Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  In late 1998, Edmund and I traveled to Cameroon with a plan to stay for a few months to set up the sanctuary. We would then leave it in Estelle’s hands and return to the United States to continue fund-raising. Our first goal was to find a sanctuary site, and to that end we used topographical maps to identify areas of interest or we learned about areas during our discussions with other people working in the forests. Sometimes we worked with volunteers from LWC and used their vehicle. Other times we took public transport, renting taxis by the day, to trek through forests of Cameroon’s English-speaking Southwest Province looking for a suitable sanctuary site. There were many criteria to consider. We wanted natural chimpanzee habitat where our presence could serve to protect free-living chimpanzees, flat land to make fence building easier, year-round access to the site even during heavy rains, and farming communities of people with the know-how to grow fruits and vegetables to feed the chimpanzees. Location was everything, and finding the right one was essential.

  Three

  At the Atlantic Beach Hotel

  Cameroon’s prominent Muna family owned the Atlantic Beach Hotel. The patriarch of the family, Soloman Tandeng Muna, had served as prime minister of West Cameroon, vice president of Cameroon, and then speaker of Cameroon’s General Assembly for fifteen years. His six sons and one daughter were all successful in one profession or another, and the family name was well known throughout Cameroon. In 1998, George Muna, a businessman based in the city of Douala, took over management of the Atlantic Beach Hotel and two other hotels the family owned in Limbe. His move to the coastal town was precipitated by the departure of the family’s French hotel manager, who had fled the country with money extorted from the hotel business.

  Before his departure, the French manager had assured us we could take Jacky, Pepe, and Becky to our sanctuary, but we weren’t sure what his exodus would mean for the chimpanzees. Now, we needed to get the approval of the Muna family firsthand. Because Estelle and Dana had moved to Cameroon a few months before Edmund and I came back in November 1998, Estelle first went alone to meet with George Muna. To our great relief, George was quick to agree that we could and should take the three chimpanzees away from his hotel.

  I met George that November, soon after Edmund and I arrived from the United States, when I approached him in the wood-paneled hotel reception area about the possibility of renting an oceanside house owned by the Muna family. The neglected two-bedroom house, white with blue trim like the Atlantic Beach Hotel located one hundred yards from it, was perched idyllically on a low rocky cliff above the ocean. Edmund and I needed a base of operations, and I wanted to live in this little house badly enough to come knocking on George’s door, so to speak. George was slightly overweight and not exactly handsome in a classic sense, but his charisma filled the room and made me self-conscious during our first meeting. He was wearing a dark blue dress shirt and maroon tie, and he spoke to me with the dominant self-confidence of Cameroon’s aristocratic class. After I introduced myself and explained my purpose, George led me into his office, past at least ten people who waited outside his door for an audience. I would learn that Cameroonians wait far more patiently and graciously than Americans and that receiving important people first is normal. Businessmen and government officials generally scheduled their day’s appointments with everyone arriving at the same time and then received each person in an order appropriate to his status. It took me years to understand that this inefficient system that wasted so much of my and everyone else’s time was the only one that could work in a society with so many communication, transportation, and general infrastructure challenges. No one could be expected to “keep the time” for precisely scheduled appointments. George sat in a leather chair behind his big wooden desk, and I sat on the edge of a hard-backed chair in front of it while he explained why he was grateful to us for proposing a solution to his chimpanzee problem.

  George Muna and I spoke easily to each other, which was surprising considering our vastly different backgrounds and perspectives on the world. My white liberal guilt, vegetarianism, and casual clothes were in stark contrast to George’s status consciousness, culturally entrenched carnivorism, and tailored suits.

  “The chimpanzees were here when my family took ownership of the hotel, and they’ve caused us trouble from the beginning,” he told me.

  Rising briefly to pull a cardboard filing box from a room-length shelf that contained dozens, he spoke of insulting letters he had received from European hotel guests complaining about the living conditions of the chimpanzees. Sitting again, he pulled a letter from the box and handed it to me. It was in French, and I couldn’t read a word, but scanning the first page and glancing at the second, I nodded knowingly, trying to look sympathetic about the problem of his family’s business image with French-speaking Europeans.

  George went on to say that his bigger concern was about safety. “I worry every night that those chimpanzees will hurt a hotel guest,” he said. “They’ve already wounded several employees.”

  “That’s a valid worry,” I affirmed sincerely.

  While our motivations for wanting to relocate the chimpanzees were different, George and I could certainly eye the same prize of getting them moved. It was the foundation for an alliance of sorts. Before I left his office, George had agreed to rent Edmund and me the little run-down oceanside house, in the most beautiful location I had ever lived, for the equivalent of $100 per month for three months.

  Edmund and I could hear Jacky, Pepe, and Becky vocalizing from the house. When we weren’t out in the field looking for a sanctuary site, we visited the chimpanzees frequently. Going to see them was the first thing I did each morning, even before coffee. I hardly ever ate without saving something for them, although they got enough food from the hotel staff, and we were always bringing gifts of fruit juice, tennis balls, which Becky and Pepe liked to toss back and forth with us, clip-on key chains, magazines, mirrors, and anything else we thought might ease their boredom. Becky especially enjoyed the magazines we gave her, and she paged slowly through them, looking at the pictures. Pepe loved the plastic mirrors we brought—most animals cannot recognize their own reflections, but chimpanzees can. Pepe opened his mouth wide to examine his teeth and held it behind himself to examine a scratch on his lower back. He even used it to surreptitiously watch what the other chimps were doing behind him.

  Jacky, the oldest of the three, was in the middle cage. We knew he had been at the hotel since the late 1960s, possibly earlier. People called him the “mad chimpanzee” of Limbe, and it wasn’t difficult to see how he earned that reputation. He refused to make eye contact with us, and his various forms of stereotypy, while heart wrenching, did make him appear lost to the sane world. In one of his most disturbing and frequent manifestations, he placed one open hand in his mouth while rapidly and forcefully pounding the top of his head with his other fisted hand. He abused himself like this frequently and for minutes at a time. Jacky was bald on top of his head, and the skin there was thickened, as a result of his head beating. Other times he sat with a fixed upward stare as he rocked back and forth for hours, sometimes masturbating while he rocked. He was unresponsive to the taunts of human onlookers and seemed oblivious to their presence until the fateful moment when a careless person ventured too close to his cage and paid a high price for the mistake. With lightning speed and certain intent Jacky could grab hapless hands, pull them into his cage, and with a single bite inflict irreversible damage. Restaurant employees, careful not to get too close, threw his food to his outstretched hands.

  One evening after we ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, Edmund and I were visiting the chimpanzees just after dark. I was filling bottles of drinking water for the chimps from a freestanding tap when I heard Edmund’s terrified scream for help from behind me. I spun around to see him plastered against Jacky’s cage, pulling back futilely against the powerful iron grip on his right arm. When Jacky decided to let go, Edmund’s own strength propelled him backward and hard to the groun
d. Before I could get to him, he had rolled over to a kneeling crouch, cradling his hand in pain. During the interminable several seconds that I couldn’t see his hand, I feared the worst. I pulled on his arm, trying to see his right hand, which he stubbornly enclosed in his left, frozen by the pain.

  “Let me see your hand!” I shouted. When he finally opened his left hand to reveal his bloody right one, we saw together in the dim light that all his fingers were intact. “Thank God,” I said. While he still clutched his hand in agony, I was grateful he hadn’t been permanently maimed.

  One mile away, at the veterinary room of Limbe Wildlife Center (we had to take a taxi to get there because we still didn’t have our own vehicle), I stitched a deep bite wound, an inch and a half long, and left open another small but deep puncture. Edmund’s right hand and all its fingers would eventually return to full function.

  Other people who had been hurt by Jacky were employees of the hotel. Three painted words, MONKEYS ARE SEIZING, on each end of the cage warned visitors to stay away, and it seemed that tourists took the warning seriously. Cameroonians were typically afraid of large animals anyway, but employees were injured because they were doing work around the cage, or because with familiarity, over time, they became too casual in wandering near it. At least two of them lost fingers, and one was left with a permanently frozen knuckle. The terrible injuries caused people a lot of pain and were financially costly for the Muna family, but Jacky could have caused much more damage than he did. With a few well-placed chomps he could have removed a human hand, but in the cases of which I was aware, he bit only once before letting go.

  We wondered whether Jacky could ever be socialized with other chimpanzees. If he were to escape our enclosure at the sanctuary and severely injure or kill someone, not only would it be a horrible and arguably preventable tragedy, but it would endanger the whole project. One consultant told me that euthanasia was the only reasonable solution for Jacky. For me, ending Jacky’s life would have been unethical, and leaving him at the hotel alone while we took Pepe and Becky to a better life would have been unfathomably cruel. Jacky was a victim of a terrible injustice, and I wanted to make it right for him. Although I worried about the dangers of taking Jacky to the sanctuary we would be building and went so far as to get some Prozac donated for him (which I never gave him), I never considered any option but giving him a chance to recover at the sanctuary. Edmund and Estelle were my allies every step of the way in this decision. We didn’t know of any precedents where chimpanzees as psychologically damaged as Jacky had become well-adjusted members of a chimpanzee society, but we knew we had to try.

  Pepe and Becky were much easier to love initially. The two of them had been together since they were babies, raised as pets by a French expatriate couple. Although the couple probably didn’t start off with terrible intentions, they surely had very limited understanding of Pepe’s and Becky’s needs. No human home and garden could accommodate normal chimpanzee behavior. When the chimpanzees became adolescents, much stronger than anyone in the household and difficult for the couple to manage, they were left at the Atlantic Beach Hotel, where Jacky already languished in the middle of three cages. Other chimpanzees had lived and died there many years earlier. Pepe and Becky were placed in individual cages on either side of Jacky—deprived of the ability to touch or comfort one another with mutual embraces. Even if anyone thought of it, which they might have, the small mercy of putting Pepe and Becky in cages next to each other couldn’t have been accomplished without the ability to anesthetize and move Jacky. The three chimpanzees had lived in their single-file configuration for ten years when we met them in 1997.

  Pepe always loved my attention. Back and shoulder massages became part of the bargain of my friendship with him. After he groomed me, it was his turn. He turned and plastered his back to the wall of the cage and dropped his arms to his side. I massaged the strong muscles of his arms, neck, and upper back just as I would have liked it, and when my fingers got tired, I groomed his skin using the technique I learned by watching him. Pepe loved my touch and seemed to really enjoy his massages, which I delivered lovingly, but writing this now, so many years later with so much more experience, I can’t help but wonder if he would have preferred simple grooming. Whenever I pointed to Pepe’s hand, he knew instantly to pass his huge extremity through the bars, and my small hands cradling one of his were dwarfed by the comparison. I cleaned under his fingernails and toenails, cutting them with my large toenail clippers when they got too long. Pepe was always tolerant and trusting.

  Estelle warned me to watch him carefully for sudden changes in his temperament. Adult male chimpanzees are emotionally volatile, pushed around to a large extent by their hormones. In the wrong set of circumstances, all can be deadly dangerous. Pepe was locked in a cage behind a hotel, while I was free to come and go. While he himself should have been living free with his own kind in a forest far away from us, he was reduced, in his lonely boredom, to begging for interaction from me on my terms. These were definitely the wrong circumstances. The sadness in the situation was ever present for me. The danger was brought home when Pepe bit a long, deep gash into the upper arm of a volunteer from Limbe Wildlife Center. I wasn’t there at the time and never knew the exact circumstances under which the bite occurred, but the man had worked with chimpanzees for years and knew how to behave around them. It was a disturbing incident. Nonetheless, during my sporadic long visits with Pepe in those early years of 1997, 1998, and 1999, the gentle side of this large and powerful chimpanzee was the only side he showed to me.

  Becky, on the other hand, was clever and often sweet natured, but also mischievous and prone to mood swings. She had shiny, almost blue-black hair and a beautiful black face, from which her sharply contrasting topaz-brown eyes sparkled.

  One morning when Edmund was hard at work on repairs to our apartment, I was walking home after a meeting with a local businessman from whom I was soliciting donations of metal for the sanctuary. When the chimpanzees saw me passing, they extended their familiar excited greeting of pant hoots and screams. I was wearing a light beige dress that buttoned all the way down the front and fell to within a few inches of my ankles—the only dress I owned that was fit to wear to business meetings with government officials or potential contributors. Ordinarily I would have changed clothes before visiting the chimpanzees, but I couldn’t resist their hearty invitation this morning. Something in Becky’s bright-eyed expression of anticipation caused me to visit her first.

  As I reached the side of the cage where she sat watching my approach, I realized she was interested in the half-full bottle of drinking water in my right hand. Her eyes traveled from the bottle of water to my eyes and back to the water—a master of efficient communication. I took the screw cap off, although she would have had no problem doing it herself, and handed her the bottle. She took a big swallow and set the bottle upright on the concrete floor. Careful not to tip over the water bottle, she scooted close to the cage bars and rotated her leg to reveal a spot on her wide inner thigh that she wanted me to see. As she pointed to the area, I reached my forearms through the bars to examine it.

  As Pepe had done with me, and as I had watched other chimpanzees at LWC do with one another, I rhythmically opened and closed my mouth with some lip and tongue smacking to assure Becky I only intended to groom her. I did my best to mimic what I had seen, but I’ve learned since then that the almost universal chimpanzee mouth movement during grooming is highly individualized. It can be subtle and quiet or vigorous and loud depending on who is doing it. Regardless of the exact characteristics, it communicates benign intent with perfect clarity. Even chimpanzees who have been orphaned as young infants tense their lips in concentration and pair grooming with mouth movement as they mature, which implies an innate neurological connection between the nerves used in precision hand movements and those innervating the mouth. My own mouth positioning when I perform a difficult surgery or other truly challenging fine motor task with my hands is of the sam
e quality, although more subtle, as that of the chimpanzees when they concentrate on grooming someone. For us it may be a benign and useless remnant now, but the connection may have played a role in the evolution of human language.1 Grooming the chimpanzees didn’t trigger my unconscious mouth positioning the way performing surgery on them would, the way grooming me did for them. My mouth movements as I groomed Becky were practiced and intentional, but she understood my meaning.

  With her head bowed she watched my fingers part her hairs to reveal a tiny inflamed pink spot—it looked like an insect bite. I flicked at it gently as I raised my eyes to hers reassuringly for just a moment and then proceeded to groom all around the tiny lesion on her thigh. Soon, she too began grooming her own thigh, so the two of us occupied ourselves with this single important task.

  In the cage next to Becky, Jacky pretended to ignore me, but I was aware of Pepe watching and waiting a few yards away in the cage on the other side of Jacky’s. I needed to visit him, too, and I wanted to find water bottles to give both Pepe and Jacky in case they were thirsty. Even if they weren’t, I always tried to be equitable in my distribution of gifts, however small, to the three of them.

  Just as I was preparing to leave, Becky casually grabbed a fistful of the ample beige cloth of my dress and pulled it through the bars.