Before reading this book, the strongest connotation I had with Kinshasa was its central significance in the co-operative boardgame Pandemic. There are a handful of cities on each continent and players coordinate the strengths of their roles to stop the spread of disease; these days, it’s hardly light entertainment.
Fortunately Deni Béchard’s direct and descriptive style countered my lack of familiarity with Kinshasa and Empty Hands, Open Arms: The Race to Save Bonobos in the Congo and Make Conservation Go Viral was immediately engaging, once I was able “…to make sense of this spot on the map:
“Djolu, mud huts and dusty footpaths, a town harder to reach than the vast majority of places on earth. It lay at the heart of the Congo River basin, an immense territory covering more than 1.4 million square miles, its tributaries draining from Gabon, Angola, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Congo-Kinshasa, and Congo-Brazzaville. Half of the basin’s territory is rainforest, nourished by the tributaries on their way to the Congo, the fifth largest river on earth carrying the third-largest volume of water.”
All these superlatives: convenient factoids packed into an overarching and urgent narrative, about the Bonobo Conservation Initiative’s work to protect these matriarchal great apes, humans’ closest relatives.
Béchard must work hard to situate a not-so-science-y reader, but he makes his education efforts look effortless. In just a few sentences, for instance, he summarizes the geological shifts that resulted in the continents we see on the map today (and how this impacted climate and habitats). In a single paragraph, he presents a sequence of leadership changes in the DRC, illustrating the shift from tribal to colonial control over a few centuries.
Photo by Madeleine MBuyu on Unsplash
At times, he includes gentler, more reflective commentary, like his description of hiking a nearby trail:
“Dozens more of them pressed together, fluttering in place. I had never seen butterflies like these: a few with white tails, others turquoise or tiger-striped. One had brown wings when they were closed, but the insides were baby blue, visible only when it flew.
As we walked onto the log, they fluttered up from in front of our feet, clouding around us, landing again as soon as we had passed.”
The BCI’s efforts stem back to Japanese primatologist Takayoshi Kano’s efforts in 1973, in Equateur Province, where he began working with the Bongandu. This tribe believes that bonobos walk on four legs only when they are being observed and otherwise move about like humans; the Bongandu view their bonobos as their ancestors and hunting them is forbidden. Over time, conservationists have turned away from the national park model and begun to work with communities like this one, to protect the bonobos.
Conservationists working with communities must work in concert with ancient human relationship with the land, spiritual traditions, and tribal boundaries, all with an acute awareness of how foreigners have consistently exploited these local communities. “The most complicated part of the work wasn’t the bonobos, despite the challenges of habituation, but how to satisfy a starving, traumatized people who had learned form a century of brutalization that outsiders would take what they owned and leave them with nothing.”
In this territory, the reserve is the only source of cash for dozens of miles in every direction. If community members produce goods to sell, they must choose either a 10-13 day walk to Kisangani, where there are markets, or a 3-day walk to Befori, a small town on the river, which has a riverboat that travels to Mbandaka (but the trip could take one month). Most people have one outfit of clothing and it’s not uncommon to eat a single meal every couple of days.
There are several reasons for urgency. If the larger population of Africa’s chimpanzees could be reduced to 5% of what it was a hundred years ago, the bonobos—who may number as few as 5,000 and are spread over 139,000 square miles—will need a concerted human effort to ensure their survival.
One unexpected threat to that is the abundance of disillusioned youths who once worked with NGOs, whether humanitarian or conservation, who have left behind their commitment, “finished with saving the world”, frustrated by the infighting, the power grabs, and the projects that have more to do with the people running them than with what or whom they are trying to protect.
Béchard writes: “Before I’d come here, it was hard to feel the urgency of the problems and how long change takes, the constant attention to detail it requires, the endurance and patience.”
Reading Empty Hands, Open Arms is the closest I can get to understanding that.
Two things: 1) Thanks to this post, I just spent a bunch of time googling bonobos on the internet. And 2) Now I’m curious to know more about the Bongandu. It’ s hard to imagine that degree of isolation.
It is hard to imagine. And, I guess because we are often inclined to read more about what we already know, rather than reach for new reading interests, we give ourselves fewer opportunities to learn how to imagine too. I bet you found some fascinating sites and images. I also bet you’d like the book (especially the parts about the relationships, which I didn’t want to spoil, but it was all SO interesting).
I would definitely find the animal behaviour sections interesting! That was one of my favourite university courses. On to the list it goes! 🙂
I bet you’ll enjoy it even more, with your research session behind you. Isn’t that often the way: the more we know, the more we want to know.
This sounds like a beautiful but quite tough read. Fascinating to see what goes on in these communities to save animals. Bonobos are such wonderful creatures, I have only seen them in the zoo (and I have very mixed feelings about most zoos) when I went with children from school, they are the kind of creatures I hate to see locked up like that.
It’s a good choice if one wants to read about the issues but with a measure of distance in place, more of a focus on the complex issues than an up-close-and-personal view of the patterns of destruction and abusive behaviours which put these species at risk. It’s so interesting reading the reports about how the animals in captivity, in zoos, are responding to the absence of human onlookers (higher birth rates, for instance, go figure!).
Wow this sounds like a difficult (but beautiful!) read. I’ve read some of Bechards fiction, but I find he’s a bit wordy for me. Was this book long? I’d enjoy him a lot more if he got straighter to the point haha
And here’s the gossipy side of me-I did meet him a few years ago and he’s a very charming, outdoorsy type of man. He liked to boldly proclaim he ‘had no home’ because he travelled so much. He’s also got a killer smile 🙂
overexaggerated sigh YES it was long. Surely you don’t begrudge the bonobos more extensive media coverage?! insert frustrated bonobo emoji
But, okay, I know what you mean about his style: there are a lot of words on 332 pages, with skinny margins and a skinny font. His style in his more recent novel (I think you probably read Into the Sun?) is somewhat tighter, but I’m not convinced that’s a book that would appeal to you either (more about ideas, a la Lampedusa, than plot).
Thanks for sharing the gossip! Now everyone can google him to check out that killer smile. (Like, here, merci Radio-Canada!)
The closest thing to this that I’ve read is Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo by Biruté M.F. Galdikas, back in 2013. Soon afterwards I got a chance to go behind the scenes at Jersey Zoo (founded by Gerald Durrell) and ‘meet’ a few of their orangutans, a very special experience. Reading about conservation can be dispiriting: for every few steps forward there are many steps back. But we have to keep trying.
That would have been wonderful, I’m sure. Were you inspired to write about it afterwards, or was it just too much to put into words, something to preserve as a memory in another way?
For those interested in making a small change for the orangutans, check out this simple fact-sheet about palm kernel oil from the WWF.
Alas, that was before my blogging days!
We avoid palm oil when possible, but it’s in so many processed foods that it’s hard. At the very least, we look for the sustainable marker.
It’s crazy how that industry has infiltrated so many levels of consumerism. And it does come down to convenience often, doesn’t it.
That’s the problem with lots of the parts of the world – mostly rainforest, on reflection – that we’d like to save to make up for our depredations elsewhere, coming up with an economic model that supports the locals.
“Saving” and “Aid”, such complicated matters. Just this weekend I was reading about Brazil and the devastation wrecked there, while much of the world has been focussed on the latest coronavirus.
Oh, this sounds like a hard read, I’m such a softie when it comes to anything about animals, endangered or otherwise.
I know what you mean, but this one just feels more informative than anything and, from another perspective, one can see it as encouraging that there are so many different groups pursuing these goals.
I don’t remember who said it, but, “It is not Nature that needs saving, rather it is we who need saving from ourselves.”
A snippet from a poem I wrote:
Sashaying in the streets of Pompeii,
our steadfast way naïve to natural sway.
Oil and water seething at every crossway.
Nature oblivious to right or wrong,
adapting life forms in moving on.
Oil and water.
True. And thanks for sharing your words. For those who haven’t yet visited your page of poems (this one is included, just browse via the carousel), you can read them here.