🌊 The Battle for the Chimpanzee

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By Max Frost

In Sierra Leone’s Western Area National Park, nature is alive.

Chimpanzees whoop and cry in the distance, monkeys jump in the treetops, insects’ chirping surrounds you, and the birds flying overhead are so large that their wings whoosh as they pass.

Then, in the distance, you hear the chopping. 

Sierra Leone was once nearly entirely rainforest. Today, only 30% of it is. One of the few remaining forest areas is the Western Area National Park, where rangers are in a constant battle to save the forest from corrupt officials, poachers, and illegal loggers.

One of these rangers took me out on a Sunday morning to see how he, equipped with a shotgun, patrols the woods. 

We walked through the trees, past chimpanzee prints and poaching camps. Then, quickly, the forest stopped. 15 years ago, my guide said, the forest stretched as far as I could see. Now, it stops here. 

From our vantage point, we heard the chopping of wood. My guide scanned the tree line in the distance, until he spotted a group of men in the distance, clearing the nationally-protected rainforest. They were likely paid a couple dollars a day to clear the trees so well-connected politicians and officials could build their homes. 

Across Sierra Leone, a battle is raging between those who seek to exploit nature and those who seek to preserve it. Caught in the middle are the poor – who often have no way to earn money beyond poaching or logging – and the wildlife. And no wildlife is more vulnerable than the chimpanzee, which needs to migrate through vast stretches of wilderness to survive. 

Chimps are humans’ closest living relatives, with 98.6% identical DNA. Seeing them up close, they look, act, and often emote like humans. They have friendships, laugh and play together, and follow strict social systems. 

Despite this, people eat them.

Tacugama Sanctuary is Sierra Leone’s leading chimpanzee conservation center. Founded with the support of Jane Goodall, their job is to protect the chimpanzees’ habitat, lobby on the chimps’ behalf, and save chimps from poachers. They have sources around the country who alert them when they learn about chimps that are being trafficked. 

Shortly before my visit, someone from a city in Sierra Leone’s interior tipped the Tacugama Staff off about a captive chimp. Tacugama responded by dispatching a team to try and save the animal. 

When they arrived, a police officer told the rescuers to leave: It wasn’t their business, he said. For three days, the team pleaded with the family to turn the chimp over to them. It could be dangerous, they warned, and was an endangered animal.

The family that had the chimp refused. The mother of the house even taunted them and warned that she would soon cook it.

Two months later, the Tacugama team returned again. 

This time, the family emerged with a pot of bones: “You could still see the remnants of pepper on it,” one of the Tacugama staff told me. 

The chimp had been killed and eaten one day prior. This time, the mother was sobbing, feeling vicious remorse that she had eaten an animal to which she had become close.

Sidikie Bayoh, Tacugama’s communications officer, told me that “poaching and habitat loss are the two main threats [to chimps]. They go hand in hand because the more the forest goes, the more likely it is for a hunter to go and kill a bunch of chimps in the forest.”

Hunters are the main problem: They go into the bush looking for animals. If they encounter chimps, they kill them. Sometimes they’ll keep the orphan chimps and sell them as pets. Hunters, though, are often in places with no economic opportunity and where they are desperate for work. To them, a chimp isn’t special – it’s a way to survive.

Because chimps are protective animals, saving an orphan chimp invariably means other chimps have been killed.

“Every time we receive one, we assume eight to ten of that group’s members have been killed because they don’t want to leave a baby behind and they have to have killed all the group members,” Sidikie explained.

Chimpanzees have suffered greatly, but now, Sidikie and his boss are leading the fight back.

As a child, Bala Amarasekaran moved from Sri Lanka to Sierra Leone when his parents landed jobs there as teachers. In 1989, when Bala was working as an accountant, he was driving through the countryside when he learned of a chimp that was being kept in a pen in the village.

“We saw this chimp kind of in a very desperate situation and he came, you know, hugging onto our legs,” he told me. “That’s what really moved us to say, ‘Okay, you know what, if you leave this chimp behind, possibly he's gonna die. So we didn't even realize what we are getting into, we just rescued him.”

So Bala took the chimp, Bruno, home with him. He soon found another orphaned chimp, Julie, and did the same.

In 1993, Jane Goodall – the renowned chimp expert and conservationist – was in Freetown and learned of Bala. She spent a week with him and his chimps and promised to help relocate them to her sanctuary in Zambia.

Yet before they could do that, Bala found two more chimps. This made him realize that sending chimps away was merely a band-aid solution.

“I started getting an affinity, an attachment to the chimps,” Bala recalled. “So that's what prompted me to kind of turn around and tell Jane, ‘You know what, Jane? I think what we need is more Jane Goodalls. Not everyone going to Jane Goodall.”

He was able to land $300,000 from the European Union, which enabled him to start his own sanctuary – Tacugama – in Sierra Leone.

By the mid-1990s, when civil war had come to Freetown, Tacugama had 38 chimps and Bala felt that “my obligation towards the chimps was not different from what I have to my own family.”

At one point, rebels attacked the compound, trapping him for three days. With banks closed and war all around, he feared donors in Europe would believe the sanctuary was done for.

That led him to go to Europe and secure continued funding, which kept the sanctuary – and its chimps and staff – alive throughout the war.

Things have since gone much more smoothly, Bala says, however his challenge has only grown: He’s now focused on creating a conservation model rather than just a sanctuary, the difference being that a sanctuary protects animals in its borders, while conservation seeks to protect animals outside of the sanctuary.

“Every time a chimp arrives here, people think, ‘Oh well, you guys are really good, you rescued a chimp,’ but for me, it's like a kick on my face.”

That model involves sensitization efforts, such as sending teams into schools and communities across the country to teach them about the value of the environment and the animals within it, as well as to help establish ecotourism that will help communities make money off the forest without cutting it down. 

One major success in that effort came in 2019, when efforts by Bala led Sierra Leone’s government to declare chimps the country’s national animal.

“That's a huge boost for our conservation effort,” he says. “Because when you get a national animal, then I think it comes with its own protection. It's not just a matter of ‘you cannot kill or eat a chimp,’ it's about, it's ours. It's a matter of pride. This is our national animal, we cannot be killing it or eating it.”

Bala concludes, “We are trying to do a few things so that the chimp gets that recognition it deserves.”

Editor’s Note

Thank you for reading. This was our last Sierra Leone installment. If you enjoyed it, please check out our past stories from the country, all of which are listed below. 

• Part 1: Inside Trash City

• Part 2: Inside the Secret Societies

• Part 3: The Truth about Eating Monkey 

• Part 4: Inside the “Blood Diamond” business

Enjoy the rest of your weekends and see you tomorrow-

Max and Max