Searching for Bonobo in Congo

Remembering Wally in Kinshasa

February 7, 2010 – 11:54 pm

Wally with daughters, Kristel and Nathalie, in the 1980s.

Wally was friend, landlord, and fellow annotator of life as seen from the center of the world, i.e. Kinshasa. His shop got the news of his death last Tuesday; strange, how quickly a place can feel empty and abandoned with everyone still standing around.

That changed on Saturday when friends and workers gathered here, at the shop, to say good-bye.

Gouv, always the organizer, arranged for the music, the chairs, beer and eats.

Gouv also gave the words of welcome on Saturday.

The orators came forward. After Gouv, Baruti, a Kinshasa artist, one of many who frequented Wally’s shops and whose art hangs on his walls, explained what Wally was in the life of his friends and the city. Then François, at least ten years as one of the guards and gardeners, offered the necessary rambling prayer.

Baruti speaks.

François prays.

The mood started somber as late afternoon turned to evening.

But Wally would have approved of the generous libations,something for everyone.

And he would have approved of the denouement: dancing and music, of course. It went on all night and welcomed the dawn.

Below are a couple memories from Wally’s Kinshasa neighbors:

Reflections on my friend, Wally
I remember vividly the first day I met Wally back in 1981. I was just finishing up my service as a Peace Corps volunteer and needed some money. Word had it amongst the PCVs that there was this mysterious guy living in the Inga Shaba Residence who cashed US checks at the black market rate which was six times the official rate. Back then, in Mobutu’s Zaire this was an illegal activity so I was advised to be very discreet when I went to see him. With some trepidation, I presented myself at the Residence entrance and a sentry led me to Wally’s room. In s very cordial and business-like manner he took my check, and making sure that I understood the process, carefully counted out the local currency equivalent and the transaction was completed. I am sure that there are probably hundreds of other ex- Peace Corps volunteers who share this same memory. The difference with me was that this first encounter would mark what would later prove to be the beginning of a long and enduring friendship. Before I go on with my dealings with Wally, I would like to just share a couple stories that kind of give an indication of who the Wally we knew and loved was. These stories are pretty tame. The really good stuff I wouldn’t dare put in writing.
Wally was very independent and on occasion was inclined to use extremely unconventional means to solve a problem. He was also an extremely meticulous manager and he had a habit of making daily to-do lists. I remember one time glancing at one of his lists and one item caught my eye. It said “ask Toby about poison for the chicken”. Needless to say, I was puzzled by this notation and when I asked him about it, he told me that there was a rooster residing at the nearby Peace Corps guest house whose crowing was waking him up every morning at 3:00 o’clock. This was making him extremely unhappy and he had decided to do something about it. In classic Wally style, he went down and railed at the house caretaker about the noisy bird on several occasions, but with no results. Having failed at negotiations, he had then decided that he was going to take matters into his own hands. He had a plan, hence the poison. Fortunately, the plan never reached fruition because he ran into the Peace Corps Director soon thereafter at the AERWA bar also known as the American Club They got to talking and Wally told him about this issue. The next day they both went over to the Guest house and the rooster’s elimination was ordered, thereby avoiding the poison option.
As most of his friends grew to learn, Wally was his own man and when he didn’t agree with something, he could become quite confrontational and was known to lose his temper from time to time. Many of us, for the most part unwittingly, were subject to one of these angry outbursts at one time or another. One of my favorite Wally stories happened in a Kinshasa restaurant about twenty years ago. I was not present, but a mutual friend told me about it, and Wally later confirmed it. The two of them were dining at Chez Nicolas where the specialty was pizza prepared by the owner in a brick oven adjacent to the dining area. Nicola was also a legendary Kinshasa character, known for having a bit of a short fuse. Wally had ordered a pizza, repeating several times slowly and methodically to the waiter that he did not want any green peppers on it. Well lo and behold; when the pizza was served it came with green peppers. Wally was not very happy about this and was in the process of giving the waiter a piece of his mind when Nicola himself came over to join in the fray. After exchanging a few choice words, Wally just stood up, pizza in hand, and in a short, quick, motion dropped it on the floor at Nicola’ feet. He then turned around and calmly exited the premises. Chez Nicolas was one of Kinshasa’s most popular restaurants at the time and there must have been 30-50 stunned diners witnessing this altercation. I recently learned of an interesting epilogue to this event when a couple of weeks ago, I was relating the story to Kristel and all of a sudden her face lit up. She then told me that for years she had never understood why every time she asked her dad if they could go to Nicolas for a pizza, Wally would suggest some other place. An old mystery had been solved.
Being a friend of Wally’s I also had my run-ins with him from time-to-time. This went with the territory, but we always reconciled our differences after a couple of days or so. Two very important words in Wally’s vocabulary were confrontation and reconciliation. Arguments happened, but his door was always open to make amends and it was over and completely forgotten.
Back to my personal history with Wally; after finishing up with Peace Corps, I stuck around in Zaire and tried to make a living for myself without much luck. Then in 1984, when Wally’s partner at Logistics and Supplies Company scheduled a trip to Europe, he asked me to fill in for him during his one month absence. Being between jobs, I jumped at this opportunity to make a little money. When we found out that his partner wouldn’t be coming back to Kinshasa for some time Wally asked me to stay on the job for another six months to help him close down the company. During this period, we shared the same office which gave me a unique opportunity to get to know Wally and benefit from his good will. He was a natural trainer, patient and supportive, and he taught me how to use a computer and schooled me on accounting procedures. When the six month period was up, we had closed the books on the Logistics and Supplies Company and my job was finished. I think that Wally felt a bit guilty about leaving me unemployed, so he managed to use his contacts to find me a short term opportunity working for German Technical Assistance conducting a fisheries study in the hinterlands of the Bandundu province. When this contract was finished, he found another employment opportunity for me, a consultancy with Peace Corps. He started a new company, called Capitale Associates and made me a minor shareholder. This made it possible for me to obtain a residents visa. Later, he asked me to take over his business for a year and a half while he went home to remodel a house. Back in 1990, he introduced me to the vice-president of the company that currently employs me and has employed me for the last twelve years.
During the last 26 years, I guess that I got to know Wally about as well as anyone in the DRC and throughout this period, he has had a profound positive influence on my life. He was a true self-starter, energetic, creative and always looking for new ideas and activities. He was a friend, mentor, role model, and advisor, and someone whom I could trust and confide to. He always seemed to be looking out for my best interests.
Wally was a creature of habit and generally, at around 5:00 PM, he would glance at the clock, proceed to lock up the office, and invite anyone present to go over to the American club for some liquid refreshment. I can still hear him saying “hey buddy, let’s go grab a beer”. I was a regular participant, and I wasn’t alone; in the old days there were usually a bunch of us guys who would conveniently show up at Wally’s late in the afternoon.
At the club, Wally was pretty much an institution. All sorts of people went there just to see him…..Lebanese, Pakistanis, Europeans, Congolese, Chinese, businessmen, pilots, CIA agents, Embassy officials, and people coming back after prolonged absences. They all knew Wally and wanted to get his take on the latest happenings in town. I was fortunate to be a spectator of and later a participant in these encounters. During the dark period between 1992 and 1997 when Mobutu and Zaire were being shunned by the international community, Wally and I were amongst the very few Americans still residing in country, and many times we were the only clients at the club. With no one else to hang out with, we got so accustomed to each other’s company that we used up all of our drinking stories. Countless times one of us would start up on a favorite anecdote and the other would say “I’ve already heard that one, but go ahead; I don’t mind hearing it again”. To this day, when something funny, out of the ordinary or outrageous happens to me, my first reaction is “I must call up Wally and tell him about this”.
While he could be cantankerous on occasion, Wally was also a very caring, compassionate person, and he was a great father. His office was located behind his residence and while at work, he frequently received visits from one or the other of his two young daughters. On these occasions he would immediately put aside anything he was doing to give his daughter his full attention. Among other things, Kristel would show up with questions on her homework and Nathalie was especially prone to bursting into the office, jumping up into her Dad’s lap, and wrapping her arms around his neck. He made a point of always being there for a hug and a few comforting words. I remember one time Wally told me that a visitor, after seeing him interact with his daughters had said he had decided to rethink his own lifelong decision to not have children. Wally told me that this made him feel pretty good.
While I miss Wally’s presence, I am comforted when I take into account that his suffering is over. Getting to know Kristel during her recent visit to Kinshasa reassured me that Wally’s spirit is embodied in the minds and character of his two daughters and this helps to take the edge off my grief. It isn’t easy though. Kinshasa will never be the same without my old friend. May he rest in peace. TOBY

Remembering Wally.
We first visited Wally’s “atelier” about 25 years ago. I remember it as bare and empty; a sort of forgotten back lot along the ports, but Wally obviously thought it was great. And it is! Wally took the storehouses and built apartments, he planted avocadoes and bougainvillea. He hung orchids in every corner that needed a little softening. Now we all live there, Dag, Minaz and us. We are there with the team Wally built up of handymen that can fix about anything: they will build a cabinet, frame a picture, or turn a container into a house. It is just Wally who is missing. No one delivers the three day old paper anymore, with half-smile and humor as dry as the newsprint itself. No one to stop by with the little pot of beans he cooked himself or to divide up the ripe avocadoes so we all get exactly our share. No one watching the evening news then up at 6 o’clock to get the day off right. Somedays just don’t get off right anymore. We miss you Wally. Terese

Wally’s perspective…
I think it may have been our rural Midwestern backgrounds that set the stage for the friendship between me and Wally. But it was a shared sense of humor about life in Kinshasa that led to a special understanding of each other over the years.

Every day in Kinshasa brought its little tribulations, hassles, problems that could have been avoided if only things were better organized. There was nothing we could do about most of them. They were as unavoidable, and unchangeable as the dusty crowd milling along the cratered road with its interminable traffic jams just outside our gate. But we could always joke about it all, most often relaxing over a beer at the end of the day.

Both Wally and I liked Congolese contemporary art, and especially the painting. One day we were commiserating about the difficulties encountered on the detours and back roads we took to avoid better traveled cross roads where there were traffic cops notorious for their petty shake downs. Wally made the off hand comment that “ a slice of the old gray matter gets taken off every day”.

“At this rate it won’t be long and there will be nothing left,” He laughed.

The image became a standing joke between us. Every small problem we reported to each other was announced as “another cut”. Every absurdity endured, we told each other, “It’s going fast”.

One evening, over a cold beer as the lovely golden light slanted into the parcel, Wally suggested we go see his friend the Congolese artist, Cheri Samba. Cheri Samba’s paintings developed themes of Kinshasa’s daily life. He certainly had an appreciation of the absurd that attracted Wally and me.

“ Let’s see if he can pick up on that theme of the daily cut”, Wally laughed.

Cheri Samba loved the idea, and one day, almost a year after we met him at his workshop in one of Kinshasa’s neighborhoods, he called Wally to come and get his “tableau”. Wally called me over that evening to come and see it. It was magnificent and totally hilarious. A series of vignettes, images of Kinshasa’s daily life, with a self portrait of the artist in each witness to it all, a caricature of resignation to the forces beyond his control. In each self portrait his brain was sitting beside him, attached to his head by an umbilical-like cord, and a slice neatly cut off. There was the traffic cop, stopping the car for some imagined “major infraction”. There was the street scene with an overloaded hand-pushed wheel barrow creating a major traffic jam. There was the petty bureaucrat presenting a list of hitherto unknown and unpaid taxes.

As I think back now about that painting, and how it came to be, it brings together for me a special side of Wally, his unswerving capacity to take Kinshasa as it came, and to make some thing of it.

I will miss Wally dearly. Kinshasa will continue to lurch on to its destiny unknown…But there will be for me an empty place that won’t easily be filled, a sharing of experience and an understanding of life in this African capital that will never be replaced. John

By Terese Hart | Posted in Kinshasa | Comments (4)

On the Google Lat and Long of Congo.

January 28, 2010 – 8:23 am

The high points and low points of the project are google-mapped. Nick January took the coordinates and pasted the posts into place, linked back to each event. We slipped the map into its own tab.
Take a look and let us know what is missing.

By Terese Hart | Posted in About the project | Comments (0)

Can Congo’s Forest Support Pygmy Hunter-Gathers?

January 19, 2010 – 6:42 pm

Pygmies do not now live independently in the Ituri Forest, but did they sometime in the past? For the last few centuries they have lived in a complex reciprocity with agriculturalists. The Mbuti pygmies provide meat, various forest products and other services in exchange for manioc flour, bananas, tubers and rice. No forests in Congo have Pygmies living as hunter-gatherers without a regular source of outside agricultural food. But maybe once they did?

In the 1970s John lived in the southern Ituri forest and discovered just how important farm food was in the diet of the Mbuti. Eight years later we returned to the central Ituri Forest, as a family, to do the research for our PhDs. Over those 2 ½ years we examined the forest’s own ability to provide the calories needed to maintain a group of hunter gathers. Could the forest do it? Or was agriculture a pre-requisite for forest people?

John weighing a baby duiker in 1981 “assisted” by our eldest daughter, Sarah, then three years old.

Here are some of the wild survival options we looked at:

BUSHMEAT:

Meat is currently the Mbuti’s most regularly acquired forest food. This bushmeat is mainly traded for agricultural starch. Could the meat, in and of itself, be the main caloric as well as the main protein component of Mbuti diet?

Mbuti pygmies on a net hunt in the central Ituri Forest carrying their nets between casts.

Cultures that rely on animals for calories hunt animals with fat-rich bodies. In the 1920s a study found that 75% of Inuit energy intake was from fat (walrus, polar bear, whale…). If only meat low in fats is available, protein must be metabolized for energy. This is inefficient and puts a physiological strain on the body.

In the early 1980s we followed net-hunters in the central Ituri Forest. We stayed 5-10 days each at 8 different camps located 6-30 miles from the village of Epulu. We followed all hunts and recorded all animals caught.

One of the measurements we took was an index of antelope body fat as % of kidney covered with fat. If a carcass had more than 20g of mesentery fat, the hunter would strip it and roast it over a fire. That was rare. It occurred only during the years of high seed fall when the forest floor is briefly covered with seeds shed by the forest’s dominant trees. Results: Only one dry season did kidney fat ratio average over 40% and then only briefly, by the beginning of the wet season and for the rest of the year the average was under 15%.

Mbuti have a name for protein hunger, ekbelu, separate from calorie hunger, njala. They won’t stay in the forest camps with njala no matter how many animals are being caught on the hunt.

In 1983, Sarah with our second daughter, Rebekah, in a hunting camp north of Epulu.

GATHERED PLANT FOODS:

There are a number of wild food plants with high calorie content that the Mbuti always collect when they find them.

Major “staple” plant foods gathered by the Mbuti in the central Ituri forest.

The wild plant foods above compare very favorably to agricultural foods with respect to energy available as fats or carbohydrates and some are high in protein as well. None of them however are dependable in terms of availability. They are either:
1. rare and/or
2. seasonal.

There are at least five months, even during the years of most abundant fruiting , when there are essentially no seeds available. Some years there is little fruiting at all. Yams are less seasonal but tend to be small in the Ituri and are only clumped in relatively rare environments.

Mbau is the only food tree that is not rare in mature forest. They are the dominant tree in forests that cover sometimes many tens of square kilometers (link). When one flowers they usually all flower, and during the fruiting season the forest floor is littered with the starchy seeds. However the season of plenty does not happen every year and even when it does it only lasts two months, at most three. And, alas that season of plenty coincides with the ripening of other fruits and seeds and is not a bridge over a period of dearth.

Secondary forests, where a garden existed from 10 to 50 years earlier, are the habitats favored by most wild food plants. Without agricultural disturbance, these trees would be much rarer in the interior of the forest being restricted to the deciduous edges of the forests and more open hill forests.

OTHER WILD FOREST FOODS:

Mbuti rarely move camp to be near wild food plants. There are, however, two wild foods that will cause Mbuti to move from their hunting camps or village camps for periods of days, even weeks at a time. These are honey and termites. Again these are unreliable from year to year. In the Ituri we only ate termites in one out of three years. Although honey is more reliable, years of truly abundant honey are not common.

Mbuti smoking out bees to take honey from a hive relatively near the ground. Usually this process happens high in the canopy.

Seasonality of non-bushmeat forest foods in a year of plenty.

Even in the best years, the Ituri Forest has at least five months of carbohydrate scarcity. Could the Mbuti live permanently within the closed forest before partnering with agriculturalists? Why would they? The easiest scenario to imagine is that the Mbuti lived on the edges of the rainforest, along the savanna margin or in deciduous forest. Many of the food plants are more abundant here and they would have had the option of moving in and out of deeper forest in response to availability of termites, honey or mbau seeds.

View Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers in a larger map

By Terese Hart | Posted in Bushmeat, Indigenous peoples, The Forest | Comments (5)

In the 1970s: Bushmeat Trade Manipulates Pygmy Economy and the Fate of the Forest.

December 30, 2009 – 5:24 am

In the 21st century the pygmy net-hunt has become a major source of bushmeat leaking out of the Okapi Reserve in Congo’s northeast Ituri Forest. The Mbuti pygmies are ineluctably depleting the Reserve’s animal resources, their only resources, by hunting deeper and deeper into the forest. Outside traders pack their wares deep into forest hunting camps, to come out as quickly as possible with loads of antelope carcasses they will sell at a phenomenal mark-up to the expanding markets both in the village of Epulu and in distant towns.

Is this new? Perhaps new in the Okapi Reserve, but John reported a similar commercialization of the net-hunt between 1973 and 1976 in the southern Ituri Forest. Fresh out of college, John spent two and a half years living with three different bands of Mbuti Pygmies. Later, 1979, he wrote up his observations as a Master’s Thesis.

John’s passport picture, 1970s, from the period he studied Mbuti hunting economy in the southern Ituri Forest.

Why did John do this? :

Like many college undergraduates in the early ‘70s he was charmed by Colin Turnbull’s romantic anthropology “The Forest People” (Simon and Schuster, 1962). The image was appealing: the Mbuti pygmies living in material simplicity whose daily security was guaranteed by intimate familiarity with a generous forest home. What was glaringly absent from Turnbull’s depiction of Mbuti life was any biological or economic analysis.

John was granted a Watson fellowship – 6,000 USD – to learn the economic-ecology of Mbuti culture in the Ituri Forest. He made the grant last two and a half years, covering his food, clothes and all his transportation. His largest purchase was a one-speed bicycle for occasional trips to larger towns. His second largest purchase was a kerosene lantern, so he could write notes late into the tropical darkness.

His methods:

John lived alone in the camps of three different Mbuti bands, each of which hunted different, but contiguous stretches of forest. He maintained continuous residence in the camps for periods of three to five weeks with only brief village breaks in between. His research tools were a tape recorder, a camera and hand-held spring-scales for weighing the fresh catch on net hunts and for weighing any garden food the Mbuti received in trade for bushmeat.

John spoke Kingwana, a version of Swahili used throughout eastern Congo and used by Mbuti as well, although he also learned to understand the more localized languages of Kibira and Kipakombe.

The question John started with:

1. Was it really possible for the forest to support an Mbuti culture living in isolation from agricultural villages ? This was Turnbull’s ideal.

A question John added once in the Ituri :

2. How able was the forest to support the high bushmeat demand coming from towns in the east? Meat-traders were an emerging reality.

At the Kugongea, or the opening fire at the start of the net-hunt where all the men, women and children gather who will take part in the hunt. Photo from John’s 1970s collection.

John found a traditional interdependence between Mbuti and forest bantu.

In the southeastern Ituri forest John found bantu populations for whom the forest is ancestral home. Among these groups, the Bira and Pakombe have been associated with pygmy populations for many generations, for as far back as their oral histories reach.

There are family level relationships between individual Bantu farmers and individual Mbuti hunters. These bantu, known as bakbala (mkbala = singular), provide their Mbuti “partner” with agricultural starches (cassava, plantains, yams) from their gardens. Mbuti provide their bakbala with wild meat from the forest. The bakbala are also the source of tools and clothing for the Mbuti who, for their part, diversify forest products for the bakbala including mushrooms, fish, and honey. They also provide intermittent day labor for the village gardens.

Mbuti woman with mushrooms she has brought to our house (1980s).

John’s description of this pygmy- bakbala traditional relationship:

1/ Reciprocity is not necessarily immediate. John recorded periods where a mkbala provided his Mbuti with starch on many successive days with no meat in return. This was possible as the relationship was long-standing with confidence on both sides that each would support the other. The Mbuti would eventually provide forest products. The relationship was personal, and based not only on the needs of the other but also based on current availability. When there was meat, the mkbala would be recompensed.

2/ Relationship is one on one. A mkbala has a relationship with a particular Mbuti who then shares garden starch acquired with other members of his enlarged family and band. Likewise, a mkbala receives meat from “his” Mbuti which he will, in turn, share with his immediate relatives and neighbors.

John made a couple other noteworthy discoveries about the kbala relationship:

• The net hunt, the spear, and all iron tools had their origin with the Bantu. Before interacting with Bantu, the Mbuti must have hunted with poison tip arrows and smoked animals out of holes. There would not have been the possibility for large meat surpluses. (this was more than five centuries ago)

• Although there are Bantu ethnic groups living in the forest without relationships with Mbuti; there were no Mbuti living as forest hunters without bakbala relationships. The forest does not provide adequate starch. Wild yams and Mbau nuts are the biggest wild sources of starch, but yams are not abundant and have a very limited distribution whereas Mbau nuts are available only briefly with unpredictable seasonality.

• Historically Mbuti have provided other services for bakbala. In the 19th and early 20th century they hunted elephants when the bakbala were being pressured by Arab merchants and later by Belgian colonists for this commodity. Even earlier the Mbuti were the guerilla warriors essential in the wars between different ethnic groups.

John also found a new commercialization of the net-hunt:

From 1973 to 1975 meat traders became an increasingly prominent part of the Mbuti economy in the southeastern Ituri. These traders from distant towns packed full loads of merchandise directly into hunting camps where they replaced them as quickly as possible with full loads of smoked bushmeat they packed back to the markets. The merchandise they brought was most frequently rice or cassava flour, sometimes liquour, sometimes trinkets.

One of the three bands of pygmies traded almost exclusively with meat traders or bachuuzi. They also hunted the most distant forest.

Woman wearing traditional Kange “paint”, flowers and twigs along with a trinket available from bachuuzi.

John’s description of the bachuuzi (trader)-pygmy relationship:

1/ The bachuuzi went to the most distant, animal rich camps. They traded exclusively for immediate return and left with their meat as soon as they ran out of trade items. Smoked meat begins to lose market value after a couple weeks so rapid trade was important.

2/Relationships with traders were ephemeral. There was no reciprocity, no willingness to make a loan. The bachuuzi’s goal was immediate profit and return on loans was far too uncertain to be practical.

John made a couple associated observations about the commercialized net hunt:

• Meat trade is exploitative. The value of the meat relative to the value of the starch decreased according to Bachuuzi trading standards. Several spot checks John made in the big markets around the forest showed that meat was running at five to ten times the amount paid by bachuuzi in the forest.

The “prices” meat traders would pay for bushmeat were far inferior (1/3) to what the bakbala would give for the same amount. The Mbuti “allowed” this exploitation for the convenience of having the agricultural food brought directly to their hunting camp.

• The commercial net hunt is depleting wild game resources. Over the study period there was decreasing hunting success and the Mbuti had to hunt longer hours and extend their hunting area into ever more remote forest, forest that would have previously been a refuge for animals.

For his two original questions , John found the following answers:

1/ The Mbuti do not live independently in the Ituri Forest . Agricultural starch is an important and regular part of their diet. It is indeed unlikely that Mbuti live exclusively as hunter-gatherers anywhere in the Congo as we have since found that the Ituri was among the richer forests.

2/ Sustainable net-hunting cannot fulfill the bushmeat demands of surrounding towns. The Mbuti with commercial traders are continuously moving into more remote unhunted forest.

Indeed the pattern in the southeastern forest of thirty-five years ago is very like the situation today in the Okapi Reserve. What would be interesting would be to know what has happened to the descendents of these three bands of Mbuti today. We will try to get this information and post it sometime during the next six months.

Photo from John’s 1970s collection.