My expectations were high. I’d heard stories of human-bonobo interactions, of bonobos blowing kisses in zoos and staring into people’s eyes. But Elykia forgot about me as she touched the screen, selecting one of several lexigrams, none of which I could understand. Each time, Tyler released a grape through a slot in the wall, near the floor, to reward her. She scooped it with speed and dexterity, barely pausing before refocusing on the screen. I couldn’t imagine a human moving so immediately in response to a stimulus; it was almost as if Elykia’s body were doing the thinking. She touched lexigrams a few more times, and then, hardly looking, she shot her arm out and captured a grape as it began to roll. If we humans have gained brainpower in our evolution, we’ve certainly lost physicality.
After the session with Elykia, Tyler took me through the hallway to the outdoor enclosures, a series of large cages attached by corridors of steel mesh to a yard of yellowed grass. Speaking as he would to a person, he introduced me to an eleven-year-old male, Maisha (“life” in Swahili), who, he explained, was basically a teenager. (Bonobos become sexually mature at nine but do not reach their full adult size until after the age of fifteen.) From watching TV, Tyler explained, Maisha had become obsessed with motorcycles. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t have one. In the same enclosure was Matata, “tough” or “trouble” in Lingala, the group’s wild-born matriarch, now at least forty years old. She rested as Maisha ran back and forth, dragging his laminated sheet of lexigrams across the ground. Seeing me, he threw a paisley cloth over his head and swung along the cage’s ceiling, playing the stooge, then raced out into the sunlit grass.
The differences among the bonobos—the distinctness of their personalities—was undeniable. In the way she held her body, Matata exuded a wild energy, as if her limbs remembered the rainforest. There was authority in her presence even as she dozed, like an old chieftain closing her eyes, barely interested in people like me. She glanced only once before lying on her belly in the sun and going to sleep. Finally, Maisha came over to greet me shyly, lowering his eyes, his fingers hooked in the mesh of the enclosure wall.
Kanzi and his half sister, Panbanisha, whose name meant “cleave together for the purpose of contrast” in Swahili, appeared more curious. As I spoke, I could sense Panbanisha studying me. Her dark eyes peered into my own with a mix of wariness and curiosity that I’d seen on first dates. Female bonobos have pink genital swellings that grow large and pillowlike as they mature, and Panbanisha’s was infected. I asked her how she was, and she stood up and showed me the inflamed area, then sat and crossed her arms, staring at me, as if it might be my turn to reveal something intimate.
As for Kanzi, he was a handsome, well-built bonobo with a wide forehead and barrel chest. He was used to media attention, and when I walked in and he saw my camera, he flashed a photogenic grin and lifted a hand. I failed to snap him in time, and he sighed, appearing exasperated. He studied me, as if to determine just how interesting this encounter might be. After all, he’d played music with Paul McCartney and Peter Gabriel.
Despite their relatively peaceful nature, I wasn’t allowed into the enclosures. Bonobos are significantly stronger than we are, and they can accidentally injure us. There is also confusion around their putative benevolence. The media describe them as sexy, peace-loving creatures, but like us, they can be violent. People are shocked to hear this, since there is a general tendency to simplify, as when we think of someone as “nice” and imagine her, therefore, without anger or jealousy. The same is true of the way we think of bonobos, though by human and chimp standards, they do display remarkable restraint.
My encounters with the bonobos were pleasant, all of them according me some time. They used frequent eye-contact, looking into my eyes as if trying to figure out why I was there. But they didn’t react to me in any dramatic way, except for Elykia, who, as I walked through the building, hooted and peeked from every corner of her enclosure, finally flirting, excited to see a new male.
Kanzi pushed his belly against the mesh and motioned to Tyler, who crouched and tickled him. Kanzi picked up his laminated sheet of lexigrams. Each time he pointed to one, Tyler explained it to me. Kanzi was requesting grape Kool-Aid and celery now, but he was also pointing at lexigrams to indicate that he wanted strawberries before bedtime. Watching, I recalled words from a book Savage-Rumbaugh had co-written with two fellow researchers, Pär Segerdahl and William Fields: “That Kanzi lives in a world permeated with language is visible in his physiognomy. . . . The way his eyes meet your eyes, the way he glances at other persons or cultural objects, the way he gestures towards you or manipulates objects with his hands: everything bears witness to his language.” As Tyler went to the kitchen to get Kool-Aid and celery, I sat on one side of the mesh, Kanzi on the other, a few inches between us. He glanced over and sighed, then just stared off, content with my company on this sleepy afternoon.
Even before my experiences here, my definition of humanity was larger than the one prevalent a few decades ago. Philosopher and anthropologist Raymond Corbey, in his essay “Ambiguous Apes,” describes how, in the 1950s, Belgian cinemas showed a film in which a scientist kills a mother gorilla and skins her body as her infant, soon to be sent to a zoo, sits crying next to her. He writes, “Ten or fifteen years later, such a scene, in a film meant to be seen by Western families with their children, had become unthinkable.” He reflects on French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas’s theory that the gaze of another “appeals directly, without mediation, to our moral awareness,” and he asks whether this holds true when it is not the gaze of “a human child but that of a gorilla child or an orang-utan child?” However, human attitudes are changing, and if we were exposed to the suffering of hunted and imprisoned great apes rather than to glossy photos of wildlife beauty on NGO fund-raising calendars—and if we understood the causes, frequency, and severity of this suffering—we might respond in greater numbers.
A firsthand experience, of course, has a different level of power, and for me, even during my short visit to the Great Ape Trust, there was no doubting the intelligence in the gazes of the bonobos. When we look into another’s eyes, we can tell whether her mind is spacious, holding room to consider, to see things from different angles and evaluate them, or whether she is simply carrying through motions, confined, driven by instinct and habit.
How would the bonobos in the Congo appear to me? Kanzi and Panbanisha were used to humans, my own visit insignificant to them. They’d taken a step into our world despite the gap between us, a gap made clear by the steel mesh of the enclosures—one no doubt smaller for those who worked with them. Though I was curious to know how I would perceive bonobos in the abundant rainforest that had formed their bodies, instincts, and cultures, I also wanted to see how conservation efforts could protect them. I was only beginning to understand that bonobos lived in social groups not so different from those of humans, sharing many behavioral traits with us: playing games, daydreaming, teaching children, establishing friendships, caring for each other’s injuries, or grieving for the loss of loved ones. It was hard to imagine their families broken apart, the adults shot, their bodies butchered or smoked, sold in bushmeat markets; the traumatized infants tied in baskets, starving for weeks as traders attempted to sell them. This, too, was part of the story, and I wondered if, when I saw the bonobos in the rainforest, it would affect the way they looked at me.
For many Westerners, it would be hard to travel to the Congo without confronting the way our cultural narrative portrays it: through a media rap sheet of barbarism so long it predates Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But what our fear blinds us to is that these descriptions say less about how the Congolese traditionally lived, and still live, than about the result of their living in one of the most fertile, mineral-rich, and strategically important nations on earth.
Before Western colonization, the area that now constitutes the DRC was home to dozens of complex societies. Over four hundred years ago, the Kongo Kingdom had ambassadors in Portugal, Spain, and the papal courts, as well as organized and trained militaries. The slow rise of the Portuguese slave trade—in conjunction with the spread of cash crop plantations in the New World—eroded the kingdom. In the late nineteenth century, rather than export the Congolese, the Belgians