as if I were corroborating a view he had long held. Seeing his look of genuine interest, I offered more details: my planned visit to a community-based reserve in the Congo’s Équateur Province, the importance of conservation not only for the wildlife, but also for the local people.
I showed him my letter of invitation, and he studied it, the page explaining that I would help “protect biodiversity by writing a book about the Bonobo Peace Forest . . . and raise up the image of the DRC in its conservation efforts.” When I’d received it a month before, the ambitious statements surprised me. The letter was necessary for my visa, and I was beginning to understand that the Congolese who composed it must have thought it important to impress officials. Now, as this one read it, he nodded repeatedly. When he finished, he flashed me a broad smile and thanked me, with what sounded like earnestness, for having come to the Congo. He stamped my passport and said, “Bon voyage.”
As I walked, jumbled concrete buildings and a few sprawling hotels cluttered the descending land between the road and the rocky shore of Lake Kivu, its waters reaching to a hazy blue line at the horizon. Five young men on motorcycles shadowed me, asking if I wanted a ride, though I could easily reach the hotels on foot. Where the road branched inland, the city appeared empty, a ghost town but for two white UN Land Cruisers racing in the distance, lifting plumes of dust.
It was hard not to be vigilant. From my readings, I had mixed impressions of Goma, a backpackers’ haven that, in the almost two decades since the Rwandan genocide, had become the epicenter of a chronic warzone. To make matters worse, in 2002, about 40 percent of the city, then home to more than half a million people, was destroyed in the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo. A stream of lava at times two thirds of a mile wide had poured through. Even now, volcanic rock protruded from the dirt where the roads were unpaved, catching at the wheels of passing motorcycles.
I was most struck by how the Congolese looked at me. Rwandans and Ugandans were used to visitors, and even those who wanted to sell something gave no more than cursory attention, whereas the Congolese I passed studied me, as if to see who was before them, to know why I was there. They carried more scars, on foreheads and cheeks, or had missing teeth, a droop in the corner of an eyelid, hints of old injuries in the way they walked, positioned themselves to pick up a bag, or rode a motorcycle. They gazed at my eyes, narrowing their own, at once cautious and curious. But when I smiled, they smiled back quickly, as if relieved.
I spent that night in the only hotel I could find with a vacancy, the others filled with the personnel of NGOs. My room was more luxurious than I expected, with polished wood cabinets and shiny bathroom fixtures, though nothing quite worked. Electric sockets sizzled when I wiggled the plug, but gave no power; the shower head dripped, and none of the doors, bathroom or wardrobe, sat well on its hinges.
I was too tired to care, but after I lay in bed, I couldn’t fall asleep. The next day, I’d fly to Kinshasa, one of Africa’s most populous and chaotic cities. If all went to plan, a week later I would head into the forest, either by dugout canoe or bush plane. I’d looked at maps, at satellite images of the Congo basin rainforest, the second largest on earth after the Amazon, its hundreds of rivers the real highways, far more perceptible than the occasional yellow line of a dirt road. How would it feel when the only clear space was that surrounding a few huts, each village an island of sky? If you walked out, you traveled for weeks beneath the trees, barely seeing the sun.
But to experience this place and its people clearly would require a conscious decision to look beyond the stereotypes. The Western view of the Congo remained limited by colonial mythologies: the great river, the dark heart of Africa, notions that Cold War rivalries, mineral exploitation, and the recent wars had kept alive in our minds. The Congo had come to signify savagery, and hearing its name, many shuddered without quite knowing why. But for millions of Congolese who struggled to build ordinary lives, this shudder pushed them deeper into alienation, further from the global community. The shudder increased our blindness not only to the forest and its importance to life on earth, but to the very people whose actions were crucial to saving it.
Outside my window, Goma was silent but for the occasional passing vehicle and the brief, muted voice of the guard in the hotel’s entrance.
Empty Hands, Open Arms
Front Iowa to the Bonobos of Équateur
Naked Apes, Furry Apes, Godlike Apes
In an age when the state of the planet preoccupies us—from climate change to deforestation, and from the extinction of species to the degradation of human habitat—it’s hard not to wonder whether we are capable of working through lasting challenges. Do we have the cultural staying power, or will short attention spans, coupled with our love of instant gratification, doom our attempts to rehabilitate the environment, just as the naysayers have been predicting? Having read countless dismal news reports in recent years, I wanted to know about the sorts of people and projects that aren’t dominating the headlines, those developing long-term solutions to environmental destruction, their work done year in, year out, in all its routine and tiresome glory.
The Congo caught my attention early on because its rainforests are so crucial to preventing climate change, and because the country itself was at a crossroads. In 2003, it emerged from possibly the world’s most devastating conflict since World War II, and with increasing political stability, its massive forests and mineral wealth were again vulnerable to large-scale exploitation. Conservationists were rushing in, and of those working there, one group, the Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI), was fostering a surprising number of conservation areas in spite of its small size and limited funding. Two large community-based reserves had already been established and several others were in the works, all with the goal of protecting the habitat of the bonobo, a matriarchal great ape that, like the chimpanzee, has more than 98.6 percent of its DNA in common with humans.
When I contacted BCI’s president, Sally Jewell Coxe, and explained my interest in writing about new approaches to conservation, she described how she and a few others started the organization in 1998, in the spirit of bonobo cohesiveness, its goal to build coalitions so as to use resources more sustainably. Unlike national parks, the reserves contained villages whose occupants were trained to manage and protect the natural resources and wildlife. BCI’s model was inclusive, she said, inviting people in rainforest villages to participate and taking into account their histories, cultures, and needs in order to foster grassroots conservation movements.
This last detail caught my attention, that understanding another culture’s values had allowed BCI to develop a self-replicating conservation model. They focused on creating forums to discuss different ways of thinking about natural resources, and encouraging the local people to take leadership roles in conservation projects. Given that populations and the global demand for raw materials were soaring, that millions of hungry people were eager to cut down the Congo’s forest for farmland and hunt the remaining wildlife, a change of consciousness was as urgent as the application of environmental laws. The rainforest’s importance for life on earth was undeniably clear: it protected watersheds while releasing oxygen and removing carbon from the atmosphere. As for bonobos, they were already on the verge of extinction, their habitat only in the DRC, to the south of the Congo River’s curve, in an area where the national government’s influence barely reached.
The portrait that Sally painted of effective conservation work was a mixture of anthropology and conservation biology, in which knowledge of the land, the people, the animals, and the country’s history was essential. At the center of BCI’s vision was the bonobo. As one of humanity’s two closest living relatives, the bonobo was—Sally told me—important for our understanding of ourselves as humans:
