Chimpanzees in the Shadow of a Lion-Shaped Mountain

Human-chimpanzee conflicts threaten the survival of our closest living relative in Sierra Leone

In a small village in central Sierra Leone, an elderly woman I know as “Granny” sits in front of a thatched roof hut and hums while weaving a grass mat. She is surrounded by a cultivated garden of mangos, bananas, and pineapples. The mangoes are ripe and ready to pick. The bananas and pineapples will follow soon after. Beyond this garden is a thick wall of forest.

 Tacugama Chimpanzee SanctuaryPhoto by bobthemagicdragon, on Flickr A chimpanzee at the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Sierra Leone. The majority of chimpanzees in Sierra Leone live outside of protected areas.

Granny’s singing is suddenly interrupted. Something is moving in the forest. She puts her weaving down, stands up, and stares into the trees. The movement has stopped and the forest is still. Granny sits back down and resumes her weaving. This time, however, silently.

Granny lives in a village that I encountered on my first trip to Sierra Leone. I was there to study how chimpanzee calls are affected by the specific acoustics of each habitat. While looking for chimpanzees in a riverine forest, my team and I stumbled upon a clearing with several nests visible from the road. We drove to the nearest village, called Maroki, and were met by the chief. When we asked if there were chimpanzees in the area, he excitedly reported that they had “many chimpanzees.” In fact, he said, beaming, they had just killed two a few days ago! At this, we decided to stay in the village. Over the next few weeks we explored, searched for chimpanzees, and got to know the villagers.

Now, years later, as I stand just a few meters away, Granny weaves in the garden and the movement in the forest returns. Three large male chimpanzees emerge and enter the garden so silently that Granny doesn’t hear them. They walk slowly, in a single-file line, and move closer to her. These chimpanzees are part of a group that occupies a forest fragment beside the village. The group has a population density that is unusually high for chimpanzees. The results of an early census, which we conducted soon after our arrival, revealed a density of two chimpanzees per square kilometer. Limited food resources in the forest fragment points to a population that is not sustainable in this habitat. They do not have the area or resources necessary to viably support a group of this size; and yet, they survive.

This group, sharing a habitat with Maroki, represents a growing reality for wild chimpanzees everywhere. Instead of living deep inside a protected forest, chimpanzees are now, more often than not, scattered in small forest fragments. They live alongside human villages with virtually no protection. This leads to frequent interactions between the two species, which, almost all of the time, prove to be profoundly negative: Chimpanzees raiding crops, chimpanzees killing livestock, chimpanzees attacking humans, and humans killing chimpanzees — all of which have occurred in Granny’s village.

For this reason, when Granny finally sees the chimpanzees coming towards her, she is terrified. She drops her weaving and stands up on her chair. She begins to shout at them. They ignore her and make their way to the mango trees. The three chimpanzees ascend three different trees. Granny climbs down off the chair, picks up a stick, and begins to shake it at them. Her voice has gone from terror to frustration, and now, to rage. Still, the chimpanzees take no notice. Within moments, the three mango trees are bare. Returning to the ground with their arms full of fruit, the chimpanzees make their way to the forest edge. As they disappear into the trees, Granny throws her stick down. Defeated, she walks into her hut.

A camera trap captures a chimpanzee walking through a forest fragment close to Granny's garden.</

Though frustrating, losing mangos is far from the most significant form of competition the village has with the chimpanzees. The village economy is centered on oil palm cultivation. Villagers receive loans for oil palm seeds in the hopes of harvesting the oil and using the kernels to make soap. They can then sell these products in the nearest town. However, the chimpanzees frequently eat the petiole of the palm (the stalk connecting the palm fronds to the trunk), killing the trees in the process. The villagers are left in debt for the seeds and devoid of any economic means.

It was not always this bad. Prior to the 10-year Sierra Leone Civil War, which ended in 2002, the primary means of economic activity for the village was rearing livestock and cultivating honey through bee keeping. However, during the war, rebels occupied the village, killed the livestock, destroyed the bee keeping boxes, and burnt all of their remaining crop fields. By the end of the war, the village was left with nothing. The situation intensified competition with (and hatred of) the small group of chimpanzees sharing the village ecosystem.

For the chimpanzees, the situation has also grown more dire. Deforestation rates, which have increased 7.3 percent since the end of the war, have, quite literally, pushed chimpanzees closer together into these tiny unsustainable forest fragments. As a result, the chimpanzees are, in effect, forced to crop-raid to survive.

In Granny’s village, the crops provide a crucial source of nutrition for the chimpanzees. The oil palms provide necessary lipids and vitamins. The non-native bananas, mangos, and pineapples provide high-energy food resources that are, otherwise, not found in the nearby forest fragments. The chimpanzees have adopted these crops into their diets as preferred food sources; despite the fact that they risk getting shot in the process of obtaining them.

Such is the situation for the chimpanzees raiding Granny’s mango trees. After they disappear into the forest, they make their way along a chimpanzee-created trail. They stop after a while and eat some of their mangos, leaving the seeds along the path. Mango seeds, that without human introduction would have never touched the inside of an African forest, are now deposited in the African soil by a nonhuman species.

On many occasions, I have seen mango saplings deep in the forest. A local hunter has taken me through the forest, shown me the chimpanzee-created trails, and pointed out mango saplings that are growing alongside the path — some that have sprouted into fruit bearing trees. Through the presence of humans, the chimpanzees have inadvertently been able to change the ecology of their forest and increase their food resources.

I once asked the hunter if the presence of new fruit in these “chimpanzee gardens” made the presence of chimpanzees any more bearable. The humans, I reasoned, could go into the forest and harvest these fruits. He explained that the people in the village feared the chimpanzees. They were dangerous in addition to being destructive. The more interactions they had with the chimpanzees, the more likely they were to be attacked by one.

The hunter also pointed out that villagers could benefit from selling a dead chimpanzee. Even though killing a chimpanzee is illegal in Sierra Leone, the fine is minimal (roughly $1 US). The parts of a dead chimpanzee, often sold as bush meat or for use in ritual practices, can garner hundreds of dollars on the market. This fact, coupled with a perception of chimpanzees as dangerous pests, ensures a dire situation for the future.

In 2010, the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Freetown, Sierra Leone, commissioned a nationwide census of chimpanzees. The census revealed that the majority of chimpanzees in the country live outside of protected areas, in situations much like that in Granny’s village. This census was followed, a year later, by a Population Habitat Viability Assessment workshop that identified human-chimpanzee conflicts as a primary issue affecting chimpanzee viability in Sierra Leone. Taking Sierra Leone as an indicator of chimpanzee viability worldwide (the nation, boasting the second highest population of western chimpanzees, showcases frequencies and facets of human-chimpanzee interactions that occur throughout the continent), it becomes obvious that if we don’t find a solution to mitigating the conflicts between humans and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives will disappear quickly from the Earth.

I follow the chimpanzee trail from Granny’s garden into the forest. The trail takes me deep into the heart of the fragment, past chimpanzee nests, and, finally, to a wide river. The river, which forms the eastern border of the fragment, travels for over a hundred kilometers, flows into the Freetown Estuary, and empties into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Freetown Estuary acts as a nautical gateway into the interior of the county. It is flanked by an unnamed massive lion-shaped range of hills. Their shape provided the country with its name after early Portuguese explorers stumbled across the land, naming it Sierra Lyoa (Lion Mountain in Portuguese), which later became Sierra Leone. If you use your imagination, you can see the lion. I imagine the towering shape would have looked forbidding to sailors coming into the estuary — almost as if the land was guarded by the Earth’s most powerful creature. However, the lion-shaped mountain failed to protect the country from being exploited by the outside world, evidenced by the ships from all over the world floating in the Freetown estuary. The ships import goods — including machines, vehicles, petroleum, and seeds from all over the world — into Sierra Leone to be distributed throughout the country.

People also come to Freetown to obtain a variety of resources from Sierra Leone at a very low cost. It is in Freetown that deals are made to purchase large portions of forest, which can be clear-cut for sugarcane and biofuel plantations. It is out of Freetown that the illegal exporting of minerals, timber, and animals occurs. These resources are transported to distant locations around the globe and provide goods for people who may have never even heard of Sierra Leone. The inherent corruption in the import-export industry has sustained the nation’s poverty, doomed its infrastructure, and in 1991, helped catapult the country into a brutal civil war. As a result, the biodiverse and fragile ecosystem of Sierra Leone is hammered by the overall impact of humans from all around the world. Habitats disappear, animals are displaced, and ecosystems are forever changed. In this way, Sierra Leone is at the epicenter of the anthropocene, the age of humans.

The chimpanzees in Granny’s village reflect a very complicated picture of the anthropocene. Their behaviors, from where they find food to where they sleep to what they defend as a territory, are determined by the incredibly complex and multifaceted anthropogenic landscape. Everything from their population density, to the trees growing in their forest, have been affected by the activities of humans. Pushed together by the forces of deforestation, in a situation exacerbated by the history of war, and competing for resources with a highly impoverished human community, these chimpanzees show us the indirect and insidious effects our species can have on animals and habitats that are far away.

Looming in the distance of this group of chimpanzees, the lion-shaped mountain still stands. Its face has changed since the time of the early explorers. It is now made up of more than just rocks, plants, creatures, and small dwellings, and includes a conglomeration of buildings, embassies, and structures from a global world interacting with the living systems that inhabit it. Its new face has been created by a very specific history. Everything on the mountain is part of the mountain — intrinsically tied to together by the forces of ecology.

As the sun sets, the lights of Freetown illuminate the mountain with an ominous glow. The sky dims and the land beyond the mountain is enveloped in a lion-shaped shadow. We are reminded that our activities have helped create the shadow. Like every other living thing, we are at the mercy of the collective that is the mountain. It is a monolith that reminds us that we, like other species that have fallen in its shadow, can suffer the last gasps of a natural world being strangled by a causal nexus run amok.

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