Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  “What were you doing?” Estelle repeated.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just looking at the market. What did you buy?”

  Estelle had bought bananas, papaya, mangoes (the first of the season), corn on the cob, peanuts, and long baguettes of white bread—enough of everything for all ten primates at Luna Park. We stopped at a small supermarket to buy two plastic cups of yogurt for Dorothy and Nama. Estelle and I both had read about the diets of free-living chimpanzees, but the wild fruits and leaves they ate weren’t available to us. The fruits and vegetables and peanuts that Estelle bought were staples of the chimpanzees at LWC and also were part of the diet of the chimpanzees at her sanctuary in Guinea. In addition to all kinds of fruits and vegetables, we had seen Jacky, Pepe, and Becky enjoying bread from the hotel restaurant, and yogurt was a special treat I often bought for them. We knew we had food that Dorothy and Nama would like.

  Back at Luna Park, as we carried the food toward Dorothy and Nama, an attendant approached us.

  “The chimpanzees are very dangerous. The big one can be vicious,” he informed us. “I am the only one who can go near them. I’m the one who cleans after them and feeds them.” While I waited for him to speak and Estelle to translate, I watched Dorothy and Nama. They were watching us and waiting impatiently—Dorothy sitting at the limit of her chain and Nama pacing jerkily back and forth.

  “What do they normally eat?” I asked him, through Estelle.

  “Palm nuts and bananas,” he said. “They will also drink beer and smoke cigarettes. If you have cigarettes, I’ll show you.” Estelle explained to him that I was a veterinary doctor, that we worked with chimpanzees, that cigarette smoking was bad for chimpanzees, and that we did not want to see them smoke. I suggested that we could write a list of appropriate foods so he could try to get a variety of them to feed the chimpanzees and other primates every day. We showed him that we had food in our bags and informed him that we would now give it to the chimpanzees ourselves. He looked skeptical, hesitating as he formulated his objection. Without waiting for it, we turned and walked quickly with our several bags of food to a patch of manicured grass between Dorothy and Nama. Dorothy grimaced and bounced on her back feet in excitement, but her extreme anxiety of the previous day was absent. Nama, too, was calmer as she watched us remove food from the bags. Estelle doled out the fruit, while I handed each of them yogurt and bread. We approached the chimpanzees less cautiously than we had the day before. We were now acquaintances, with a positive record—albeit short—of benevolence.

  While they were enjoying their food, I fed the baboon, collected the water bottles to get fresh water, and distributed some food and water to the small monkeys on the veranda. When I came back out, Estelle was sitting close to Dorothy, grooming her outstretched leg. At the same time, Dorothy gently groomed the top of Estelle’s head. How sad it was that the attendant and others at the hotel had misunderstood Dorothy so completely. How many years had it been since anyone touched her in a loving way? How long since she was allowed this simple pleasure of grooming someone else? As I watched the sweet scene between Dorothy and Estelle, which I knew represented a blossoming friendship, I longed to change places with Estelle.

  I turned toward Nama, who also was watching Dorothy and Estelle. As I walked slowly within her reach, she took my arm, and I allowed her to pull me in close to her. I sat down beside her in the wet dirt, trying to avoid the diarrhea. She looked at my face curiously for a few moments, glancing at my eyes but not really looking into them. She was inspecting me, rather than trying to communicate. After a minute or two, her hand hovered in front of my face, her lips grew taut in concentration, and her mouth smacked open and closed rhythmically. Understanding that she was about to groom me reassured and relaxed me, but then her fingers on my face were not really so gentle. She was digging at the corners of my eyes in a way I didn’t enjoy. I turned my face away. When I looked back at her, she perused my face again briefly, and then tried picking my nose with a finger that smelled of feces. I turned away again. I clacked my own mouth and tried to groom her face, but she didn’t like it either. She turned her head to escape my hand as I had done with hers. This wasn’t going perfectly.

  Finally, when I lowered my hands to groom her chest, she pushed her shoulders back and straightened her neck to give me good access. I moved both my hands over her chest the way I thought another chimpanzee would—parting the grayish hairs, flicking off dirt particles, gently scratching at blemishes on skin stretched tautly over easily discernible ribs. After about ten minutes, Nama lowered her head and returned her chest and shoulders to normal posture. When I looked up to see what she wanted to do next—not more face grooming, I hoped—her eyes were seeking mine with a desire to communicate that startled me. While she held my gaze, she took my right hand and placed it purposefully on the chain around her bony neck, rubbed bare of hair by the shackle. Her lower lip hung open, and her eyes were steady, beseeching. She was requesting the freedom she needed most of all and was expecting no less than simple action as an answer from a friend. All I could give her was a promise that she couldn’t understand, although I meant it with all my heart.

  “Nama, I will take that chain off you, just as soon as I am able to. I will never rest a single day until I do.”

  Suddenly, Estelle’s voice surprised me in its proximity to us. She had approached without me noticing her. She was saying that a group of three men, including the attendant, were watching us.

  “One of them might be the manager. We should go talk to them,” Estelle said.

  I agreed that I should accompany Estelle to speak with the men. I had become totally relaxed with Nama, but when I tried to stand up, the emotional tenor changed abruptly. Nama grabbed my arm tightly and pulled me back down, causing me to fall hard on the dirt. While I was thinking about how to handle the situation, she took my hand and stood upright on her two legs. When I managed to get on my feet, she started walking me in tight circles around the concrete slab to which the end of her chain was attached. She mostly walked upright, only occasionally putting down one hand on the dirt. With her other hand, she held on to my hand tightly, stubbornly. Around and around we went. She may have looked frail, but she was clearly a lot stronger than I was. I wasn’t sure what she might do if I tried to pry her hand from mine or spoke harshly to her. I really wanted us to be friends, and I really didn’t want her to bite me. The loss of control frightened me.

  “Nama won’t let me leave at the moment,” I told Estelle, who had seen what was happening. I tried not to sound nervous about my capture.

  “Do you want me to try to help you now?” Estelle asked.

  “Go talk to the people first,” I said. “I don’t want them to get annoyed that we’re ignoring them.”

  Since I couldn’t speak French, we had already planned what Estelle would say, which was basically just the truth. We were starting a sanctuary in the forest for adult chimpanzees, and we wanted to take Dorothy and Nama there so they could have a better life. She would also try to find out how long Dorothy and Nama had been at the hotel.

  Nama quit walking me in circles, and we sat back down. She released my hand, and once, I tried to scoot away. I hoped that by staying on her level, instead of standing up abruptly, I would be able to slip out of her reach, but when the space between us increased to a few inches, she grabbed my arm tightly. Stay with me! Minutes earlier Nama had owned my heart, and now I hated being subjugated by her. She would no longer meet my gaze or even look at my face, but she could not let me go and face being alone again. Suddenly, my empathy for her smothered every other emotion. If I so detested the loss of my free will for even a few minutes, how unimaginably horrible it must have been for Nama, and for Dorothy, to be so cruelly deprived of even the slightest autonomy and choice. I scooted closer to her to entwine my arm through hers. She could have her way, in this at least. I would stay as long as I could.

  Sitting arm in arm with Nama, I watched Estelle talking to the three men. Soon, she
and one of the men strolled away from the rest. He towered over Estelle and appeared comfortable as they talked. He was casually dressed in Western clothes, but he carried himself with the poise of Cameroon’s affluent class.

  Estelle gestured toward me. I waved stupidly, and he nodded. In a few minutes, Estelle and the man shook hands, and he walked back toward the office of the hotel, the other two following.

  “How did it go? Was that the managing son?” I asked her when she approached.

  “It was. According to him, Dorothy has been here over twenty-five years, and Nama came in 1984. He said he will talk to his family about letting us take them.”

  “Did he seem opposed to the idea?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t particularly negative about it. I told him you were a veterinarian examining the chimpanzees, and we would bring back some medicine for them,” Estelle said. “He seemed to like that.”

  Unfortunately, Estelle needed to get back to Yaoundé to attend a play that evening at her son Nick’s school. As we were discussing my captivity and deciding what prize—something the restaurant had for sale—we might barter for my freedom, Nama suddenly moved away from me to the opposite side of the concrete slab. She glanced across at me one time, quickly, and then stared out past me, to the left of me. As simple as that, she told me I was free to go, and her resolve broke my heart again.

  “Nama, look at me,” I called to her. “I’ll be coming back soon.” But she had retreated into herself, done with me for the day.

  I had no idea how much of a fight it might be, or how long it might take, to rescue Nama and Dorothy from Luna Park, but I intended to give Nama some medical treatment within days. I collected a sample of her feces in a plastic bag I had carried in my pocket for that purpose. I would have it checked for parasite eggs when we were back in Yaoundé. Intestinal worms could be at least partly to blame for Nama’s diarrhea, anemia, and wasting away. I would run the tests and come back soon with medicine. I would spend time with Dorothy next time.

  As we walked to the Pajero, I stopped and looked back at Dorothy and Nama for a minute or so—from one to the other. Their loneliness and boredom were palpable. I tried to comprehend the aching, crazy-making frustration in such extreme confinement, but I could not even imagine the depth of despair that such a life must bring. How had they maintained their sanity? A painful, burning lump of fury formed and expanded in my chest and burned my throat, seeking escape. I wanted to sob. I longed for the release that tears might bring, but my eyes were dry. Anything but effective action seemed self-indulgent. My aching fury was as trapped in me as Dorothy and Nama were trapped.

  Seven

  The Village

  Soon after our search for a sanctuary site in Cameroon ended at the Mbargue Forest, Estelle took over operation of a chimpanzee sanctuary in the West African country of Guinea. When she and her husband, Dana, had left Guinea two years earlier, she had taken the eight baby chimpanzees in her care to a larger sanctuary in Haut Niger National Park. Now the director of that sanctuary had just resigned, and the government of Guinea asked Estelle to come back and fill the position. It was a position that would give her a great deal of autonomy in decision making, but also included raising all the necessary operational funds.

  Estelle moved back and forth from Cameroon to Guinea. When she was in Cameroon, she was busy raising funds for her Center for Chimpanzee Conservation in Guinea. Her availability to help me set up the new sanctuary was limited, although she really came through as a friend and collaborator at some crucial moments.

  On May 31, 1999, the minister of the Ministry of the Environment and Forestry in Yaoundé signed an official letter giving us permission to establish a chimpanzee sanctuary on government-owned land in Cameroon. Until that point, we had been moving forward with verbal assurances and a letter from a lower official in the ministry. Getting the signed letter from the minister gave us real authority from the national government to move forward.

  I had just hired Kenneth Fonyoy, a twenty-eight-year-old Anglophone from the Northwest Province of Cameroon, to be my driver and translator. Kenneth was smart. He had a good sense of humor, but his handsome face often wore a solemn expression. His smile was pretty, but not quick. He wasn’t a big man, but his cocky attitude made him seem larger than he was. I thought he was chauvinistic, and his fast driving got on my nerves. My monitoring of the speedometer, like a mother with a teenaged son, undoubtedly got on his nerves. I got the distinct impression that he thought this job of driving me around was beneath him, and I was quite sure he thought I was a little crazy.

  When he threw a Coke can out the window, I insisted he stop the car and go collect it.

  “We don’t litter from this car!” I explained a little too emphatically, faced with the glaring evidence that everyone except me, and perhaps other people riding in this particular car, did indeed litter in Cameroon. When he picked up his Coke can, he pointed to three others on the ground within view and asked sarcastically, “Would you like me to pick up those, too?”

  When he captured a stunned and frightened quail that he had accidentally, although fortunately from his perspective, hit with the Pajero, he was thanking God for the free dinner until I thwarted his plans. I insisted he place the bird on the grass, and as we watched her lying almost lifeless before us, Kenneth assured me, “She will die here in the grass, a benefit to no one.” When she suddenly flew away as if nothing had happened, he rolled his eyes and walked silently to the car. For him, I was unreasonable and annoying, but he needed the job more than he wanted me to know. I needed him even more.

  By the time I hired Kenneth and we received the minister’s letter, we had decided to locate the sanctuary in a particular section of the Mbargue Forest near the village of Bikol. It met the essential criteria we had established, and Liboz would make our driveway, clear our camp, and transport our supplies. Although Cameroon’s national government favored our selection of the Mbargue Forest, the section we had chosen was considered the traditional territory of the village of Bikol. The current national government, led by President Biya since 1983, encouraged people to “help themselves”—as in “God helps those who help themselves.” This meant eking out their existences on free land in remote forests where they were free to hunt, gather, and farm. As a result of the “free land” policy and the burgeoning human population, new settlements of squatters were continuously springing up, especially along logging roads that created access. However, like hundreds of other small, isolated villages scattered throughout Cameroon’s forests, Bikol had predated the existence of the Republic of Cameroon as an independent country with its current boundaries and its national government, and it preceded Liboz’s logging road by four decades.

  Bikol was created in 1958 when two men who were natives of the larger village of Mbinang decided to break off from it. About two and a half miles from Mbinang, the founders of Bikol found the small Ndian River, running through the bottom of a steep ravine, on its way to the Sanaga River. They perched their two houses on level land about a half mile up an incline from the little river, which would be their water source. The name Bikol means “the King” in their Bamvéle dialect. The two men brought relatives to join them in Bikol, and with multiple wives, they swelled the population with descendants. Their sons brought wives, and new genes, from outside villages. When we arrived in 1999, one of the founders, “Pa” Michel, still lived in Bikol, but he spoke no French and had gotten quite old. Chief Gaspard, the prominent voice of the village when we first arrived in Bikol, was the son of the other founder. His father’s tomb was prominently displayed in front of his house.

  Although the people of Bikol did not possess a deed to the land, which officially belonged to the national government, no one disputed their “traditional rights” to use it. We would have to negotiate with them if we wanted to put a chimpanzee sanctuary here. We would need to convince them that the chimpanzee sanctuary would improve their lives, and we would need to make it true.

  Kenneth
drove Estelle and me from Yaoundé to Bikol for an official meeting with the village community. We pulled into Bikol with every available space in the Pajero crammed with bags and boxes of food and drinks. We brought a hundred pounds of rice, a Styrofoam ice box of mackerel, large bags of bitter greens and peanuts for a local dish called ndolé, ripe plantains, and basins of tomatoes, hot peppers, and other spices for making sauce. I had wanted the feast to be vegetarian, but Kenneth, and even Estelle, insisted it would insult the community and the local government officials who would attend. Kenneth argued that we should take live chickens so we wouldn’t have to worry about the meat spoiling. Estelle thought it was a practical idea, which even I could concede, but she couldn’t bring herself to argue for traveling with and getting to know chickens that we would kill in Bikol. I finally compromised on bringing the dead fish in a cooler. To drink we brought several cases of boxed red wine, crates of beer, and soft drinks. There was also candy for the children. We decided it was prudent to keep the drinks locked in the Pajero, but we handed over all the food to the women of Bikol so they could begin preparing the feast that would top off the next day’s big meeting.

  Chief Gaspard gave us permission to set up Estelle’s small tent, which she and I would share, near one end of the village on a bumpy patch of dirt in a clearing between the last two stick-and-mud houses. For Kenneth’s accommodation I had planned to rent a bamboo bed in one of the mud houses, like Estelle and I had done previously, but he preferred to sleep on the reclined front seat of the Pajero instead. The village of his youth was in a more affluent area of Cameroon’s Northwest. The house where he grew up was made of mud bricks that had been formed in a brick press, not just mud plastered on a stick frame. The floor of his village home was made of concrete. For sleeping, Kenneth preferred the car seat to Bikol’s dirt-floored huts.