The Ragged Edge of the World (21 page)

Since I wrote
The Alms Race
in 1976, I have made many trips through the continent. All too often it's been a depressing experience, and this was no exception. Arrayed along the road were village after village, indistinguishable from those I had passed on my first visit to East Africa in 1974. The only difference now was that there were more villages and fewer forests. Growth without development has been the central narrative of sub-Saharan Africa.

At some point it became clear that Marcel didn't know where we were going, so we started asking for directions in Kasese, 70 kilometers to the south of Fort Portal. As it turned out, however, when we finally did arrive, Wrangham's suggestion did the trick. In rundown Fort Portal, we found plenty of cabbies who knew the station, but none who could explain how to get there. Everybody kept saying, “Turn right up ahead,” but we suspected it was more complicated than that. We hired a kid on a motorcycle to lead the way.

We arrived at the station just as the sun was setting. I gave my driver some money for a room and meal back in Fort Portal, and then introduced myself. At the station were Kathi Pieta, who ran the station while completing her studies for the University of Vienna, and Kim Duffy, who was doing research as part of her graduate work at UCLA. Naturally, they had no idea I was coming, but to my relief, they knew who I was from my earlier writings on apes and were quite hospitable. At Richard's suggestion I came bearing gifts—some food and, more important, wine.

In terms of amenities the camp itself was in the midrange of research stations I've visited. The buildings were solid, the latrines well designed, and there was even water for washing up. We enjoyed our dinner out on the camp's simple porch. The camp cook had died two weeks earlier of AIDS, so Kathi worked up a nice meal of rice and sauce spiced by some sardines I had brought along and accompanied by a Wente Cabernet Sauvignon. Kim, fighting some tropical bug, passed on the food but joined the conversation, and the two graduate students told me a bit about the Kanyawara community of chimps.

The group then consisted of about fifty chimps, including about ten adult males, seventeen mothers in three different geographic groupings, and assorted other infants, adolescent males and nonreproducing females. The Kanyawara chimps don't seem to hunt as much as other chimps in the region but will go after red colobus monkeys when the opportunity presents itself.

Farther up the mountain slopes lay the Ngogo Primate Project run by John Mitani of the University of Michigan and David Watts, who began his work with primates at Karisoke. Hunting figures far more prominently in the Ngogo chimp community, with prey that includes black and white colobus, mangabeys, duikers, and red tail monkeys, as well as red colobus. (The Ngogo chimps apparently also had epic confrontations with neighboring chimp communities, with up to forty male chimps squaring off against one another in battle.)

In the Kanyawara community, Imoso was then the top dog. Described as young and very aggressive, he had seized the dominant spot in 1998 when the former alpha male, Big Brown, found himself hampered by a snare caught on one hand that forced him to carry around a big log until he eventually got free of the wire. Imoso did not seem to be a popular leader, among either the chimps or their human observers.

His reputation did not improve among the researchers with the discovery that he was a wife beater. As Carole Hooven, the researcher who first saw the behavior, described the attack, Imoso had been trying to get at Outamba's infant. Perhaps afraid that Imoso intended harm (there have been cases of infanticide in the Kanyawara community), Outamba fended off his efforts. This seemed to enrage Imoso, who began kicking and punching Outamba, who exposed her back to Imoso while she cradled and protected the infant.

Carole took notes in her neat, precise handwriting, and then prepared a summary of the attack for Richard Wrangham. As she described what happened next: “MS [Imoso] first attacks OU [Outamba] with one stick for about 45 seconds, holding it with his right hand, near the middle of the stick. She was hit about 5 times with the stick. My notes read that he beat her ‘hard.' (The stick was bought down on her in a somewhat inefficient way—if I were to hit someone with a stick, I'd raise a bent arm, holding the stick at an angle to the object I was hitting, and swing the stick down. MS seemed to start with the stick almost parallel to the body and bring it down in a parallel motion. There was a slight angle to his motion, but not the way a human would do it for maximum impact.) During this first beating, she was also punched and kicked several times.”

After resting for a minute, Imoso resumed the attack, this time with two sticks, again held toward the middle of the stick. The assault continued with Imoso hurting Outamba in a number of creative ways, once hanging from a branch above her and stamping on her with his feet. To Carole the attack seemed “interminable.” Throughout the beating, Outamba protected the infant, and indeed, toward the end, her three-year-old son, Tenkere, gallantly rushed to her aid, pounding on Imoso's back with his little fists.

Imoso may have started a new trend in Kanyawara. Johnny, his best friend, was the next to beat up poor Outamba in the summer of 2000 during the fruiting season of the
Uvariopsis
trees, which provided a favorite food for the chimp community. Again, Outamba's infant daughter seemed to figure in the attack. Kathi was observing Outamba when, seemingly for no reason, Johnny attacked the youngster. Outamba again attempted to protect her offspring, whereupon Johnny turned on her. He tried to hit her, and immediately she became submissive.

Johnny was not to be appeased, however, and after first stepping on Outamba, he picked up a big stick and started hitting her. Excited by the commotion, two other young males came galloping over, displaying, at which point Outamba seized her opportunity to escape and fled to a tree. The whole attack lasted perhaps three minutes. After a short while in the tree, Outamba came down and acceded to Johnny's invitation to copulate. He left the stick on the forest floor. After the chimps moved on, Kathi Pieta retrieved the stick, which is now at the Museum of Anthropology at Harvard.

After the encounter, the humans were stunned, knowing they had witnessed something important but, again, not quite sure what it meant. You don't launch a study based on two observations, but the researchers did start paying attention to the ways in which chimps used sticks.

I was to learn more about the niceties of sticks as weapons when I woke at 4:45 to meet up with Kathi; Donor, the head tracker; and another tracker, Francis Mugurousi, to go in search of Johnny, Imoso, and their beleaguered wives. We left at 5:30 and after a vigorous walk reached the area of a fruiting ficus tree where the chimps had built their nests the previous evening. At 6:30 we heard the first pant hooting, and by 6:50 the chimps were already feeding in the ficus down the trail.

Johnny was there, as were Mokoko and a number of other chimps. Imoso had not been seen for several months. As we watched, a little three-year-old female was struggling to get up into the ficus. The trunk at the base was far too large for her to grab, so first she tried climbing a neighboring sapling. Finding the gap too wide, she carefully jumped to another, closer tree. No luck here either, so the determined toddler tried a third tree. Success! She managed to transfer from a branch of this sapling to a part of the ficus trunk that she could grasp. Donor applauded. He was a good-humored man who clearly was very fond of the animals he tracks.

Donor and Francis brought with them “urine sticks,” which had an absorbent sponge on top that they used to collect urine samples from leaves when the chimps above peed. The samples were used for genetic testing and for monitoring hormone levels. As he took a sample, I asked Donor for his thoughts on why Imoso had attacked Outamba. “Imoso is just a mean chimp,” he replied, adding that he knew he was witnessing something extraordinary when he saw the beating, but his excitement was tempered by his sympathy for poor Outamba. Donor also confirmed that the chimp's hitting stroke was not particularly efficient if he was trying to inflict maximum damage. “It was not like a man hitting another with a stick,” said Donor.

Francis had viewed his share of beatings as well. He saw Imoso beat one female after inspecting her and discovering she was not ready for copulation. In this instance, he picked up one stick and beat her, then dropped it and picked up another to continue the beating.

While all the instances thus far observed had involved males hitting females, Francis and others had observed male chimps threaten other males with sticks. Francis noted that Johnny attacked one male named Stocky in 1998. After screaming, Stocky picked up his own one-meter-long stick. Seeing this, Johnny stopped his attack and ran into a tree. On another occasion, during a charge Imoso picked up a half-meter-long stick and threw it at another male named Tofu, but missed.

The attacks raise many more questions than answers. Is this a new behavior, or merely the first observation of one that has persisted for thousands of years? Why is it that the chimps seem to use sticks more often against females than males? Is it because the stick as weapon is a new technology and the risks are lower testing it against females, who are no physical match for the males? When I spoke to him on my return to the United States, Richard Wrangham noted that male-male attacks have such high stakes that few males would risk trying out a weapon before they were certain that it would work.

On the other hand, no one knows what chimps do during the 99 percent of the time that they are out of sight of humans. If they ever develop an efficient swing, they could, with their incredible strength, do real damage to each other and to other species. Wrangham also said that maybe one out of a hundred sticks lying around in the forest might be robust enough to withstand a blow delivered by an adult male chimp.

After a while the chimps moved off. We followed, Kathi occasionally jotting in her notebook. The blond graduate student had a diffident manner, but she moved with easy confidence in the forest and didn't miss a thing. We had not gone far when the chimps simply melted into the thick undergrowth, providing an excellent demonstration of the virtues of knuckle-walking in such areas. As they disappeared on what seemed like a very deliberate route, I asked Kathi which of the chimps made the plan for the day. “Johnny thinks he does,” she said with a laugh.

The preliminary evidence of weapon use may be an exciting discovery, but the last thing these and other chimps need is another way to hasten their own extinction. The Kanyawara chimps already have plenty of external threats to cope with. Apart from intermittent guerrilla activity, there are poachers who set snares to catch whatever comes along. Even if the chimp manages to get free of a wire, it often loses a hand. One chimp, Nectar, eventually lost both hands and starved when she could no longer climb, according to Kathi. The station now has two full-time employees dedicated to finding and destroying snares.

After failing to reestablish contact with Johnny and his chimp gang, we made our way back to the station, where I had further discussions with Kim Duffy and other trackers who stopped by. Then my driver arrived and, again accompanied by the incessant pinging in his car, we made our way, at insane speed, back to Kampala.

Back in New York, exhausted, having flown straight from Entebbe, I experienced that inevitable sense of relief that comes from leaving an impoverished, disease-ravaged region that bears the scars of war and returning to the relative safety and comfort of my home just outside New York City. I returned on September 8, 2001, three days before the airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, horribly underscoring our superiority over chimps in the development and use of weapons.

Still, we don't really know what we don't know about what chimps do in the wild. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In the meantime, researchers continue to ponder the mysteries of chimp weapons in a type of
CSI Chimpanzee
. For instance: Why sticks, not rocks? Chimps do use rocks in food gathering and, in the Tai Forest, to smash nuts. At Gombe chimps have used rocks in hunting. In one documented instance, a male threw a rock at an adult forest pig in order to separate it from a piglet the chimps were hunting. A chimp could mortally injure another chimp by hitting it with a rock.

Both Richard Wrangham and Carole Hooven speculate that this might be one reason for the preference for sticks: Their intention is to inflict hurt rather than serious injury. Most of the attacks have been directed at sexually active females, and while the males might intend harm to the babies, they have nothing to gain by killing their mates. Brutal as it seems, is it possible that the use of sticks is an indicator of restraint rather than a chimp arms race?

It's also possible that chimps are simply more familiar with sticks. They use them occasionally to scratch themselves, and, more to the point, they will sometimes throw sticks at mangabeys to chase them away from fruits that the chimps covet. I had wild chimps throw branches at me, but this was clearly for show, as the branch fell harmlessly to the ground. They also use sticks as props during threat displays. A male wants to look as big and threatening as possible during a threat, and he will seize on anything to help it do so. (One intriguing development observed since the first attack has been instances in which young females carry sticks. In this case, however, the females hold the sticks more like dolls than weapons, sometimes even placing them in little nests.)