Something went Wrong in the Middle of Congo
Category: Threats, people | Date: Jul 29 2008 | By: teresehart
In a remote western corner of our vast nearly trackless study area – something was not right. We had been hearing rumors for almost 7 months that in a series of isolated villages, the Djonga villages, something had gone wrong for conservation. We had to find out what.
That was why we sent Maurice and Crispin on their 11 day trek to the west. Maurice was to find out what wildlife was in the forest, Crispin, who is a biologist with a flare for social work, was to find out if what we had heard was true ie, a conservation NGO was “tarred and feathered” or at least banished from Djonga.
Crispin explaining in Djonga what TL2 motives are and how we work
Maurice and Crispin got an icy cold reception in Djonga – the villagers thought, at first, that they worked for ACOPRIK, the local NGO whose reputation is in tatters.
This is what Maurice and Crispin were told about the ACOPRIK event in November 2007 when all hell broke loose:
- Lambert Papesola an ACOPRIK employee who came from another province was shot in the legs.
- Other ACOPRIK employees were chased off a study area in Djonga forest.
- Even now, if a certain Andre , the president of this ACOPRIK, so much as sets foot in any Djonga village, he can expect far worse than bullets in the legs….
But what did ACOPRIK do?
- Did they steal chickens or goats from someone in the village? NO
- Did they make off with village women? NO
Papesola showing the scars from gunshot wounds in his legs.
It was something more subtle… something that I had a lot of trouble understanding. This is what the villagers said:
- ACOPRIK had been well received by the village on several visits between 2005 and 2007.
- ACOPRIK came to get the Djonga chiefs to sign documents saying they would not hunt bonobo or okapi.
- ACOPRIK deceived Djonga by using these signatures on a different document in distant Kinshasa, with the result that
- ACOPRIK sold their own Djonga forest and officially lost their traditional rights.
- Word of this fundamental deception swept like wildfire over radio and word of mouth from the capital of Kinshasa.
Is that what really happened?
A little research here in Kinshasa , revealed that AKOPRIK’s president, Andre, did push through a decree creating the Sankuru Reserve. He did this just before the last minister of the environment left office. The Djonga villages are indeed within this Reserve on its eastern edge.
I read the ministerial decree creating Sankuru Reserve (attached here at the very end of the post). Did it take away all the Djonga villagers’ rights? NO. In fact I don’t think anyone could create a more meaningless Protected Area. Limits are drawn on a map but there are in fact no restrictions inside the Sankuru Reserve at all : not on hunting, fishing , farming nor even logging. The statute says nothing except that restrictions are possible at some later date. Good grief.
It all seems incredibly ridiculous. What is the point of the joke? Was ACOPRIK and the American NGO, BCI, that backed it, trying to delude Djonga for some reason? And delude us? After all this Reserve was announced in National Geographic (Conservation, June 2008, vol. 213, #6 ), in Science magazine (Vol 318, 30 November 2007, p1365 ) and in Time. Or is ACOPRIK planning some second step we don’t know about? Please, if you know the answer, leave a comment.
But in the meantime – last night at about 11 PM – I finally got a spark of insight into the origins of this incredible tension. It is on page 633 of the 955 page tome sited below. My translation and interpretation follow:
“In Sankuru (district) a latent and murderous opposition developed between the Tetela of the savanna and those of the forest…..”
This was during the years of the 1960s. The president of ACOPRIK, Andre, is from the savanna section of the Tetela tribe. Djonga and all of the Sankuru Reserve is the forest section. The problems then and now are those of power and control. What’s more, Andre inspires little trust in his fellow countrymen with a long background in war-time politics (RCD Goma) before moving to conservation.
Quote from
Histoire générale du Congo. De l’héritage ancien à la République Démocratique. 1998. By Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem. De Boeck & Larcier s.a. Paris, Bruxelles. 955 pp
The ministerial decree creating the Sankuru Reserve
Treking across Central Congo to Arrive Unannounced
Category: About the project, Places, wildlife | Date: Jul 24 2008 | By: teresehart
We are in the very center of Congo because we want to know where and how many bonobos remain in this forgotten forest of 50,000 sq km. What threatens them and other large animals like the elephant and the okapi? Our ultimate goal is to bring real protection to some part of the forest between these rivers: the Tshuapa, Lomami and Lualaba (TL2).
The compass sets the direction, the observers follow and porters are last.
Our teams move out across the forest to specific locations, using GPS waypoints to guide them along a map-determined route. They follow a well-tested protocol of field methods to discover the presence and abundance of forest animals. In May and June two teams were doing just that, but Maurice’s circuit, described here, had a special mission.
A view towards Djonga as the team climbed the hills between the Tshuapa and Lomami watersheds.
Maurice was to lead a team to go to the far west of the TL2 zone to where there is a scattering of small communities called Djonga. Why? Because those communities were angry, angry about conservation. We had heard that a group from further west, one professing to work for conservation, had come to Djonga last year and something went wrong, very wrong. We rely on the good will and support of all the villages in this 3-river area. We need the Djonga population to protect the far west flanks of TL2.
The first stage of the trip was the trek from Obenge to the first Djonga village through the blocks of E15, D15 and C16. It took 11 days.
While Maurice’s team explored the Djonga forests, Crispin was put in charge of discussions with the villagers. Here is the first report of their trip to Djonga:
Crispin crossing forest towards Djonga. Although this stream has a white sand substrate it is clear unlike the black water streams in the north.
Djonga is a cluster of small settlements surrounding several islands of savanna near the Tshuapa River. It took Maurice, Crispin and their team eleven full days to march across uninhabited forest between Obenge and Djonga. This was a major trek with nothing but GPS guidance, even by the standards of these seasoned TL2 explorers.
A pre-dawn breakfast on one of the eleven days of forest-march to reach the villages at the western edge of TL2
The expedition encountered no people and very little sign of human passage in the crossing to Djonga. During the recent war years, however, army detachments, Mai Mai groups, and various armed men under minimal control crisscrossed this forest. They left their noms-de-guerre and often a date carved on tree trunks.
This graffiti tree is on the approach to Djonga
They also encountered little sign of animals. Tracks or dung of okapi, buffalo and bongo were rare. Was this because they had been hunted out, or because the forest soils were impoverished ? Only monkeys were abundant: including the new species of monkey, Lesula, first found close to Obenge.
Hardly a large mammal but this viper was worth a photo along the trek to Djonga. It’s not usual to see them climbing.
Exhausted the team finally marched out of the forest into the clearing of Bolota the most northeastern of the Djonga villages. They were a strange sight indeed in a community as insular as this! And it felt a bit dangerous considering the last visitors had indeed made themselves unwelcome….
Weary but cautious, Maurice prepares to meet the village elders.
IVORY : West of the Lomami
Category: people, wildlife | Date: Jul 19 2008 | By: teresehart
The TuTu River is fast, deep and difficult to cross
There is a remote forest west of the Lomami and sheltered between the TuTu tributaries that is amazingly rich in wildlife.
West of the Lomami and east of the Tshuapa, block E15 has amazingly little hunting compared to adjacent blocks of 900 sq km.
The Tutu bends 90 degrees and the feeder rivers of its basin bend with it, so as Bernard’s team followed the compass line of their transect, they negotiated many difficult rivers. They found a forest rarely frequented by bushmeat hunters: too difficult to be worth it?
Crossing a Mutoto ya TuTu, or TuTu’s child, the name our porters gave all the streams and rivers of this unknown area of forest
A red colobus overhead follows the progress of Bernard’s “caravan” beneath him
Primates peered from the trees. There were bonobo nests, forest antelope, okapi and more sign of forest elephant than they had found anywhere before.
A fresh okapi print near one of the many Mutoto ya Tutu
Bonobos were feeding here. The evidence is the ripped and stripped Marantaceae fronds.
But what made this circuit memorable were the ivory tusks found lying in the mud on the 8th day of the circuit (4 days from the return to Obenge). They had been there a long time, mottled orange like the earth itself and no bones were in sight.
The porters gather round one of the tusks where it lay along their path.
Perhaps an elephant, wounded or just old, came to this secluded area to die. It is not often that ivory is found — anywhere in the wild. Usually elephants are killed, their ivory hacked out, their flesh stripped, and the bones left to molder.
This is the more usual scene of elephant remains found along a transect. There was an elephant slaughter here, more than a year ago, and the ivory was carried away by the poachers leaving the bones to slowly decay.
This time ivory was found after the bones were completely gone. Old ivory, but heavy. One tusk was 19 kg (42lbs) and the other 19.5 kg (43lbs). Can you imagine carrying that around like your teeth, day after day !!
This photo by Reto taken of an elephant family in a baie in the Ituri Forest. kuster.reto@gmx.net
I first wrote about this after the tusks were brought out, Ashley and John told me about presenting the tusks in Obenge, and then in Opala and finally in Kisangani. But now I have had a chance to sit down with Bernard, go through his photos and his account of carrying the ivory back. They were even bigger than I had been told before!
The porter Kasidi resting against the two tusks.
This is what happened
The trail-blazer and observation team were following the compass bearing.
Omene with the compass, directing the trail-blazer who is ahead of him. Bernard follows.
At particularly dense areas the porters skirted to one side to avoid crawling through the worst liana tangles with their loads. This was such a place. Bonne Année who was in the lead spotted the first tusk and Kasidi the second. They all gathered to consider the best move. Should they bury them? Throw them in the river? Take them back? Ivory could be big trouble…
At the site of the find. Bonne Année is on the left.
And so I add the photos below to the previous post about the ivory’s fate. I do so with a special appreciation for the forest and a special awe for its ivory seeking history: The slave caravans of Ngongo Luteta lugging loads of ivory to Zanzibar and, later, the ivory barges of the Belgians shipping more loads of ivory, now in the other direction to the Atlantic. And with a renewed commitment to help assure that elephant will have a place in the basins of the TL2 (Tshuapa-Lomami-Lualaba) carrying their own ivory for many years to come.
Carrying the ivory out.
Crossing a stream, now with the ivory.
Helping each other with the ivory across a bigger river.
Diamonds are Small Stuff on the Lomami
Category: Threats, people | Date: Jul 12 2008 | By: teresehart
but when the diamond camp, MOPAYAZOBA, attacked us, it was almost bloody – almost….
The Lomami diamonds are small. Notice the size of the threads!
A diamond village “supermarket”
These are not big-money diamonds. To live in a Lomami diamond village year after year, like many do, you need a substantial garden for daily food. Then, if you are lucky, the diamonds you dig up and sieve out will provide enough for the extras of life: sugar, batteries and an occasional new cloth. That is how many live in the small diamond camps that are sprinkled through the forest of the D12 block.
The white hatchings are the blocks that we still had not explored at the end of 2007. D12 is the far north west of those blocks.
Below is the story Bernard told me about when his team of 11 men explored “D12” in May of this year. (Picture of Bernard at end of this Post)
Their initial reception was hardly warm.
Throughout D12 the stream-beds are pocked with diamond - diggers’ pits and trenches.
“We are always quiet in the forest. That is one of the rules, otherwise we don’t see monkeys. Even the porters who follow behind are quiet. This time they were whispering together soon after we started. I was up front with the compass-man and the trail-breaker. None of us knew that we were only a kilometre from a diamond camp, Mopayazoba, and a couple of miners in the forest had heard our whispering.”
All of a sudden Bernard heard yelling, and clanging and the most incredible scuffle.
“I hurried back to find two of our porters, Vava and Hussein, pinning someone flat to the ground with his arms twisted.
‘This little **@** tried to kill us”, they told me, “There were ten maybe twenty of the **@**’″
The porters had been charged with sticks and machetes. They met the charge with machetes and their own greater brawn. Brawn won before blood was shed and the attackers fled.
Bernard and the whole team couldn’t carry-on without knowing why the sudden assault.
Their captive, now apologizing and saying it was all a mistake, led them to Mopayazoba.
The diamond village of MopayaZoba
As Bernard explains it the diamond village had thought they were poachers. Just a month earlier poachers had come through, killed five elephants, taken their diamonds and even taken women. So when they heard people, the village men came out with machetes and sticks.
Tensions were high at the beginning of the “peace talks” in Mopayazoba. The shit-faced grin behind our team is the fellow they pinned to the ground
Perhaps if the village PDG, Président Délégué Général, or headman had been present the response would have been more measured, but in any case in the course of a couple hours the atmosphere went from very tense to very friendly.
Albert became our escort, assuring our safe passage through diamond country.
Diamonds are a pretty poor way to make a living in Lomami, so Bernard had no trouble hiring a local miner, Albert, to guide them through the diamond villages that lay ahead. Their new friends told them there would be a lot. They were right!
A miner greets Albert as we arrive in his diamond-village, AfrikaMoto.
Every village was dirt poor. Diamonds are WHOSE best friend – really!!
But the rest of the circuit was quiet : here are a few more pictures:
Big storm in the afternoon = a forced halt = an opportunistic (much needed) nap
Small mammal snares were found throughout D12. Bushmeat is an important part of the diet in the diamond-villages.
The teams share the usual candle-lit meal of beans and fufu after a long day on the trail (candle stuck in a split sapling in the middle).
Crossing the Loli river on the return towards the Lomami.
In the prow of the dug-out, heading back up the Lomami towards Obenge after completing the D12 circuit.
Bernard (with blue plastic mug) taking a little breather
Back from the Lomami, but soon to return
Category: About the project, Threats | Date: Jul 07 2008 | By: teresehart
Sorry for the Silence.
But silence is not absence. Ashley just returned to Kinshasa after first landing in Kisangani and disbursing the tired teams to their respective homes for a few weeks of much needed rest.
He is now emptying notebooks into the computer so the information can be sent to John who has already started a second step in the analysis. The two will meet in a couple weeks with some other colleagues to work through what the numbers all mean. Is this important? – VERY.
A carved okapi watches quizzically as Ashley pounds in the data
How many bonobo are there in the TL2? How many elephant? How many okapi? There is enough information so we can begin to look at these numbers – begin to find out what more is needed – where are the holes, what areas in the TL2 river basins are likely to be most important? And what areas are most threatened by bushmeat hunting.
Bringing home a bush pig in Katopa. That’s a lot of meat.
Then back up the Lomami in August for a final marathon push to get the remaining information needed to fill the holes. At the end of the year we will again lay all the information on the table.
THEN WHAT? Information is only a first step. Then (and now as well) we have to move towards protection.
How do we do that? One thing is certain, to get a protected area that is believed in on the ground and not merely a piece of paper in a distant capital city means we need a lot of support and at all levels — we will need a lot of people pushing with us.
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