After Kindu I met John in Beni and we continued to the Okapi Reserve to meet with two TL2 team leaders. We arrived in Epulu completely beat and painfully saddle sore. Traveling through Congo is never easy, but it should have improved along the RN4 (National Route 4) between Beni and the Okapi Reserve, after all the Chinese road crews had worked well over a year. What’s the problem? Since the war began and the road became impassable for bigger vehicles, John and I have ridden the backs of motorbikes more times than we can count. The war is now over and the road has been “repaired”. So, why is it worse? Reason one: The Ituri River bridge is out so we decided to take the “short cut”. How so? Within weeks after the Chinese improved the bridge, a Kenya-bound truck carrying nearly twice the permitted weight in illegal wood tried to cross the bridge. The result below. And yes, lives were lost. Reason two: Three days of rain had turned the “short cut” into a slick with soup filled pits. We were still traveling (sometimes on foot) well after dark. Reason three: Face it – bad bikes. Even if the “motards” or drivers were courageous these flimsy Chinese-made SENKES did not measure up to our usual Yamaha AG100s. So, for the return trip we followed the Chinese-repaired RN4 all the way back and crossed by boat at the Ituri. We were seat sore when we got back to Beni anyway. So in the final analysis:
This note is from the far southeast corner of the TL2 “Wilderness” where the internet connection is as fickle as the electricity. I am in Kindu. From the viewpoint of “government” hill I have a panorama of the Lualaba (=Upper Congo); in the foreground red brick walls of new government buildings rise against crumbling old colonial structures. The colonial buildings, built in the 1930s, rose with equal enthusiasm among the even older edifices of the Congo-Arab era. Just upstream from Kindu, in the 1870s, Tippo Tib reigned from Kasongo and Nyungwe over an undisputed Congolese sultanate, sending huge caravans of slaves and ivory back to Zanzibar. Kindu is a place for history to swirl, fossilize, and be ignored. But nobody is looking to the past here. The determination and need for a new Congo and a new province of Maniema (Kindu is its capital) are almost a physical force in the air. The governor’s attentiveness and the large attendance at my little presentation were very promising. But fingers are still crossed. In Kindu I sleep in a neat Islamic guest house where three parrots in the courtyard parody life around them. At first light they mimic the nanny shrieking endlessly after the child “babu, babu, babu, babu” until finally sleep is no longer possible. At last light the parrots mimic exactly the click of a mobile phone at the end of its electric charge. “Choeet, choeet, choeet”, they screech at an insanely loud volume reminding us that no electricity for the recharge can be expected for at least another two hours. Hey, I’m ready to move to Kindu, but hopefully with my own generator and a stock of fuel. A few more photos from this, my first-ever stay in Kindu:
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. 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:
But what did ACOPRIK do?
It was something more subtle… something that I had a lot of trouble understanding. This is what the villagers said:
Is that what really happened? 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: Quote from
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). 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. 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. 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: 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. 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. 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. 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….
There is a remote forest west of the Lomami and sheltered between the TuTu tributaries that is amazingly rich in wildlife. 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? Primates peered from the trees. There were bonobo nests, forest antelope, okapi and more sign of forest elephant than they had found anywhere before. 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. 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 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 !! 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! This is what happened 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… 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.
but when the diamond camp, MOPAYAZOBA, attacked us, it was almost bloody – almost….
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. 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) “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. 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. 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. 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:
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. 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. 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.
And what do they find? More of the same. Alas.Ashley, Bernard, Kahindo, Dino with all their field teams , headed south in both dugouts. They stopped at the village of Ngoma Myuli, in the Province of Kasai Orientale and within the new Sankuru Reserve. It is a small village of just over 30 people. The ethnic group is Balanga. Ashley says this: “They are friendly and open, but have no scruples about hunting. That’s how they make a living. They proudly showed us yesterday’s catch. It includes monkeys and among them a bonobo. There is a 12 gauge shotgun. That is what killed all of them. There are no military weapons: No AK47, No FAL and no outlaws or brigands terrorizing the population. The bushmeat is carried to the village of Kindu. It takes at least 3 days to get there: pirogue and bicycle. Sold in Kindu, the dead monkeys are each worth 8000 Francs Congolais or $14.50 That is more than twice the mark up from selling them here to a traveling merchant . But the bonobo – now that is real money – if smoked whole and sold in Kindu, it could get 50 US dollars, maybe even a bit more. This is the challenge to conservation. How do you turn good people away from a good living with no alternative of equal value to offer ?? For more information about bushmeat hunting in the TL2 landscape: About bushmeat trade – general: Different views of bonobo:
Of Laughter, there is an abundance. Of Happiness?
Our dugout had barely landed in Obenge when the women of the village came dancing and singing to greet us. They surrounded me and the Mama A.T. where we were sitting in the plastic chairs that we had just carried up from the dugout. The chairs were lifted again, this time with me and Mama A.T. in them. And the women carried us around over their heads, singing and dancing the whole time. Quite the enthusiastic greeting ! I guess we were almost unimaginable to them: two women who represented authority, state authority and project authority. Something for the village women to dance about! From the start, it was the women of Obenge who interested me the most. In some ways they are so strong and determined, in other ways so powerless. John had a joking relationship with Madawa, the woman who managed the Losekola primate camp. As we hiked out to the camp she and John were constantly teasing each other “Ahh, Madawa I think I dropped some money would you go back and find if for me” “If you dropped any money it is already in my pocket and you won’t find it again.” She had an irresistible smile. At Losekola we ate her food and drank the water she carried. I was eager to get to know her. We could communicate in simple Swahili and she also spoke some broken French. Kinyamituku was her native language. She and all of her family came from the north edge of TL2 – between the Lomami and the Lualaba. Not surprisingly, as I ask her about herself, it is “her men” she wants to talk about. She points out her son in a distant field as we return to Obenge from the Losekola primate camp. And who were the other people living in the house? Conader. Remember Willy Conader? His wife was stolen by the Maimai and his youngest son died a couple months later in “captivity”. Conader is the nephew of Madawa. Like her he is of the banyamituku ethnic group and born in the village of Kobekobe further east in the forest towards the Lualaba. Conader works hard to please Ashley and John. His goal is to earn enough money to bring on another wife so that he can reclaim his two older surviving children, a girl and a boy. Now they are in Kobekobe with Madawa’s brother. Washi. Washi, another porter with the project seemed the happiest of Madawa’s family. He too is a nephew of Madawa but his wife and children are living with him in Obenge. It was Madawa’s own story that I really wanted. When their son was just two years old, Madawa’s “husband” left her near Kobekobe and came with their son to Obenge. It was his right. The children belong to the husband. He was a bushmeat hunter but when the boy was barely ten years old his father died. Madawa got the information and immediately came to live with her son. Together they built the house where they now live. This almost seems like a story with a happy ending –except, according to Madawa: After the Obenge massacre of 2001, at which time Madawa and her son had managed to flee into the forest, they were left with absolutely nothing. Dracula took or destroyed everything in every house in the village. Then Colonel Thoms came and he was the “colonial” master of Obenge. All the young men worked for him including, of course, Conader and Washie. Now maybe things will change. Even if it is only slowly. Madawa laughs and hugs Wahsi’s son, Sahive. I hope it is a justified optimism. We all like happy endings, and how could fate resist a smile like that??
Mama A.T. visits her impoverished but prodigal brood
Adele, the territorial administrator from Opala left a devoted husband and two adoring toddlers in order to accompany us to Obenge. She was more than a week away, not only from her family, but also from the territorial administration. WE appreciated it; the visit was a good thing for the TL2 project and definitely put Obenge on the map of the local administration. Over the years, John and I have known many territorial administrators who used their position to gain gratuities and beltline. But Mama A.T. from Obenge did not invite bribes …. This was business. Mama A.T. took full advantage to warn the citizen’s of Obenge to stay away from brigands and the illicit activities by which they live. Her examples were Colonel Thoms and Major Ranger, the two Maimai that recently “ruled” this little village. We toured Obenge together and she questioned many of its inhabitants. All of this was to be expected, after all she did come as far as Obenge, but what really surprised us is that she agreed - and eagerly – to accompany us to the primate camp, Losekola, a ten kilometer trek through the forest. She really wanted to know what we did, what we were all about. Afterwards I wondered if part of the reason she pushed all the way to Losekola was because the Bishop of Isangi told her that our real activity was diamond mining – and she wanted to see for herself. If so, we congratulate her. It is always easier to just believe rumor. Whatever reason she came, we were able to show her the trail grid, the monkeys, and importantly, the skeletons left from the elephants poached by Colonel Thom and Major Ranger. We were not the ones to tell Mama AT about the elephant killing but rather Jean Mutetela. He was at his forest fishing camp when the poachers came. We stood around a knee-high skull from which the ivory had been severed while Mutetela told us how it took a full day to flay and hack the meat from the carcass. The surprising bit of the story was what happened afterwards. Mutetela described this with wide open eyes. The family of elephants came back. He pointed to the destroyed shelter the poachers had built. The elephants trampled the shelter and they scattered what was left of the carcass. And – Mutetela paused , “ they still come back sometimes – just to visit their mother’s bones.”
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