was April when I visited, the sun warm though the air was still cool, the land yet to bloom. A grove of leafless trees and a small lake separate the tall, electrified fence topped with barbed wire from the Trust’s two concrete buildings. Tyler, the laboratory supervisor, a man in his twenties, showed me into the bonobo building and let me watch as he ran experiments with a fourteen-year-old female bonobo, Elykia (“hope” in Lingala, the lingua franca of the western Congo). He told me I’d have to sit in the hallway and stay still, that bonobos were generally shy. He went into a small room next to a glass-walled chamber with a computer touch screen.
A doorway in the back of the chamber opened into the area where the bonobos lived. Elykia entered through it on all fours, craned her neck, scanning the inside, then moved fluidly, rapidly, onto the platform near the touch screen. She gazed out and saw me, her large black eyes opening wide, before she fled in a black blur.
“She’s just being dramatic,” Tyler called to me. “She’ll be flirting with you in no time.”
She neared again, looking in, and made a high-pitched, birdlike sound before bounding to sit on the platform. Though I’d read Japanese primatologist Takayoshi Kano’s description of hearing bonobos in the Congo, like “hornbills twittering in the distance,” I was startled by how different their calls were from the barks and low hoots of the chimpanzees I had seen in zoos.
Elykia glanced around and settled in. Lexigrams appeared on the screen, and she hesitated before touching one with a fingertip. Her hands resembled my own but were long, with more distance between each knuckle. The muscles of her arms were finely shaped, like those of an athlete. She had somewhat less hair than the wild bonobos I had seen in pictures, since captive bonobos can become restless and overgroom. In zoos and sanctuaries, they are sometimes nearly naked, revealing how similar their musculature is to ours, or at least how some of us might like ours to be.
My expectations were high. I’d heard stories of human-bonobo interactions, of bonobos blowing kisses in zoos and staring into people’s eyes. But Elykia forgot about me as she touched the screen, selecting one of several lexigrams, none of which I could understand. Each time, Tyler released a grape through a slot in the wall, near the floor, to reward her. She scooped it with speed and dexterity, barely pausing before refocusing on the screen. I couldn’t imagine a human moving so immediately in response to a stimulus; it was almost as if Elykia’s body were doing the thinking. She touched lexigrams a few more times, and then, hardly looking, she shot her arm out and captured a grape as it began to roll. If we humans have gained brainpower in our evolution, we’ve certainly lost physicality.
After the session with Elykia, Tyler took me through the hallway to the outdoor enclosures, a series of large cages attached by corridors of steel mesh to a yard of yellowed grass. Speaking as he would to a person, he introduced me to an eleven-year-old male, Maisha (“life” in Swahili), who, he explained, was basically a teenager. (Bonobos become sexually mature at nine but do not reach their full adult size until after the age of fifteen.) From watching TV, Tyler explained, Maisha had become obsessed with motorcycles. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t have one. In the same enclosure was Matata, “tough” or “trouble” in Lingala, the group’s wild-born matriarch, now at least forty years old. She rested as Maisha ran back and forth, dragging his laminated sheet of lexigrams across the ground. Seeing me, he threw a paisley cloth over his head and swung along the cage’s ceiling, playing the stooge, then raced out into the sunlit grass.
The differences among the bonobos—the distinctness of their personalities—was undeniable. In the way she held her body, Matata exuded a wild energy, as if her limbs remembered the rainforest. There was authority in her presence even as she dozed, like an old chieftain closing her eyes, barely interested in people like me. She glanced only once before lying on her belly in the sun and going to sleep. Finally, Maisha came over to greet me shyly, lowering his eyes, his fingers hooked in the mesh of the enclosure wall.
Kanzi and his half sister, Panbanisha, whose name meant “cleave together for the purpose of contrast” in Swahili, appeared more curious. As I spoke, I could sense Panbanisha studying me. Her dark eyes peered into my own with a mix of wariness and curiosity that I’d seen on first dates. Female bonobos have pink genital swellings that grow large and pillowlike as they mature, and Panbanisha’s was infected. I asked her how she was, and she stood up and showed me the inflamed area, then sat and crossed her arms, staring at me, as if it might be my turn to reveal something intimate.
As for Kanzi, he was a handsome, well-built bonobo with a wide forehead and barrel chest. He was used to media attention, and when I walked in and he saw my camera, he flashed a photogenic grin and lifted a hand. I failed to snap him in time, and he sighed, appearing exasperated. He studied me, as if to determine just how interesting this encounter might be. After all, he’d played music with Paul McCartney and Peter Gabriel.
Despite their relatively peaceful nature, I wasn’t allowed into the enclosures. Bonobos are significantly stronger than we are, and they can accidentally injure us. There is also confusion around their putative benevolence. The media describe them as sexy, peace-loving creatures, but like us, they can be violent. People are shocked to hear this, since there is a general tendency to simplify, as when we think of someone as “nice” and imagine her, therefore, without anger or jealousy. The same is true of the way we think of bonobos, though by human and chimp standards, they do display remarkable restraint.
My encounters with the bonobos were pleasant, all of them according me some time. They used frequent eye-contact, looking into my eyes as if trying to figure out why I was there. But they didn’t react to me in any dramatic way, except for Elykia, who, as I walked through the building, hooted and peeked from every corner of her enclosure, finally flirting, excited to see a new male.
Kanzi pushed his belly against the mesh and motioned to Tyler, who crouched and tickled him. Kanzi picked up his laminated sheet of lexigrams. Each time he pointed to one, Tyler explained it to me. Kanzi was requesting grape Kool-Aid and celery now, but he was also pointing at lexigrams to indicate that he wanted strawberries before bedtime. Watching, I recalled words from a book Savage-Rumbaugh had co-written with two fellow researchers, Pär Segerdahl and William Fields: “That Kanzi lives in a world permeated with language is visible in his physiognomy. . . . The way his eyes meet your eyes, the way he glances at other persons or cultural objects, the way he gestures towards you or manipulates objects with his hands: everything bears witness to his language.” As Tyler went to the kitchen to get Kool-Aid and celery, I sat on one side of the mesh, Kanzi on the other, a few inches between us. He glanced over and sighed, then just stared off, content with my company on this sleepy afternoon.
Even before my experiences here, my definition of humanity was larger than the one prevalent a few decades ago. Philosopher and anthropologist Raymond Corbey, in his essay “Ambiguous Apes,” describes how, in the 1950s, Belgian cinemas showed a film in which a scientist kills a mother gorilla and skins her body as her infant, soon to be sent to a zoo, sits crying next to her. He writes, “Ten or fifteen years later, such a scene, in a film meant to be seen by Western families with their children, had become unthinkable.” He reflects on French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas’s theory that the gaze of another “appeals directly, without mediation, to our moral awareness,” and he asks whether this holds true when it is not the gaze of “a human child but that of a gorilla child or an orang-utan child?” However, human attitudes are changing, and if we were exposed to the suffering of hunted and imprisoned great apes rather than to glossy photos of wildlife beauty on NGO fund-raising calendars—and if we understood the causes, frequency, and severity of this suffering—we might respond in greater numbers.
A firsthand experience, of course, has a different level of power, and for me, even during my short visit to the Great Ape Trust, there was no doubting the intelligence in the gazes of the bonobos. When we look into another’s eyes, we can tell whether her mind is spacious, holding room to consider, to see things from different angles and evaluate them, or whether
