Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Panbanisha was five or six then, and she and Sally explored the forest, Panbanisha riding piggy-
back. Researchers left food stashes in various locations, and Panbanisha knew each one, first point-
ing to strawberries on her sheet of lexigrams, or cantaloupe, then directing Sally to that cache. They
also played hide-and-seek, and when a researcher called, “Panbanisha, where are you?” Sally and
the little bonobo sat, looking at each other, eyes wide. Sally felt like a child again, she and her best
friend playing in the forest, speaking as much with words as with gazes.
Often, Panbanisha groomed Sally. She broke a twig, made it sharp, and traced it under each of
Sally's fingernails. Then she bit off the ends of the nails. She inspected every bug bite and scratch,
and Sally had to tell her each one was okay before Panbanisha moved on to the next.
Kanzi also groomed Sally, though he once peeked down her shirt, first looking up into her eyes
to ask permission, in what seemed a gentlemanly manner. The difference between their species
didn't appear to bother him, and when he was older, he would occasionally pleasure himself while
looking at ordinary women's magazines, particularly turned on by the models in fur coats. But flirt-
ing was rare. For bonobos, females dominate, and Kanzi knew the hierarchy. His adoptive moth-
er, the wild-born Matata, couldn't communicate well with humans, but he obeyed her. His abilit-
ies—from language, to building fires and cooking, to chipping knives like those from the Stone
Age—didn't change that.
The bonobos were joyful by nature, and Sally had sensed that they loved to be happy and play.
She felt sorry for Kanzi, that a creature with uninhibited lovemaking in his genes had no female
companion. Like humans, bonobos have a strict incest taboo. But because his father had been used
for breeding and his genes were overrepresented among zoo bonobos, Kanzi was given a vasectomy
by those in charge of captive breeding. Over the years, however, the vasectomy failed. At the Great
Ape Trust in Iowa, he fathered his first child, the baby Teco, whom Savage-Rumbaugh has been
raising, further exploring the lines between human and bonobo culture.
But all that miraculous summer, Sally was planning to do an article—and eventually a
book—about her experiences, believing she could help bonobos by writing about them.
“I was doing it as a participant observer,” she told me, “thinking that I was going to bring the
story back to
National Geographic
. It didn't work out that way, but I did get to bring
National Geo-
graphic
to Kokolopori twenty years later.”
Though BCI would take the
National Geographic
team into the field in 2011, the work that
would lead to this was just starting. After that summer with the bonobos, Sally joined the Bonobo
Protection Fund. Founded by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Takayoshi Kano, it was the only existing
organization focused on bonobo protection in the wild, though under the statutes of Georgia State, it
was limited to research and education. Working with the BPF, Sally started the Pro-Bonobo News-
letter and raised more than $100,000 for the organization.
“That summer, Sue and I talked about visiting Zaire. Having spent so much of her life with
bonobos, she'd dreamed of seeing them in the wild. It was my dream, too, and we decided to visit
the research site at Wamba, where Dr. Kano had first habituated wild bonobos in the mid-seventies.
We arranged to go with a group of Japanese researchers led by Dr. Takeshi Furuichi, one of Dr.
Kano's protégés, and a film crew from NHK TV in Japan.”
Sally earned money for the trip by doing freelance copywriting and began to study Lingala with
Alden Almquist, who would eventually join BCI's board. An anthropologist who'd grown up in the
Congo, he'd worked at the Library of Congress as a sub-Saharan Africa research analyst and liter-
ary examiner for over two decades. By the time she left for the DRC, she had a good base in the
