My night flight from Paris arrived in Doha at dawn, the sun’s perfect orange disk on the horizon like an emblem of Arabia. I was en route for Uganda, where I would visit sanctuaries and learn more about primate conservation before traveling overland to the Congo. I had a nineteen-hour layover in Qatar, so, though sleepy, I hired a taxi to show me around. As the driver took us towards the downtown, it was difficult not to compare what I knew awaited me in Africa to the excesses I was seeing: SUVs and luxury cars, Hummers and BMWs, and the showcase of skyscrapers: sleek, modern constructions fused with Islamic facades, pointed arches in Westerner high rises, arabesques embroidering the edges.
Just before leaving Paris, I did a telephone interview with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the primatologist whose work on language capacity in apes, particularly bonobos. She has earned her a place on TIME’s 2011 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Surprisingly, shortly after receiving this honor, she lost the funding to continue her research. For more than three and a half decades, she has studied apes, first chimpanzees, then bonobos, to see how they use language.
The work was challenging for years until Kanzi, a baby bonobo who observed the language lessons that his adoptive mother, Matata, suffered through, suddenly demonstrated that he was learning English naturally, the way human children do. Given that a bonobo’s vocal cords are not suited to human language, he communicated using a sheet printed with symbols. When a symbol was lacking, he composed, asking for pizza by pointing to “cheese,” “tomato,” and “bread.” He’s been on CNN and Oprah, and is listed as a public figure on his Facebook page. I met him last April, and he studied me closely, as if to determine just how interesting this encounter might be. After all, he’d played music with Paul McCartney and Peter Gabriel.
When I spoke with Sue, I wanted to discuss how bonobos can serve as a flagship species for the Congo rainforest. I told her the question I most often hear—that many conservationists hear—“Why bonobos? What makes them interesting?” At first, she answered simply: “In terms of anatomy, genetics and personality, bonobos are the most humanlike of all apes.” But then, after a moment, she explained that in bonobos, “It is love and the rearing of children that holds the group together. Bonobos are the only great apes that live in large tribes in the Congo, and they most closely touch the origins of humankind… We still carry so much genetic heritage that’s in common with the bonobo that only by studying them can we have any inkling of what might actually have happened in the past.”
“And this is more true of bonobos than of Chimpanzees?” I asked.
“When the data is fully in,” she told me, “I think that it will be seen that bonobos are more fully related to humans in how their genes express themselves.”
For those who know little about bonobos, there’s a reason: they live only in the DR Congo, far from the coastline, and, because of their isolation and resemblance to chimpanzees, were the last great ape identified as a distinct species. Until recently, they received little media attention and lacked vocal champions like Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, and Birute Galdikas. They were nicknamed the “hippies of the forest” because they love sex and have never been witnessed killing each other. Unlike chimps, they mate face-to-face, gazing into each other’s eyes; they enjoy oral sex and French kissing, and are bisexual. This behavior is, of course, seen through the lens of human sexuality, and researchers often disagree as to its value for bonobos. What appears certain, however, is that, for comfort and reconciliation, they rely on frequent genital rubbing, which can take place with all combinations of partners in a group. They are also largely matriarchal, females forging alliances that determine the ranks of the males.
However, this is the sort of information gleaned from field observation, and there’s a line between what we can learn as scientists and what we learn by actually living with another creature. Sue has lived with bonobos for over three decades, attempting to take part in their culture while they have studied hers, and I asked what that had taught her.
“Freeing oneself absolutely,” she said, “from any thought or tendency towards aggression, and focusing on group love and cohesion—and I don’t mean sex—I mean love, is the way of the bonobos. It’s a message that humanity needs to try to understand.”
“But don’t they have conflict the way we do?” I asked, and she acknowledged that they did, often behaving like humans by screaming at each other and showing off their strength. “But,” she added, “they tend to try to find ways not to actually harm each other. They search for that… [Working with bonobos has] given me a perspective on humanity, a perspective on myself that I could never otherwise have had… Jane Goodall changed humanity’s view of itself when she revealed through her efforts with National Geographic that humankind shared a feeling world with chimpanzees… [With Kanzi] it has been shown that truly for the first time there are other animals on the planet that can share a language, intellectual, thinking world with human beings. You put those two together, and you have to ask what is human. So Kanzi is stretching the definition of human. He’s forcing a redefinition of what humanity means. And that for some is intriguing and fascinating. For others, it is very uncomfortable. In part, you can be influential because you upset the social system. Kanzi upsets the social norm.”
As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, the bonobos live in rainforests vital for the purification of the atmosphere, and what could be a better symbol of those forests than a creature who, in many ways, symbolizes our better selves and our ability to transform? And yet our increased awareness of bonobos has begun at a time of financial crisis. Even Sue has lost funding that, compared to the massive expenditures of governments and wealthy citizens, is very little. After all, I wrote the first draft of this blog in Doha, a few hours after having taken a taxi through the Pearl, a four million square meter artificial island of luxury villas, five star hotels, and very expensive boutiques. I couldn’t help but consider that humans often confuse personal transformation with the acquisition and exhibition of wealth, and no doubt, in a rampantly capitalistic world, money offers the clearest path to some sort of change. But if TIME acknowledged the importance of Sue’s work, it was because of what it says about the deeper power of our dynamic nature: that what we’re considering human can shift drastically, just as Kanzi is learning across cultures and expanding his notion of self.
“The important aspect of that message,” Sue told me, “is that humanity isn’t stuck in the current rut… We might consider ourselves a naked ape, but we have the capacity to be, let’s say, a godlike ape. We can do far more than we’re doing. We have limited ourselves and our understanding of our biology—our understanding of how we must structure the world—by the past. And we don’t have to continue to do that. If Kanzi can learn a language, what can human beings learn that we haven’t learned yet? We can certainly learn how to get along.”
At first, when I heard her say “a godlike ape,” I was surprised, and yet she was saying something that many of us have often thought. We value those with transformative powers and mastery; it’s why we constantly tell ourselves stories of anything even slightly superhuman. Ironically, despite what she was teaching us, she was facing having her bonobos split up within two or three months, each of them sent to whatever different institutions would accept them.
“Is there any last thing you would want to tell someone about bonobos?”
She hesitated for a long time.
“That,” she said, “that we’re just on the cusp of really understanding how brains interact, brains between species and human brains within a given body. We have thought of ourselves as individual sacks of skin. We’re far more connected than we’ve ever understood. And bonobos have almost a sixth sense. They have an understanding of their connectedness. And when we are able to finally grasp and measure that scientifically, I think we’ll be able to know what it means when we say humans have vibes or humans react with each other. I don’t think that’s just a phrase. I think there’s something going on that’s really happening between us, but that linguistically we have, through our culture, shut out. And bonobos haven’t shut that part of themselves out. So I just want people to realize that we’re just on the cusp of understanding the most fascinating species on the planet—not that elephants and dolphins and others aren’t—but we’re on the cusp of understanding that species and we’re about to decimate it in the Congo and we’re about to let the special group that we have here, that has language skills and can talk to us, disappear.”
Learn more about Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s work at www.bonobohope.org. For information about bonobo conservationism, visit bonobo.org. My website, dybechard.com, features more of my work. My travel updates and reading habits are on Twitter @denibechard. Track me online here with my satellite GPS tracker.
What do you think of Deni’s conversation with Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh and the fascinating culture of the bonobos? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below!
About the Author
Deni Y. Béchard
Deni Y. Béchard was born in British Columbia to French Canadian and American parents and grew up in both Canada and the United States. He has also traveled in over forty countries.
He is soon to publish Cures for Hunger (2012, Milkweed Editions), a memoir about growing up with his father who was a bank robber. His first novel, Vandal Love, (2006, Doubleday Canada) was published in French and Arabic, and won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, both for the best first book in Canada and for the best overall first book in the British Commonwealth. It was also nominated for Le Prix du Grand Public Salon du Livre Montréal/ La Presse, 2008, as well as the French version of Canada Reads (Le Combat des Livres, 2009). On four occasions, he has been a recipient of Canada Council and Québec Arts Council Grants, and he has been a fellow at MacDowell, Jentel, Ledig House, the Anderson Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Edward Albee Foundation.
He has done freelance reporting from Northern Iraq as well as from Afghanistan, and his articles, blogs, stories and translations have appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers, among them the National Post, Maisonneuve, Le Devoir, the Harvard Review, and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. He is currently doing research in the Congo rainforest as he works on a book about conservationism, Empty Hands, Open Arms: how saving the Congo’s bonobos can help save the world.
