Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Albert explained the value of the forests for conservation to his family and friends in Kokolop-
ori, the possibility of attracting international funding to protect wildlife. But they couldn't see how
the forest could be of interest to those so far away. Équateur Province, especially this part of it, had
always been among the most isolated areas in the country. Even compared to Djolu, Kokolopori
was poor. Its villagers referred to themselves in Longando, the local language, as
bato ba mbusa
bokele
, “the people at the back of the house.”
For two years, Albert observed where bonobos lived in the forest. To survive, he planted cassava
fields. The country was creeping up on the cataclysmic end to Mobutu's reign, and after Albert's
first year, he couldn't find transportation to Befori, the town on the Maringa River, halfway to
Mbandaka, where he could sell his produce. The next year he was able to get only nine bags of cas-
sava to Befori's market. But as a result of his time in the forest, and of visiting the Japanese research
camp in nearby Wamba, he better understood how the bonobos were studied, and he could sense his
ideas coming together.
He returned to Kinshasa, bringing back information about bonobos for Savage-Rumbaugh, as
well as field reports from Wamba to send to Dr. Takeshi Furuichi, a Japanese bonobo researcher.
Albert stayed with one of his older brothers who was in the military and who worked with Mobutu's
son, Kongolo, a man whose ruthless tactics to keep power had earned him the nickname Saddam
Hussein.
Kongolo Mobutu had been a longtime defender of his father's regime, all the while extorting
money, spying on political opponents, siphoning off the country's wealth. His new company, la So-
ciété Zaïroise d'Importation et Exportation (SOZADIE), had a simple concept. Being Mobutu's son
and a powerful military figure, he was exempt from paying taxes on anything entering or leaving
the country, and he set up the business so that people could pay him to bypass both the usual laws
and the bribes necessary to move merchandise.
Albert felt that he had no choice. Despite planting fields he'd earned virtually no money. Every-
one was making concessions, working for corrupt officials, selling themselves in some way to sur-
vive in a country where theft was a way of life. Though Albert became the secretary general of
SOZADIE, he also found a position at the Ministry of Energy, and began working in the Water De-
partment just after the first of the two Congo Wars had begun.
When you learn about a family or a person's life in the Congo, you sense the politics and wars
like the features of a landscape, distant mountains beyond which it is almost impossible to see who
people once were. Even the army lootings in 1991 and 1993—euphemistically dubbed
les évène-
ments
, “the events”—are often used by people to pin down a date, to recall when they last saw a
relative. Overnight, in 1997, with the end of the First Congo War and more than twenty years after
Mobutu changed the country's name, people would suddenly no longer be
Zaïrois
but
Congolais
again.
But though Mobutu's downfall came suddenly as a result of Rwanda's military intervention, the
people of Kinshasa saw their neighboring country's claim to have removed Mobutu as ridiculous.
The Kinois had been resisting him for years, and to address domestic unrest, he had begun to demo-
cratize. For an invasion to topple him when he was politically weak and dying of prostate cancer
made no sense to them.
And yet the Congo Wars were among the most complicated in modern history, ethnic tensions
in the eastern DRC mirroring those in Rwanda, where conflict between the Tutsis and Hutus hadn't
stopped since the end of the colonial period. Though ethnic division between the two classes had
