Publicity:

They make Carrie Bradshaw and her Sex and the City gal pals look like stitched-up prudes and the Playboy Mansion a sleepy retirement home. They are Bonobos, the original swingers – frisky, fun loving apes and sex is never very far from their minds.

“They have sex in all flavours. They’re bisexual; some people call them pansexual, female-female sex is actually the most common type of sex.”
Sally Coxe, Bonobo Conservation Initiative

In a remote corner of an isolated pocket of Africa, girl-power is proving to be a successful and cohesive community hierarchy. Bonobos have their spats but it rarely gets nasty. They care for each other and share with each other. It’s behaviour that’s in stark contrast to much of the human behaviour surrounding them and of course evident around the world.

The Bonobos are inhabitants of the Democratic Republic of Congo – a war torn, strife ridden, poverty struck nation that in recent decades has seen some of the very worst human behaviour possible.

Standing between the Bonobos and the encroaching human threat is a dedicated group of conservationists and aid workers trying to improve the often dire circumstances of locals and empower them to protect the Bonobos.

“People are the threat to the bonobos and if we don’t take care of the people at the same time we’re not going to be taking care of the forest and the Bonobos.”
Sally Coxe, Bonobo Conservation Initiative

Eric Campbell ventures deep into the African jungle to see these extraordinary apes in the wild and to talk to the people trying to understand them and ensure that they prosper. Even now it’s incredibly difficult to reach the Bonobos’ jungle home. There are no commercial flights to the area, no roads - just bone-jarring tracks - and a couple of clapped out cars in the entire region. Locals walk or travel by dugout canoe. There’s no electricity or running water, and villagers still use drums to communicate.

Nevertheless it’s a fascinating and enthralling journey of discovery where we learn a great deal about the least understood of the Great Apes who make love not war.

Jungle plants and butterflies

Music

00:00

Plane lands on Congo airstrip

00:16

CAMPBELL: They may be our closest relatives but you have to go a long, long way to see them.

00:26

Campbell greets locals

It’s taken us six days to get this far – a remote speck in the middle of Africa.

00:36

Driving over rough roads

We’ve been promised the wild bonobos will be worth every bone-shaking moment. One of the reasons people are coming all this way is to answer the really big questions - like why are we the way we are? Would the world be better if it were run by women? Even why are we so obsessed with sex?

00:45

Some clues to those answers are swinging from tree to tree not a hundred kilometres from here. We just have to get there.

01:10

Fixing tyre

And that’s not easy. There are just two clapped-out cars in this entire region. Fixing a tyre means melting rubber for a makeshift patch.

01:20

This part of the Congo hasn’t just been neglected by the government, it’s been utterly abandoned. There’s no electricity or running water, let alone decent roads or bridges – and did I mention the tyres?

01:33

It’s our second flat tyre in ten minutes. I don’t like our chances of getting there before sunset.

01:49

Driving in the dark

Music

01:53

CAMPBELL:  Not surprisingly, people here don’t get many visitors.

01:58

Villagers’ welcome

When they do, it’s cause for celebration.

02:06

[VILLAGERS SINGING]: We hear your name everywhere, and you continue your work…

02:12

CAMPBELL: They don’t mean my name. They’re singing about two remarkable conservationists – Sally Coxe from the United States and Albert Lokasola from the Congo. They’ve devoted their lives to helping both the bonobos and the people who live among them.

02:18

Sally with Campbell

SALLY COXE: Did you have a flat tyre?

CAMPBELL: We had three flat tyres in the end.

SALLY COXE: Are you kidding?

CAMPBELL: No we’re running out of tyres.

SALLY COXE: Oh no.

02:35

3am trek to bonobos. Sally briefs trackers

CAMPBELL: At 3am we start the final leg of our journey, a gruelling walk into the rainforest. Every day the trackers follow bonobos till they make their night nests. We have to reach them by dawn before they move again. We make it just in time.

02:51

Bonobos in trees. Sally and Campbell watch

SALLY COXE: This group we’ve been watching over here, they heard them vocalise over there – and then the group starts moving. But isn’t it amazing how gracefully they move? It’s like almost a dance the way they navigate.

03:17

CAMPBELL: Do you don’t get blasé about this?

SALLY COXE: Not at all. Not at all. They’re not scared at all as you can see. They’re really interested in us. These same trackers have been tracking them for several years now and they’re like family.

03:32

Bonobos

CAMPBELL: Bonobos are only found in the Democratic Republic of Congo and they’re the least known of the four species of Great Apes.

04:02

Scientists have been studying gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans for more than a century, but they’ve only been following these apes since the 1970s and for much of that time, the whole region’s been closed by war. It’s a rare and special experience to be this close in the wild

04:15

Bonobos urinates from tree above

and at times rather moist.

SALLY COXE: You just got peed on.

04:37

Sally and Campbell

CAMPBELL: Bonobo pee! [laughing]

SALLY COXE: It’s great for the hair [laughing]

04:42

Bonobos in trees

CAMPBELL: They look similar to chimps and it’s thought we all share a common ancestor, but bonobos have gone down a very different evolutionary path, raising fundamental questions about our own behaviour.

04:52

SALLY COXE: Bonobos have squabbles but they don’t kill each other the way chimpanzees do. You know chimps literally wage wars against other troops of chimps over territory, which is what is happening in this country with the war. But bonobos don’t do that.

05:07

Sally and Campbell

They may have squabbles but then they make up pretty quick.

CAMPBELL: And they’re run by females.

SALLY COXE: Hm mm and what does that tell you?

05:23

Bonobos in trees

CAMPBELL: Almost uniquely in the animal kingdom the males remain with their mothers for their entire lives. It’s the adolescent females who leave and join new groups, attaching themselves to a dominant female.

05:33

Female bonobo in tree

So how do you tell a female?

SALLY COXE: Females have a big pink swelling which is their genitalia. It’s basically a bonobo vagina. And it’s big, it’s like a bull’s eye

05:46

Sally and Campbell

and the males are males.

CAMPBELL: And what’s really getting people’s attention is that they make love not war.

05:59

Bonobos copulate/Sally and Campbell watch

SALLY COXE: It’s a way of bonding and of course they have sex in all flavours and it’s just part of their lives.

CAMPBELL: So they really are the hippies of the jungle?

SALLY COXE: They certainly are.

06:14

Bonobos copulate

Music

06:27

CAMPBELL: To see just how frisky they are, you have to go to the main place they’re being studied, a bonobo sanctuary on the other side of Congo just outside the capital, Kinshasa.

06:34

You can barely point a camera here without capturing their favourite pastime. One of the most common forms of sex is female to female. It’s a way of forming power alliances, because in bonobo world, it’s girls on top.

06:45

Group of female bonobo

SALLY COXE: In bonobo society it’s the ranking female who’s dominate and she has her coterie of other females and it is usually the son of the ranking female who’s the highest ranking male.

07:16

Bonobos copulate

They have a peaceful, cooperative society. They’re the only primate other than humans that have sex not just for procreation and they’re bisexual. Some scientists say they’re pansexual because they really have sex in every way shape and form possible,

07:30

Sally

but that’s really the polar opposite of chimps which are our other closest relative. Chimps have a male -dominated patriarchal society. So in that way bonobos and chimps are sort of like the yin and yang of human nature.

07:45

Villagers sing and dance

CAMPBELL: And that’s where we get to the big questions about us. Why are people sometimes sharing and loving like bonobos, and sometimes selfish and violent like chimps.

08:02

Back to bonobos in trees

A clue may lie in the bonobos themselves. Unlike other apes, they’ve never had to fight for survival. While gorillas and chimps developed on the north of the Congo River, bonobos have had the south bank all to themselves.

08:16

SALLY COXE: So chimps and bonobos are never in the same region. Dr Richard Wrangham of Harvard wrote a book called ‘Demonic Males’ about chimps and he postulates that the reason why chimpanzees are more competitive and territorial is because they’ve had to compete with gorillas over terrestrial herbaceous vegetation – the salad of the forest that apes eat – and bonobos have had no competition for these foods, so that’s his theory as to why bonobos are more peaceful and cooperative and share food with each other as opposed to fighting over it.

08:33

Jungle foliage

Music

09:08

CAMPBELL: The terrible irony is that the human world they’re living in couldn’t be more different.

09:23

River shots

CAMPBELL:  People have been fighting here ever since Europeans came sailing up the Congo, and it’s all been over resources. First it was slaves, ivory and rubber, and in recent years whole armies have fought over valuable minerals. Albert Lokasola spent his childhood hiding in the jungle from marauding soldiers.

He fell in love with nature and founded a conservation group called Vie Sauvage.

ALBERT LOKASOLA: My intention was to save the wildlife, to serve the forest and to help the people

09:57

Albert

because all are living together.

10:13

Albert and Sally visit village

CAMPBELL: Five years ago he joined forces with Sally Coxe’s group, the Bonobo Conservation Initiative. She’d become fascinated by the apes while working for National Geographic magazine.

10:17

SALLY COXE: I really found my Holy Grail, my personal calling back in 1993, thinking that I would write about bonobos and try to help them that way and help conservation that way.

10:36

Sally. Super:
Sally Jewell Coxe, Bonobo Conservation Initiative

But what I found was there was practically nothing being done for conservation and one thing led to another.

10:44

Village shots

CAMPBELL: They both believe the key to helping animals is to help the people, so instead of fighting over the forest, they look after it.

SALLY COXE: You can’t do one without the other. The conservation problem is a people problem. People are the threat to the forest, people are the threat to bonobos, and

10:49

Sally

if we don’t take care of the people at the same time, we’re not going to be taking care of the forest and the bonobos.

11:08

Village domestic shots

That’s why our model is to work with the people to try to build up their standard of living bit by bit and to involve them in the project so that the project really benefits them and provides them with sustainable sources of income in the future.

11:14

Jungle trek

CAMPBELL: They won the community’s support to turn the forest into a protected zone. In return they’ve helped bring in micro-credit projects, better schools and healthcare. Dozens of locals have been employed as rangers.

SALLY COXE: They’re fantastic.

11:37

Sally with trackers

The trackers here are doing an amazing job. This is our team leader here and he was saying that they take care of the bonobos and they love the bonobos and they’re like members of the family, that they are used to each other and they come every day and they really love them. And of course in their tradition,

11:54

Sally

in their society, the Mangando people traditionally have protected bonobos for generations.

12:14

Bonobos/Village market

CAMPBELL: But here’s the problem. Decades of war and poverty are straining those traditional bonds, forcing people to plunder their environment. Selling meat from wild animals has become essential for survival.

12:24

Albert Lokasola took us to the local market to see some shocking images. Even here wild primates are being killed for meat and the orphans sold as pets.

ALBERT LOKASOLA: This species is called Lophocebus aterrimus, Black Mangabey.

12:41

Albert. Super:
Albert Lokasola, Vie Sauvage

It’s status now in the forest is calling for attention. It’s becoming very rare. A monkey like this will cost $20 for pet, $10 for food. If you get it alive then you pay more.

13:03

Meat in a pot. Albert and Campbell

ALBERT LOKASOLA:  And this is a monkey.

CAMPBELL: It’s a monkey in there?

ALBERT LOKASOLA: This is a monkey.

CAMPBELL: Right, but no bonobos?

ALBERT LOKASOLA: No bonobos yet.

CAMPBELL: Right, right so that’s been some progress you’ve brought on.

ALBERT LOKASOLA: Exactly.

13:26

Kisangani market

13:40

CAMPBELL: The problem is even greater in big cities like Kisangani where rows and rows of smoked monkey meat are openly on sale, though our cameras aren’t especially welcome.

13:44

Congo River

Poaching wildlife has become one of the biggest trades in Africa, particularly along the Congo River. These days about the only way of getting around is dug-out canoes. The commercial steamers of colonial times have all but disappeared, along with the coffee plantations that once brought money to remote communities.

14:00

SALLY COXE: The biggest threats to bonobos are hunting for bush meat and logging, habitat destruction. Because the infrastructure has broken down so much here in the Congo,

14:27

Sally. Super:
Sally Jewell Coxe, Bonobo Conservation Initiative

basically the only way for people to make money is to kill an animal and sell it. Smoke it, take it to market and sell it. So it’s really impossible to tell people not to hunt at all.

14:38

Village drummer/ dancing

CAMPBELL: If you want to tell people anything here, you do it the old fashioned way. There are no mobile phones so villages rely on drums to communicate.

14:50

ALBERT LOKASOLA: The talking drum is telling to people that we are on our way to Yalokole station.

15:05

Albert

So they are saying ousong embote embembole [PHONETIC] meaning that you, white people, ousong embembole, are coming with Albert.

15:12

Driving to health clinic/Veronica in back of truck

CAMPBELL: We’re heading to the village where the project’s most ambitious development is taking place, a new health clinic. Hitching a ride with us is Veronique De Clerck, a Belgian mid-wife who’s come to check on the clinic’s progress.

VERONIQUE DE CLERCK: Just to get basic drugs here is an extraordinary challenge.

15:29

Veronique. Super:
Veronique De Clerck, Indigo Foundation

To get out of the place when you’re sincerely sick, there’s no possibility for poor people to do that.

15:49

Driving into village

CAMPBELL: Getting a clinic was the main trade off people demanded for protecting the forest.

VERONIQUE DE CLERCK: You can’t just come here and say we’re going to save the bonobos.

15:55

Veronique

It’s not possible. People will not allow you. People will prioritise their health.

16:08

Driving into Yalakole/ Welcome to Campbell

CAMPBELL: Yalakole is the main base for the project and its people have laid on an unusual welcome. To honour the visitors, the villagers lay down sarongs so our feet don’t touch the ground. It’s a little overwhelming as it goes on for almost half a kilometre. This is Albert Lokasola’s home village and they’re showing their hometown support.

16:13

Villagers sing welcome

[VILLAGERS SINGING] “Our hearts are full of joy because you sent someone to rescue us. Our hearts are full of joy. The family of David gave birth to a rescuer. Our hearts are full of joy.”

16:46

CAMPBELL: It took three years of often fraught negotiations with the local community to get protection zoning for the forest. Here people seem happy with the trade off.

17:03

Dignitary greets Albert, Veronique and Campbell

LOCAL DIGNITARY: [To gathering] We like the work of wildlife conservation very much. Papa Albert, Mama Sally and all the delegation don’t listen to the enemies – every single good thing has obstacles. Don’t be afraid to go ahead with the project. We support you.

CAMPBELL: Merci beaucoup!

17:14

Veronique walks with doctor to clinic

CAMPBELL: The clinic has been built through the Australian aid group, the Indigo Foundation. Most of the money has come from NSW barristers after two visited here four years ago.

17:51

VILLAGER: [Showing operating table] It’s nothing, but we’ve already operated here on 171 patients.

VERONIQUE DE CLERCK: 171?

VILLAGER: With only three deaths.

18:06

CAMPBELL: It doesn’t look much by Western standards but it can make all the difference in an area that until recently, had nothing.

18:17

Doctor examines baby

VERONIQUE DE CLERCK: I think with the little means that they have, they’ve been doing an extraordinary job. This is a very difficult context. You can only fly in, there’s no roads. There’s one car in a radius of five, six hundred kilometres. So knowing that, I think they’ve been really managing, but there’s still a long way to go.

18:27

Veronique. Super:
Veronique De Clerck,
Indigo Foundation

What they’re doing today in terms of surgery is trying to save a life because the other alternative is death, that’s it.

18:49

Clinic pharmacy

CAMPBELL: And the need is enormous. The clinic struggles to keep up with the endless demand for medicine.

ALBERT LOKASOLA: We are like a hub and people are coming, coming, coming, coming and most of the time we are overworked. The demand is very high.

18:57

Albert

CAMPBELL: So you’re stretched very thin trying to do it all.

ALBERT LOKASOLA: Very, very, very thin.

19:17

Veronique examines children

CAMPBELL: Unless it gets even more help, children will continue to die needlessly.

VERONIQUE DE CLERCK: We don’t have the treatment for the more complicated diseases, so the child like this morning is very likely to die. Knowing very well that if we would have the means to take it to a proper hospital or a western type of hospital with good diagnostics it would have a very good chance of surviving.

19:24

Veronique

CAMPBELL: So it’s still heartbreaking isn’t it?

VERONIQUE DE CLERCK: It is heartbreaking, but it’s the reality I’m afraid and it’s the reality in the majority of sub Saharan Africa, not only here.

19:49

Villagers carry pig/Queue outside clinic

CAMPBELL: And bringing something to an area that’s had nothing can be a risky business. Many people walk for days from other villages to come here. While most are grateful for what the project’s doing, some are resentful, because every time one village gets help, another gets jealous.

20:02

Albert with village men

ALBERT LOKASOLA: This is a daily, daily problem - the benefit sharing, and power sharing - because resources are so, so limited and the needs are extremely high and people are not always patient.

20:25

Albert. Super:
Albert Lokasola, Vie Sauvage

So this is really a daily challenge we experience here.

CAMPBELL: And that’s your job to sort all that out.

ALBERT LOKASOLA: And that’s my job. [laughs]

20:46

Animals

CAMPBELL: In a desperately poor place where the forest sustains people as well as animals, declaring a reserve can be a sensitive issue.

ALBERT LOKASOLA: Conservation is not always 100%.

20:58

Albert

The situation is that the majority is supporting the reserve, but as in any human enterprise you have a minority which is afraid of being landless.

21:13

Sally dancing with villagers

CAMPBELL: But Sally Coxe is determined to keep on going, slowly winning the people’s confidence that everyone will benefit.

SALLY COXE: I started this thing and I can’t quit. I can’t quit. It’s really a life’s work and

21:34

Sally

I hope that we put ourselves out of a job eventually. You know, if what we’re trying to do really works, then eventually the Congolese will be able to do this work themselves and that’s really what we’re working toward.

21:51

Lola Ya Bonobo sanctuary

CAMPBELL: And she’s not alone in her dream. Outside Kinshasa, the Lola Ya Bonobo sanctuary has been protecting orphans for eight years, even when the war spread right to the capital.

22:02

Gladys with young bonobo

Gladys Shorland is one of scores of dedicated carers.

22:16

GLADYS SHORLAND: I think a lot of people take them in as pets and then it’s the typical story of you know they’re very cute and attaching when they’re little but

22:26

even these six year olds are as strong as a grown human man so having that inside the house is a bit destructive.

22:34

Baby bonobo examine and climb on crew

CAMPBELL: This is where scientists have done some of the most important studies, though it’s no easy task.

22:42

Bonobos have shown themselves to be incredibly intelligent and curious, preferring to study us than let us study them.

CAMPBELL [to bonobo] : You’re trying to work out how  to undo my laces, aren’t you?

22:49

Adult bonobos

CAMPBELL: The sanctuary has just started the difficult process of releasing adult bonobos back into the wild, but it’s a fraught aim in a world still dominated by human violence.

GLADYS SHORLAND: Obviously they know humans and up until a certain age they’ve only known humans who have been good to them and nice to them.

23:02

Gladys with baby bonobo

So then they’re not necessarily afraid. They can’t tell who’s a hunter and who’s not, so I guess the fear is that they won’t be safe in the wild, but I think it’s the logical next step after a sanctuary, because building up, and building up a population in captivity is not where they’re supposed to be either.

23:23

Bonobos at river/ in jungle

Music

23:47

CAMPBELL: The bonobos’ long term survival may depend on helping people become the forest’s guardians.

24:02

Music

24:08

CAMPBELL: In these strange and little known apes, Sally Coxe sees a symbol of what humanity could be.

SALLY COXE: We certainly would do well to emulate some of their qualities,

24:14

Sally

especially at this time, in our own cultural evolution on the planet.

24:26

Bonobos in jungle

We would be well to learn how to share our resources and cooperate and find a way to co-exist without fighting with one another over those natural resources. I think that’s the great example bonobos have to show us.

24:31

Credits:

Reporter:  Eric Campbell

Camera:    Ron Ekkel

Editor:       Simon Brynjolffssen

Producer: Marianne Leitch

24:55