Endangered (23 page)

It's only by digging my fingers into his ribs that I'm able to make Otto let go. He gives great big raspy laughs, rolls onto his back, and smiles, exposing strong creamy teeth. His baby clambers over his sleeping mother to join in, crawling right over Otto's face to get closer to me. I don't tickle him, though — this little bonobo has never had direct contact with humans, and I'd like to keep it that way.

I take advantage of the distraction to stand up. Otto's immediately on his feet, placing the infant on his back and stepping toward me. When I reach the fence he shrieks to warn me about the electricity. But I know something he doesn't, of course, and step through the doorway and shut it quickly. My mom flicks the power back on.

Otto stands as close as he can to the fence and purses his lips, making his kissy-kissy face. I lean as close as I can and blow air over his mouth. He smiles and purses his lips again, bobbing his head.

On the other side of the fence lie the release bonobos. Within her crate, Songololo is now awake and down from her nylon hammock, standing at the bars and watching Otto curiously. There's nothing apprehensive about her expression; she remembers Otto and seems excited to get out and greet her old friend and his new companions.

Mom wakes up the porters and the vet and gets them ready for the release. Ropes have been tied to the crate gates, threaded
through the fence to our side of the enclosure. All we have to do is pull. While the rest of the group sips tea and discusses potential complications, I stand at the fence, blowing on Otto's face and saying my good-byes.

Once they've heard the commotion, the rest of the semiwild bonobos will soon be here, so my mom decides now is the time. Three of the porters take up the other ropes, and I ask for the fourth. Otto watches me, intrigued. I see his eyes follow the rope to the crate, and he goes over to it, sitting in front and waiting for the door to open. My smart boy.

He lies down on all fours, peering between the bars. With a creaking slide, the door pulls open. Otto lays his arms down, palms open, in the bonobo sign of trust, as little Congo takes a wide-eyed look around and ventures out.

Though the specific conflict I've written about in
Endangered
is fictional, the lengthy history of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo is not. Though as of publication there is still widespread fighting in the east, Congo is not officially at war today. That's a semantic technicality rather than a reality: Numerous rebel groups are active near the Rwandan border, plundering resources and recruiting child soldiers and raping women — by UN estimates, a thousand a day. Attempts to rein in the violence are often ineffective and, even worse, can lead to retaliatory massacres.

The Congolese began the twentieth century toiling under colonialism and ended it in the midst of armed conflict. There is more reason for optimism today, however, than there has been for years. Violence may still be endemic, but the existence of the nation itself isn't in question, as it was in the 1990s. Though the last twenty years have seen assassinations and regime changes, in the current moment few are anticipating the capital could fall as it does in
Endangered
. But the United Nations still sees a need to maintain its largest peacekeeping operation in the world in Congo, keeping forty thousand units on the ground. Whenever there is an election, as in 2006 and 2011, the world holds its breath to see whether the first stirrings of Congolese democracy will hold.

The conflict and the reasons for it are diffuse. This book is a work of fiction, and is neither a recounting of real events nor an attempt to get to the bottom of the reasons for the fighting. The Democratic Republic of Congo is an enormous country, rivaling Western Europe in landmass, and, with almost seventy-two million people, is the world's largest francophone country. The scale of what has happened there — the five million and counting dead, the
grotesque brutality of much of the slaying — is hard to comprehend. Unlike the cases of the most infamous villains of recent history (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Milosevic), the killing in Congo is less the product of an ironfisted regime than of the lack of one, the consequence of a government so impoverished by corruption that it doesn't have the resources to combat the lawless factions terrorizing a huge territory.

In the midst of all this live the bonobos. The Democratic Republic of Congo is the only place in the world where they exist in the wild. Though monkeys have always been eaten in Congo, almost all of the tribes in the country have had taboos against eating great apes, the tailless intelligent primates known in most local languages as “mock men.” But with the rampant starvation that comes along with such a long war, those taboos have eroded. The story of each orphan that arrives at the bonobo sanctuary in Kinshasa is virtually the same:

Hunters enter the forest. They wait for nightfall, when the bonobos call loudly to one another while bedding down in their tree nests. They hide out beneath them and, come morning, shoot or machete as many as they can. The adults they eat immediately or smoke to sell as bushmeat. Infants can fetch upwards of $50 on the black market, or $1,500 if they're smuggled out and sold internationally. (One of Lola Ya Bonobo's orphans was rescued after being imaged in a Paris airport security scanner, crammed into a carry-on.) When the average DRC income is $12 a month, either amount is a windfall, so the infants are caged and transported to marketplaces in the larger cities. Most don't survive the trip. Each bonobo who grows up in the sanctuary serves as an effigy for the many more that have died in the process of getting him there.

In
Endangered
I've strived to remain true to what scientists know of bonobo behavior. I'm sure there are inaccuracies and
errors, for which I of course take sole responsibility. Similarly, the conflict I've fictionalized is, I'm sure, untrue in a hundred ways to how a full-on civil war might transpire. I have a lot of hope that the Congolese people are heading into better times. But, all the same, writing about war didn't require that much speculation.

NEW YORK, DECEMBER 2011

Q: How did you wind up writing about bonobos and Congo?

A: Congo, formerly known as Zaire, is the same land Joseph Conrad wrote about in
Heart of Darkness
. The state department suggests no nonessential travel there. I'm not quite what you'd call a tough guy, so how did I end up going? The answer's more
GQ than National Geographic
: a pair of pants.

I couldn't figure out where my new Bonobo brand khakis had gotten their name, so I hit the Internet. A few months later I was sitting on a porch in Congo, talking with the founder of the world's only bonobo sanctuary about how odd it is to find yourself reflected back in a creature that isn't even human.

I knew Congo was the home of the world's deadliest conflict since World War II, but not much more than that — I'd always skipped the page if I found an article on the violence, figuring it was depressing and there was nothing I could do. But the bonobos were a new way in. Their evolutionary history and their current plight are closely linked to what it means to be a human living in a world divided between development and deprivation. In my first days reading about them, I found my apathy punctured and was gulping down more and more material about both primates and politics.

The moment I knew the bonobos would become a novel, though, was when I read about Kinsuke, an orphan who had arrived at the bonobo sanctuary too frail to survive. In her final moments, she had held tightly to the rope that her captors had used to restrain her, refusing to let it go. It was her only possession
left after everything else had been taken from her, and she died clutching it to her cheek. Sometimes your greatest torment can also be your greatest treasure. Writing
Endangered
was a way of trying to get my head around that.

 

Q: You traveled to Kinshasa in June 2011 to stay at the bonobo sanctuary run by Claudine André. Were you intimidated by the trip?

A: The first sign that I was leaving my comfort zone was that Expedia and Travelocity didn't permit Kinshasa, a city of ten million people, as a destination. Luckily for me, Orbitz had no such qualms. When I sent my passport to the DRC embassy, it came back with a fuzzy rubber-stamped visa, hand-numbered.

When I went to the doctor and asked him to give me whatever inoculations I would need for DRC, he started chatting about malaria and cholera while he lined up a drawer's worth of syringes on his desktop. Eight needles later, I walked out of there with massively punctured biceps and a bad case of nerves.

Months of research and one highly anxious mother later, I was on my way, flying from New York to Washington to Ethiopia to Brazzaville and finally to Kinshasa. I was scared, sure, but mostly I was excited. I was about to meet my first bonobos.

I flew into the western part of Congo, almost a thousand miles away from Goma and the Rwandan border, where the worst fighting is. The Lola Ya Bonobo sanctuary is very well run, and they took great care of me. There was even air-conditioning! It was the easiest way imaginable to visit Congo.

That said, being in Congo also meant losing the safety net I'd had living in America. I felt it most as I was leaving Kinshasa and got hassled for bribes at the airport. A lot of bribes: A good half-dozen people, from airline representatives to security agents, pressed for handouts. I had read about the airport kleptocracy and came
supplied with granola bars, which I gave out instead. For some reason passing people food instead of dollars made me feel like less of a dupe. I realized, though, as I made my slow and almost amusingly harassing passage through the airport (one security agent even told me she wouldn't let me through unless I married her and got her a US passport) that in the back of my head was running a ticker-tape thought that
if this gets bad I'll ask for a supervisor
. But the supervisor had already asked me for a bribe. And the police can't always be trusted, so outside of the US embassy, there was nowhere to escalate the problem, if it came to that. It all made me realize how much faith we have in our Western institutions, and how important that faith is to our going about our daily lives in relative calm. Michela Wrong writes that it's a discomfort common to first-time visitors to Congo, realizing “their well-being depends on the condescension of strangers.”

 

Q: Obviously, in a book about an endangered animal in Congo, suffering is going to be a theme. Did you discover anything about it that surprised you?

A: How people get through suffering was on my mind as I started, but in spending time learning about the bonobos and the recent history of Congo, that question got a little more tailored.

My own personal journey was realizing that you don't have to ignore a lesser suffering because there's a greater one out there — that's a sure route to paralysis. This one Sophie is able to come to terms with fine; she wonders how people can devote their lives to improving the lot of animals when there is so much human anguish, but the presence of Otto in her life is enough to settle the debate. He needs her, and she loves him; it's that simple. I had a much harder time getting my mind around it. Though I've always been more of an environmentalist than a humanitarian, writing a book about Congo that focused on bonobos first and humans
second, when there is such a humanitarian crisis going on, gave me pause. I asked myself: Is it moral to concern ourselves with nonhuman suffering? But that artificial classroom question of human vs. animal disappeared when I actually visited, because it became clear that the two issues can't be separated. How we treat the environment is inextricably linked to how we treat one another. The same systems of social power — in Congo's case, a corrupt government and rapacious corporate forces — treat underprivileged humans and animals in much the same way.

 

Q: Since gaining independence from Belgium in 1960, the Democratic Republic of Congo has suffered from a succession of dictators and widespread violence, while other neighboring countries, such as Congo-Brazzaville or Central African Republic, have had a somewhat easier time. What's kept Congo back?

A: Everyone's got a different theory for why Congo has had such a hard time. A lot of the seeds were planted back when King Leopold II of Belgium was in control — he was merciless in using slave labor on his rubber plantations, including cutting off the hands of slaves who tried to run away, and that devaluation of human life stayed on after the Belgians fled. There was an attitude among the colonists that empowerment of native Congolese would subvert the country:
“Pas d'élites, pas d'ennemis.”
(“No elites, no enemies.”) After the Belgians left, there were only seventeen Congolese with college educations. Untrained men were rushed into government posts with the American CIA playing a major part, and the country was born with a cramp in its side.

Obviously there's more to it than that, though. It seems DRC's main curse is the very richness of its land. Elsewhere politicians, even the most selfish, need a tax base to get money. In Congo, all a politician needs is to pull minerals out of the earth and sell them. People — and bonobos — are less important than efficient
mining. It's an irony about Africa that its most resource-rich countries are often its most unstable.

 

Q: Bonobos are closely related to chimpanzees, and for a long time weren't thought of as a separate species. Even once they were, they were called pygmy chimpanzees until the classification was changed to bonobo in 1954. Now that they're standing on their own two feet, so to speak, what other differences between the two species have come out?

A: What I love most about the peaceful, matriarchal bonobos is that they prove war and conflict aren't inevitable.

When anthropologists first looked to find our evolutionary origins, they settled on
Australopithecus
, which is seen as a now-vanished midway point between us and chimpanzees.
Australopithecus
wasn't thought to be a friendly guy. It behaved a lot like a chimp. It killed infants so its own offspring could prosper. Its sexual life was pretty close to continual rape.

Bonobos didn't enter into anthropologists' picture of our origins because their natural shyness meant no one knew much about them until recently. They're as genetically close to us as chimps, if not more so, and yet they aren't nearly as violent. The big difference: the Congo River. It split the two groups, with bonobos getting the south of the river, where they didn't have to compete with gorillas for food. Given their relatively plentiful resources, they didn't have to evolve the same systems of intense competition and squabbling. Social interaction and support became more important than fighting for resources, and so they turned to sex as their means of structuring society instead of violence, and the resulting profound sense of intimacy and companionship led to a far better lot for females and children. With bonobos, mothers are in charge, and everyone benefits.

 

Q: What do you make of the irony that a symbol for human-kind's potential to avoid war and aggression lives only in one of the most war-torn countries in the world?

A: I don't think it's reductive to say that the bonobos have a lot to say about how Congo can get out of its plight. Studying how bonobos diverge from chimps (and why) reminds us that the difference between widespread conflict and widespread harmony lies in access to resources. The Congolese in the east have scant support from the government — little education, roads, hospitals, police — and so are vulnerable to militia groups who rove, raping women and recruiting boys. But would the militias persist if there weren't such a struggle for resources? When there's enough to eat, you don't have to use violence to get your dinner. Just ask the bonobos. They're right there in Congo's backyard.

 

Q: What do Congo and its bonobos need now?

A: I'm no Congo scholar. But a strong legal system would be a start, with a court of justice that could hold the country's highest executives responsible for misdeeds and stolen money. With that faith in authority at the center, the rest of Congolese society could follow suit. Beyond that, as Congo's economy continues to grow it will be able to employ more people and give them a baseline of subsistence that will prevent them from needing to trek into the jungle to trap food. Tourism will be essential for this, and in that way Lola Ya Bonobo serves a dual function: providing a home for orphans and serving as what many say is the best-functioning element of the Congolese economy.

 

Q: What can someone sitting in relative luxury do to help?

A: Conservation takes money, and holding fund-raisers to help those working to maintain environmental integrity throughout
the world is a great way to help them do their work and simultaneously get the word out about the plight of the bonobo. There are only a few thousand bonobos left, and the numbers continue to diminish. But the fledgling national parks in Congo can reverse the downward trend, for the bonobos and the other animals — like the forest elephants and okapi — that will also benefit. Congo's lack of economic development has a silver lining, since a lot of its land is still pristine and untouched by roads or logging. Now is the time to act and preserve it.

Among the best groups working in conservation today, with projects that directly impact the well-being of bonobos, are:

And, focusing more specifically on bonobos, are:

While I was in Kinshasa, I spoke to Terese Hart, a conservationist who has been fighting for bonobos for years. I asked her what someone who is getting started could do to help. Her answer surprised me: Learn how to do field observations. She meant taking college courses that involved fieldwork, but I was reminded of Jane Goodall's description of her youth in her remarkable memoir for children,
My Life with the Chimpanzees
. She would
lie for hours in the garden of her English house, staring at dogs, cats, and birds, and take notes. For her, that's how it all started. Observation. Dr. Hart was talking about how to make a good research scientist, but I think her advice can apply to us all: Look. Notice.