Table of Contents
For Malou
Au Congo la guerre est finie
Oh, mon ami,
Alors pourquoi de la fort
Ils inondent notre nursery?
A Lola
A Lola ya Bonobo
Cest leur paradis.
Kikwit et Lomami, comment aux arbres grimper
Sans les doigts que les sorciers vous ont coup?
Kikongo et Lomela, comment oublier
La peine et la douleur?
A Lola
A Lola ya Bonobo
Cest leur paradis.
CHANSON DES MAMAS, LOLA YA BONOBO
In Congo, the war has ended
Oh, my friend,
Why then from the forest
Do they flood our nursery?
At Lola
At Lola ya Bonobo
It is their paradise
Kikwit and Lomami, how do you climb trees
Without the fingers the witch doctors severed?
Kikongo and Lomela, how can you forget
The pain and suffering?
At Lola
At Lola ya Bonobo
It is their paradise
SONG BY THE MAMAS, LOLA YA BONOBO
Chapter 1
Its 2:17 A.M. in a Paris hotel room and my sweat is bleeding into the sheets. Ive been staring for hours at the popcorn ceiling, little balls of stucco poised to drop like concrete rain. The walls boxing me in are as thick as a bomb shelter, built to keep out the noise of landing planes and overzealous couples in neighboring rooms.
Anxiety is drilling holes into my chest, because I have to sleep and I cant. In a few hours Im going to a place where bad things happen. I need to be rested. I must be alert.
But instead Im shivering and clammy. I have never done anything as stupid as this journey I have already begun. My eyes are almost swollen shut but I cant keep them closed. I am curled and crushed under this fear that Ive been carrying around, like a hernia, for so many days.
There is a man sleeping next to me. His curls fall over his face and his cheeks are flushed because the room is too warm. His eyelashes are obscenely long, his lips too full. He could be a woman except for his prognathic jaw, his Neanderthal brow. His breath sails in and out of his lungs without effort. His sleep is so deep that his fingers are twitching and his eyes flicker behind his eyelids.
Its because of him that Im here. He is on a treasure hunt. Chasing shadows of our simian past to answer the greatest question of all time.
I want to slap him awake. I cant believe he can sleep when Im obviously freaking out. I want to push him off the bed with my feet and hear the satisfying thud when he hits the thinly covered concrete. But weve already fought for an hour tonight. Or rather, I screeched at him like a harpy with my fists twisted into the covers so they didnt punch him in the face.
I want so desperately to go home, to go back to my family and tell them it was a horrible mistake, this new life with him.
His tongue falls back against his throat and a small snore escapes. It reverberates through this jail cell Im in and rakes its fingernails across my nerves.
Were supposed to get married and Ive never hated anyone so much in my life.
Chapter 2
I didnt always want to push my fianc off a balcony. Twelve months ago I would have jumped off a balcony for him. But a lot can change in a year.
We met in Uganda at the house of Debby Cox, the founder of a chimpanzee sanctuary called Ngamba Island. Debby and I had been friends for years. I first met her when I was twenty-two and fresh out of college. I was volunteering for Taronga Zoo in Sydney when I heard about the chimp island she had started for orphan chimpanzees whose parents were killed by the bushmeat trade.
Part of Debbys conservation program was counting the chimpanzees in Budongo Forest. The worlds biggest population of chimpanzees was in Congo, but they were rapidly being butchered and eaten. The Ugandans had traditional taboos against eating apes, and they had the second-biggest population. But no one knew how many chimpanzees were left or where they were. My job was to lead a team of Ugandans on a census, for which I had zero qualifications. Debby hired me only because the real primatologist got malaria and pulled out at the last minute.
Those were interesting times. It was 1999 and eight gorilla tourists had been hacked to death with machetes in Bwindi National Park. Their bodies were found covered in deep slashes, their skulls smashed to pieces. The 150 rebels who surrounded their camp were part of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and used the mountains as a base.
Debby wrote three days before I was supposed to arrive and told me it was too dangerous and I should cancel my trip, but being young and stupid I told her I didnt care about rebels and I was coming anyway. In return, Debby threw me into the jungle like a football and hoped I would come out alive.
I envisioned myself slicing through the foliage with my hair swept into a glossy ponytail and stylish smudges of dirt underneath my cheekbones. I would walk among forest elephants in the glittering sunlight. I would adorn myself with pythons and gain a reputation among the rebel warlords as some kind of goddess. Perhaps I would even find my own personal Tarzan whom I could take home and show the wonders of civilization.
All I found in the jungle were bugs and a lack of personal space. The vegetation pressed in thick and close, and hacking your way through it wasnt as easy as Indiana Jones makes it look. We barely even saw chimpanzees, and when we did, they screamed their heads off and clearly wanted to rip our guts out.
After four months, I was ready to get out but I didnt want to go home. So I started helping Debby with the education programs around the office.
Then one afternoon, a pet pack was dropped on the doorstep and changed my life. Shivering in the back of the pet pack was Baluku, a two-year-old chimpanzee. Hunters had shot his mother and locked him in a coal shed for two months. When the Ugandan police confiscated him, he was as white as paper beneath his hair from lack of sunlight, and two slashes in his groin oozed pus where he had struggled against the rope that tethered him.
Debby took Baluku out of the pet pack and plastered him to my chest. And that is where he stayed for a month. Debby wasnt trying to give me the experience of a lifetime. Baluku needed someone to cling to and Debby needed a giant petri dish to inform her of the diseases he was carrying. If I got worms, it meant Baluku had worms. If I got giardia, Baluku had giardia.
But from the moment his tiny fingers latched onto my T-shirt, I was never the same. Before Baluku, I loved selfishly. I took my family for granted, my boyfriends were an extension of my vanity, and my friends were a fun way to pass the time. That wasnt enough for Baluku. He needed all of me. He didnt let go. I cooked, showered, slept, and went to the toilet with his frail arms wrapped around my neck. If I tried to give him to someone else even for a minute, he dug his fingers into my arms and didnt let go. If I did manage to pull him off, he would fall to the floor, hit his head on the ground, then finally wrap his arms around his knees and rock with a terrible blank look in his eyes.
