“No one was here to care.”
Today Jackie and I traveled into Kahuzi-Biega National Park, the lesser known of the parks that hold DR Congo’s gorilla population. Located southwest of Bukavo, Kahuzi-Biega holds approximately 200 eastern lowland gorillas, of which two families have been habituated to human contact. Visiting with these animals, the largest of the great apes, is humbling and enlightening - truly a reminder of what makes this country so special.
But it’s not that experience I want to write about today, it’s what came after. From Kahuzi-Biega we traveled to Lwiro Primate Rehabilitation Center which takes in orphan primates or those rescued from the illegal wildlife trade. This center does amazing work, protecting and preparing for release our nearest animal relatives. It is located on the grounds of the Centre de Recherche en Science Naturelles (CRSN) (Center for Research in the Natural Sciences), a colonial era building built by a Belgian prince in the 1950s.
As soon as your step onto the grounds of the CRSN you can instantly tell it was once magnificent and that those days have long since passed. Our visit included meeting the staff who work whenever a donor provides funds for the upkeep of the grounds, or more impressively the restoration of its 800,000+ volume library that dates to the late 19th century when the DR Congo was the private colony of Belgian King Leopold II and the humanitarian crises he brought. CRSN’s history encapsulates (to me) the rebuttal to the oft heard “Why help there? That place has been a mess and always will be.”
Succinctly put during the colonial the colonial era the Congolese were denied education, administrative training, or being a part of the governance of their own country. This magnificent research center was built by the colonizers who neither trained the staff or provided the funds as independence approached. After having the first prime minister and national hero Patrice Lumumba killed, installed a pro-West dictator who drained the country dry for his own personal financial gain who ruled until the 1990s. Since the country has been wracked by neighboring genocides, its own internal struggles, and governance issues - all while sitting on the most valuable natural resources, in the largest known quantities, on the planet.
DR Congo doesn’t know how to operate, its people ran successful kingdoms until Europeans arrived, took its future through the slave trade, stripped it for wealth, then set it adrift with no preparation or guidance. Maybe it’s all best summarized by the elderly bookbinder who works for an average of $30 a month, when asked what happened post-independence, “No one was here to care."
