Searching the Elusive Bonobo in Congo

Category: Equipment | Date: May 31 2007 | By: admin

Quick definition. Pirogue: Dugout canoe. Large, possibly +30 metres long. Made from one single trunk of a forest tree. Can take up to one month to hollow it out with hand tools. Need a very large tree to make one. Very labour intensive like most things out here in DR Congo.

This is turning out to be the key obstacle for the project at the moment.

The Mbandaka team has been here in Kisangani for over 2 weeks now and it is the principal job of Jonathan to find the right pirogues. He has searched high and low for good ones. Very frustrating and tiring in the burning heat of the day.

Then you get situations like has happened over the past couple of days. Jonathan finally found one. It was huge and in very good condition and he contacted the proprietor about buying it. They arranged to meet and discuss the price.

Well the first 2 times they were to meet the proprietor cancelled at the last minute after the guys had left to go and speak to him. 2 days gone by. Finally tonight (Tuesday, 29/5/2007) they met up with him.

The proprietor started off on a big spiel about how he had talked to his family and friends about the pirogue and that there was an important family reunion coming up, and so on and so on. So finally they got onto the price. He didn’t want money but a brand new outboard motor 25v Yamaha. We have just bought one of those and it cost $3,500 not including transporting it to Kisangani from Kinshasa. Add another $200 for that at least.

He did not want money even if we matched that crazy price.

My budget IS $2,000 for TWO pirogues– one big one and one tag-along little one (for emergencies).

So the search goes on.

Ashley Vosper

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Category: Places | Date: May 31 2007 | By: admin

On the shores on the Congo River in Kinsangani. Photo taken by Judith Rose on Flickr.

Kisangani is DR Congo’s 5th city with less than a million people according to fr.wikipedia.

It is situated on the fleuve Congo (river Congo) and is surrounded by forest. It gets very hot and humid here, with incredible storms. I seem to be permanently covered in sweat. You do get used to it but it is also rather uncomfortable.

Personally I prefer it to Kinshasa though, which is huge, very busy, noisy and filthy. This city suffered heavily during the civil wars of 1996-2004. A lot of people were killed here and I’m sure the people could tell a few stories about this. Very sad.

It is classic Congolese from what I have seen. Everything is run down, falling to pieces but has a look that in colonial time it would have been quite spectacular. What a shame that transition couldn’t have gone smoother.

For a white person it is nice here because you can walk the streets without people giving you too much hassle and I even walk home at night and don’t feel bothered, unlike say some parts of London.

For me personally it is also nice being here. When I was a little boy I read a book about sailing up the Congo River from Kinshasa to Kisangani and the kind of adventure it was.

All the strange people on the boat, the animals on the boat and the huge forest all around. All the comings and goings of these boats.

Like for example, other small boats attach themselves to these big boats and over time more and more attach themselves. Finally the captain has had enough and he just drives into the side of the river and basically knocks them all off!

Not sure if that still happens — though nothing seems to have changed on this river in the last 20 years. The story then talks a little bit about Kisangani as well. So maybe in one of these weird subconscious ways that is why I have ended up here.

Or it could just be that I drew the short straw…

Ashley Vosper–

Photos: check out Flickr photo results for Kisangani. Google has yet to put high res images of Kisangani. Take a look anyway and realize that it’s in the middle of the jungle.

Books: V.S. Naipaul wrote a A Bend in the River (on Amazon, not in Congo!) which is set in early post independance in Kisangani. Very popular book among expats here. Kurtz was also near Kisangani in Conrad’s famous Heart of Darkness which inspired Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Videos: Here’s a short video on a typical “dancing on the pirogue” on YouTube. Only in Congo. Still on YouTube, someone made a clip of driving near Kisangani. It’s not downtown, but gives you an idea of the surroundings.

Readings: Of course, there’s always Wikipedia to tell us more on the city. MONUC, the peacekeeping mission, has a city description in detail in French only.

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Category: About the project, people | Date: May 21 2007 | By: admin

A photo of the crew, with Ashley on the right.

The crew is up-river. Up the Congo River that is and preparing – only preparing – to start up the Lomami River. Originally from Mbandaka, the crew is now in Kisangani, the big bend in the Congo River, and even further upriver than Kurtz’s ramparts – that’s the Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The crew’s immediate mission: buy food, collect the fuel and most importantly, buy the right dugout for the river trip. They are investigating every fisherman’s wharf and consulting local expert carvers.

Who is this crew? Most were with Ashley on his search for bonobo in the Salonga National Park. Here’s Ashley’s take on them:

Bernard Ikembelo

With Bernard you know someone is watching the details and calculating consequences. Incredibly important.

In Salonga, his first job was looking into park border disputes. He stood out immediately. He drew a map of the area showing all the villages and where the park border was meant to be. The details were minutely precise and the map was to scale, explaining everything about the area. It was far more than was expected and showed he had qualities that the other guys just did not possess.

He is now my top chef d’équipe (team leader) and I feel he will go really far. He is also a great father to his kids, which I like as well. A young man with real character.

Maurice Emetsu

Maurice is long-experienced as chef d’équipe. He worked in Salonga for many years, first helping to assess elephant density and then looking for bonobo. He knows a lot about data collection: what data are needed and how to be accurate and complete in recording. I never have problems with his data. From notebook to computer—one step. All in all he’s someone I can rely on totally—and I know I will need that.

Marlène

Marlene is key. The only woman in the équipe, at this point, and respected by all. A job description would put her as cook, but she is cook with corn starch stirred right in and holding us altogether. No matter what crisis is going on, she just gets on with her work. I went with Marlene for the mega voyage up to Lomela in Salonga NP. This was an 8 day trip in the pirogue, small compared to what we are about to start, but sill it took a lot of organizing. No freeze dried rations here!

She had a tiny area in the front of the pirogue where she worked, and always managed to come up with great food everyday for over 20 people. That is no mean feat and a she’s a sort-of mama to the guys besides. After a week I knew she was a must for taking care of all of us.

Johnathan

Now Jonathan. Without him I would be pretty worried about pushing off onto unknown waters. But Jonathan just knows rivers, he has a feel for rivers, pirogues and motors. He can carry on all night if it is needed. Tremendous energy and courage. To steer these pirogues at night is incredibly dangerous and he is always in control. I never worry with him there. Put it this way, other people tried to hire him away from us, but we got him. He trusts me and knows that when I say he will get paid every month for x amount of time that actually happens.

Assistant of Johnathan

A new person. Interviewed well. No blah blah, very calm and experienced.

Maga

What can I say about Maga. He is a man of the forest. We hired him in Salonga as assistant cook to Marlene but he knows the forest so well, I think it is time to move him onto the teams.
Forest work is physically very demanding. When you arrive at camp at the end of the day most everybody collapses. Well Maga after hauling heavy loads all day is the sort of guy who gets the fire going immediately, makes me a coffee, washes my revolting sweat sodden clothes and gets dinner ready for everybody. Quite a guy. Oh and he named his child after me. Okay so I’m totally vain. Every team like this needs a Maga. I believe he will go far.

Ashley Vosper — His GPS is going down the Lomami
Terese Hart — I’ve got the pen and provisions

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Category: About the project, Places | Date: May 21 2007 | By: admin

Lomami River, DR Congo, from space

Why take a dug-out 650 kilometers through DR Congo’s forest emptiness? Those four tiny openings we see on the satellite image might not even be villages. All those endless river meanders between the town of Opala and the southern savanna with nothing to look at but the same equatorial snapshot : dark trees draped in lianas, why do it?

I could say Ashley, the leader, is pushing off for adventure. I could say the appeal is that huge blank (about 60,000 km2) on the map. All true enough, and I could leave it at that. But it is not the whole picture. Far from it.

The rest of the picture: forest conservation. And it is urgent.

The truth is governments only protect places they know about, because conservation costs money, lots of money.

In Africa, the big conservation organizations have their priorities. Those priority places were explored long ago, they are places with relatively easy access, easy research, easy infrastructure. There is information. How many large mammals are there? You can read about it in articles. How many birds, how many hills, and what you can see from the tops of those hills: it is known. Not so the Lomami.

In their priority areas, the big conservation organizations can justify saving special monkeys, and endemic salamanders and certain important mineral licks for elephants. Not so the Lomami. There is no information.

In this information age there are still information holes where, although the satellites beam down, nothing beams up – no correlated reference – no pictures, no recorded sounds, no list of animals or plants, no census even of human presence.

All that we know about the Lomami is that south, below Kisangani and below Opala, the satellite gives back a nearly unbroken roof of forest leaves. Beneath those leafy shingles are bonobo –a great ape that is not a chimpanzee but as much our cousin as any chimp.

There are also okapi, a giraffe the size of a horse that eats only forest leaves and lives a solitary, secretive existence. We know this because of the bushmeat that arrives far north in the outdoor food markets of Kisangani; that is not the same as knowing where the okapi and the bonobo occur on the ground, how many there are and what other monkeys, antelope, snakes, birds also occur in these forests.

So Ashley’s mission is a first step into the unknown. His initiative will orient a second step: forest teams counting and recording animal sign they will spread across the whole 60,000 km2 forest expanse on either side of the Lomami, west into the Tshuapa river basin and east up to the Lualaba River.

These two steps will give the understanding needed to build support for a national park.

WHY is it URGENT?

Because north of Kisangani the first roads are being re-opened and surfaced. Big money is moving down those roads. The long ten-year Congo wars are over, and the 30 years of Congo corruption are promising to give way to investment that will transform forests with logging, with mining and with trade.

We can fight to protect a park, but not 60,000 km2 of unknown, un-inhabited wilderness that reflects on the distant lens of a satellite as a carpet of leaves, with only a raveling of rivers breaking through.

Terese Hart

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Category: About the project, people | Date: May 21 2007 | By: admin

Ashley working on his laptop under an unfinished hut.
Ashley is an unpresuming Brit , who understates most everything and speaks in a heavy “brogue”. He disagrees. Smiling sweetly he says its “blarney” not “brogue”. Anyway the rest of us are always saying “What? Would you repeat that one“. Here in Kinshasa, the capital, however, the language challenge for Ashley is French. Hard to get by without it. Ashley’s deformation of the simplest French phrases would raise the hair on a Parisian cat.

But, however he talks, and really it is not too much, Ashley is the right person for this job. The job: exploration of the least known track of forest in Congo. Where? Dead center: Congo’s darkest heart, south of Kisangani, west of the Lualaba River, 250 km east of the largest forest park on the African continent: Salonga National Park. Ash will explore this equatorial forest drained by the Lomami River , mystery forest. No reports – even from colonial times – just google map satellite images.

Why are no more people living along the Lomami? Why is this blanket of forest so unknown? Well, no roads. And there has never been much population there, so missionaries never got established. Not enough souls to save. No missionaries means no airstrips, no schools, no health care. But the truth is we don’t know why there are so few people there.

Why didn’t the government put in health care and elementary schools? Those basic institutions would have brought more people. True, but the government never has made that sort of investment. One explanation is that it has never had the chance. There was war at independence, a war that lasted years. And there was war from the mid-90s right through the first half-decade of this century. But another explanation is that it wasn’t a priority… there were plenty of other priorities in what was a failing economy and a failing nation-state.

Maybe that will change now. Maybe. There’s a new Congolese government, just elected at the end of last year-2006.

But no waiting, the area has hardly been touched by the 20th century let alone the 21st and now is the time for exploration. Ashley already has the satellite phones, compasses, GPS’s and malaria cures ready… The outboard has been bought. All that is needed is a huge dugout. Last purchase, we’ll make it next week in Kisangani. And of course, we’ll post the photo.

Terese Hart

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