Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  The first six and a half hours of the journey were over paved road, and, at times, between police checkpoints, I fell asleep, but once we hit the bumpy, muddy road, which made up two hundred miles of the route, the discomfort for the chimpanzees and for Estelle and me increased dramatically. The cages bounced hard on the metal floor, increasing the anxiety of the chimps, who did not suffer silently, and causing me to worry that the feet of the cages, already making dents in the floor of the van, might actually break holes in it. Estelle and I bounced about painfully on the metal floor and both yelled for the driver to slow down, to little effect. From the floor of the van, we couldn’t see the road to anticipate bumps. After an especially painful landing on my tailbone, I threatened Kenneth. “Make him slow down, or you’re trading places with me!” Kenneth was persuasive enough, but soon speed wasn’t the problem anyway. The muddy conditions of the road slowed us to a crawl, and still the van was slipping and sliding.

  Then, it happened. About ten hours into our journey, the driver lost control as the van slid and came to an abrupt stop in the mud bog that ran along the edge of the road. His efforts to drive out only sunk us deeper in the mud. Following Kenneth and the driver, Estelle and I crawled out of the sliding door, sinking in mud to our ankles. The front and rear wheels on the passenger side were half buried in mud. I pointedly avoided eye contact with Estelle, but I could still read her thoughts, flying at me like barbs. “We’ll get out,” I reassured all.

  Kenneth and I had had recent experience digging ourselves out of a mud bog. I knew it might take a long time, and it did. Estelle and I tried to comfort the increasingly distressed chimpanzees while Kenneth and the driver, both already exhausted from the night without sleep, took turns with our shovel, digging out mud from around the passenger side tires and creating a mudless trench of firm ground in front of each one. Finally, the driver decided to make a break. When he pressed lightly on the accelerator, the wheels found traction and rolled forward for two rotations only to bog down again. After all four of us pitched in to dig for another half hour, Kenneth, Estelle, and I pushed the van with all our might while the driver accelerated. The chimps contributed screaming and thunderous cage shaking to the tense drama. When the van finally jolted forward onto firmer ground, it sent me sprawling on my hands and knees in the red-brown mud, but as exhausted and relieved as I was, I hardly noticed. The three of us climbed in the van silently. We knew a celebration might be premature, since we still had a long trip ahead of us. Fortunately, although it was slow going, we weren’t stopped again.

  When we arrived at the sanctuary an hour before dusk, eighteen hours after leaving Limbe with the chimpanzees, the construction crew was waiting for us. The villagers had never seen live chimpanzees up close, and they were both excited and frightened. The satellite cage we had built for the chimps was a hundred yards from the camp down a forest trail . The crew helped us carry the transport cages, one by one, to the cage, and the chimps were mostly quiet for once. For the first time in their adult lives they could see and hear the forest around them, and though they had no idea what to expect and were undoubtedly frightened, they seemed fascinated at the same time.

  The satellite cage had three chambers with sliding doors between them that could be left open or closed. Estelle and I briefly discussed whether to separate the chimpanzees in different chambers until the following day and decided against it. They had been through hell and the new environment would be foreign and scary. Hoping and believing they would seek comfort from one another, we left open the sliding doors between chambers and transferred the chimps into the cage. We didn’t need anesthesia for these transfers. We used chains and padlocks to fasten the sliding door sides of each transport cage over a sliding door of the much larger satellite cage. When the adjacent sliding doors were opened, the chimpanzees could find relief in moving from the small, cramped cage to the much larger one.

  We transferred Pepe first, and then Becky. The two long-separated “siblings” ran into each other’s arms, screaming and grimacing—happy to be together, but unsure how to feel about the circumstances that were uniting them. I thought it was a picture of overwhelming emotional ambivalence. A few minutes later came the part we were worried about—how would Pepe and Jacky react to each other? In each other’s arms, Pepe and Becky watched anxiously as we opened the doors for Jacky. When he ran toward them screaming, Pepe, the biggest of the three chimpanzees, stood upright to meet and support him in a mutual embrace. Becky and Jacky hugged too, amid more high-pitched screaming from everyone, before they all quieted and sat close, each comforted by the proximity of the others as they looked at their new surroundings.

  Several minutes passed before anyone broke the huddle to explore the cage—a huge space by comparison to what they had known—and even then, they moved mostly together. Becky was first to venture through the sliding door and into the next chamber, only to rush back to beckon Jacky and Pepe to follow, which they did. After the three chimpanzees had moved en masse across the woodchip-covered floors of all three chambers, they started breaking away from one another to explore the more than four yards of vertical space with the sleeping and sitting platforms at various levels. After all the other humans had gradually wandered back to camp, I was sitting beside the cage on a patch of packed dirt in satisfied exhaustion when I heard the free-living chimpanzees vocalize from a distance. It was the first time I had heard them here. They must have been responding to the noisy commotion of these new chimpanzees in the territory. Jacky, Pepe, and Becky heard them, too, and rushing back together, they gazed anxiously into the quickly darkening forest, listening for the sound to come again. I had known the chimpanzees were living here in the forest—at least the villagers had assured me they were—but hearing them erased any doubt and made them real. Hearing the call of the free-living chimpanzees somehow made the lives of the captives seem all the more diminished. The best that I could give them wouldn’t be good enough. I so wished that they could live truly free, that they were still living free.

  The sad truth is that after a chimpanzee is orphaned and raised by humans, there’s not an easy path back to freedom. On the one hand, released, or reintroduced, former captive chimpanzees face dangers in the forest that make survival difficult: fiercely territorial free-living chimpanzees who are particularly dangerous to strange males, and poachers with shotguns who can easily target chimpanzees who lack fear of humans. On the other hand, the same familiarity and lack of fear that make them more vulnerable to poachers can also make them dangerous to humans. Humans have impacted the lives of bushmeat orphans to a huge extent, and our involvement has changed our status. We are not merely a potentially dangerous and socially insignificant species, as we are to free-living chimpanzees. Their responses to us depend in large part on their individual exposures to human kindness or cruelty or indifference, but regardless of the emotional contexts, humans are part of the social experience of captive chimpanzees. Virtually all chimpanzees who grow up with humans know they are physically stronger than we are, and their sense of territoriality can extend to us.

  In any case, older damaged chimpanzees who had relied on humans as long as Jacky, Pepe, and Becky wouldn’t be good candidates for release. They would always live at this sanctuary, but very soon they would have their own small piece of habitat here.

  The free-living chimps didn’t speak to us again that evening, but, as darkness came, so did the nightly symphony of insects and other nocturnal wildlife, only a few of which I could recognize by their calls at that time. After their brief excursions up to the higher platforms, Jacky, Pepe, and Becky had settled down to sleep in a heap on the floor. When they were no more than dark shadows, slightly discernible only in movement, I hobbled along the trail by the sparse light of my dim flashlight back to camp.

  We had taken the first irrevocable step. Jacky, Pepe, and Becky were here—a huge step closer to being back in the forest where they belonged. Their lives, and mine, had changed forever. There could be no turning
back now.

  Nine

  Forced Seizure

  In late October 1999, we finally heard from the manager of Luna Park Hotel that his family would allow us to bring Dorothy and Nama to our new sanctuary, but it would be another five months before we were ready to bring them. I was working as fast as I could to build a second satellite cage for them, but there were stressful complications and delays. When a cement shortage in the country—more accurately, a total lack of cement anywhere in Cameroon—stopped our construction for two months, I took a quick trip home to Oregon. I needed to work with Edmund to raise more money and look for someone with more expertise than I had to help me build the electric fence. Since I lacked electrical experience and a deep understanding of the way electricity worked, building the fence alone on the foundation of a crash course in Nigeria more than a year earlier had begun to appear daunting. I left Kenneth in charge of caring for the three chimpanzees with the support of two volunteers and our local staff of seven men, who worked as caregivers, groundskeepers, and night guards.

  When we had asked for job applications for the six permanent positions at the sanctuary, seven men applied. None were more or less qualified than any other. They had lived in either Bikol 1 or 2 all their lives, had minimal education, and had never held jobs before. We couldn’t arbitrarily turn one man away, so I hired seven men for six positions and created a schedule that worked. No women applied initially. Estelle suggested that it wouldn’t have been culturally appropriate for them to compete with the men for jobs. I believed this was part of it, but I also believed they were just too busy with children and farming. Eventually we would have female employees, who were sadly childless or who had mothers or sisters to help them with chores in the village. Estelle had stayed in camp for a few days just after we brought Jacky, Pepe, and Becky and helped me train that first round of employees. The cook learned his schedule for preparing yams and sweet potatoes for the chimps and local food for the staff lunches (I had finally figured out that it would be easiest to prepare lunch for village employees), the gardener learned where and what to plant, the night guards learned that keeping ants out of the cage was their most important task, and the two caregivers, Assou and Akono, learned to feed the chimpanzees and clean the cages. I had built one section of one cage wall with smaller holes in the mesh, so we could hand-feed Jacky without risk. We had hand-fed him in the transport cage on our way to the sanctuary, and on his first morning at the sanctuary, when Estelle handed him his bananas, he took them from her gently. At the beginning, the caregivers learned to hand Jacky his food from his special section, but soon they were feeding him from anywhere in the cage just as they did the other two. During the training, Estelle didn’t tolerate any tentativeness in the caregivers’ approach to the chimpanzees, and she expected nothing less than vigor in their approach to cleaning chores. I thought they did their best to comply, and once they got over their initial fright, they seemed to be tickled by the novelty of being so close to big chimpanzees. When I heard them laughingly refer to Estelle behind her back as Margaret Thatcher, I couldn’t help but wonder what they might be calling me, but I knew they harbored no malice. By the time I left for the United States, they all had some job experience under their belts.

  While I was in Oregon my friend Matt Rossell introduced me to his brother Greg, who with his wife, Anita Phillips, operated a small construction business building and selling houses. Together, they could manage all aspects of constructing a house, and they understood electrical circuitry. For several years, they had been incorporating into their work schedules enough downtime to volunteer their construction expertise to projects they thought were worthy, and they both liked a challenge. To my great relief, Greg and Anita agreed to come to Cameroon for eight weeks and take charge of building our electric fence. They studied the electric fence built by Peter Jenkins for juvenile chimpanzees at Limbe Wildlife Center and then adapted the model for our adult chimps. Working at a phenomenal pace, they finished our first solar-powered fence within six weeks. Encompassing five and a half acres of lush forest, at the time the enclosure seemed huge to me.

  Greg also helped finish the new satellite cage for Dorothy and Nama, so that by mid-March 2000, we were ready to bring them to the sanctuary. I rode the train to meet Estelle in Yaoundé, leaving Kenneth to manage the sanctuary. He was to follow me in the truck a couple of days later to pick up Dorothy and Nama. Estelle and I arrived at the Luna Park Hotel around midday, and Dorothy and Nama recognized us in her white Toyota Starlet as we drove past. We delivered their food and spent a few minutes visiting. I was so excited with the expectation that we would be taking them with us in a couple of days, and I so wished they could understand that their lives were about to change dramatically. They surely noticed that my disposition had changed—my sadness replaced by a hopefulness that was almost joyful. I put my hand on the chain on Nama’s neck. “It’s coming off, Nama. You’ll be coming with me very soon.” She listened as she chewed her papaya. After we gave food to all the monkeys and distributed water to everyone, Estelle and I were eager to discuss details of the pending relocation with the hotel manager we had come to know.

  When we asked for the manager in the hotel office, we learned that he wasn’t there. In fact, he was no longer the manager. A younger sibling, drunk on his newfound authority and significantly more belligerent than his brother had been, was now in the role of manager. We met with him at a corner table in the Luna Park restaurant. From where we sat I could see Nama, at the limit of her chain, still chewing the food we had left and cocking her head to try to see us. The manager kept us waiting while he gave instructions that had nothing to do with us to two restaurant employees, then summoned a groundskeeper to give irrelevant—from our point of view—directions to him as well. Finally, with an air of casual indifference, he turned his attention back to us. Calmly, he informed us that we would not be allowed to take Dorothy and Nama. Unconcerned that he was breaking his brother’s verbal contract with us, he said simply, “My brother is no longer in charge of the hotel or the chimpanzees. My father is making the decisions.” With forced composure, Estelle translated all that the infuriating, disdainful young man said, although I had pretty much understood it.

  “Is your father here?” I asked. He was. Estelle and I hardly spoke as we sat alone and waited for the manager to find out whether the elder decision maker would grant us an audience. He would.

  With an air of arrogance, our informer led us out of the restaurant and around back to a private patio where his father sat. The patriarch wore a navy floor-length robe, and I noticed a walking cane leaning against his chair. After we shook hands, he gestured for us to sit in white plastic chairs across from him. We started off with small talk, as is customary in Cameroon. Estelle thanked him for receiving us. She translated my compliment that his hotel was beautiful. (Although I was by now speaking some basic French to my staff, my vocabulary was small, my grammar terrible, and I certainly would not speak French in a situation like this where nuance was critically important.)

  In response to Estelle’s query about how old Dorothy and Nama were, he told us that he had acquired Dorothy when his oldest son, now forty years old, was a baby. He said they had bought Nama in 1984. As I did the calculations in my head, Estelle went on to explain who we were and what we were doing in Cameroon. So Nama had been here for sixteen years. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to accept that Dorothy had endured this “life” for forty years. We had independent confirmation, from someone Estelle knew in Yaoundé who had met Dorothy when he visited Luna Park as a child, that she had been chained here for at least twenty-five years. I couldn’t bear to think she had been here longer than that.

  “Bullshit,” I responded when Estelle mentioned it later, without any sound reason for my skepticism. “I’m sure he doesn’t remember when she came,” I said.

  When Estelle finished introducing our mission, the distinguished looking, regally behaving patriarch acknowledged his understanding w
ith a nod. The several moments of silence that followed served as my cue that it was time to get to the substance of the meeting.

  Estelle translated as I started off in my most respectful tone. “After your son told us we could take Dorothy and Nama, we prepared a very good place for them where they will be able to move freely, off their chains. Soon they will live with other chimpanzees in a tract of forest we have enclosed with electric fencing. They will move through the forest like they did with their mothers when they were babies. They will be happy.”

  “My wife and I are accustomed to seeing them here. We will keep them here,” he said matter-of-factly, as if that matter were finished. He wasn’t accustomed to being challenged. I certainly couldn’t leave it there. I couldn’t believe he was condemning Dorothy and Nama to continuing hell, and breaking my heart, with such a casual tone. Surely he would see reason, would have some compassionate feelings toward the chimps. I struggled to keep my tone respectful, while I grappled with the realization of what was happening and reacted to it physically with something akin to nausea.

  “I understand your sentiment toward them, but this is not a good life for them,” I said. “If you care for them, please be kind to them and let us take them to the forest. We have an enclosure that is ready and waiting.”