The Ragged Edge of the World (20 page)

After Prof climbed up a tree to eat palm pith, Jane looked at her watch. It was 11 a.m., she pointed out—one hour until Saddam's deadline. Shortly thereafter we heard screams in the distance. “Colobus,” said Jane. “The chimps are hunting colobus monkeys.” Again we heard screaming and then quiet. Jane thought and then said, “The colobus chased them away—that's what blew Christophe's mind.” She was referring to Christophe Boesch, who had studied chimp hunting behavior in the Tai Forest in the Ivory Coast. “Anyway,” said Jane, “I hate hunting. I like mothers and babies.”

Later we walked up to the feeding station, which she'd established nearly thirty years earlier, and where she and Hugo raised their son, Grub. From there we proceeded to a waterfall about twenty minutes from the station. Jane explained that the chimps did the most remarkable display in the waterfall, climbing up vines and swinging into the spray. She added that whenever she was asked whether chimps had a religion, she thought of how they reacted to the spray and also the wind and the rain, and all the other magical, essential elements of nature, and how they had no means of sharing their primal response to these forces. She was convinced that what she was witnessing in those scenes was the stuff out of which religions were formed, a pantheism that dates back millions of years.

Back at camp we discovered that a group of potential donors had arrived by seaplane along with a huge shipment of food. This was most welcome, since we had eaten nothing but cheese and bread for the past four meals. Gita Patel turned out to be a nice fellow who was captivated by chimps. When he heard that Jane's guesthouse had been ransacked by thieves and wrecked, he offered to build her a new building and replace all the stolen items. This was not an atypical reaction to Jane. That night we spread out a tarp on the beach and had a barbecue. It was a perfect evening, and I felt the most relaxed since my arrival in Africa.

The next morning I spent a long time looking out over the pure lake from this beautiful spot. I didn't want to leave, but it was ultimately wearying to spend too much time in the presence of a legend. This was no fault of Jane's—indeed, she was funny, charming and as canny an observer of the sexual politics of research stations as she was of chimps. Still, the gravitational force of celebrity implacably bent everything to Jane, the chimps and their plight, and after a while I felt I needed air. It was time to go.

I
n New Guinea, the ornithologist Ralph Bulmer discovered that locals like Saem Majnep could offhandedly tell him things about birds that he might otherwise have spent years trying to discover. In 1991 I had a similar experience involving Pygmies and their knowledge of the forest. But perhaps I hadn't been as open-minded as Bulmer, and I discovered that to benefit from indigenous knowledge, you had to pay attention. When a Ba'Aka Pygmy told me about an extraordinary behavior his father had observed, I at first dismissed it as unverifiable. I should have given him more credence.

About ten years later science finally caught up with what Pygmies knew all along. This is a story about what we can learn from listening to those who live in the forest. It is also a story about how little we still know about our closest relatives. As noted earlier, what is a cultural holocaust for indigenous people at the ragged edge of the world has reified into a literal holocaust for the great apes. Even those chimps that have survived in a few isolated enclaves still risk losing their culture. At the eleventh hour for these apes, we are finally discovering how rich their own culture is.

During my travels in the Central African rainforests, the Pygmies told me many stories about chimps and gorillas, which ranged from the same behaviors observed by scientists to the truly extraordinary. A story recounted by Bakombe, a Pygmy who worked with Andrea Turkalo, fell into the former category. He spoke of how his father had told him once that he saw chimps dancing around a tree while making pleasure grunts and “having fun.” This corresponded somewhat with Jane Goodall's account of seeing chimps perform what looked like a celebratory dance during a rainstorm. It was possible that Bakombe was accurately reporting what his father saw, but I had no way of knowing.

The Pygmies had no problem acknowledging kinship with chimps. Said Teti, another of Andrea's guides, “Chimps are like us. They eat like us; they eat honey like we do.” He then described how they would take a stick to enlarge a hole in a tree and then put their hand in to remove the honey. Teti said that he had never seen a gorilla use a tool. All the Pygmies I spoke with argued that chimps were far smarter than gorillas.

Then there were the more fantastic stories, some subsequently verified and others yet to be confirmed. Teti had said that gorillas and chimps don't get along, and to illustrate the bad blood he mentioned an encounter he had witnessed when he was out in the forest with his father as a boy. He said that he saw a battle between chimps and some gorillas, and that the chimps won, perhaps in part because they used sticks as weapons.

If confirmed, this would have been astonishing. The literature on chimp “warfare” is large, but I hadn't come across any accounts of fights between chimps and gorillas. Gorilla social structure, organized around a silverback and his harem, is not nearly as complex as chimp society. I didn't know of any examples of gorillas cooperating in warfare, so in theory at least, I could imagine that an organized group of chimp males might have an advantage over a silverback-led group, despite the huge gorilla advantage in size and strength. Chimps are well known to use sticks in threat displays, but no one had ever reported on chimps using sticks purposefully as weapons either in competition with other males or in battle. Finally, chimps and gorillas are typically not in proximity to each other. So to believe what Teti described, I would have had to suspend disbelief about an increasingly incredible series of behaviors.

A year later, when I was on another trip into the forest, another Pygmy guide shared an account of chimps using sticks to do battle with gorillas, likewise citing this as evidence that chimps were smarter than gorillas. Once again I figured that he was confusing a threat display with actual weapon use. Once again I did not think the story worthy of mention in the article I was writing on apes and humans. Once again I may have been wrong.

In 2000 I ran into Richard Wrangham, one of the world's leading experts on chimpanzees, at an interdisciplinary meeting on animal intelligence convened by the Chicago Academy of Sciences in honor of the thirtyfifth anniversary of Jane Goodall's establishment of the Gombe Stream Reserve. I knew Wrangham from interviews I had conducted during the reporting of my story on apes and humans for
National Geographic
. He was cautious but excited when he passed along some news: Two of the researchers at his study site in Uganda had witnessed chimps using weapons to beat other chimps. His caution was merited because of the paucity of data. With such a small database, the behavior might be the product of anything, including happenstance.

Still, I instantly remembered what Teti had told me years earlier. I also knew that I had to get to Kibale, Wrangham's research station, and the opportunity presented itself a year later when I received an urgent request to go to Nairobi, Kenya, in the summer of 2001 to do some last-minute editing/ rewriting of a United Nations paper on desertification. It was just a brief flight from Nairobi to Entebbe, and I figured that after my work was done, I could take on a trip to Kibale before flying home. Because of the imminent deadline I booked my flight to Kenya for the very next day, and so I immediately called Wrangham, who graciously agreed to contact the two American researchers then in residence and let them know that I would be stopping by. As for directions, he might have been guiding me to the local Starbucks: “Get to Fort Portal,” he said as though this were the easiest thing in the world, “and then find the cab stand near the post office. They all know the way, and the trip takes about forty-five minutes.” This was not a lot to go on, but I did not have time to worry about details.

I was set, or as set as things ever are when a trip in Africa is involved.

Wrangham, who is an expert on chimp warfare, established the research program in Kibale in 1988. He began his work at Jane Goodall's Gombe Stream Reserve, and in the course of one of his studies of intergroup raids discovered that during them chimps show none of the restraint that mutes the consequences of fights to improve status within a group. Sometimes raiding groups will hold an enemy chimp down while others try to rip him apart.

Wrangham argues that this rare natural instance of intraspecies warfare is, for better or worse, one piece of evidence of the extremely close links between humans and chimps. He believes that the shared trait of conducting warfare suggests that human proclivities to wage war predate the dawn of the hominid line. Wrangham developed this argument in
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
(1996), which he coauthored with Dale Peterson.

Some studies have shown that as many as one-third of all male chimps die at the hands of other chimps. With that kind of kill rate, who needs weapons? Hence, I was simply fascinated when Wrangham first told me about what his researchers had seen in the forests of Uganda.

The writing job in Nairobi was intense, but it went well, and after I finished I took the short flight to Entebbe. I arrived at the Grand Imperial Hotel in Kampala at about midnight, and its name proved to be quite accurate, since the sprawling building had clearly seen its best days when Uganda was part of the British Empire. My plan was to get up early, hire a reliable car and driver, and head out that morning. To get to Fort Portal, we would have to traverse the entire width of the country, but Wrangham had said the trip could be done in six to eight hours. With any luck I would arrive in Fort Portal before sunset, and with any luck we could get directions to the research site, and with any luck Kathi Pieta, who ran the chimp station, would have received my message and not turn me away. (I'd sent an e-mail, but Wrangham had said that the staff collected e-mails only intermittently when they made trips into town.)

If my journey was successful, I would get up early and tag along if someone was planning to follow the chimps. I've visited most of the major great ape research stations over the years and am fairly familiar with the etiquette of following chimps, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans in the wild. After interviewing as many of the researchers and field assistants as I could fit into this short schedule, I planned to have my hypothetically reliable driver pick me up and take me back to Kampala. Faced with a plethora of other deadlines, I had to get back to the United States quickly.

The plan contained more ifs than Rudyard Kipling's poem, and enough hope to loft a dirigible. In fact it was preposterous. In a country where reliable cars are as rare as rhinos, where the roads have one of the worst accident rates in the world, and where you never know what various armed guerrilla groups are up to, I was leaving myself no margin for error. It would have been absurd for me to try to limit myself to one day's reporting had this research station been in the Catskills, but it was little short of lunacy trying to do so halfway around the planet in one of the more remote corners of Africa.

Sometimes you have a feeling about these things, though, and when my plane landed in Entebbe without incident, I felt I was off to a good start. The feeling continued the next morning when the hotel concierge found me a car and an affable driver who said that he could take me across the country and back for a reasonable fee, plus gas. (I asked the man his name three times, but he was so shy and his accent so thick that I heard only a murmur that sounded like “Marcel.”) I took a long look at his run-down Toyota. It seemed okay, and indeed, but for a persistent and ultimately maddening pinging that accompanied us all 900 kilometers of the trip, the car ran fine.

Marcel said that the direct road between Kampala and Fort Portal was bad, so we took a circuitous route south to Mbarra and then up through Kasese. Once outside Kampala we did not encounter a single traffic light during the entire trip. Marcel kept the speedometer needle pressed close to 120 kilometers per hour except on those occasions when we passed through villages, when he dropped to 100 kph.

If Uganda vies for superlatives in any category in Africa, it has the best shot at the title for the most dangerous roads. The problem is that they are just good enough to encourage extreme high-speed driving. On the other hand, there are no traffic lights or other controls whatsoever. During my trip to Kibale, 3.3 percent of the nation's sportswriters were killed in just one head-on collision, according to the
Monitor,
a lively tabloid. The only real limit on the death toll seems to be the price of gas, which keeps most vehicles off the road. As it was, most of the cars we encountered seemed to be official vehicles of one of the myriad organizations attempting to better the lives of Ugandans.