capital, Mbandaka, a city 365 miles up the Congo River, to join BCI staff stationed there, and would soon be on boats, taking supplies upriver to the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve.
Michael Hurley, BCI’s executive director, left his computer and shook my hand. He pushed his glasses down to speak, pale indentations on the bridge of his nose where the skin had been damaged after many years in the sun. He was maybe six feet tall, with wavy gray-blond hair, and though fifty-nine, he had a boyish smile, his front teeth slightly overlapped.
“This week has been overwhelming,” he told me. “Sally rushed here from DC for a meeting with the national government. Now we have deadlines with the African Development Bank, and we are working to meet their criteria.”
Standing at a map, Michael pointed out fifteen conservation areas under development within the bonobo habitat, 193,000 square miles of dense forest to the south of the Congo River. BCI’s goal, he explained, was to create a chain of protected areas that, linked by wildlife corridors, would become the Bonobo Peace Forest. Over a period of ten years, during which their annual budget had grown from about $100,000 to a million dollars, BCI had helped establish three times as much government-recognized protected area as all of the big NGOs in the DRC combined: the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve (larger than Rhode Island at 1,847 square miles) and the immense Sankuru Nature Reserve (11,803 square miles, bigger than Massachusetts). A number of other reserves were under development and would eventually link up to Kokolopori and Sankuru, protecting a huge swath of the bonobo habitat.
Michael put his index finger on the area we would be visiting: the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve at the upper reaches of the Maringa River, a tributary that flows northwest before curving south within the Congo’s great riverine arc. The dark green of the Congo basin covers much of Central Africa, its many tributaries trending west as the Congo River flows north and then turns toward the Atlantic Ocean before veering south, picking up the tributaries and growing in size. I gradually charted our path within this labyrinth that, more than anything else, mapped out the uniform expanse of the rainforest.
From the office down the hall, Sally Jewell Coxe, whose voice I recognized from our numerous telephone conversations, called out a question I missed because part of it sounded like Lingala, or maybe someone’s name. Michael crossed the room, shouting out information for a report she was about to deliver. He realized he left his coffee mug on his desk and, still talking, reached back for it even as he seemed to be moving forward.
Sally was fifty-one, eight years younger than Michael, with sandy hair and large green eyes that gave an impression of someone who loved observing the world. Like Michael, she got lost in her train of thought, and over the next few days I would see her checking budgets, writing grant applications, and contacting donors while fielding calls from Mbandaka to prepare the boats that would take supplies on the ten-day trip to the reserve, then following up with staff to make sure those supplies were ready: hand pumps and ultraviolet SteriPENs for drinking water; medicine for the reserve’s clinic and for BCI’s staff in case anyone got malaria; headlamps, machetes, and new rain ponchos for trackers and eco-guards; batteries for everything and everyone. The list went on.
Another concern was transporting fuel to the reserve. Because of its high price in the DRC, the fuel for the outboard motors and for a month in the reserve, where it would be needed to power generators, motocycles, as well as a Land Cruiser and a Land Rover, could cost $10,000. This was still cheaper than paying to take all cargo and passengers by bush plane, or buying fuel there, where it was marked up three times. The boats could bring more supplies and more people, but the time the trip would take depended on the water level. We were at the end of the dry season, when the boats often got caught on sandbars and had to stop at night.
As Sally spoke, I could barely keep up with all of the details. Skype beeped constantly on her computer, receiving messages from BCI’s office in Washington, DC.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just have to send a report. I’ll be right back.”
Both Sally and Michael worked the nine-to-five shift in two time zones, until the US office closed at 10:00 p.m. West Central Africa time, and when I said goodnight, they hurried back to their computers in different rooms, still calling out to each other. They had been a couple for ten years, BCI in its early stages when they met. Its current incarnation was in many ways the fruit of their relationship.
That evening, I stayed at the home of BCI’s national director in the DRC, Evelyn Samu, a statuesque woman with a still, appraising gaze and a sudden, at times wary smile. She’d been in conservation for over fifteen years and lived with her younger brothers, her granddaughter, and her niece. Her father had been a successful businessman under Mobutu and built the sprawling home off Matadi Road. Its pipes were a less reliable source of water than the swimming pool where insects skimmed the surface, so the maids filled blue plastic buckets and carried them on their heads to the tiled bathrooms. When the power failed, they switched to another network, from a different hydroelectric plant, and when both grids went down, they waited until nightfall to start the generator. Well-kept gardens surrounded the grounds, and the terrace by the kitchen offered a view of the western horizon, its rolling blue hills speckled with buildings, the setting sun spectacular over the savannah.
The night was pleasantly warm. Normally, in the DRC, the dry season south of the equator lasts from April to October, the opposite of the seasons to the north of it. There is little variation in temperature, with a yearly average high of 86 degrees Fahrenheit and an average low of 70. Kinshasa usually has a particularly short dry season, from June through August, but there had been almost no rain that February, and the dust and the lingering, acrid smell of smoke from trash fires had the Congolese wondering when it would rain.
The next morning, before departing for the BCI offices with Evelyn, I waited at the front gate of her home as she prayed near a wall-size shrine to the Virgin Mary. Michael had told me how much energy it took to get around and shop for basic needs, how demanding life was for BCI’s staff. Just traveling the four miles to BCI’s offices gave me a sense of the city’s pace, at once hectic and painfully slow. People rushed cars with an empty seat or trucks with space in the bed even as traffic stopped for minutes at a time. Vehicles crammed the street as far as I could see, the distance obscured in the smoke of burning roadside trash.
The only clear geographic marker for Kinshasa is a widening of the Congo River called the Pool Malebo, formerly Stanley Pool. On the map, it nearly resembled a bull’s-eye, an immense lake partially filled in with an island of sediment, around which the river flows. It separates the world’s two closest capitals, that of the DRC from Brazzavilla in the Republic of the Congo, a former French colony.
Kinshasa, founded in 1881 by the American explorer Henry Morton Stanley and named Léopoldville after the Belgian King, served as a trading post where the river’s navigable stretch ends. One of the challenges of colonization was that the river, though providing a route into the continent, began its descent to the ocean, just beyond the Pool Malebo, by rocketing down dozens of narrow cataracts. To link Léopoldville to the port, a railroad had to be built across Bas-Congo Province, a panhandle that attaches the country’s massive inland territory to its scant twenty-five-mile stretch of Atlantic coast.
During the colonial era, Kinshasa’s nickname was Kin la Belle, “the beautiful.” Now it’s referred to as Kin la Poubelle, “the trashcan.” Heightening the sense of disorder is the construction underway in many parts of the city, fueled by the postwar rush for minerals. During the recent wars, the borders the DRC shares with nine other countries were often less boundaries than sieves through which its wealth escaped. Now, with the growth of industry in India, China, Brazil, and Russia causing an increased demand for raw materials, the minerals are often still sold illegally through the DRC’s neighbors, notably Rwanda. The Chinese are renovating the capital and building highways into the Congo’s interior in exchange for mining contracts, and the country’s elite are profiting. Signs of commerce
