It’s 33C and I can feel droplets wiggling down my back in the muggy heat. Mud is squelching through the broken soles of my old trainers. I’ve just extricated a big green fly that’s flown into my mouth. And on the table in front of me, at Brazzaville’s main food market, I see a dead monkey. It is whole: its fluffy fur and long tail still attached to its tiny body, its ribs cleaned of innards and its face contorted into a hideous grimace. “Très bon, très delicieuse,” the woman behind the table says, urging me to taste a sample she’s sliced from one she’d prepared earlier. “Fume, fume…”
Officially, monkeys, apes and protected species shouldn’t be sold in the Republic of Congo. Since years of civil war finally ended in 2003, the government has been trying to work with conservation organisations and NGOs to try to lure tourists in to their three National Parks and scattering of reserves, and so has tried to ban the sale of endangered bush meat.
But it isn’t an easy task. Congo-Brazzaville might be the fourth biggest producer of oil in Africa, but corruption is endemic, leaving its population of three million poor and its infrastructure crumbling. Roads sport potholes the size – and sometimes the depth – of pool tables. There are few jobs. The west of the country is overrun with opposition militia called Ninjas, who have almost brought the railway, and so trade, through the western port of Pointe-Noire, to a halt. Even electricity is in short supply; when we sit having dinner in Brazzaville, the lights go out several times – apparently because the only supply now comes from the country’s even more troubled neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Besides, for centuries the people of Africa have eaten bush meat: the flesh of wild creatures who have fed on rich natural forests which, I’m assured, is delicious. To tell Congolese they can’t hunt, or have to buy (with money many don’t have) thin chickens and tasteless pork when there are delicious forest creatures to eat is extremely difficult. Which is why, in the stalls of Brazzaville’s main market, there are few creatures that I can’t buy.
On a small scrubbed table, a three-foot live crocodile lies miserably, its legs and long nose tied with raffia to prevent it moving. Turtles keep trying to flip themselves (to the stallholder’s annoyance) from their shell onto their feet. Butchers’ blocks are neatly piled with cubes of smoked eland, wild boar, and whole monkey carcases. And in the traditional medicine section – hanging with feathers, beads, leaves, flowers, bundles of bark, the soles of elephants’ feet, jars of eyes, mammal foetuses, birds' heads and little vials of cobra venom – I am offered the very thing I hoped not to find: gorilla bones.
Current estimates for gorilla populations make for depressing reading. Of the most populous species – the western lowland gorilla – there are thought to be about 125,000 left in the world. But at the current rate of extermination of about 60 per cent in the past 25 years, according to Amos Courage of The Aspinall Foundation, which is working with the Congolese government to protect the species.“We will be lucky if we have half of that left by 2020. And even fewer mountain gorillas,” he says.
If anyone knows about gorillas it is Courage. After his natural father died, his mother married the multi-millionaire eccentric, John Aspinall, who made his fortune from casinos and who spent much of it on wild creatures. In his childhood home in Mayfair, there was at one time a tiger, a capuchin monkey and a gorilla (regularly visited by the postman and the Mayfair bobbies on their beat). The family, Courage says, was rarely without a gorilla somewhere. “My mother would happily take a baby gorilla to Harrods in her bag,” he says. “And I think I was the only boy at school who had one watching on sports days!” The expansion of the family menagerie led to the opening of Howletts (where I met Courage), and then Port Lympe, Wild Animal Parks in Kent. As more space became available, more gorillas arrived from Congo-Brazzaville: rescued from the bush meat trade, from private homes, from crowded zoos, from crates at airports en route to the Lebanon, where they are favoured as pets, or confiscated at ports and airports by customs.
When the foundation first started working in Congo-Brazzaville, trying to halt the trade in the creatures and to keep them in Africa, gorillas that were confiscated from illegal traders were kept in a Brazzaville orphanage started by a French woman. “But it was a hellhole,” Courage says. “In theory, at the back the gorillas had a small garden to venture into during the day. But in reality it was the outflow for a latrine from neighbouring government offices. And there were too many of them – about 70 were housed there in the Eighties and Nineties – about three-quarters of which were dying from human diseases: from polio, TB, pneumonia. We quickly realised we had to get them out.”
In 1992, the Aspinall Foundation negotiated with the government to give them the use of a national reserve; today they run 44,000 hectares of the Lesio-Louna Gorilla Natural Reserve and 130,000 hectares in the neighbouring Lefini Fauna Reserve (as well as a similar sized park in neighbouring Gabon). It is here that they run the only projects of their kind in the world: reintroducing confiscated baby and adult gorillas into the wild.
The Congo reserves, 87 miles north of Brazzaville off the main N2 highway, are a world away from the mud, shacks, hooting traffic and disturbing meat markets of the city. From the top of the Batéké Plateau, steep red cliffs drop into dry yellow grasslands. Rivers carve their way through valleys, their banks fringed by greenery. And in the distance loom vast stretches of dark green: the thick tropical forests in which 25 rescued western lowland gorillas live.
It’s in this jungle that the foundation has created five basic camps, to house the two Belgian conservationists, seven national soldiers and 23 eco-guards who protect these creatures, and for the few tourists happy to rough it in order to see the great primates in the wild.
Driving into the forest in a four-wheel drive is like being on a set of The Jungle Book. Trees soar 230ft into the sky. The shadows of exotic leaves create pretty patterns on the ground. Lianas drop from branches like giant monkey swings. And in the undergrowth, giant lime-green ferns grow amid exotic lilies. There are swampy mosses, rust-coloured algae floating in pools, and dozens of multicoloured, flitting butterflies. It’s the tropical forest of fantasies.
The style of the main camp, Iboubikro, is suitably rustic for this pristine environment. The eight simple guest rooms are clumped in one big wooden cabin, raised on a platform: each with comfortable beds, whirring fans and electric lights (when the generator is on for a few hours at night) and a few shelves. There’s a separate block for ablutions. And beside the Lefini river is a thatched boma, where meals are taken and conservation lessons given. For those mad enough to brave the occasional hippo and crocodile that ventures past, there’s even a swimming aid: a rope in the river to hold on to and enjoy the cooling current.
It’s in a small wooden room overlooking this river that the two conservationists live, and welcome the few dozen guests they get a year who are prepared to live basically in order to see gorillas up close. Marielle Puit and Luc Mathot, both environmentalists with masters degrees in tropical forest management, are only 28, yet are in charge of half a million hectares, a staff of more than 40 and more than 25 gorillas. While Luc takes care of the Brazzaville office, the bureaucracy, transport, building and environmental protection, Marielle runs the camps, staff and office, as well as overseeing the gorillas’ health, vaccinating the babies against human diseases, and taking stool tests when they are ill.
Over dinner on our first night, in an open-sided thatched boma into which hundreds of insects buzz, Luc tries to explain just a few of the problems they face. Last year, he says, four gorillas were intercepted en route from Cameroon to a zoo in Malaysia – which had paid $1,600,000 (£1million) for the primates. “Of course, the guys who trapped them only got a tiny proportion,” he says quietly. “It’s the middle man who makes it. But everyone’s greedy for their bit.” There’s a problem of corruption in Africa: poachers being let out of jail by bribing officials – and the NGO Laga (www.laga-enforcement.org) has been set up to ensure poachers are properly tried and punished.
The jails are short of food, which means prosecutors often have to provide the food themselves if they want the convicted to remain inside. The Chinese, in exchange for mining and forestry rights, are building hydroelectric dams, but without doing environmental impact research – one of which is upriver from the gorilla sanctuary and will push surrounding villages into closer proximity to the primates. There are few environmental organisations working on educating local populations about the benefits of wildlife, and few other tourism ventures, so locals can’t see the benefit of conserving gorillas. And as a result, of course, there is poaching: for bones for traditional medicine, for meat to eat and for pets for foreigners uneducated and uncaring enough to believe that an enormous, wild creature – particularly one so clearly intelligent, and so human-like – can be kept for his own pleasure.
Just how like humans the world’s largest primates are only dawned on me when we saw our first gorillas, just after sunrise on our second day. Every night, the four babies recently rescued by the foundation – Tanga, 4, Kingoue, 2, and Lokolo and Epena, both 19 months – are tucked up in a protected shed-like room in the jungle, so that they feel both cosy and safe. As we crept up to the cage, and looked through the fine wire mesh window, they were waking up – like children, disentangling arms from around each other, rubbing their eyes, yawning and stretching. As one hung from a branch to stretch an arm, another picked up an old half-lemon, appreciatively closing his eyes and sniffing it before grating it on the fence to enhance the smell. They picked their noses, scratched, checked each other’s fur for insects, and looked at us shyly, and slightly puzzled, as if to say, “Have we met before?” Then, like all youngsters, when their nursemaids arrived with food, they perked up: showing off, tripping each other and rolling about, before settling down in their nursemaids’ laps for their first bottle of the day.
When the sanctuary was first opened, visitors were allowed to go near to the babies, and perhaps even hold them. Now, to try to prevent creatures getting human illnesses, and to keep them in as wild a manner as possible, only their nursemaids have physical contact, taking care of them 12 hours a day in the jungle, attempting to teach them what their natural mothers would have done: to climb, to play and to forage for food, before putting them to bed at dusk.
As tourists, we had to make do with sitting on a river bank, about 160ft away, and watching them through binoculars for an hour or so, as they left their cage for their jungle playground. I could have stayed all day, watching their human-like behaviour. As one lay on his side on a riverbank, examining his reflection and wafting his hand in the cool water, another sat cross-legged eating a banana, while the other two rolled and mock-fought with each other. They climbed trees and ate fruit. And occasionally each would wander over to the nursemaids, sit on one of their laps and wrap their arms around them for a hug.
The babies, Luc explained, will spend up to five years with the nursemaids, sleeping out at night and playing further afield as they get older. Eventually they will be released as a group – to keep their social structure – on to a large island, or piece of land with rivers and swamps as boundaries (to prevent them wandering out beyond the reserve borders, and being shot by poachers). And one day, hopefully, they will mate, have babies, and repopulate the area – as, so far, four re-released females have done.
While on paper the process sounds straightforward, Luc explains, it is fraught with complications. For one, gorillas are emotionally sensitive; unlike chimpanzees, which apparently adapt relatively quickly after relocation, the bigger apes can suffer from stress, then depression: the most common cause of death. “Over 40 per cent of babies that arrive die,” he says. “And even the older ones suffer; of the six adults we first brought here in 1994, only three survived.”
Then there’s the problem of territory. Like many animals, the troops are dominated by a single male to every three to four females. But unlike bonobos or chimpanzees, which share their females reasonably amicably, once gorilla males become sexually mature, at about the age of 10, they can become aggressive towards other males, and sometimes kill them.
So far, the foundation has successfully reintroduced two groups back into the wild, one of which we spot on our second day. Travelling out along the Louna river, about an hour’s boat ride on a traditional dug-out pirogue, past thick jungle tangled with lianas and undergrowth, the driver suddenly points to a bank to our right of grassland dotted with a few trees. There, on all fours, is an enormous silverback, his head cocked up, looking straight at us. Then a few minutes later, a female with a new baby hanging on to her stomach arrives, followed slowly by 10 other adults and infants – all, having heard the boat engine, coming to the steep riverbank in the hopes of getting fruit (which might occasionally be thrown to them, our guide explains, if they have been relocated to areas without abundant fruit trees).
This is a relatively rare sighting, Marielle says, as from the river we watch the great apes walking through the grasslands and, when they are not given fruit, slowly moving away into trees. It’s also an extraordinary one: almost a dozen gorillas of all ages, living together as a group – in spite of the fact that originally many were ill, disfigured, stressed and thin, and from all parts of the Congo.
Equally exciting is our next sighting: three massive silverbacks, which live further down the river on an island alone, having been deliberately separated from the mixed groups to prevent them killing other males’ babies. Every day, the guide says, they bring these big males 170lb of fruit, to ensure their diet on a restricted island is varied and nutritious enough to keep them healthy. The gorillas know the guides are coming, and on hearing the engines, they come slowly ambling out of the forest, on to the riverbank, for their food.
It is only when the creatures are about 65ft away from the boat that I realise just how big they are. Full-grown silverbacks like these weigh on average about 375lb and, when standing, are about 5ft 6in high, with thickset necks, strongman shoulders and heavy, square jaws. Unlike mountain gorillas, whose moderately long coats are black and tinged at the back with silver, these western lowland gorillas are natural redheads, their slightly pointed skulls covered with short orange fur. It’s not difficult to see why – with their bulging muscles, long pointed canines, finely focused eyes that seem to look straight through you, and chest-thumping antics – people believed it was possible for a gorilla to wreck a city, like King Kong did in the film. These really are creatures you wouldn’t want to venture near alone. Seeing the primates looking so glossy, so contented, in their natural habitat was particularly poignant when I heard about some of the grim places from which they’d been rescued. One gorilla, Lengui, had been discovered in a field beside the hand of her dead mother, caught in a trap. Another, Pikounda, had been transported about in a small bag, malnourished and disfigured from abuse. Tchivou had wounds around her stomach, having been tethered by a rope. Massabi had been kept alone in a dark room for eight months. Most, when rescued, screamed whenever humans came nearby, or cowered in a corner, baring their teeth. Some have never regained their trust.
The instances of abuse, though, do seem to be decreasing, Luc said over dinner that night at the boma, with insects whizzing above our heads and coin-sized raindrops thundering down outside. When the project first started, about 10 gorillas were rescued a year. Since the end in 1994 of civil war (during which many foreigners fled), and since the foundation started to work closely with the government on enforcing the law, creating a tourist industry, educating the local population and protecting the reserves with anti-poaching units armed with Kalashnikovs, the annual number of orphans has dropped to two or three.
“But, unfortunately, no matter what we do it just doesn’t seem quite enough,” says Luc, passionately. “We are making an impact, but we know dozens are still being killed because we hear reports and sometimes see the meat – often an entire gorilla family will be killed just to capture the baby. If we had more tourists come here, we could put more money into local projects and education. Because, when it comes down to it, conservation is just a question of funding.” The projects to save the gorillas in central Africa costs $1million (£655,000) a year to run, according to Amos Courage. Which is why, from this year, the foundation has upgraded the camp (when he lived there for four years from 2000 there were neither showers nor lavatories), added a further two basic camps and trained a cook (who produces delicious, simple meals). Because more tourists, they believe, will mean they have funding to save more gorillas.
Having heard disappointed stories from fellow travellers who have had only 40 minutes on a gorilla safari in Rwanda – and had to hike for hours to get to the creatures – I hadn’t expected much from my trip to Congo-Brazzaville. But since I got back, I’ve already visited Howletts to see a gorilla baby that’s been rejected by its mother and is about to be relocated to central Africa. Once you’ve been looked in the eye by a gorilla, it’s hard to forget them – or to ignore their plight.
- The Aspinall Foundation (www.totallywild.net) can arrange for small groups to visit its gorilla reserve. A seven-day trip, with five nights in the reserve, visiting the baby orphans and bachelor group, and one night in the Olympic hotel in Brazzaville, costs from £3,800 per person, including return economy flights, board, lodging, guiding and transfers, and expeditions to the Blue Lake, visits to local villages and hikes on the plateau. For more information, email Luc Mathot at email@example.com. To buy tickets to the Rainforest Ball to be held on September 18 2010 in the Aspinall mansion at Port Lympne in Kent, in aid of the gorilla project, call 01303 264647 or email Ball@totallywild.net.