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Bonobos: Democratic Republic of the Congo
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Why the Bonobos Need a Radio and Other (Unlikely) Lessons From Deepest Congo - Page 3The only jungle dwellers more mysterious than the Iyaelima people are the rare bonobo apes that live alongside them. A perilous expedition into the Democratic Republic of the Congo hopes to establish contact that will help preserve them both. Text by John Falk Photograph by Robert J. Ross
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Expedition Photo Gallery | Video Exclusive
<< Previous | Page 3 of 8 | Next >> Jo Thompson is a living testament to the power of dreams—specifically one conjured by a seven-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio, with a love of Dr. Seuss. Thompson can still recall the moment in 1963 when she turned to a photo of Kakovet, a bonobo, in a Seuss imprint entitled I Was Kissed by a Seal at the Zoo. "I remember knowing right then that I was going to spend my life working with bonobos," she said. "I still have that book with me."
After attending graduate school at the University of Colorado for biological anthropology, Thompson landed in the DRC—then called Zaire—to study bonobos in 1992, at the age of 36. (She would eventually receive her doctorate in primatology from Oxford.) When Thompson arrived, the DRC was just slipping into a war that wouldn't formally end until 2003. The bloodiest conflict since World War II, it killed an estimated 3.9 million people. Thompson, however, had heard reports of bonobos living far south of their known habitat in the Congo Basin, and she moved into a mud hut on the border of the Bososandja forest to investigate. "She must have been one of the few researchers to remain in the Congo during the war," says Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, professor of primate behavior at Emory University, who helped kick off the bonobo boom with his best-selling book, Our Inner Ape. "It's remarkable that she stayed on."
The study of bonobos was still a nascent field when Thompson began her research. For much of the 20th century, primatologists looking for parallel insights into Homo sapiens focused on the savanna baboon and the gorilla. In the '60s and '70s it was the ostensibly peaceful chimpanzee's turn—that is, until 1974, when Jane Goodall began documenting the brutal four-year war of the Gombe chimps, during which one group of chimpanzees systematically annihilated another. Nearly 20 years passed before the public found a suitable primate alternative: It was up to the longer limbed, flat-faced, satin-furred bonobo to help answer key questions about primate—and ultimately human—nature. Were we fundamentally violent, selfish, domineering, and destined to be led by rough men? Or were we by nature cooperative, egalitarian, pacific, and matrilineal? Who went off the reservation, Ted Nugent or Joan Baez?
It was chiefly their forbidding habitat that accounted for the relative lack of research on bonobos. They are found exclusively in the DRC, in an area the size of Montana, south of the Congo River and north of the Kasai River. As such, they were one of the last large mammals to be identified, in 1933. It was not until the 1950s that two pioneers in the field, Germany's Eduard Tratz and Heinz Heck, assigned a species known then as the pygmy chimpanzee its own generic name, bonobo, possibly a derivative of an ancient Bantu word for "ancestor."
In 1973 Japanese researchers set up one of the first bonobo field sites outside a village called Wamba, about a hundred miles (161 kilometers) north of the Salonga. Rather than engage in the extremely difficult process of habituating bonobos in the rain forest, the Japanese planted a field of sugarcane to entice the apes to come to them. It worked. For the next decade the Wamba site—along with another nearby site at Lomako—gathered unprecedented data on wild bonobos.
The research showed that bonobos, far from being aggressive and violent, often alleviate disputes, both within the group and between groups, with sex. And not just sex, but an orgiastic male-female, female-female, male-male, and juvenile-adult free-for-all. Casual sex is a large part of a bonobo's daily ritual, an erotic smorgasbord that includes tongue kissing, oral sex, missionary intercourse, and a bonobo specialty known as genital-on-genital rubbing. The primates are also matrilineal in a Steel Magnolias way with tight-knit groups of females dominating individual males, who although physically more powerful than females, tellingly, often eat after them. Bonobos rarely hunt, instead eating a diet of mostly fruits, piths, and leaves with the occasional termite thrown in. Researchers speculate that their genteel nature may be due to the fact that bonobos, unlike chimps, don't have to share their habitat with any other large-bodied primates.
By the time Thompson set up her own field site south of the Bososandja in 1992, the first photos of wild bonobos were being published in National Geographic. For the next six years Thompson spent ten hours a day with 20 bonobos she named the Luenga Group. The hard-core study led to two groundbreaking discoveries: The Luenga bonobos, she found, frequently went out onto the savanna, a previously undiscovered bonobo habitat, which provided a possible link between bonobos and savanna-dwelling hominids; they also often waded waist-deep into perennial pools to feed on subaquatic vegetation, a find that changed the way bonobos were held in captivity.
Thompson marveled at the Luenga Group's sex life, observing bonobos making eye contact during intercourse (humans are the only other species to do so) and apparently having orgasms. "They're pros at it, but they're not oversexed," she said. "Anyone who has researched bonobos in the field long enough knows they are complicated primates who hunt, can be violent, aggressive, and selfish.
"Still, the bottom line is that you can't sit in front of bonobos for any extended period of time and not see their humanness, the similarities between us," Thompson added, recalling an incident in the Bososandja when she came upon a baby bonobo clinging to the chest of its dead mother, who had been shot by poachers. "It had terror still in its eyes. The baby was traumatized because it realized, it knew its mother was really gone.
"Bonobos have an authentic emotional life and even empathy for other beings. It's really freaky," she said. "And I think on some level people can learn from them in that they are like us, or we are like the bonobo."
In 1997 dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was overthrown by his longtime nemesis Laurent Kabila, which ushered in a phase of the DRC conflict known as Africa's World War. "By then, in that environment, with all the awful, horrible things that were happening, pure field research became a luxury," Thompson said. She instead began working with local villages and their headmen to protect bonobos as well as other endangered species. In the Bososandja, where Thompson continues to work, she convinced the 23 chieftains of local villages that the wildlife in the nearby forest was "theirs" and therefore should be protected. Her most powerful tool in winning hearts and minds proved to be a 20-cent poster of Muhammad Ali—a demigod in the DRC dating back to his 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" in Kinshasa—that reads "Be a victor. Protect your flora and fauna." The chieftains were so impressed by Thompson, they deeded her the rights to every tree in the Bososandja, a parcel long coveted by a Malaysian logging company. Thompson instantly became one of the largest private owners of virgin forest in the world.
For her efforts, Thompson has been arrested several times, had her research site burned down, and been condemned to death by a drug-crazed warlord, Siki, who controlled the village where she lived during the war. The off-the-charts psychopath was known to torture his victims by stuffing them into oil drums in the equatorial sun. "When he finally sobered up, he released me from house arrest," Thompson recalls. "I was lucky, but that's the risk of working in an environment where human beings slaughter each other without any mercy whatsoever."
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