AR-News: The Gentlest of Beasts, Making Love, Ravaged by War

[Adam Weissman, Wetlands Preserve]

NY Times
KINSHASA JOURNAL

The Gentlest of Beasts, Making Love, Ravaged by War
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: May 3, 2004

INSHASA, Congo - Upstream from this dog-eat-dog 
capital, where the Congo River spills its 
tendrils into the belly of the equatorial rain 
forest, lies the jungle home of one of mankind's 
closest cousins and one of the most endangered 
primates on earth: the bonobo.

Genetically, humans and bonobos, a species of 
chimpanzee, are more than 98 percent similar. 
Socially, it is another matter. Matriarchal as a 
rule, bonobos eschew conflict. They do not fight 
over territory. They do not kill. Any small 
friction they resolve through sexual contact: a 
playful rub, oral sex, full intercourse.
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Peace-loving they may be, but during Congo's 
latest war, the bonobos' jungle habitat fell 
smack on the front line between fighting factions.

Fishing and farming all but ground to a halt 
during the war, which officially ended last year. 
Civilians and soldiers alike turned to the forest 
to fill their bellies.

More and more, the bonobos turned up as supper. 
Their smoked remains showed up at riverine 
markets. Babies were orphaned, which is to say 
they were more or less destined to die: the 
bonobo infant, accustomed to staying on its 
mother's back for the first several years of 
life, has great trouble making it on its own.

So it was that the bonobo orphans of the central 
African rain forest found themselves hurtling 
hundreds of miles down the Congo River to this 
gritty metropolis and into the arms of a 
redheaded Frenchwoman called Claudine André.

Ms. André recalls it as love at first sight. More 
than 10 years ago, after a famous, ruinous 
pillage of Kinshasa, Ms. André, then a 
businesswoman, went to the ravaged city zoo and 
chanced upon a bereft infant bonobo. He looked as 
though he wanted to die, she recalled. She named 
him Mikano, took him home and became, in her 
words, his surrogate mother.

When the war came, more orphans trickled in. She 
kept them on the grounds of an elite American 
school. Then, last year, when peace came, she 
opened Lola Ya Bonobo, a sanctuary for orphaned 
bonobos on a 75-acre patch of green on the 
fringes of the capital.

Infants are paired up with surrogate mothers. 
There is an endless supply of bananas and sugar 
cane (bonobos have an incurable sweet tooth). An 
electric fence encircles the park, so as to keep 
the apes from scampering out of the woods and 
into Kinshasa's traffic. The park is open to 
visitors.

On a Sunday afternoon not long ago, the park's 31 
young charges did what young bonobos do: chewed 
on blades of grass, swung from palm fronds, 
kissed, frolicked and fondled.

"It's the hippies of the forest," Ms. André said, 
taking their wrinkled hairy hands in hers. "When 
they feel anxious, when they are afraid, they 
have sex. And they calm down."

As if on cue, a big bonobo mounted a small 
bonobo. They rolled around on the grass, rubbed 
against each other and went on their merry ways.

Bonobos are not proprietary about mates, and sex 
is not always about procreation. Homosexuality is 
au courant, and sexual play begins when they are 
barely a year old, though intercourse must wait 
until they are teenagers. Much to Ms. André's 
delight, a teenage orphan, a male, arrived 
recently. Hopefully, she said, mating will soon 
begin.

"It's really make love, not war," Ms. André said 
of the bonobo way of life. "It was so sad to see 
such a pacific animal so destroyed by war."

The plight of the bonobos, a species found only 
in Congo, is a window into the repercussions of 
war on the ecology of the Congo River Basin, one 
of the most diverse ecosystems in the world and 
home to more than 400 species of mammals. Mining, 
logging and a sustained trade in bush meat have 
all put the squeeze on their habitats.

War having made vast swaths of the country 
inaccessible to researchers, it is impossible to 
know precisely how these creatures have fared. 
Certain habitats may have been left untouched, 
others devoured.

In the Virunga Highlands near the border of 
Uganda and Rwanda, the mountain gorilla 
population has grown, according to a census by 
the Wildlife Conservation Society. By contrast, 
in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the eastern 
lowland gorilla's population has fallen by 70 
percent to fewer than 5,000, according to 
Conservation International. The elephants in the 
same park may well have vanished.

As for the bonobo population, scientists have no 
reliable numbers but fear the species may be 
nearing extinction. Late last year, the United 
Nations Environment Program reported that the 
bonobo, along with the gorilla, chimpanzee and 
orangutan, could disappear in 50 years.

Peace is likely to present a new challenge to 
forest dwellers: Congo's rain forests have once 
again opened up to logging companies, and today 
the first batches of timber can be seen floating 
downriver from Équateur Province to the port here 
in Kinshasa. With blessings from the World Bank, 
150 million acres of rain forest could be opened 
up for logging.

As the World Bank sees it, timber concessions 
could pour hundreds of millions of dollars into 
government coffers. Environmentalists fear that 
the logging could also endanger the habitat of 
the Pygmy people, who have eked out a living in 
the forest for centuries. The bonobos are 
sometimes called Pygmy chimpanzees, because 
Pygmies too are averse to conflict; they too 
prefer to hunt and forage in the forest rather 
than fight one another for territory. United 
Nations investigators suspect that some of them 
had been eaten during the war too.

--
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