like the joint in a cross. But he was mistaken; the city was in fact a few miles north of that imaginary line. Under Belgian colonial rule, the province became Équateur and the city Coquilhatville, a convoluted formulation commemorating Camille-Aimé Coquilhat, the Belgian governor-general of the Congo Free State. But within a year of taking over in November 1965, Mobutu gave the provincial capital its current name in honor of a local leader, soon therafter changing the Congo to Zaire and Léopoldville to Kinshasa.
During the Second Congo War, from 1998 to 2003, when Kinshasa was at times without electricity and water, crowds filling buckets at the river and carrying them home, Mbandaka and the surrounding regions suffered far worse. Opposing armies occupied people’s land and homes, eating their food and robbing them. Hundreds of thousands, most of them civilians, died not only of violence but of starvation and disease.
Now, Mbandaka, a city of 350,000, had yet to recover from its years of penury. Its streets were filled with bicycles, but there were only a few motorcycles and the occasional car. For less than twenty cents per trip, a constant stream of bicycle taxis carried people across town, passengers seated on the padded racks behind the driver. The bikes reminded me of souped-up low-riders in the United States: reflectors and stickers; sparkles, colorful paint, and tassels; fancy rearview mirrors on long stems; pump horns and thumb-rung bells on the wide handlebars; passenger seats of red shag rug, couch cushions, or padded chair armrests bolted side by side.
The retro persisted at the hotel whose name we couldn’t manage to identify, though we asked everyone. Four large concrete buildings stood in a fenced courtyard, each painted a different pastel. Our apartment had a living room, a stripped-down kitchen, and two bedrooms, one for me and the other for Sally and Michael. The security guard told us it was the hotel of the governor, though we couldn’t figure out if this was its name, if the governor stayed here, or if he owned it. The electricity came on briefly after sundown. As at Evelyn’s house, the bathroom had buckets of cold water for bathing and flushing.
Two men from the bank came in the door, with gym bags loaded with 15,000 US dollars in Congolese francs, at least three dozen large bricks held together with rubber bands. The exchange rate was 900 francs to the dollar, and BCI would need small bills of 100 or 200 francs. Whereas inflation had made Kinshasa expensive, a fifteen-minute ride in a taxi or a street meal easily costing ten or twenty dollars, the economy in Équateur’s rainforest was largely barter with almost no outside stimulus, and 100-franc bills—a little more than ten cents—gave the people living on the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve currency for local products.
When Sally and Michael and the two bankers had finished counting money to pay trackers and reserve staff, as well as for the costs of the trip, there were five backpacks full of cash that they locked inside three large plastic duffels. It was already dark. We ate a meal of cassava, rice, chicken, fried bananas, and amaranth greens, cooked and carried over by Aimée’s younger sister. Afterward, Sally continued making calls and meeting with people, and I was not surprised when I walked by her door and saw her asleep in her clothes.
Michael suggested that we take a walk and maybe grab a drink with researchers from CREF, the government’s Centre de Recherche en Écologie et Foresterie whose staff had worked closely in the field with BCI for over a decade. Since our arrival in Mbandaka, a few of them had stopped by to say hello. As part of its goal to support Congolese agency, BCI had supported CREF, funding them to do wildlife surveys for each of the future conservation areas. Michael explained to me that given the distances they traveled, the researchers were the best source of knowledge about everything happening in the province, and he wanted to speak with them more. We locked the door, then descended the stairs and went outside.
Night in the city was nearly absolute, a wide swath of equatorial stars largely unfamiliar to my eyes, a few bright flares out across the city. It took us a moment to find the security guard, sitting near the gate in a folding chair, an AK-47 across his lap.
“Who stays in this hotel?” Michael asked in French. It was BCI’s first time using it, and he wanted to make sure that Sally would be safe in the room.
“Only NGOs and government,” the guard told him. “No one else comes in. It’s very secure here.”
We hesitated a moment, but the hotel’s compound did look well contained, and Michael had spent considerable time in Mbandaka. He and Sally had never had problems in their decade of carrying cash and supplies in and out.
“Many people here watch out for us,” he said, explaining that BCI was well known in Mbandaka. Then, as we walked out along the road, he told me the story of a young man the locals called Miracle Bonobo.
Since my arrival, I’d learned that many people involved with BCI have bonobo nicknames. For example, the Congolese often called Sally and Michael Mama Bonobo and Papa Bonobo. Mama and papa are terms of respect in the DRC, but it had taken me a while to get used to being called papa by people in the street, by Evelyn’s maids, and by the staff at airports and supermarkets. BCI’s oldest member, Dr. Mwanza, who was born in Bas-Congo in 1949 and earned his PhD in biology in the USSR, focusing on species reintroduction, is called Mpaka Bonobo, mpaka meaning “old” or “grandfather.”
The story of Miracle Bonobo dated back six or seven years, to when BCI was still building credibility among the Congolese in the hard period after the civil war. The rebel- and government-held provinces had just reunited under a fragmented central administration when BCI assembled its team of boatmen. The captain was Malu Ebonga Charles, a green-eyed Congolese in his late forties whose grandfather had been German, hence his nickname—Le Blanc, “the white.” The team often plied the long trip from Mbandaka to Kokolopori. Among them was Médard, a young Congolese man who became friends with Michael’s eighteen-year-old nephew, Joey.
“My sister trusted me with Joey,” Michael said. “It was summer vacation, and she asked if I could bring him back alive. I almost didn’t, actually. He was all over the boat, hanging out with boatmen, and he and Médard became friends. Being on the pirogues—the dugout canoes—is BCI’s vacation. It’s the only time we get to unwind and relax. It can be challenging, of course. There are storms on the river, and accidents. But we love it.
“Joey was lying in the sun, hanging out with the boatmen, and we were stopping to swim often, but then he got malaria. He was so feverish that we had to stop to put him in the water to cool him down. We were giving him medicine, but it was taking him a long time to recover. Everyone on the boat really liked Joey, and after he went back to the US, Médard gave me a letter to send to him. In it was fifty dollars.”
Michael paused in the dark. He was breathing a little hard and stopped, putting his hand to his mouth as if to cough or clear his throat.
“He told me,” he said in a thick voice, “that Joey had talked about saving money for college. Médard wanted to send the money, but fifty dollars was half his monthly salary. It was barely enough to live on here. I couldn’t believe he wanted to give away that money, and I insisted that he keep it. I told him Joey didn’t need it.
“A few months later, in Kinshasa, Sally and I got a call. Médard and his friend had been hit by a motorcycle. They were walking here, in Mbandaka, at night, and the motorcycle driver lost control or swerved suddenly to avoid a hole. We never got the story straight. Maybe he was drunk. But he was going really fast. You see how dark it is. It killed Médard’s friend instantly and left Médard unconscious and in critical condition. The hospital said that he’d suffered a massive head injury and would probably die.”
We’d stopped walking and stood on the dark road, no sense of the city around us at all, just the vast, depthless night.
“Our team sent us photos of him. His entire face was swollen. His eyelids were as big as fists. He was bleeding from his ears and eyes
