Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  “I will build an enclosure for them here, better than what you have built,” he informed us. I had not expected him to say that and was not prepared with a diplomatic reply.

  “C’est ne pas possible pour vous.” It’s not possible for you. I blurted my too honest response in very bad French. I should have stuck to English. Probably more than any other exchange between us, these words gave rise to his feeling, later expressed to the Ministry of the Environment and Forestry through his attorney, that the American woman, specifically me and not Estelle, was a racist.

  “You think you can do it, but I cannot? Why do you think I cannot accomplish what you can?” The volume of his speech didn’t change, but anger drenched his words.

  Indeed, I didn’t think he could, or would if he could, build an electric enclosure for Dorothy and Nama. Only a few people in the world possessed the expertise required to construct an electric fence that would actually contain chimpanzees. The expensive building materials were not available in Cameroon and had to be imported. Logistical difficulties aside, to believe that this man would go to the trouble and expense of even trying to build a big electric enclosure when he had let Dorothy and Nama live on chains for decades would have been an impossible stretch of my imagination. If he had possessed the slightest sensitivity to their feelings and welfare, or to that of the eight monkeys who were also tethered, he could have extended some effort on their behalf years earlier—even to build a cage.

  Now, more than a decade later, I see possible shades of gray in his motivations and more options in my own choices of behavior and words. Perhaps the mere fact that this elderly man of such high status had agreed to meet with two powerless—or so we all thought—Western women reflected some decency that I couldn’t see at the time. After all, no one forced him to meet with us. Maybe he had hoped that we would be a resource to provide something better for Dorothy and Nama right there on the manicured grass of Luna Park. A self-serving notion to be sure, but it would have incorporated a better future for the chimpanzees—and possibly the monkeys too. We never got as far as discussing anything like that. I don’t know if he had ideas to which he never gave voice, perhaps impeded by my impulsive reply.

  I met his angry stare with a suppressed fury that at least equaled his. “Is that your final word? You are refusing to make the humane and decent decision for Dorothy and Nama?”

  As Estelle finished translating, he reached for his cane as if to rise.

  “Is that your final word?” I insisted. I was drawing battle lines. I had no common ground with this man. I knew he would never agree to let us take Dorothy and Nama, and I would never stop trying to get them out of that place through any means I could find.

  “Yes,” he answered simply as he met my eyes a final time before standing up. The meeting was over.

  Estelle and I stood, and with forced civility that felt ridiculous, we each shook his hand. On the walk back to the car my anger gave way to the deep sadness that spawned it. I didn’t want Dorothy and Nama to see me so sad, and Estelle must have felt the same. Neither of us went to say good-bye.

  Back in the car on the drive back to Yaoundé, I finally broke down and cried. Silently, Estelle smoked a cigarette and waited for my crying spell to pass. She understood that any words of comfort and reassurance she could offer would be empty. After a few minutes, I blew my nose and sniffed a couple of times, a signal to Estelle that I was done.

  “Let’s go by the Ministry of the Environment and Forestry office on the way home,” she said. “We’ll see what they have to say.”

  The timing of our visit to the Central Province’s Ministry of the Environment and Forestry (MINEF) office in Yaoundé was fortuitous. MINEF’s divisional delegate for the Obala region happened to be attending a meeting there when we arrived. Mr. Daniel Essi was just who we needed to see. After we described our new sanctuary in the Mbargue Forest and told him about our experience at Luna Park earlier that day, the delegate told us about his own frustrating experiences with the politically powerful family. Representing MINEF, he had asked the family repeatedly to acquire permits that would authorize them to hold chimpanzees and monkeys at Luna Park. Because the family had acquired Dorothy and Nama before Cameroon’s law protecting endangered species was strengthened in 1994, MINEF was willing to give them an exemption to the provision of the law prohibiting private ownership of chimpanzees. They could have paid permit fees, equivalent to $400 for each primate, and kept the chimpanzees and the monkeys. That they refused to pay the fees indicated to Mr. Essi that they thought they were above the law. He felt that they had disrespected MINEF and him personally, and he was angry about it.

  He told us he was willing to confiscate Dorothy and Nama, but only if we could arrange a home for all the monkeys so he could seize them at the same time. He could not enforce only part of the law. We could take all or none of the primates. When Estelle and I walked out of the office, we were not yet jubilant, but the world looked completely different than it had two hours earlier when I was sobbing in the car—it was now full of possibility for Dorothy and Nama. When presented with the necessity of rescuing the monkeys too, I felt ashamed that we had been willing to leave them behind. To do otherwise had not seemed possible before because they weren’t protected species. But in any case, we had thought the family was so powerful that the government wouldn’t move against them, so we had wasted time trying to get an agreement with the family for Dorothy and Nama.

  We reached out to Limbe Wildlife Center (LWC) and to Cameroon Wildlife Aid Fund (CWAF), which operated Yaoundé Zoo, about taking the monkeys, providing them details about the species, age, and gender of each one. Limbe Wildlife Center was willing to take three of the monkeys, including the adult baboon, and Yaoundé Zoo would take five smaller juveniles. Australian Dave Lucas, the new manager at LWC, and Jonathan Kang, the head caregiver there, would come to Obala in their pickup truck to provide technical and logistical support for the confiscation. Then they would transport three monkeys back to LWC. Bibila Tafon, “Dr. Babs,” the talented veterinary technician from Yaoundé Zoo, would also come with a caregiver and two vehicles—including one taxi—to fit five monkeys. When the necessary arrangements had been made, Mr. Essi set the date on the second Tuesday of May 2000, when we would all convene in Obala for the operation. I went back to the sanctuary in the interim and returned to Yaoundé with Kenneth in our old red Toyota pickup, which I had bought after selling the Pajero. On the fated Tuesday, Kenneth, Estelle, and I crowded into the single cabin for the drive to Obala. I had gotten up before dawn after hardly sleeping. I was nervous and so hoping that nothing would go wrong.

  While Dave, Babs, and their caregivers waited alongside the road in front of Obala’s open-air market—the very market where I had battled my conscience over the dire fate of a doomed crocodile more than a year earlier—Kenneth, Estelle, and I joined Mr. Essi and three of his forestry officers at the Obala headquarters of the military police, only a three-minute drive from Luna Park. The bright hunter-green uniforms of the forestry officers contrasted sharply with those of olive green worn by the more authoritative military police, who topped their ensemble with a distinguishing red cap. Concerned that news of the planned confiscation might leak out to the politically connected Luna Park family, Mr. Essi didn’t even tell the military police commander in advance what we would be doing. Instead, he had requested four officers for an unspecified mission. Only on that warm, sunny morning, convened under the big mango tree outside the commander’s office, did Mr. Essi explain to all seven armed participants that they would move into Luna Park for a forced seizure of ten primates.

  “Your job will be to protect the technicians”—he gestured to us—“while they load the primates into cages and onto their vehicles. They will need some time to do their work, and you should be prepared for resistance.” The military officers, each holding automatic rifles, exchanged tentative glances with one another. I wondered if they knew the proprietors of Luna Park personally, since the
y all lived in this small town, and might be uncomfortable with the operation, but I thought they looked prepared, more or less, to move forward. They really didn’t have any choice since the commander had issued their orders.

  “Any questions?” Mr. Essi asked. None were voiced.

  During the three-minute drive to Luna Park Hotel, the atmosphere in our pickup was tense. No one said a word. Our caravan of seven vehicles, with Mr. Essi in the lead, pulled into the long driveway. We parked our vehicles along the side and filed out onto the grass. The officers spread out, positioning themselves at the periphery of our work area, each holding his weapon diagonally and very visibly in front of his torso. After we offloaded our cages, Estelle led Dave and Babs to the seven monkeys tied on the veranda. They had seen the adult baboon chained near the driveway on our way in. Thereafter, each team proceeded to work independently and quickly, while Mr. Essi went to the office to serve papers.

  I was available if Dave’s team or Babs’s team needed me, but they didn’t. They darted the adult baboon and three older juvenile monkeys with anesthesia and were able to carry and place the four youngest into cages without anesthesia.

  Estelle, Kenneth, and I focused on the chimpanzees, first carrying one of the transport cages into Nama’s area. She expressed interest in the cage immediately, pushing up the sliding guillotine-type door herself. “Nama may go in without anesthesia,” Estelle said hopefully, while helping Nama lift the door up far enough for a curious chimp to crawl through the opening. When Nama was completely inside, Estelle closed the door quickly and threw herself across the top of the cage, holding the door closed with her body weight. Her weight would not have been enough to contain most adult chimpanzees, and even frail Nama might have gotten out if she had tried. Fortunately, Nama was concerned, but she didn’t panic, and her efforts to push the door open again were halfhearted. She watched with great interest while I used our big bolt cutters to sever the chain tying her to the concrete slab. Estelle opened the door just enough for me to push the cut end of the chain into the cage with Nama, so we could completely close the cage door and slide a lock through the latch. It had been amazingly easy! Nama had developed a degree of trust in us, the only friends she had had in many years I reckoned, and I knew she was desperate for any change in how she was living. Once we were safe at Sanaga-Yong Center, I would need to anesthetize her to cut the tight chain from her neck. I harbored no illusions that Nama trusted us enough to let us approach her neck with those big bolt cutters—she likely would have confiscated them for herself.

  Unfortunately, Dorothy had no intention of entering a cage willingly. Under different circumstances, she might have allowed us to give her an injection of anesthesia with a handheld syringe, which is much less painful than a dart, but not this day when she was agitated by all the strange activity around her. She was wary of the syringe and wouldn’t have it anywhere near her. I had to blow a dart of anesthesia into her big thigh. When it hit her, she screamed and grimaced, and I hated that my sweet friend thought I was betraying her. Fortunately, it was over quickly.

  When Dave and Dr. Babs had collected their monkeys, they helped us carry the cages with Dorothy and Nama to our truck and load them in the back. Within forty-five minutes of our arrival at Luna Park, the chimpanzees and all the monkeys were loaded into the four vehicles that would take them to better lives. Just as we were preparing to leave, Estelle went to assure the concerned-looking employees, who had congregated on the steps of the restaurant, that all the primates were going to places where they would be happier. Standing at the bottom of the short staircase, she spotted two sick, almost featherless parrots in a tiny cage in the back corner of the open-air restaurant. We had not seen them there before. “I wonder if we can take two sick parrots from the restaurant?” she said when she came back to the truck where I was watching and comforting Dorothy as she began to wake up from the light anesthesia.

  “Ask Mr. Essi if we can take them,” I suggested.

  I watched Estelle approach Mr. Essi’s car, where he was waiting for us to finish and leave. The two spoke through his open window for less than a minute, before she returned to me.

  “They don’t have permits for the parrots, either,” she said. “We need to take them.”

  I knew that Chris Mitchell had just completed a small aviary at Yaoundé Zoo. Dr. Babs agreed to take the parrots there until they might be released one day, and he sent the caregiver working with him into the restaurant to bring the miserable birds out.

  We had lined up the cages of Dorothy and Nama side by side, front to back, in the bed of the pickup so that there was space for me to sit beside them. I would ride to the sanctuary back here with the chimps, which was only slightly less comfortable than squeezing onto the single-cabin truck seat with Estelle and Kenneth would have been. This was especially true since we had another passenger in the cabin. The past January I had assisted MINEF authorities in the town of Kribi confiscate four-year-old chimpanzee Caroline from a small cage at a restaurant. Lacking a quarantine facility or a nursery at our sanctuary, I had arranged with Dave to keep her at Limbe Wildlife Center for three months, and it had stretched into five. On this day of the confiscation, he had brought her with him from Limbe to hand over to us.

  Our red pickup had been last in line heading into Luna Park; now heading out we were at the head of the caravan. As we neared the end of the single-lane driveway, we were forced to stop when a big black Mercedes pulled in. I stood up in the back of the truck as the driver of the Mercedes quickly maneuvered it sideways across the road, blocking our exit. Luna Park’s proprietor, the elder family patriarch, stepped out of the backseat in a yellow floor-length robe and planted his feet and cane defiantly.

  Mr. Essi walked up from behind us to manage the problem. “Sir, this is an official action by the Government of Cameroon. We have seized the animals you were holding illegally. Please instruct your driver to move the car.”

  “No one is taking my animals anywhere,” our nemesis responded with conviction.

  “It’s too late for that, sir. Your animals are being distributed among the three MINEF primate sanctuaries, and you can visit them there.” Mr. Essi turned and instructed the military police, who had also walked forward, to clear the road. With that, he proceeded back to his own car, leaving the police officers to handle the obstacle.

  The patriarch got back into his car. After a minute or so, with no indication that the car would move anytime soon, one of the police officers instructed us to drive onto the grass and around the front of the car. When Kenneth tried to do it, the driver of the Mercedes also pulled forward onto the grass to block us. As Kenneth returned to our original position on the road, the driver also backed up to straddle the middle of the road once again. I was sensing that the military police officers weren’t eager for a physical confrontation with the car occupants; they probably knew one another. Their next strategy was for us to try driving on the grass around the backside of the car. Doing as he was told, Kenneth steered our pickup hard to the right and inched onto the grass as if to go around the back of the car. No one, certainly no one in our pickup, was the slightest bit surprised when the Mercedes driver backed up onto the grass to block us. With both vehicles back in their original positions, we watched the military police officers discuss their options among themselves. Finally, one of the officers moved quickly to open the driver’s door—fortunately the window was down so the driver couldn’t lock it—and another pulled him out of the Mercedes. Now we could drive around the car.

  The patriarch got out of his car and pointed his finger at me menacingly. As our truck rolled past him, I met his hate-filled glare without embarrassment. Turning my face to the road ahead that would carry Dorothy and Nama to their new life, I couldn’t have been happier.

  Ten

  Who’s the Boss?

  Soon after their arrival Jacky and Pepe started fighting for dominance, and it continued throughout the months before Dorothy and Nama arrived. Becky enjoyed lov
ing relationships with both males, and she was neutral in their extended contest. Because she and Pepe had grown up together since they were babies, they had a brother/sister relationship that was not overtly sexual. Jacky chose masturbation over copulation; for decades he had known nothing else. Nonetheless, the fights between the males were more frequent when Becky had her genital swelling—a descriptive term for the monthly vulvar engorgement that occurs in female chimpanzees before and during ovulation.

  The violence upset Becky terribly, and she tried her best to keep the peace and to break up fights when they happened. When she sensed that Jacky or Pepe was in a menacing mood, she tried to calm them with grooming or distract them with her sexuality if she was in swelling or position her body between theirs. She screamed and slapped and tried to intervene during the heat of their battles, but she did not seem to favor one over the other. She spent time engaging socially—grooming and hugging—with both of them. I knew from reading that group support can be very important in establishing and maintaining the dominance hierarchy among chimpanzees, but in the circumstances I had read about, an established dominant male was forced to fend off challengers. The length of a male’s reign and the success or failure of his challengers was highly influenced by who was on their sides. Between Jacky and Pepe nothing was established, neither had acknowledged the dominance of the other, and the one neutral female in the small social group was not hastening an outcome. I briefly considered keeping them apart until we had a larger community of chimpanzees. I certainly would have done that if it had seemed that one needed protection from the other, but when Pepe and Jacky fought, they were both willing combatants. Neither was submitting to the other, which is all it would have taken to stop the fighting, and I kept thinking they would sort it out sooner or later. After each fight they reached a temporary truce, which usually started with Pepe making a tentative approach to groom Jacky, but sometimes it was the other way around. According to the caregivers, Pepe started more of the fights than Jacky did. In times of peace, they engaged in mutual grooming sessions and even hugged when they were excited about a favorite food or frightened by an unusual occurrence, like an airplane overhead. Sometimes weeks could pass without bloodshed, but when tension became too thick, it was vented through loud and frightening fights that served to temporarily restore calm.