Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
language, but a few months before her departure, the Rwandan genocide began. During the hun-
dred days beginning on April 6, 1994, eight hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus would be
massacred—most of them killed with machetes. The trip to the Congo suddenly seemed far more
dangerous.
Sally had a college friend whose father had served in Vietnam alongside Brigadier General Wil-
liam E. Stevens, one of the first African-American generals in the air force. Stevens had a master's
in national security affairs and African studies, worked at the Pentagon, and later, after leaving the
military, would join the Africa-America Institute, an organization that fostered education in Africa.
He'd been stationed in Africa on and off for decades, and he counseled Sally. He advised her to
take three hundred American one-dollar bills, which back then were still accepted in the Congo,
and keep them hidden for emergencies. If she was in trouble, she could show only small bills to buy
help.
Well into the night before she left, she wrote copy to earn a little extra as her friends packed her
bags and weighed them on a fish scale. Her bonobo habit had already been expensive, and this trip
would cost her an additional $10,000. But once on the plane, she went back to studying Lingala and
continued to do so after reaching Nairobi and flying into Bunia, a city in Zaire near the Ugandan
border. Though the First and Second Congo Wars have since devastated Bunia, leaving it in a state
of militia infighting over control of its gold mines, in the early 1990s it was quiet. The only place
to stay, there as well as at Sally's next stop, in Nyankunde, was with Protestant missionaries.
These were the final years of Mobutu's regime, the country's economy in free fall, its remaining
infrastructure disintegrating. Sally had traveled in rural Costa Rica and Mexico, but the poorest
places she'd encountered there were far more developed than what she saw now. Even Bunia and
Nyankunde were more developed than Wamba, where Takayoshi Kano had started his work twenty
years earlier, deep in Équateur and less than sixty miles from Kokolopori.
Daily, Sally gave classes on the importance of the rainforest and had the children of Wamba
teach her Lingala. She befriended two half sisters, Maki and Francine, who explained much about
the Bongandu's culture. She accompanied them to church, to the river to wash clothes, or to their
homes, learning to prepare local dishes and
fufu
—a staple food made by boiling cassava, then
pounding it into balls the size of bread rolls that are eaten with sauces.
Each morning, at four o'clock, she went into the forest with Furuichi and the trackers. She spent
her days with the villagers, making friends, perfecting her Lingala, and recording the folktales about
bonobos that formed the basis of the Bongandu's hunting taboo. In one, a man climbs a tree to get
honey but drops his rope and has no way down. When a bonobo comes along, the man is afraid,
thinking the bonobo will throw him to the earth. But the bonobo turns and motions for the man to
climb on his back, then carries him down. Months later, in the village, when the crops are ready
to be harvested, the bonobos come out of the forest to eat sugarcane. The angry villagers throw a
net over them, planning to kill them, but the man whom the bonobo saved picks up the edge and
lets them escape. He tells his people how he was saved and makes them promise never to harm a
bonobo again. This was one of many such tales, others describing bonobos and men living side by
side, lost children who were led back to their villages by bonobos, or a man who left his wife alone
and a bonobo who took his place as the head of the family.
Ever since Sally had fallen in love with bonobos, she'd followed her instinct and passion, know-
ing that once she'd learned enough, she would understand how she could help. Now, the pieces were
coming together. She loved the rainforest and its people. It recalled her childhood, summers spent