An orphanage for primates

Claudine André shields her eyes from the Kinshasa glare, peering toward the thick jungle beyond the perimeter fence and the telltale scraps of banana leaves. "Où êtes-vous?" she calls out. Where are you?

From the canopy of trees comes excited screeching. Ms. André smiles. Her bonobos – 50 or so orphans rescued from pet cages and bush-meat markets – always respond. "On y va!" she yells. Let's go.

Seemingly unbothered by the tropical heat, André glides up one of the steep hills of the nature sanctuary here, the only one of its kind in the world. Soon, a posse of bonobos strolls alongside her on the other side of the fence, grinning and romping. André introduces them by name, and by story.

There is Manono, munching on a banana. "Bonjour!" André coos toward the fuzzy male. Manono grins and belts back an appropriately monkey "ooh-ooh-ooh-ah-ah-ah!" André gestures to the big female a few yards away: "She will try to grab your notebook. She likes writing." Then she pauses. "We found her in a research laboratory. In a cage. She never saw daylight."

André walks toward a coffee-colored lake, trimmed by birds-of-paradise and bamboo. Across the water, juvenile bonobos swing on branches and divebomb into the water.

These came from Kinshasa's bush-meat markets, André says. Baby bonobos are considered too small to eat, so poachers sell them as pets – often displayed in cages over the smoked meat of their mothers.

André is unabashed about tugging at heartstrings. A chief goal of her Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, which she started in 1994, is to raise sympathy for this peace-loving primate. If she can get others – particularly Congolese children – to care about them, she believes, then she is a step closer to saving them from extinction. "Conservation begins with education," she says. "It is important to save these 50 bonobos. They have to be ambassadors for the last bonobos in the wild."

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It is one of nature's ironies that the bonobo – a primate whose social structure is based on peace and equality and who diffuses tension through sex rather than violence – is found only in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), one of the most volatile countries in Africa. For decades, fighting has plagued the DRC (formerly known as Zaire). The Congolese threw off repressive Belgian rule in 1960. Five years later dictator Mobutu Sese Seko took power. In the 1990s, ethnic and political fighting racked the country. More recently, the five-year Second Congolese War, which ended in 2003, claimed some 4 million lives through violence, hunger, and disease.

André has lived through most of this tumult. She was a young child when her father, a veterinarian, moved his family to the Belgian Congo in 1951. Like most Europeans, the family fled after independence. But five years later, André returned to her "home country," settling in the Virungas Volcano region where Dian Fossey had started her study of mountain gorillas.

André met Fossey, but it wasn't for two decades that she would begin her own odyssey with primates. For her, the genesis and catharsis came in 1991, when soldiers looted the capital city of Kinshasa, where she was working for an airplane company. After the violence, André went with a friend to the city's zoo, which had been ransacked. "I knew as soon as I pushed the door open that my life would change," she says.

The place was in disrepair – with many animals dead or starving and the pens and lairs in ruins. For the next few months, André bought food for the staff and animals and helped rebuild the zoo. Then, one day, a man arrived with a baby bonobo. "He said, 'Don't get your heart involved in this animal. They never survive,' " she recalls.

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