Searching the Elusive Bonobo in Congo

Category: About the project, Places, people | Date: Oct 27 2007 | By: admin

Paka was ready to go as soon as he heard about the Lomami “adventure”

Paka was so eager to join John and Ashley on the Lomami River that he sent his father, Nobirabo, to talk to me when I was in the Ituri Forest at Epulu (Okapi Faunal Reserve) earlier this month. I’ve known Nobirabo for more than 25 years. I taught him English when he was a young primary school teacher and John and I were doing our PhD research in the Ituri. Later, Nobirabo joined our project to study Okapi in the wild.

Okapi, a horse-size forest “giraffe”, at the GIC project in Epulu. Photo by Kim Gjerstad.Kisangani

“Epulu is a long way from Kisangani,” I warned. The expedition is already making preparations in Kisangani, from there Ashley and John will launch south. But Paka had another reason for wanting to join; he could save money for going to university.
“If Paka can get to Kisangani on his own, he can work with us.”

Paka taking his morning tea before heading for Kisangani on his one-gear bicycle.

No Problem. Paka set out with a one gear Chinese-made bicycle . It is the same model that young men modify into cargo transport-carriers to replace trucks. The road is still in too impossibly poor condition for truck traffic.

Bicycle transporters, “Toleka”, pushing their cargo up the slippery first section of road past Epulu. The Chinese have broadened and leveled but not yet surfaced.

From Epulu to Kisangani is 460 km. It took Paka 5 days.….and it was not just bad road it was a whole diversity of sorts of bad road.

Stuck in the road, a hundred km west of Epulu. This truck is waiting for spare parts, having broken down half way through the worst of it.

First: the first section of road is under rehabilitation by the Chinese road crew. At this stage of repair, if it starts to rain, it turns into a morass of slippery clay. Hard even to push a bike. The Chinese say that if this was anywhere else in the world, the road would have been done 6 months ago. As it is, in more than a year, they are just past the 2/3 mark (Epulu) of the part they contracted to repair. The worst section of road stills lies ahead of them.

This middle section of road lasts for at least 150 km — without relief.

Second : the worst section of road. This middle section is an incredibly rutted and runnelled run-off corridor. It really can no longer be called road. This will keep the Chinese busy for a while.

Paka says that the hardest is trying to judge where the water will be shallowest when you walk the bike through the “pits”.

Villagers have become used to welcoming the bicycle travelers who end up spending many nights on the road.

Third : the section of road where the Lebanese road crew (working east from Kisangani) have cleared and leveled only

A mis-step, here in the Lebanese section, and Paka was in over his knees.

Fourth : the final two lane hard packed finished road — but beware it is already beginning to erode on the slopes !

The last 141 km are smooth and a bicycle actually has to be careful of fast moving Lebanese pick-up trucks

For the last three days Paka has been riding his bike around the “big city” of Kisangani, picking up culture before heading down the Lomami.

The dug-out will be a relief and the Lomami a smooth surface!!

Soon, again, down the Lomami.

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Category: About the project, Places, Threats, people | Date: Oct 14 2007 | By: admin

This village along the Lomami must look much as they did a century ago.

The Belgians fought the Arabs from 1892 -1894 to end slavery in the Congo. They beat the Arabs. Did that end slavery in Congo?

My American elementary school definition of slaves was “people who are bought and sold” to run plantations. The Arabs also used slaves to run their Congolese plantations, but they didn’t buy them. They were captives of war, a war driven by search for profit - ivory. Is there a difference between capture and “own” and buy and “own” people? Arab captives sometimes became important warriors or, like Ngongo Luteta, entirely freed (read his story in my previous post).

Was it freedom that the great emancipator, King Leopold II, brought to the Congo? Or was it another kind of “slavery”.
Was it the King of the Belgians that emptied the Lomami?

The Lomami that Ashley saw from the prow of the dugout was vast and mainly empty of villages.

That is the historical mystery I want to solve. Why did Ashley find so few people when he took the dug-out up the Lomami? The Lomami was a main navigation route a century ago. What happened? The DR Congo today is, after all, a country of more than 60 million people in an area no bigger than the USA east of the Mississippi.

King Leopold II, not the country of Belgium, was the “owner” of the entire Congo Free State from 1885 until 1908. He had a personal challenge to “develop” the Congo but being unable to use the Belgian coffers, he had to make his colony profitable.

King of the Belgians and “owner” of the Congo Free State

No surprise, therefore, that slavery was present from the very beginning when the Belgian militias were still fighting the Arabs. The observations below were made along the Lomami in the 1890s:

This antislavery movement has its dark side also. The natives suffer. In stations in the charge of white men, government officers, one sees strings of poor emaciated old women, some of them mere skeletons, …carrying clay water-jars, tramping about in gangs with a rope round the neck, and connected by a rope one and a half yard apart. They are prisoners of war.

E.J.Glave

This map published by E.J. Glave shows villages along the north of the Lomami River in the 1890s

And no surprise that the first international objections were not about slavery but about the lack of free trade. Europe had agreed to King Leopold’s Congo Free State on the condition that there would be no economic “monopoly” and no commercial “privilege” in the Congo Basin… But that is not what happened.

An Academic Journal objected to King Leopold’s “domaine privé” or private Congo holdings, and published a map that showed their extent– 1902:

The Congo State… has officially declared a monopoly of the products of the soil… either for itself exclusively or for certain Corporations… whose management it controls (appointing and dismissing Directors, & etc) and whose operations it assists by its Force Publique (private army).

The Force Publique forced the population to produce wild rubber, copal, cotton, ivory.

A year later the following statistics were published in a letter to the editor in the New York Times – 1903:

Foreign Trade of the Congo State by Country / Imports / Exports
Belgium / $2,903 600 / 11, 067,000
Great Britain /618,800 / 690,200
Germany / 214,200 / 119,600
…
With this analysis. Let us not delude ourselves into the notion that the State of the Congo is a “free” state. It is a slave State in fact and the whole realm is being exploited with a vengeance by the Belgian monarch…

Meanwhile on the Lomami in the heart of bonobo habitat:

Congo State granted concessions to the Lomami Company in 1898 to 1912. The company established ports all along the north part of the river in the land of the Mbole peoples. The Mbole gained little and maintain somber memories. Colonel Tom is Mbole as is the current Territorial Administrator from Opala. Ivory, rubber and copal were essential riches for King Leopold II and they were plentiful along the Lomami. The Congo Free State used cruelty to force villages to make their quotas. Mutilations and murder were part of the repertoire of punishment.

For just a few posts, this ‘search for the elusive bonobo’ has sent us on a skim through history to when bonobo were abundant but already the future of their forests was being forced to a new vision. So, let us change the vision. OK, “us” includes me, but “us” also includes my neighbors in Kinshasa, the diplomats of the free world, the prospectors from China, the students of the Great Ape Trust Academy in Des Moines, Iowa… “Us” has to be big to make a difference.

–
References:

• Likaka Osumaka. 1994. Rural Protest: The Mbole against Belgian Rule, 1897-1959, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol 27, No. 3 pp 589-617
• Glave, E.J. 1897. Cruelty in the Congo Free State – report from December 1894. The Century.
• The Congo State and the Domaine Privé. Journal of the Royal African Society, Vol 1, No 3 (Apr 1902) pp 355-357
• Aug 22 1903 Letter to the Editor J.F.C Wahsington, D.C. THE NEW YORK TIMES
• Hochschild, Adam. 1998. King Leopold’s Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Houghton Mifflin Books.

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Category: Places, people, wildlife | Date: Oct 05 2007 | By: admin

Ivory found in the Ituri Forest in the early 1990s. Paulin Tshikaya, over 6 feet tall, and warden of Garamba National Park is in the center.

All hell broke loose on the Lomami River during the 1890s.
It began east of the Lualaba in the 1860s, with the rise of the Arab ivory trade. Tippo Tib from Zanzibar (where he started life as Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi ) carved out a Congolese Sultanate. Slaves hauled his ivory to the markets of Zanzibar often hefting a single tusk at over a 100 pounds.

Tippo Tib, ivory merchant and slave trader, built a successful empire in eastern Congo. This picture first published in 1889, The Illustrated London News.

His favorite slave, Ngongo Luteta, came to him as a young boy. Luteta was from the Batetela tribe that lives where the Lomami plunges from high savannah plateau, to forest islands and into unbroken forest. Ngongo Luteta rose fast and became a leader of Tippo Tib’s wanguaana (Arabized Congolese) warriors and the strategist who brought the most ivory and slaves back to his master. Tippu Tib was so pleased with the dashing Luteta, that he freed him when he was only 25 and sent him home to the Lomami.

But Tippo Tib sent Ngongo Luteta with a clear mission: caravans of ivory must come east to him from the Lomami and the Tshuapa basins. Luteta was immensely successful. Great graves of elephant bone rotted in the forest duff, the ivory was carried east. The people of the Lomami who carried the ivory, were enslaved and their societies torn asunder by the firearms and cold determination of Ngongo Luteta.

Ashley, 120 years later, when his dugout was not more than two days south of Opala , wrote “Not many people here. This forest is empty” . He repeated it all the way to the savanna. Were the massive slave campaigns initiated by Ngongo Luteta partly to blame?

The Lomami River is depopulated here in the north and Ashley found fewer and fewer people as he moved up stream and deeper into the forest.

Ngongo Lutete is hero and nemesis.

I have no picture of him (send it if you find one), but here is a description written by a begrudgingly respectful European of the 19th century (The Fall of the Congo Arabs, Sydney Hinde, 1894)

He was a well-built, intelligent- looking man…with a brown skin, large brown eyes, very long lashes, …and a straight narrow nose. His hands were his most remarkable characteristic: curiously supple, with long narrow fingers. One or both hands were in constant movement, opening or shutting restlessly. His features meanwhile remained absolutely immovable.

The description of him in battle was even more suggestive:
[Ngongo Luteta] hissed out his orders one after another without a moment’s hesitation. He was capable of sustaining intense fatigue, and would lead his warriors through the country at a run for hours together.

Ivory was big money and the Europeans wanted it. Ngongo Luteta met the Belgians on the rivers of their new colony and realized he could make more profit trading his ivory to them. The Arab’s suzerainty was at stake. Tensions rose, a European ivory merchant who had set up two trading posts on the Lomami River, Arthur Hodister , was massacred with ten other whites and the Belgo-Arab wars began in earnest. Nongo Luteta was fighting on the side of the Belgians and the Congo Free State.

Although carrying an anti-slavery banner, there was no doubt that control of resources (importantly elephants) was central to the Belgian King, Leopold II.
Francis Dhanis, main Belgian architect of the war, marched to Ngandu, Nongo Luteta’s post on the Lomami River in 1892. Hinde describes it thus:
N’Gandu was a fortified town by the river-bank, with four gates, each approached by a very handsome pavement of human skulls, the bregma being the only part showing above ground. I counted more than 2000 skulls in the pavement of one gate alone.

The campaign trail followed by Commander Dhanis with Capt. Hinde. First stop, before engaging in battle, was for reinforcement at Ngongo Lutete’s village of N’Gandu

Francis Dhanis with his Belgian officers and fighting men were strengthened by Ngongo Luteta and 10,000 of his men. Together they marched on to meet the Arabs further east.

Fighting at the Arab stronghold, Nyangwe

Numerous times Ngongo Luteta’s courageous tactics pushed a battle to victory for the Belgians. In January 1894 the Belgians prevailed and central African trade routes no longer led to Zanzibar in the east but now the ivory and eventually the rubber, copper and gold all went out to the Atlantic on the west.

Commander Dhanis led the campaign to drive the Arabs from the Lomami, Lualaba and all Maniema province, 1892-1894

Francis Dhanis was made a baron by King Leopold II of Belgium for his exemplary perseverance, foresight and skill throughout the campaign. But Baron Dhanis expressed a strong regret over what had occurred just four months before he received his honors in Belgium:

At N’gandu, Ngongo Luteta’s home on the Lomami, on the 15th of September 1893, a Belgian army officer named Jean Scheerlinck independently decided that Ngongo Luteta was a traitor. Without consulting his superior, Francis Dhanis, he court-martialed Luteta, had him condemned to death, and put before a firing squad.

Curious and sad what is excused by war.

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