Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  One evening just after my return from a two-month visit to the United States, I crouched near Jacky’s satellite cage as dusk was approaching.

  “Hey, Jack,” I called. “It’s me.” He was about to ascend to a high platform carrying an armload of grass to make a nest for the night. Instead, he walked over to my side of the cage and extended his hand out through the bars toward me. I closed the space between us, somewhat tentatively since I had been gone awhile. While Jacky was kind and gentle with chimpanzees and he and I had a positive history, I couldn’t forget that he could be violent with humans. When his eyes moved to my hairline and his mouth tightened in concentration, I knew he wanted to groom me. He came in peace, the only way Jacky had ever come to me. I scooted close to him and bowed my head so his fingers would have easy access to my hairline. For several minutes, I enjoyed one of the few times Jacky has ever groomed me. When I raised my head to look at his face, I found his eyes seeking mine. Now when he extended both his hands outside the cage toward me, I placed my hands in his, and we both squeezed. In the moments that followed, looking deeply into Jacky’s eyes, holding his hands, I didn’t speak, but the song in my head was my spontaneous and heartfelt message of respect to him. I know who you are. I know who you are. I know the strong character that is yours. Jacky understood my message, and he was telling me the same thing. We were two people communicating with body language we both understood.

  The perimeter of the new enclosure we built for Jacky and Nama’s group was about three-quarters of a mile. I still enjoyed accompanying them on their morning patrols, and though I stayed on my side of the fence, Jacky seemed to consider me a member of his group during our walks. If I fell behind, he stopped the group to wait for me. One morning, as I paused at a corner of the fence line to film the group walking ahead of me, I captured Jacky turning to use a beckoning hand gesture to request I hurry along.

  Although I have been pleased and honored by Jacky’s attention when he has chosen to give it to me, my deep admiration and adoration of him stem from my observances of him with the other chimpanzees. He earned my deepest respect for the venerable chimpanzee he was with them. But Jacky wouldn’t have reached his potential as a gentle leader without the unwavering support and guidance of wise and brave Nama. Her loyalty, sense of justice, and courage were unsurpassed. Whether in collaboration with Jacky or acting alone, she always made admirable choices.

  One of our former volunteers is probably alive today only because Nama put herself on the line to protect her. When I was in Yaoundé, we had a terrible accident at Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center. One of our caregivers mistakenly let some of the chimpanzees into the human corridor that runs down the center of the large satellite cage between the two rows of chimpanzee chambers. From this protected corridor, caregivers and volunteers could give food, and medicine when necessary, to all the chimpanzees in Jacky’s group. A volunteer was in the hallway alone when the mistake occurred.

  On this horrible day that could have been her last, Kim (I’m not using her last name out of respect for her privacy) looked up to see huge teenager Bouboule, adopted son of Dorothy, charging down the hallway toward her. Finding himself in the corridor, somewhere he had never been, with a human he barely knew, Bouboule became extremely agitated and dangerous. If he had wanted to kill Kim, he could have done so within a few seconds. Fortunately, killing her wasn’t his intention, but it could have been the tragic result he didn’t intend. Pumped up by testosterone and trying to claim this new territory that had been off-limits, he used Kim as a display object as he raced back and forth down the fifteen-yard corridor. Over and over, with bone-breaking force, he stomped on the body of this petite young woman. If Kim had panicked, she probably would have died that day, but to her tremendous credit she went into an almost calm survival mode.

  Nama was among the several other chimpanzees in the corridor with Kim and Bouboule. Curled in a fetal position, rendered barely conscious by Bouboule’s latest pummeling and trying to protect her bruised and bleeding head between her arms, Kim noticed that Nama, sitting a few yards away, had puffed up uncomfortably. Kim didn’t know Nama well, but when she saw Bouboule coming toward her again, she called out to her for help, knowing it might be her last few seconds of consciousness. “Whoo, whoo, whoo,” Kim whimpered to Nama like a chimpanzee crying, and Nama responded to her plea. Not unlike how she had protected Bouboule’s mother, Dorothy, from Pepe years earlier, she now intercepted Bouboule, who was much larger than she was, but ran from her nonetheless. Nama chased Bouboule away from Kim three times before the caregivers were able to dart him with anesthesia and get Kim out of the hall. Kim’s whole body and face were left with deep bruises, her eyes were swollen shut, and doctors thought she had a concussion, but thanks to Nama’s bravery and kindness, she survived with no physical wounds from which she didn’t heal.

  From the hospital, needing to recount what had happened as a form of healthy catharsis, Kim described to me the details of that awful fifteen minutes and what Nama had done to save her. In the early years when I spoke of Nama to the outside world, I often described her as lionhearted, but no lion’s heart could be as courageous or kind as that of this alpha female chimpanzee. That chimpanzees can be horrifically violent is well documented. Popular media has publicized tragic cases of human victimization. That the chimpanzee species also includes heroes like Nama is less well known.

  Until 2007, Jacky and Nama’s group of chimpanzees still included Becky and Dorothy, the other original adults whose sad plights had inspired me to build Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center. Bouboule’s adolescent propensity for terrorism notwithstanding, it was an amazing group of chimpanzees, the leaders of which were living testament to the buoyancy of the chimpanzee spirit and their phenomenal capacity to recover. I came to think of it in grandiose terms as the Jacky and Nama era, because I so admired them as leaders and so enjoyed observing the peaceful society they created and maintained. When I was on-site at Sanaga-Yong Center, I was absorbed in it. Because our chimpanzee population had increased rapidly during the first few years, we had established three other social groups in other enclosures, which I also enjoyed, but observing and interacting with Jacky and Nama’s group was special for me. I knew that I was living through a historic time that would hold significance in my life like none other. If only Pepe hadn’t left us, it would have been perfect. I was immensely grateful and felt privileged to be a witness to the astonishing transformations of these extraordinary individuals. But my happiness stemmed from more than that. In order to bring these chimpanzees to this place and time, I had needed to find the best in myself. My satisfaction in it was complete.

  Seventeen

  Necessary Trade-Offs

  We advertised for volunteers on our website and on a couple of other sites that listed job opportunities for people interested in working with primates, and while I was at Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, applications often stacked up in my e-mail box. During my regular short trips to Yaoundé to visit George and take care of business that required an Internet connection, I conducted telephone interviews with volunteer candidates who seemed to meet our qualifications and made decisions about who we would accept. The volunteers were required to work six or seven days per week (depending on how many volunteers we had) preparing fruits and vegetables for the four chimpanzee meals per day, preparing and delivering milk formula for the babies three times per day and at midnight, taking babies into the forest when we were short of staff (especially on Saturdays), doing the marketing in Bélabo for the whole camp, and making sure the staff signed out all the equipment and supplies they needed each day. They were usually up by 6:00 A.M. and had little downtime, so I required people with stamina. I looked for people who could speak French at least on a conversational level, and I preferred people who had some experience living in Africa and/or working with chimpanzees or other primates. In reality, I rarely found anyone who met all the qualifications. Eventually, long-term American volunteer Karen Bachel
der, who traveled to Cameroon and worked on-site at Sanaga-Yong Center many times, very capably took over the interview process, formalized it with strict reference requirements, and made recommendations to me about whom to choose. Before that I often made predictions about who would be able to adapt to our environment and serve the project well based on my gut reaction to them in the short telephone interview, as much as anything else. I got it right sometimes and wrong sometimes. I was always delighted when a good volunteer wanted to come back.

  After volunteering for six months in 2002, Agnes Souchal came back to Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in 2004 with the intention of volunteering for another eight months. While she was on-site, she put the interests of the chimpanzees above everything else, certainly above concerns for her own comfort, or lack thereof, which was always my first measure of a good volunteer. A sure way for a volunteer to get on the wrong side of me was to complain about the facilities, which—even without running water or electricity—were luxurious compared to the tent where I started and contrasted with the surrounding villages, where people raised families in crowded huts on dirt floors. I appreciated that Agnes had no irrational fears of insects, spiders, rats, or even snakes. Her ability to adapt to the African forest probably surpassed even mine. To top off her good points, her subtle sense of humor made me laugh.

  This second time Agnes volunteered, I worked more closely with her on chimpanzee care and staff management than I had the first time she volunteered. We had our cultural differences, but I thought she was nicely diplomatic for a French person, and she thought I was refreshingly frank for an American. She was restrained in her interactions with the employees, and as a result, she wasn’t extremely popular with them the way some other more gregarious volunteers had been. But she tracked their individual problems, and when the two of us were alone together she advocated quietly for them as no one else had. Emmanuel needed help sending the orphans of his deceased sister to school. Albertine’s daughter wasn’t getting enough protein. Surely we should help them. I sometimes teased her for being too French in her notions of labor management, but I too understood that we were usually the last resort for our employees and the village people. If we didn’t help them, no one would. We found common ground on staff-related issues, and we were in sync when it came to chimpanzee care. At the end of her second volunteer stint, when she had spent a total of fourteen months working seven days a week at the center, I offered Agnes the position of general manager, and she accepted it. A petite thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman who had lived all her life in Paris, Agnes wasn’t an obvious choice to become manager of a chimpanzee sanctuary in rural Africa, but I certainly wasn’t an obvious founder of one either. Gradually, we became irrevocably bonded by our love for the chimpanzees in our care, and our working relationship evolved into a deep friendship based on the concerns that consumed us both.

  In that same year of 2004, George Muna introduced me to Raymond Tchimisso, who was interested in collaborating on a sensitization campaign in Cameroon’s West Province. During his travels around the town of Bankim as the personnel manager for a Chinese road-building company, Raymond had been touched by the suffering of strictly confined, captive chimpanzees. He had an idea about how to stop the killing and orphaning of chimpanzees in the Bankim area, where respect for the traditional chief was very strong.

  Raymond’s English was no better than my French, so our discussions about personal motivations were limited, but he made me understand that his first cousin was the sultan of Bankim, the traditional chief of a large territory, and that the relationship could be of use in a sensitization campaign to help chimpanzees. By coincidence, George was an old friend of the sultan, and as such he too had some friendly influence with him. Through a series of meetings between Raymond, George, and me, and others between Raymond, George, and the sultan, we planned and implemented a community meeting in Bankim.

  Whereas the national laws against killing and capturing chimpanzees weren’t adequately enforced, we hoped that an edict against it from the sultan would hold sway in his territory. To announce the momentous meeting, the sultan beat the drum literally and figuratively. The beating of an actual drum throughout the night in his palace summoned a team of messengers, which the sultan then launched on a walk through surrounding neighborhoods shouting the announcement of a meeting at his palace. “Elephant has sent me to call you to his palace to receive important information!” This was the cry of the messengers, and people understood that the meeting was compulsory. For reasons that were never completely clear to me, it was not considered respectful enough to refer to the sultan as “the sultan,” so instead he was called Elephant, which was meant to symbolize his power and strength. At the same time the foot messengers embarked, Elephant sent motorcycle taxis to the more distant neighborhoods and villages to notify all the chiefs under his authority about the meeting, so that they in turn could inform the people in their smaller territories. Because I was occupied at Sanaga-Yong Center, I sent my short-term (as it turned out) administrative assistant Jojo with Raymond to the meeting, and they both reported on it to me later.

  During the meeting, attended by hundreds of people, Raymond spoke about the problems chimpanzees were facing, and about the laws designed to protect them. “Our people of the Tikar tribe have been good warriors and good hunters. Until recently, we didn’t have a government outside of our tribe, but now there is a national government, which has its laws. We are here at this meeting because Elephant has called us. If we had failed to respond to the summons, his majesty could have fined us. The national government’s law says we can’t kill chimpanzees, and if we do, they can fine us, or even send us to prison, so we must respect the law.” Raymond tried to explain it all in terms his people could understand well.

  After he finished speaking, the sultan himself rose to say that the killing and capturing of chimpanzees would now be prohibited in his territory. Afterward, the meeting attendees were treated to a feast of food and drink, funded by IDA-Africa, which was essential for inspiring goodwill in the community. There were a thousand other communities that would continue hunting chimpanzees, but we made some headway in this one with a single meeting. Maybe some chimpanzee lives were spared as a result.

  Soon after the meeting, Raymond Tchimisso accepted the job of personnel manager and community liaison for Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center. He brought his personnel experience, cultural wisdom, and diplomatic skills to our operation, while Agnes adeptly managed general operations and provided loving and astutely perceptive care to the chimpanzees. She didn’t have a medical background, but her keen interest assured she was a quick learner for all things medical. Soon she was able to provide basic medical care for the humans and chimpanzees, and her need to consult with me about the details of every case decreased as she gained experience. Raymond’s arrival to support Agnes and her continually increasing skill afforded me more freedom to be away from the site.

  This freedom to come and go had become important to me as Annarose had reached preschool age, when I began to realize that my little daughter needed a different social and linguistic environment than I could provide her in the Mbargue Forest. Our cook, Cathy, had been bringing her daughter Ilsa, the baby I had “delivered” in the back of our pickup truck, to play with Annarose once or twice a week. This was the only regular contact she was having with another child. Like most village children, until she would start school, Ilsa would learn to speak only Bamvéle. Annarose was picking up this local language both from her new nanny, Veronique, and from Ilsa. While our employees were delighted that Annarose was greeting them in their dialect, I was quite sure that this language spoken by only a handful of African villagers wouldn’t serve her well in the world. I asked Veronique to speak French instead of Bamvéle to her, but it was hard to enforce and impossible for Veronique to understand the importance of it. Annarose’s speaking of Bamvéle was a source of pride for Veronique. The only English my daughter was hearing was from me, and I was busy all
day almost every day. My time with her was limited to lunch breaks and a couple hours each night. In addition to my relatively minor concerns about the language, I was worried that the isolation wasn’t healthy for Annarose. Although she seemed like an extremely outgoing, self-confident three-and-a-half-year-old, perfect in every way in her mother’s eyes, I thought she needed exposure to other children and more academic stimulation than I could give her. In 2005, I enrolled Annarose in preschool in the city of Yaoundé. With both Agnes and Raymond managing at the center, I could spend much of my time in the city with her. I missed the chimpanzees terribly and didn’t care for Yaoundé, but I was compelled to be with my child and provide the best life possible for her. The chimpanzees would always require my dedication and support, but at this time Annarose needed my consistent presence more than they did. Barring any emergencies that took me there more often, I was spending an average of one week per month at the center. When I was there, Annarose stayed with her dad in the city.

  George and Annarose had a sweet relationship. His hands-on participation in parenting went against the cultural norms for men of Cameroon. Although we had been together only sporadically, he had changed her diapers and fed her from the beginning and was proud of his involvement in her care. When Annarose was about a year old, I heard George speaking to his brothers who had experienced fatherhood in a more conventional way. “Men in Cameroon just don’t know what they’re missing. Taking care of Annarose, changing her diapers, with her little eyes looking into mine with all that trust, it’s like nothing else.” I sometimes thought he was more like a grandfather than a father, perhaps enjoying with Annarose the pleasures of fatherhood that he regretted missing in his children who were babies when he was much younger.