Brazzaville Beach (3 page)

The essence of the Mallabar approach to the study of chimpanzee society was painstaking and time-consuming. Its first and key requirement was that the observer habituate himself with the apes he was studying so that they accepted his presence in their world without fear or inhibition. Once that had been achieved (it had taken Mallabar almost two years), then the next stage was to observe and record. Over the years of the project this process had
evolved into something highly organized and systematic, and vast amounts of data were gathered and analyzed. All observations were logged in a uniform way; chimps were identified and followed, and their biographies were steadily compiled and annotated over the years. The result was that, over the two decades since Mallabar's initial studies, the Grosso Arvore project now represented the most exhaustive and thorough study of
any
animal society in the history of scientific investigation.

Mallabar was not alone, of course: there were other celebrated primate studies going on as well in Africa—at Gombe Stream, at Mahale National Park, at Bossou in Guinea—but there was no doubt that Mallabar, and Grosso Arvore, had the highest profile and attracted, thanks to the allure and skill of its founder, a reputation that could only be described as glamorous.

In this long catalog of success and glory Mallabar had made one important error—but it was one he could not have foreseen, to do him justice. He had chosen the wrong country. The civil war that began in 1968 brought massive problems, not to say occasional danger. Happily, the fighting that took place was at a safe distance, but there remained always the threat of sudden upheavals and breakouts from enclaves. The crude violence employed by the four armies contesting power and the unpredictable nature of their fortunes meant that the old days of glossy magazine stories, cover features and TV documentaries were over. The census of the chimpanzee population of the Semirance Forest (a very expensive and ambitious undertaking) was the first casualty of the unrest once the supply of Ph.D. students dried up. Work permits and visas for the remaining scientists became far harder to come by, and all manner of provisions became unobtainable as international opinion and superpower muscle-flexing imposed official or unofficial economic sanctions. Worse still, the uncompromising savagery of the federal government's attempts to crush the competing guerrilla factions drew mounting condemnation and opprobrium from the West. The supply of grants and awards—the fuel upon which Grosso Arvore ran—began to dwindle alarmingly. Eugene Mallabar and Grosso Arvore found themselves attached, by association, to a bankrupt regime with an unsavory international reputation. Mallabar, needless to say, protested everywhere that the
interests of scientific research had nothing to do with politics, but to little avail.

But good times, he said in his inimitable fashion, were just over the next hill. Lately, a UN resolution had been ratified and widely supported. The most radical of the guerrilla armies, UNAMO, appeared to be terminally underaided and the other two—FIDE and EMLA—began to talk vaguely of reconciliation. Thus prompted, the federal government started to make noises of appeasement and hatchet-burying. Suddenly there was a little new money available, but still—despite all the peace-mongering in the air—nobody was prepared to take up the short-term job it was meant to fund. Until, that is, I came along. What made me do it? I shall tell you about that in due course.

Mallabar had a new book almost completed, a summation of his life's work. It was destined to be his chef d'oeuvre, the last word on chimpanzee society and what the years of work at the Grosso Arvore Project had taught humankind about their closest biological cousins. It was also designed as the crowning celebration of Grosso Arvore's silver jubilee: we were securely placed on the scientific map, but the new book was designed to etch Grosso Arvore's name in stone.

But as the book was in its final stages there had been a mystifying schism in the chimpanzee tribe that Mallabar had documented so thoroughly. For some unknown reason, a small group of chimpanzees had broken away from the main unit, had migrated south out of the Grosso Arvore park and had established themselves in an area of the forest not hitherto covered by the research project. Why had they left? Was this important? Did it signify something crucial and unrecognized in the evolution of chimpanzee society? A new job was funded to try and answer these questions. It fell to me to observe this small breakaway group—the southerners, as they were known—and continue the documentation of their daily lives until the book was ready, and to see if there was any explanation forthcoming for their untimely departure. “And besides,” Mallabar had said in—for him—a rare moment of anthropomorphism, “they are family. We would like to know why they left us and how they are getting on.”

 

João left me and Alda and set off in the rough direction Clovis had taken the day before. Alda and I planned to go to a large fig tree where the southern group often fed. We followed a winding path through the humid undergrowth. The seasonal rains were expected soon and the air was heavy with moisture, warm and stagnant. We walked at an easy pace, but I was soon sweating, and waving futilely at the platoons of flies that escorted us. Alda walked in front of me, the dark triangle of perspiration on his pink T-shirt pointing the way.

The fig tree proved to be empty apart from a small troupe of colobus monkeys. But in the distance, not too far off, I could hear the excited hooting and screaming of chimpanzees. Another fig tree grew in an outcrop of rocks about half a mile away. From the noise that was being generated it sounded as if the whole southern group might be there.

It took us half an hour to reach it. Alda and I approached with our usual caution. I led the way. I sank to my haunches about forty yards from the tree and took out my binoculars. I saw: Clovis, Mr. Jeb, Rita-Mae with her baby, Lester, Muffin and Rita-Lu…. Alda ticked their names off on the daily analysis sheet as I recited them. No sign of Conrad. No sign of pregnant Lena.

They were sitting high in the branches of the fig tree, a partially leafless
ficus mucosae
that at some juncture, I guessed, had been hit by lightning. Half of the tree was dead, stuck in a permanent winter, while the other half, as if in compensation, flourished vigorously. The chimps foraged idly on the ripe red fruit. They seemed content and unconcerned. I wondered what had made them scream.

Alda and I settled down for a long period of observation, our analysis sheets ready, our field journals open. The chimps glanced at us from time to time but otherwise ignored us—they were thoroughly habituated to observers. Through my binoculars I studied them all individually. I knew them and their personalities, I felt, as well as I knew my family. There was Clovis, the alpha male of the group, with his unusually thick, dense fur. Mr. Jeb, an old
male, bald-headed, with a gray goatee and a withered arm. Rita-Mae, a strong mature female, with patchy brown hair. Rita-Lu, her daughter, an almost mature adolescent. Rita-Mae's son was Muffin, an adolescent, a nervous, neurotic chimp who was only happy in his mother's presence and who had been deeply upset by the arrival of her new baby, Lester. The two members of the group who were missing were Conrad and Lena. Conrad was an adult male whose eyeballs around the iris were white, not brown, a feature that gave him a disconcertingly human gaze. Lena was heavily pregnant, by whom I had no idea. She was a lone female who had attached herself to this southern group. Sometimes she traveled with them for a few days but she always left of her own accord after a while, to reappear up to a week or so later. She kept herself somewhat aloof, on the fringes of the group, but they seemed to accept her comings and goings without fuss.

We watched the chimps for over two hours. Muffin groomed Rita-Mae. Rita-Lu left the tree for twenty minutes and returned. The troop of colobus monkeys—from the first fig tree, I supposed—passed nearby. The chimps barked at them. Clovis displayed aggressively, shaking branches, the hair on his body erect. Later Mr. Jeb tried, half-heartedly, to copulate with Rita-Lu, who was partially in estrus, but she drove him away. Lester played with his mother and brother. And so the time wore on, an average chimp day: feeding, grooming, relaxing, with a certain amount of aggression and sex.

And then they seemed to have eaten their fill. Rita-Mae picked up Lester, slung him on her back and slid down one of the huge buttressing roots of the fig tree to the ground. Slowly the others followed. They prowled around the foot of the tree for a while, munching on some fallen figs. Then baby Lester slipped off his mother's back and ran off to tug and pull at what looked like a tangle of rotting vegetation. Rita-Lu scampered after him, snatched the bundle away and flailed it violently up and down, making loud waa-bark noises as she did so. Through my binoculars I could see that the object she was flinging about was limp, but solid, like a very oily rag, say, or a dead fish.

She soon lost interest, however, as she saw the other members
of the group moving out of the fig tree clearing, and threw the bundle away as she ran to follow them.

“We go?” Alda said. Normally we would spend the rest of the day trailing the group.

“No. Wait,” I said. Something about that bundle intrigued me. We picked our way over the rocks to where Rita-Lu had flung it. Alda crouched down and prodded it with a twig.

“Baboon,” he said. “Baby baboon.”

The tiny carcass was half eaten. Most of the head was gone, as were the chest and stomach. Two legs and an arm remained. A gleam of thin white ribs, like the teeth of a comb, shone through blackening membrane. The pale body, a bloodless bluey gray, was covered in the finest down. It looked distressingly human.

A dead baby baboon, eaten by chimpanzees, was not extraordinary. Chimps would eat baby monkeys, duiker, bushpigs, anything they could catch…. But I knew this wasn't a baby baboon. This was the corpse of an infant chimpanzee, a few days old.

We have been aware for a long time now that chimpanzees are not pure vegetarians like gorillas. In London Zoo, in 1883, a chimp called Sally was observed to catch and eat a pigeon that had flown into her cage, and she continued to feast on any curious bird that hopped in looking for pickings. Indeed, Mallabar's own work here at Grosso Arvore had done much to establish the different types of meat that chimps consumed, and revealed for the first time their predatory nature. Mallabar was the first person ever to observe and photograph chimpanzees hunting monkeys. In a memorable film he shot, the world saw a group of adult chimpanzees organize themselves into a hunting party, chase, capture and consume a baby bushpig. Chimpanzees liked eating meat—people were very surprised to learn—and chimps hunted and killed in order to get it. It made them less lovable, less gentle, perhaps, but more human.

I walked around the rocks and the blasted fig tree and I thought of the way Rita-Lu had thrashed the ground with the tattered remains of this baby. I wondered what Eugene Mallabar would make of this. Alda waited patiently for me.

After a minute or two I told him to put the corpse in a plastic bag and seal it. As he did so, I examined the ground beneath the fig tree and collected samples of feces in my specimen bottles. As I labeled them I tried to keep my thoughts calm and rational. What I had here was some very interesting evidence, but the case it made was highly circumstantial…. First, there was the meat in Clovis's feces. Second, the half-eaten corpse of a baby chimp, two or three days old. Third, the gleeful aggression Rita-Lu had displayed toward the corpse. And fourth? Fourth, the possibility of more meat traces in the fecal matter just collected. What did that add up to? I checked my natural excitement: softly, softly, I thought.

Then there was the baby. Whose baby? Lena's? It was possible; she was due to give birth any day. But if so, how did the baby die? What had eaten it and why? And why had Rita-Lu behaved in such a way? I stopped myself from further unprofitable speculation. We needed more facts, more data. I sent Alda off to find João and said that both of them should try to locate Lena, find out if she had given birth and if her infant was with her. I picked up the plastic bag with the dead baby in it—so light—and headed back to Grosso Arvore.

 

I stood in Hauser's lab. The simple building, a rectangular corrugated-iron shack, contained a small but surprisingly efficient and well-equipped laboratory. Hauser's work at the project was to do with chimpanzee pathology. He was currently trying to identify the various types of intestinal worms that infected chimps; hence the avidity with which he welcomed our cloacal samples brought in from the field.

We stood together, now, looking down at the pathetic remains of the baby chimp laid out on a stainless steel dissecting tray. Hauser's lab had a small generator to power his centrifuges and chill his refrigerators. In a corner a table fan turned its face this way and that, dispensing its breeze, endlessly saying no, no, no. Hauser wore a white coat and trousers, but with no shirt or undershirt under the coat. Beneath the antiseptic smells of his chemicals and preserving spirits it was just possible to distinguish the
thin vinegar reek of his body odor, a noisome seam in the olfactory strata.

He gave a soft grunt and poked at the body with the end of his ballpoint pen. He lifted a minute leg and let it drop.

“It
is
a chimp,” I confirmed.

“Absolutely. Very young and maybe dead for twenty-four hours. Hard to say. Brains gone, viscera gone. Hardly worth chewing on the rest. Where did you find it?”

“Ah…at one of my feeding sites.”

“The very discreet Mrs. Clearwater responded.”

I ignored him and laid out my specimen bottles.

“Is there any way,” I began as lightly as I could manage, “that you could tell if these ones”—I pointed at the bottles—“had consumed this one?” I indicated the baby's corpse.

Hauser looked steadily at me, thinking. The sweat stood out on his bald head like little sun blisters. “Yes,” he said. “Tricky, but possible.”