Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
vationists can address the immediate needs of people who are deeply invested in the well-being of
their land.
Even on a small scale, I could easily see how generalized approaches and prefabricated solu-
tions might not work in a place like Kokolopori. For instance, in many parts of Africa, microcredit
programs are easy to implement, given that people can grow produce or make goods that they can
quickly sell. In Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya, lorries carry goods from market to market on paved
and dirt roads, and battered cars serve as taxis for passengers and their produce. But in Kokolopori,
if someone has grown rice or coffee, or has harvested and pounded cassava, and wants to sell it, the
only option is to load it into a large, conical basket of woven vines and carry it, with a strap across
the forehead, ten to thirteen days on the rutted path to Kisangani, where there are large markets.
Or the would-be seller could choose the three-day walk to Befori, a small town on the river, where
weeks may pass before a sluggish barge or riverboat arrives to carry passengers to Mbandaka, a
trip that could take up to a month. Only a few people are fortunate enough to have rusty bikes with
which they can bring supplies more rapidly to Kisangani or between villages. And after the costs
of their own food, or of riding in a boat, they earn a pittance, if anything at all. Most prefer to stay
where they are, eating what they grow, bartering when they can.
Arriving with BCI in the village, it all seemed fairly simple to me. But I was seeing a system
they had spent a decade building: of camps with a clinic, generators and solar panels, and commu-
nication via radio; of trackers and local conservationists BCI had educated, funded, and supplied.
On each of their visits, they left most of what they brought: tools, tarps, generators, and electrical
cords, as well as boots and ponchos, bags of batteries and flashlights. And though the mud huts of
Yetee struck me as impoverished, ten years before the village had been destitute, with no livestock,
its cassava fields gone. The Congo had just emerged from a war that killed the majority of its five
and a half million victims through starvation and disease; it was a place where, if you happened on a
village, a man might come out to greet you, wrapped in a tattered cloth, then go back inside and give
the cloth to his naked wife so that she could present herself. People resurrected techniques rarely
used since the early twentieth century, of making clothes out of vines and raffia, the leaf fibers of
a palm tree. Diseases were rampant, tropical ulcers hard to cure. Now they are fairly rare, and an-
tibiotics are available. Here in the reserve, a doctor is on staff and there are few obvious signs of
malnutrition among the children.
As for the bonobos, they are notoriously difficult to habituate to people, moving rapidly through
the forest and wary of humans from having been hunted by soldiers during the wars. As BenoƮt
Mathe Kisuki, the former administrative technical director of the Institut Congolais pour la Conser-
vation de la Nature (ICCN), the Congo government's national park service, explained to me in Kin-
shasa, habituation can be dangerous for bonobos, because it makes them extremely easy to hunt. In
Kokolopori, eco-guards had to be put in place first, and the villagers had to sign accords to protect
the bonobos not only from local hunters but from outside poachers who might enter the reserve.
Once this was done, the bonobos were tracked regularly for years, until they became used to
human presence. Vie Sauvage did this while continuously building support for the creation of an
official reserve, explaining that it would be locally controlled and so overcoming the people's fear
of losing the resources in their forests or of being forced out if Kokolopori were made into a na-
tional park. The most complicated part of the work wasn't the bonobos, despite the challenges of
habituation, but how to satisfy a starving, traumatized people who had learned from a century of
brutalization that outsiders would take what they owned and leave them with nothing.