Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  At LWC, Kathy and I were assisted by a competent African staff who knew how to sedate primates efficiently, so we were able to accomplish a lot quickly. During our month in Limbe, we worked with the African employees and European volunteers to perform health screens on sixty-six primate orphans. Fortunately, Limbe is located in the 20 percent of Cameroon that is English speaking, so we could communicate easily here. We tested for tuberculosis and a battery of viruses, and I sutured a few wounds along the way. During our third week, we took one day off to drive a few miles out of town to the sandy beach with a South African man we met at the hotel. I ran across the dark volcanic sand like a wild thing set free and splashed into the warm Atlantic sea in shorts and a T-shirt.

  Two days later, I traveled with a driver to the city of Yaoundé, six hours away, to pick up a six-year-old chimpanzee named Pierre from a French biomedical research facility that had agreed to release him to LWC. During this arduous round trip, we had to traverse Douala en route to Yaoundé. I became much more familiar with the omnipresent checkpoints and really noticed the oppressive poverty of so many of Cameroon’s people. Severely disabled beggars lined the medians, and school-age children moved from car to car, either begging or selling hard candy, boiled eggs, packages of tissue, and other things. Men trying to eke out a living selling sunglasses displayed on placards hanging from their necks, or music CDs, or ties, or T-shirts, or windshield wiper blades, or any number of other things that travelers might need approached me hopefully at the service stations where we bought fuel. A dozen women and men sat under the sun in front of typewriters along a busy business route in Yaoundé, offering cheap, on-the-spot secretarial services with minimal overhead costs. I was touched by the entrepreneurial spirit of these people trying to survive in the city however they could. There were also signs of affluence in both big cities. Tiny stick-and-mud shacks abutted sprawling spacious residences and businesses.

  At the biomedical research facility, we found Pierre in a small outdoor cage near the back door leading to a parking lot, and I had to move him from there to our even smaller transport cage. I had brought a blowpipe and darts with me so I could blow a dart of anesthesia into Pierre, but in the end I didn’t need it. I was able to slip my hand through the bars and inject the drug into Pierre’s leg with a syringe while a technician at the research facility distracted him.

  I sat beside the transport cage in the back of the Land Rover so I was there to comfort Pierre when he woke up only a few minutes outside of Yaoundé. He knew that he had been stuck and I was the one who’d done it, but he accepted the bananas and papaya and peanuts I offered him through the bars of the cage. His grateful grunts of delight over the food, interspersed with his deep, probing gazes into my eyes, told me he was open to friendship, even as his eyes disconcerted me slightly with the obvious intelligence they windowed. His protruding ribs spoke volumes about the callous disregard of the research facility staff, including affluent expats from Europe, and I tried not to let my anger ruin my enjoyment of this sweet time. I hadn’t yet learned to mimic the way chimpanzees groom one another, but as I touched and petted Pierre, he leaned toward me against the bars of the cage to maximize my access. When I was tired, we leaned against opposite sides of the same bars so our bodies were touching. During a stop for fuel, I asked the driver to buy some meat from a woman cooking by the station, and this one time I chose not to ask from what animal it came. Pierre relished every morsel with a joy that seemed almost overwhelming, grunting and rolling his eyes heavenward as he ate. When I got out to ease myself, as we say in Cameroon, behind some bushes on the side of the road, a mosquito bit me on my cheek. I only knew it left a mark when Pierre squeezed his fingers through the bars to gently touch the spot on my cheek. This small, subtle exchange, Pierre acknowledging the new lesion on my face, along with my other interactions with him during our long ride to Limbe, narrowed the gap between our species for me in a way that years of academic study and knowledge about genetic similarity could never do. Sadly, this sweet little chimpanzee boy died during an outbreak of pneumonia soon after I left him at LWC. My memories of him and the profound effect our interactions had on me remain vivid so many years later.

  I was sad to leave Cameroon. During the several days that Kathy and I spent in the beautiful city of Paris afterward, I pined for the raw, pungent, relative squalor of the African environment we had left behind. Cameroon was life and death; Paris seemed boring by comparison.

  And the animal protection and conservation issues in Cameroon, where bushmeat was so prevalent, were compelling for me as an activist. I came to understand that the colloquial term bushmeat refers to any animal killed in the bush and eaten, including chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, forest elephants, various species of antelopes, cane rats, pangolins, crocodiles, and turtles. Cameroon law lists chimpanzees and gorillas as completely protected species because they are in danger of extinction. According to the law that was strengthened in 1994, it’s illegal to kill, capture, buy, sell, or possess a chimpanzee or gorilla for any purpose, but in 1997, there was almost no enforcement of this law.

  Historically, Cameroon’s mostly Bantu people had lived in the forest, surviving on what they could kill or gather from their habitat, along with some subsistence agriculture. During the five decades that preceded my arrival in Cameroon, the rapidly increasing human population had urbanized to a greater degree than before. While many people still lived in small rural settlements, those who congregated in towns and cities created the demand for a commercial trade in bushmeat. On its way from the forest to urban dinner plates, bushmeat becomes expensive, as various middlemen, or dealers, who transport and sell it cover their costs and make a profit. I was told that the meat of chimpanzees and gorillas is sweet and succulent, and adding to its desirability in some circles is the belief that eating it increases sexual virility. As chimpanzee and gorilla numbers have dwindled, their meat has become more expensive, adding to its status as a delicacy. Some of Cameroon’s affluent people serve it on holidays, at weddings, and to honor special guests.

  I loved my contact with the primates, but I was keenly aware that my “opportunity” to know them was a result of the awful tragedy that had happened to them and their families. Chimpanzee and gorilla and monkey families, including mothers with clinging infants, were slaughtered by the thousands for an illegal (at least where chimpanzees and gorillas were concerned) meat trade, and these sweet captive orphans were a side effect. While the sweet old-world monkeys inspired my compassion and the emotionally subtle, mysterious, and relatively gentle gorillas inspired my awe and admiration, the chimpanzees, more than any species I worked with, inspired my deep empathy. I recognized them as my own. I didn’t have a definitive plan when I left Cameroon, but I knew I would be coming back. I knew that their cause had somehow become mine.

  Two

  Commitment

  Edmund Stone was a British national who had already lived in the United States for seventeen years when I met him in 1997, soon after my first trip to Cameroon. He was producing a talk show for the local Fox Television station when he saw an article in the Oregonian, our state newspaper, about my recent trip. He recruited me as a guest on his talk show, and soon afterward we began dating. Edmund was six feet tall and slim. He had a perfectly groomed beard and wore his silky, light brown, shoulder-length hair pulled back in a ponytail. He had first gone to Los Angeles from Britain to work as a BBC correspondent for a radio show about the lifestyles of the rich and famous and had developed a profitable résumé-writing business on the side. Many years later, living in Portland and still writing résumés, he maintained his refined BBC accent, which was quite different from the way people talked in his rural England hometown. He cracked me up with his hilarious imitation of how he once talked. He was good company, and with his tendency toward hedonistic pursuits, such as four-olive martinis after work, he was a welcome addition to my unbalanced, workcentric life.

  Later the same year, Edmund accompanied me on a working trip
to Cameroon. I had agreed to help British national Chris Mitchell set up a veterinary care program for the new and improved Yaoundé Zoo. Chris was the founder of the Cameroon Wildlife Aid Fund, which would later continue without him, first under the direction of Talila Sivan and the late Avi Sivan, and still later under Rachel Hogan, who oversaw its renaming to Ape Action Africa. I would eventually enjoy the friendship and support of all three of these conservation heroes, but during our trip of October 1997, Edmund and I worked long, grueling hours alongside Chris Mitchell to vaccinate and vasectomize, perform dental work, and tend to various other medical needs of primates at Yaoundé Zoo.

  Edmund and I spent two weeks in the town of Limbe, where I had first worked at LWC. Here we befriended three adult chimpanzees, whom I had noticed during my first trip. Jacky, Pepe, and Becky were on display in three small cages located on the back side of the Atlantic Beach Hotel, a quarter mile down the coast from the less expensive Miramar, where we stayed. Their cages of concrete and metal sat about three feet off the ground, lined up in a straight row under some sheltering trees—built there, I supposed, for the amusement of tourists staying at the hotel, should they tire of the beautiful sea on the other side. Edmund and I visited the three chimpanzees and took them food treats at least two or three times a day during our stay in Limbe. Captured as infants by poachers, the chimpanzees had been in captivity most of their lives. Tormented Jacky, a male in his late thirties, was furious and possibly irrevocably insane. Handsome Pepe, a male in his early twenties, wore his loneliness for anyone to see, anyone who paid attention. Sassy Becky, around twenty years old, was the mischief maker, still a kid in some ways. They came to anticipate our visits. They often recognized us when we were no more than silhouettes in the distance, and they welcomed us long before we arrived with excited vocalizations—crescendos of panting and hooting that climaxed in high-pitched screams. “They’ve seen us,” I said to Edmund more than once, and we always hurried our pace so as not to keep them waiting.

  As the illegal trade in bushmeat thrived, surviving orphans, too small to offer much meat, could be sold as pets or tourist attractions. Gorilla infants, not as hardy as those of chimpanzees, often lost the will to live and refused to eat after their mothers died. Once they were out of their native forest habitat, they were exposed to bacteria, amoeba, and viruses to which they had little immunity, and many died of infections. It was uncommon to see them in captivity. While many chimpanzee infants died too, either during the hunt or soon after their capture, others survived to languish and suffer for years or even decades in strict confinement on chains or in small cages like Jacky, Pepe, and Becky.

  My sense of the injustice of what had been done to Jacky, Pepe, and Becky, and my sadness for the smallness of their lives in these horrible cages, was overwhelming. I pitied them for this fate that was beyond their control, and at the same time I was intrigued by who they were. Edmund and I each developed relationships with the chimpanzees. Pepe stole my heart first and most completely in those first weeks. From the strict confines of his lonely cell, he solicited our interaction with one big arm stretched out through the bars. The first time he beckoned me I closed the gap between us with little hesitation and allowed him to wrap his arm around my back. Somehow, I didn’t doubt his gentleness. His muscles were huge and he was fifteen to twenty times stronger than me, but he handled me like a fragile egg. I breathed in his body odor, which was a little like stale sweat but not sharp or unpleasant. I thrilled at being close to him. Although I had read about chimpanzee behavior in natural free-living groups, I hadn’t had the opportunity to observe them. I didn’t know how to mimic their behavior—to try to communicate with a chimpanzee on chimpanzee terms. On the other hand, living as a “pet” for ten years after his capture, before he was dumped at the hotel, had humanized Pepe. He wanted to be close to humans, was comfortable around us. I certainly wanted to know and understand him. Our mutual ape-likeness gave us some inherent ground for communication—we understood each other’s gestures. At each of our meetings, Pepe’s first business was to groom me—my face, my head, my arms—and the gentle touch of his big fingers was immensely pleasurable. Free-living chimpanzees spend up to 25 percent of their waking hours grooming or being groomed by their companions. What started millions of years ago, probably when chimpanzees first started living in groups, as a useful activity to control insects and keep clean evolved into an important social activity. Through this intimate touching, chimpanzees establish and maintain loyal friendships, comfort and calm children, nurture political alliances, and maintain hierarchies. Maternal grooming from the time of birth imprints the behavior on chimpanzees very early. Even though he was orphaned as a baby, Pepe knew that grooming was an important aspect of any blossoming friendship. By grooming me, he taught me how to groom him—to part his hairs and look for blemishes, dirt, or insects, to scratch or flick his skin as I searched, to move over an area systematically before moving to the next. I used my newfound grooming technique to help cement my friendship with Becky, too, although her receptivity to my overtures varied. Sometimes she was happy to spend a half hour visiting with me at the bars of her cage. Other times she kept her distance and turned her back on me, literally. Jacky was a different story altogether. We had learned about his reputation from people at LWC before we ever visited the three at the hotel. He had injured several people, and we knew not to approach him. We tossed to him the treats we handed to Pepe and Becky, or sometimes I placed them quickly through the bars of his cage while his back was turned. I noticed that he too vocalized excitedly when we approached. Our visits and the tasty treats we brought punctuated with pleasure the long hours of boredom the chimpanzees endured each day. When the time for our departure approached, I worried about their disappointment—imagined them waiting eagerly for visits that would never come. I didn’t want to leave them, especially not knowing when we could return, but we had no choice. We had jobs and companion animals awaiting our return to the United States.

  Back home, I thought about the three chimpanzees every day. I continued my advocacy work with IDA and worked some shifts seeing my old dog and cat patients at Pacific Veterinary Hospital, but being an animal activist against institutionalized abuses in the United States was like chipping away at a large stone, and I knew that other competent veterinarians could take over my work with companion animals in the veterinary clinic. In contrast, there was a sense of immediacy and possibility for bringing about big changes in Cameroon, and a sense that, at least where Jacky, Pepe, and Becky were concerned, no one else would save them if we didn’t.

  I simply could not be happy going about my comfortable life while I was aware that Jacky, Pepe, and Becky remained so bored and miserable. Of course it was true that animals all over the world were suffering as much, or even more, than these three chimpanzees, but they had become my friends. My compulsion to save them was personal.

  Edmund felt the same, although perhaps with less intensity. He and I made a promise to each other that we would figure out a way to get Jacky, Pepe, and Becky out of those grim cages at the hotel and give them a better life somewhere else, anywhere else. It was a promise that seems almost casual in hindsight, now that I know what fulfilling it would mean. Although Edmund and I were romantic partners, we were also partners in this mission. Without his mutual commitment to the goals, achieving them would have been truly impossible.

  LWC was located on the edge of Limbe very near the hotel, but the center’s physical space was limited. It had no facility, or even space for us to build a new enclosure, for three adult chimpanzees. The future of the Yaoundé Zoo was too uncertain for us to think of taking them there. The only way to assure a better life for Jacky, Pepe, and Becky was to start a new sanctuary—a notion that eventually evolved into an actual plan to take the chimpanzees back to some natural habitat forest and protect them within an electric enclosure there. We couldn’t move the chimps to a bigger cage somewhere; we would take them back to the forest.

  By the
time I knew my calling was with chimpanzees in Africa, IDA president Dr. Elliot Katz had come to believe, at least somewhat, in the power of my determination. Enough so that he agreed to continue to pay my salary while I tried to set up a chimpanzee sanctuary in Cameroon. At the same time, he made it clear that IDA was not in a position to fund a project in Africa from its California office. IDA’s contribution was to be my salary, and I would need to raise funds for the Cameroon project.

  Fortunately, I had Edmund on my side. His commitment to me and to the cause, as much as, if not more than, any other factor, gave us our early successes. During the following year, he and I set up IDA-Africa in a room of my house in Beaverton, Oregon, and raised the seed money to start a new sanctuary for the “Atlantic Beach Chimpanzees,” as we called them in our fund-raising drive. Neither of us had any experience in fund-raising, but over the course of a year, with the help of friends in our Portland community as well as some from Seattle, we gradually accumulated money through book sales, plant sales, and small receptions. Edmund in particular played the crucial role of reaching out to individual donors. I knew he was driven by his own passion for the cause, and also by his passion for me.

  In the spring of 1998, I met French national Estelle Raballand, a pretty, curvy twenty-six-year-old with bright brown eyes and very dark brown wavy hair, which she wore short, just below her ears. She had an easy laugh and spoke near perfect English with a charming French accent. She liked to use American expressions, but she could get them wrong. Her funniest that I can remember: “F you and the horse you wrote it on!” We met at an annual event of the International Primate Protection League in South Carolina. She had lived in the country of Guinea, West Africa, for five years with her American husband, Dana Ward, who worked for a nongovernmental organization focusing on family planning and HIV prevention. Estelle had worked with the Guinean government to set up a small sanctuary for baby chimpanzees. She was in the United States temporarily before she and Dana would move with their son, Nicholas, to Yaoundé, Cameroon, for his work. Our mutual friends Peter Jenkins and Liza Gadsby were first to suggest that Estelle and I work together on the ground in Cameroon.