used extensively by Max Planck Institute researcher
Gottfried Hohmann from 1989 to 1998, his presence a source of contention among American re-
searchers.)
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The feeling that everyone note 1:
Despite this, BCI survived on the strength of its network. Sally
had been in Kinshasa after the war, when few of the major NGOs were there, and she had created a
broad network that made Congolese throughout the country aware of her goals. Increasingly, they
would come to her looking for support. Her good relations with CREF and Dr. Mwanza led her to
make contact with numerous community groups seeking to work in conservation.
note 2:
According to Dr. Mwanza, a similar though less dramatic story would unfold between
BCI and the World Wildlife Fund, which had been put in charge of the “Lac Tele-Lac Tumba
Swamp Forest Landscape.” At a Congo Basin Forest Partnership meeting, where a number of
NGOs gathered to make their cases for funding, Alden Almquist, a BCI board member, and Alison
Mize, BCI's co-founder, made a case for funding BCI projects in the landscape. They explained
that BCI had been supporting conservation at numerous locations in the DRC and had an estab-
lished partnership with CREF's Congolese researchers, whom they were funding to do surveys in
the area. In conversation, Alden told me, “Alison and I were the ones who got BCI on the CBFP.
. . . They were under a mandate, and the Smithsonian moderator enforced it to include whoever
was working on the ground. They went through all of the areas where the assembled groups could
have a role. They said, 'How about community development?' Alison said, 'We do that.' They
said, 'How about research?' 'Yeah,' I'd say, 'we do that.' We got our name put into spreadsheets.
Many years later now, I'm not sure that Alison and I did the organization a favor. We've spent so
many hours writing reports to these people to get our work at Lac Tumba funded for three years,
but then WWF cut us out.”
Alden describes WWF's people in the Congo as actively non-collaborative at the time, his
emails ignored or redirected, and Sally tells me that WWF had no presence on the ground for the
first year of that phase and that they never convened a meeting of all partners until the project was
nearly over. As she recalls it, halfway into the first phase, which lasted from 2003 to 2006, WWF
began scrambling to figure out how to work in the area. By then, BCI had thirty-seven commu-
nity accords and had already drawn up plans for three community-based reserves, even laying out
