Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  George and I never had a wedding ceremony, but with young Annarose, we shared an apartment in Yaoundé for five years. He introduced me as his wife, and I referred to him as my husband, but with much of his work in Cameroon’s Southwest Province and much of mine in the Mbargue Forest, it seemed that one of us was always leaving. Although I longed for my daughter when I was in the forest, I was never really lonely there. I cherished my friendships with the chimpanzees (and increasingly with Agnes), and after days filled with physically and mentally demanding medical care or construction work, I usually fell into bed completely exhausted by 9:00 P.M. In contrast, in the Yaoundé apartment alone at night after Annarose was asleep, I often felt lonely. My days in the city were occupied with providing logistical support for the center, often gathering and sending supplies, or with attending various meetings in the ministry or with volunteer arrangements or with fund-raising efforts. I also had people to organize—my assistant, along with a housekeeper and eventually a driver paid by George. But my nights in Yaoundé were often long and empty. Nonetheless, I have some lovely memories of the times when George was there with me, particularly of his special brand of chivalry. He must have met a big challenge in wielding it for me—given the independent and headstrong kind of woman I was—but he managed it sometimes.

  Early one evening, we were walking down a dimly lit road in Yaoundé when three men appeared suddenly from an adjoining alley a few yards ahead, walking at a fast clip toward us. With no time to think, George’s instinctive reaction was to step in front of me with his arms extended and shout “Hoa!” Fortunately, the guys veered away from us and disappeared on the other side of the road. If it had come to fighting them off, I most likely could have held my own as well as George and would have certainly fought beside him, instead of hid behind him, but his brave gut impulse to protect me, potentially at his own expense, impressed me. Looking back, it still does.

  One Sunday afternoon—I remember it was Sunday because the pharmacies were closed—George suffered alongside me while my fever was rising during a terrible case of falciparum malaria. Because my brain was responding to the infection and telling my body that its temperature should be much higher than it was, I was miserably cold and racked by uncontrollable shaking, which was exacerbating the intense pain in my joints and head. I was desperate to get warm and stop shaking. George turned off the fan that normally made the hot climate bearable, and, after wrapping me in all the blankets he could find in the house, sat beside me on the bed to hold me while I shook. At one point the housekeeper entered the sweltering room and cracked the balcony door (out of concern for George, I’m sure). The slight movement of warm air coming through the narrow opening at the door felt to me like an arctic blizzard. Through chattering teeth, incapable at that moment of considering anyone else, I moaned for her to shut the door, and she did. Finally, when my fever was high enough—103.8 degrees as it turned out—that I stopped shaking, I was aware of George sitting beside me on the bed, his clothes soaked completely through with sweat. He had suffered through a long suffocating sauna on my behalf, and I knew he hadn’t left my side once to seek relief. I touched my fingers to his wet shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him.

  “You held yourself well,” he complimented me as he held a cup of water to my mouth. I hope George remembers moments of kindness from me, too. I’m quite sure he remembers times I wasn’t kind.

  Despite the love and tender moments between George and me, domestic harmony was elusive for us. Although he helped with my work for the chimpanzees in many ways—serving on the board of IDA-Africa in Cameroon, providing contacts and trusted advice, lending some of his employees when I needed extra help with a project, contributing financially—he sometimes complained bitterly that I put my work before everyone and everything except Annarose. When he was angry, he accused me of putting it even before her. He couldn’t understand that my devotion to the chimpanzees stemmed not only from my love for them, but also from my sense of responsibility to them, which really did come before everything except my responsibility for Annarose. Their survival depended on me. George’s didn’t. My husband certainly didn’t appreciate my lack of skill in “running the house” in Yaoundé. I had a housekeeper to help, but I wasn’t interested in coordinating the dinner menu a week in advance, as he thought I should. He thought it was my role as the woman to do this kind of planning for the household, and I shunned this imposed role outright, out of principle if nothing else.

  In hindsight, it probably wouldn’t have cost me much effort to “run the house” a bit more to his liking. George and I loved each other, but neither of us was willing to compromise enough to smooth out the stark cultural differences that were magnified by intimacy and close proximity. Eventually, we determined our frequent arguing hurt Annarose more than our living apart would do. But our mutual love for her, and our respect for each other, inspired us to remain close friends after we stopped sharing a household.

  Back in the United States, Edmund was still the development director and “liaison officer” for IDA-Africa. He was the one I called to organize shipments of equipment or supplies that I couldn’t get in Cameroon and to do Internet research on all kinds of topics, since my connection in Yaoundé was slow and unreliable. He worked with volunteers to organize fund-raising events in Seattle, Portland, and other cities, and I attended and spoke at them when I traveled to the United States with Annarose for about two months every summer. Edmund was a vital part of IDA-Africa for a decade. During this time, our deep and enduring friendship grew, and he became an important “family” member to Annarose. The two of them spent many hours together every summer, and they grew to love each other very much. Through it all, Edmund dated various women who usually didn’t understand or appreciate his friendship with me, but eventually he found happiness in his marriage to Cindy Scheel, who was his perfect match and who became a close friend to me and Annarose, too.

  Eighteen

  Farewell to Our Sassy Girl

  During Becky’s first few years at Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, I joked that she, unlike other chimpanzees, was not unpredictable. On the contrary, her penchant for troublemaking was very reliable. On many occasions Becky delighted in making mischief that upset her caregivers and me.

  One afternoon, she brought in a long stick from the forest and poked it between the bars of the metal mesh ceiling of her cage to tear a gaping hole in the zinc roof above it—the very roof that protected her and the others from rain while they slept. “She clearly didn’t think this through,” I joked with the caregivers. The more vigorously the caregivers and I scolded, the more enthusiastically she stabbed at the roof, pausing only for a moment to stick her tongue out at me. It was good fun for her. Only after we walked away and ignored her did the activity lose its appeal.

  Another time, one of her caregivers made the terrible mistake of leaving a machete just outside her cage chamber. It was a temptation that few chimpanzees could be expected to resist, least of all Becky. Fortunately, she was in a cage chamber alone when she committed the heist, so the danger was less immediate than it would have been if she had been with other chimpanzees. The more nervous we became about the potential harm she might cause herself and the more we pleaded for a trade, the more gleefully she swung the machete around. She held it by its handle as she had seen the caregivers do, never touching herself with the blade. When she finally got bored with it, she showed some interest in negotiating a trade, but her price was high. Not for bananas or papaya or peanuts—foods that were frequently part of her diet—but only for a cup of yogurt, she finally handed the machete to me sweetly.

  Over time, Becky’s relations with both chimpanzees and humans became more gentle and accommodating. A few years after her arrival at the center, Becky actually assisted the caregivers by performing a helpful cleaning chore and was encouraged by our praise to continue. The caregivers routinely used small straw brooms to brush the spiderwebs and dust from the mesh of the cage walls, but
they neglected to climb up to sweep the cage roof or the sections of the sixteen-foot mesh walls that were high above their heads. One day when caregiver Emmanuel accidentally let Becky get hold of a broom, she used it to diligently sweep the spiderwebs from those high parts of the cage that the caregivers couldn’t reach. Emmanuel found me in camp and asked me to accompany him to the cage to see what Becky was doing. I found her knitting her brow in concentration, performing a useful task and seeming happy to please us all. I told the caregivers to let Becky have a broom whenever she wanted one. However, quite understandably from my point of view, she lost interest in the tedious task fairly quickly and didn’t choose to do it many times.

  Like Dorothy, Becky was an adoptive mother. After Pepe died, it was Becky alone who carried Gabby—the youngest and smallest in the first group of juveniles we integrated. She allowed him to sleep with her on her tire-bed, which we moved with her to the satellite cage of the new enclosure, and she even shared her food with him. As Gabby grew older and as we integrated younger chimpanzees into the group over several years, Becky nurtured other babies, including Luke, Lucy, Future, and Emma. It was moving to see Becky content in these tender matriarchal roles.

  Perhaps the most striking change in Becky’s behavior came in her relationship with Dorothy. One morning in 2006, I returned to Sanaga-Yong Center after being in Yaoundé for three weeks and eagerly joined the group for their morning three-quarter-mile stroll around their enclosure perimeter. By this time in her life, Dorothy was rarely going on patrols anymore, but when I got back to the cage that morning, caregiver Assou told me that Dorothy had followed us—going along, he was sure, because I was there—bringing up the rear. I hadn’t even noticed her. I rushed to make the tour again, this time trying to catch up with Dorothy wherever she was along the fence line. When I found her, about one-third of a mile from where she had started, she wasn’t alone as I had feared. Becky had stayed behind with her and now rested her hand supportively on Dorothy’s shoulder. I squatted beside them, separated by a few feet and an electric fence line, to see if Dorothy was okay. She was covered with sweat and breathing heavily. I sat with them about ten minutes until Dorothy seemed rested, then stood and took a few steps.

  “Come on, Dorothy. You can make it, old girl,” I said, trying to persuade her. When Dorothy rose to walk, Becky hobbled along beside her, using only one hand on the ground and the other around Dorothy’s upper arm, pulling her along. Becky and I let Dorothy set the pace, and the three of us made several long rest stops along the fence perimeter before we finally got back to the cage. It was the last time I saw Dorothy walk around the enclosure.

  In the mornings and evenings, Dorothy and Becky were frequently together. In the heat of the day, Becky usually disappeared in the forest with the rest of the group while Dorothy sat in the shade at the edge, but whenever the group was all together, near or inside the satellite cage, any stranger watching would know that the two female chimpanzees were friends. What a change a few years had made!

  In early 2007, I was on a visit to the United States while my friend Dr. Kerri Jackson, a talented veterinarian whom I trusted completely, was on-site at Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center. Agnes called to tell me that Becky was very sick—pale, and showing signs of extreme pain in her abdomen—and that Kerri thought she needed to perform surgery immediately to find and hopefully treat the problem. From the symptoms they described, I agreed. During an abdominal exploratory, Kerri found the same kind of adhesions I had found in Becky’s belly six years earlier. This time, Becky was bleeding profusely from somewhere, and it was difficult to discover the source through the extensive adhesions that glued all the contents of her abdomen together. Racing against time, trying to find the source of the bleeding before it was too late, Kerri painstakingly dissected through adhesions to finally discover that Becky was bleeding from a ruptured uterus that contained a five- or six-month-old fetus. Becky, not yet thirty years old, died during the surgery.

  With that terrible undiagnosed pathology in her abdomen, Becky probably wasn’t destined to live to an old age, but the pregnancy hastened her death. I was devastated, and I felt guilty. To prevent pregnancies in our chimpanzee residents, I had performed vasectomies on our adult males, using a technique I had learned from a human surgery book. I had been performing them on younger males as they approached puberty, but I obviously had waited too late for one of them. I was sure it was Moabi, who I had intended to vasectomize before I left for the United States but had run out of time. In the days following Becky’s death, Agnes spent many hours collecting urine to run pregnancy tests on all our teenage (eight- to thirteen-year-olds) and adult female chimpanzees. This is how we discovered that nine-year-old Mado was also pregnant, and it was the time we started all the other pubescent and older females on birth control pills. Mado would give birth to the only chimpanzee who, as of this writing, has ever been born at Sanaga-Yong Center.

  On the sad day that Becky died, I sat useless and grieving in the United States. I could do no more than write a tribute to her life, which we shared on our website with our supporters:

  When we met in 1997, your childhood and your adolescence already had been stolen from you. But your penetrating brown eyes stared at me from behind the bars of your tiny cell, and I saw that you were surviving and curious and hopeful in spite of all you had lost. Confined and bored out of your mind for so many years, somehow you were still vibrant. Becky, your eyes grabbed my heart, and they never let go . . . I knew that every single day counted for you, and that your fortitude deserved mine . . . dearest Becky—tough chick, sweet lady, flirt, goofy face-maker, lover of your comfortable “nest” made of an old tire where you slept for seven and a half years, overeater of bananas, surreptitious plotter, cleaner of cobwebs, “sister” of Pepe and Jacky, mourner of Pepe, best friend of Dorothy, frustrater of pubescent boys, adoptive mother of Gabby, matriarch and protector of little Luke, Lucy, Future, Emma, and others—during your years with us at Sanaga-Yong Center I know you had a rich life that you cherished. And oh how we cherished you!

  Agnes, Raymond, and the caregivers buried Becky beside the enclosure where she had lived with Jacky, Nama, Dorothy, and more than twenty other chimpanzees. From the enclosure, Becky’s family and friends watched them bury her body, and then all but Dorothy wandered away into the forest. For the rest of that sad day, and significant parts of many days to follow, Dorothy chose to sit directly across from the gravesite of her close friend Becky.

  Nineteen

  Dorothy’s Legacy

  For several years after she had adopted Bouboule, Dorothy joined the rest of the chimpanzees for the morning patrol around the fence line, and when they were in the satellite cage or at the edge of the forest, she enjoyed grooming and supportive relations with everyone. For a couple of years during the period when Bouboule refused to leave her side, she even went into the forest with the other chimpanzees. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, climb trees, and I imagined her sitting calmly on the cool forest floor while Bouboule played around her or above her with the other juveniles. I hoped they dropped some of the delicious yellow fruits from the umbrella trees for her to enjoy. Of course, I didn’t know what happened in the forest; I only knew what I saw outside of it.

  As Bouboule became an adolescent and Dorothy grew older, she accompanied the group on their patrols less often. She usually rested in the shade at the edge of the forest or sometimes she found a reason for lingering just outside the cage. The cage was locked for cleaning until around eleven A.M., but sometimes Dorothy spotted leftover fruit on the floor that she could reach from outside. One morning, she spotted a half-eaten avocado, her favorite food, lying where it would have been within her reach had the holes in the mesh been large enough to accommodate her forearm. She pointed at it and grunted, looking me in the eye, asking me plainly to fetch it for her. I was in the hallway of the cage without a key to the chamber where the fruit lay. I pulled on the lock of the cage and showed her my empty hands, so she would
understand that I couldn’t enter the cage either. Grunting to express her mild annoyance at my uselessness, she turned away from me to solve her own problem. At a bush near the edge of the forest, she took her time to test several branches before breaking one off. Back at the cage, she used the freshly broken end of the quarter-inch-diameter stick as a spear to pass through a hole and stab the avocado. It took a few minutes of effort because the avocado kept falling off the spear, but Dorothy was able to use her cleverly chosen tool to bring the avocado within reach of her thin fingers. Grunting happily, she ate the green flesh of the fruit, then plopped the seed into her mouth to suck until it stained her tongue bright orange.

  Dorothy was adept at communicating what she wanted people to do for her, including when she wanted someone to disappear. With a disgusted grunt and a back flip of her hand, she told people she didn’t like to go away. I always considered it to be Dorothy’s version of the middle finger gesture. Had she ever applied it to me, it would have hurt my feelings terribly.

  Although she became more and more physically frail, Dorothy was powerful within her social group. She continued to defend Bouboule until he was a big teenager, larger than she was—until long after the only reason he needed defending was the mischief he made. One morning I was squatted beside the enclosure about a hundred yards from the satellite cage “chatting” with some of the chimps, when a loud conflict suddenly erupted just a few feet from me. I stood to see what was happening, but it was hard to take it all in. At least fifteen screaming chimpanzees were involved, and I soon realized that Dorothy was right in the center of the fracas, but it was incomprehensible that so many in the group would be angry with her. A second or two later, I realized that Bouboule, then the same size as Dorothy and much more muscular, was quite absurdly hiding and screaming behind her. She was barking and throwing punches in his defense. It ended quickly because no one wanted to go through Dorothy to get to Bouboule, although in all honesty he probably deserved whatever the group wanted to dish out to him.