For years, studies of ice cores from glaciers have revealed that the current level of carbon dioxide is the highest the planet has known in the last eight hundred thousand years. New research, however, suggests that the last time the atmosphere held this much carbon dioxide was fifteen million years ago, when, according to the scientist Aradhna Tripati, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, “global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland.” Historically, global temperatures largely correlate to atmospheric carbon levels, and though temperatures are at their highest level in four thousand years, they are expected to rise at an unusually rapid rate over the next century, one too fast to allow most creatures to adapt. Some scientists have suggested that we are crossing into unknown territory, over a tipping point, where carbon emissions will create a domino effect, transforming the planet at an exponential rate. And yet our impact is increasing, a day in Kinshasa enough to make me understand the urgency of human need and hunger. The DRC’s population—already the fourth largest in Africa after those of Nigeria, Egypt, and Ethiopia—is set to double to 140 million within twenty years. A glance from the airplane window sufficed to remind me of how isolated and unknown our few remaining rainforests are, how they can disappear without our knowing, and how much of a challenge it will be for humanity to work together to save them.
Ten minutes before landing, we crossed over the wide river again. Dozens of long forested islands split it into as many as five channels, yellow and brown sandbars visible beneath the water, carved by the current into shapes reminiscent of dunes. The jet coasted low, dropped its landing gear as my ears popped, and a minute later it banged down on the runway, all of us clutching armrests and gritting teeth.
We were let out into a sunny afternoon and crossed the tarmac to the yellow terminal, the main chamber of which contained two rows of wooden benches that looked like church pews. When I heard people say Mbandaka, I listened closely. The stress was on the first syllable, the m largely silent to my ear, at most a slight holding of the lips together before the plosive b sound.
Aimée Nsongo, a short, sturdy woman who was BCI’s Mbandaka office manager, stood waiting for us. She commanded a group of young men who gathered the dozen large duffel bags, each weighing sixty or seventy pounds. We followed them outside the airport to where six Chinese motorcycles were parked. A single white pickup, rented by BCI, was in the gravel lot. The young men loaded the bags into the back while Aimée went inside to speak with agents of the Direction Générale de Migration (DGM) regarding the legal formalities of our travel in Équateur Province.
At least a dozen people sat in blue plastic chairs, drinking large bottles of Primus beer. We joined them as shoeshine boys gathered, along with vendors selling pineapples and bowls of large squirming mpose grubs, the larvae that rhinoceros beetles lay in rotting wood.
“Mmm—mpose!” Michael said as a young man held out a metal tub of what looked like thumb-size writhing maggots with pincers on their heads. He explained that both Congolese and bonobos eat them, and I would later read that they contain more protein than chicken and beef. He paid a cook to fry them in garlic, and they were delicious, with a texture and flavor like buttered lobster, the heads crunching lightly. We would spend the following weeks asking if anyone had mpose. They were our first meal in Mbandaka and would be our last one, a month later, again at the airport, before we returned to Kinshasa.
When Aimée finished with the DGM, we drove into the city along a paved road that, aside from a few humps, potholes, and fissures, was sound. Dozens of men passed the other way on bicycles, working the pedals with the laborious swaying of their bodies. Asphalt gave way to the wide red avenues of the city, multicolored umbrellas stuck in the roadside, vendors squatting beneath. Everything seemed tinged with the russet dust, concrete walls and buildings, people’s clothes and skin.
Founded in 1883, Mbandaka was formerly called Équateur. It appeared on Henry Morton Stanley’s maps at both the equator and the Congo River, like the joint in a cross. But he was mistaken; the city was in fact a few miles north of that imaginary line. Under Belgian colonial rule, the province became Équateur and the city Coquilhatville, a convoluted formulation commemorating Camille-Aimé Coquilhat, the Belgian governor-general of the Congo Free State. But within a year of taking over in November 1965, Mobutu gave the provincial capital its current name in honor of a local leader, soon therafter changing the Congo to Zaire and Léopoldville to Kinshasa.
During the Second Congo War, from 1998 to 2003, when Kinshasa was at times without electricity and water, crowds filling buckets at the river and carrying them home, Mbandaka and the surrounding regions suffered far worse. Opposing armies occupied people’s land and homes, eating their food and robbing them. Hundreds of thousands, most of them civilians, died not only of violence but of starvation and disease.
Now, Mbandaka, a city of 350,000, had yet to recover from its years of penury. Its streets were filled with bicycles, but there were only a few motorcycles and the occasional car. For less than twenty cents per trip, a constant stream of bicycle taxis carried people across town, passengers seated on the padded racks behind the driver. The bikes reminded me of souped-up low-riders in the United States: reflectors and stickers; sparkles, colorful paint, and tassels; fancy rearview mirrors on long stems; pump horns and thumb-rung bells on the wide handlebars; passenger seats of red shag rug, couch cushions, or padded chair armrests bolted side by side.
The retro persisted at the hotel whose name we couldn’t manage to identify, though we asked everyone. Four large concrete buildings stood in a fenced courtyard, each painted a different pastel. Our apartment had a living room, a stripped-down kitchen, and two bedrooms, one for me and the other for Sally and Michael. The security guard told us it was the hotel of the governor, though we couldn’t figure out if this was its name, if the governor stayed here, or if he owned it. The electricity came on briefly after sundown. As at Evelyn’s house, the bathroom had buckets of cold water for bathing and flushing.
Two men from the bank came in the door, with gym bags loaded with 15,000 US dollars in Congolese francs, at least three dozen large bricks held together with rubber bands. The exchange rate was 900 francs to the dollar, and BCI would need small bills of 100 or 200 francs. Whereas inflation had made Kinshasa expensive, a fifteen-minute ride in a taxi or a street meal easily costing ten or twenty dollars, the economy in Équateur’s rainforest was largely barter with almost no outside stimulus, and 100-franc bills—a little more than ten cents—gave the people living on the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve currency for local products.
When Sally and Michael and the two bankers had finished counting money to pay trackers and reserve staff, as well as for the costs of the trip, there were five backpacks full of cash that they locked inside three large plastic duffels. It was already dark. We ate a meal of cassava, rice, chicken, fried bananas, and amaranth greens, cooked and carried over by Aimée’s younger sister. Afterward, Sally continued making calls and meeting with people, and I was not surprised when I walked by her door and saw her asleep in her clothes.
Michael suggested that we take a walk and maybe grab a drink with researchers from CREF, the government’s Centre de Recherche en Écologie et Foresterie whose staff had worked closely in the field with BCI for over a decade. Since our arrival in Mbandaka, a few of them had stopped by to say hello. As part of its goal to support Congolese agency, BCI had supported CREF, funding them to do wildlife surveys for each of the future conservation areas. Michael explained to me that given the distances they traveled, the researchers were the best source of knowledge about everything happening in the province, and he wanted to speak with them more. We locked the door, then descended the stairs and went outside.
Night in the city was nearly absolute, a wide swath of equatorial stars largely unfamiliar to my eyes, a few bright flares out across the city. It took us a moment to find the security guard, sitting near the gate in