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An orphanage for primates
Claudine André runs a nursery for bonobos in the Congo and warns about the vanishing presence of the most humanlike of the apes. Part 1 of two.
from the May 9, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
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.
That made André all the more determined to save it. She fed and played with the primate as if it were a child. It lived. Soon, more people were giving her bonobos. André moved from the zoo to an abandoned veterinarian clinic and then to an empty school. But after a year, as the fighting slowed and the campus prepared to reopen, André needed a new home. She visited one site about 15 miles from downtown Kinshasa – a beautiful plot owned by one of Mobutu's advisers.
It was perfect, but too expensive. Then, André checked Lola Ya's bank account and was shocked to find a deposit of 135,000 euros. "We called the bank and said, 'This is a stupid joke, we only have 500 euros,' " she recalls. The bank told her that someone had made a donation and had only one stipulation: to remain anonymous. "I still don't know who it was," she says.
The gift was enough for André to start creating the current sanctuary – still unique in the world. It has two separate enclosures totaling almost 70 acres, an education center for school children, offices, and a bonobo nursery.
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