Playing Safe
Escape to a treehouse retreat on the edge of Sierra Leone`s capital and meet the chimps who have found sanctuary in this wilderness paradise
WORDS | KATRINA MANSON
PHOTOGRAPHY | DAVID LEAHY
A LOVE TRIANGLE PLAYED OUT IN PUBLIC; a bunch of hungry teenagers making a racket; a proud mother who adores her son and a self-centred grump who just won’t accept another alpha male: it’s the stuff of life, and certainly of soap opera. The twist is that at Tacugama, each of the players is a chimp.
Deep in a forest in the west of Sierra Leone, 95 of man’s closest relatives have found refuge and hoot with happiness by the hour. They groom and tease each other with love, care and the mischief of adolescence. The latest gossip is that one-time leader of the pack Philip has been booted off the top-spot by Ole, who might be smaller but has played his furry hand well.
“He has more social skills and he’s better with women,” says Bala Amarasekaran, who founded the sanctuary in 1995, seven years after he and his wife Sharmila saw a baby chimpanzee for sale by the roadside north of the capital Freetown. Not long after buying the little bundle of fur for $30 and taking him into their home, the couple discovered that dozens of chimps were kept as pets all over the capital: some were abused, chained, made to dance or drugged with alcohol and sedatives.
Amarasekaran made it his mission not only to care for these abused, orphaned and abandoned animals and offer them a new home, but – particularly as capacity at the sanctuary becomes stretched – also to raise education among Sierra Leoneans of the importance of protecting chimpanzees in the wild.
More than 2,000 local rural school children visit the 100-acre site for free every year, but it can be hard to spread the word to the farthest villages, where chimps are still seen as pests invading farmland, and sometimes worse. “People still eat them,” says Amarasekaran. While it is illegal to hunt, capture, kill or keep chimpanzees in captivity in Sierra Leone, the state finds it hard to police.
Many of the chimps, unchained for the first time in years, come back to life in the forest, among their own; no longer picking at their fur in distress, at last communicating in their own language. There’s even a signboard helping newcomers how to speak chimpanzee (‘hoo’ if you’re happy; shout ‘hu!’ to say something’s weird; or cry ‘hee huh hee huh hee huh’ if you want to play).
Amarasekaran has put his money where his mouth is: more than 20 percent of the sanctuary’s rising costs, which run to $95,000 a year, come from his IT business. Three films have been made about the forest sanctuary. Just 30 minutes outside of the capital, Tacugama is a refuge for human visitors as well. It’s the perfect place to escape the heat and hustle of Freetown with three newly opened eco-lodges surrounded by a lush green canopy of starfruit trees and the peaceful sounds of the forest – all birds, crickets and monkey calls.
“We don’t want this place to be a hotel – it’s a sanctuary,” says Amarasekaran. That makes staying a night or two at Tacugama an unforgettable privilege. A knock at the door of my tree-house hideaway brings a breakfast of boiled cassava and tea from Posseh Kamara, who looks after the chimps when they arrive for their 90-day quarantine. “I really like it here. I love them so much,” she says of the five newly arrived babies who regularly clamber all over her.
The camp’s caretakers have all developed special relations with the sanctuary, none tested more than during Sierra Leone’s 1991-2002 civil war, when missiles flew overhead and several landed close by.
“If a chimp dies, I go crazy. It’s something like losing someone in your family,” says head caretaker Moses Kapia, 50, who was given an award from the Pan-African Sanctuary Alliance for his service to chimps. “During the war it was a matter of sacrifice. We were between the fighting factions but we braved this war and kept the sanctuary running.”
Tacugama staff smuggled food to chimpanzees and pleaded with the fighters to spare their lives. “There was shooting all over the place but abandoning the chimps would have meant they would have starved to death. We stayed on during the hard times as we had an obligation to save our chimps.”
No one knows how many wild chimps were lost to the war, but the sanctuary is currently embarking on the first national census in decades. Already it has recorded 2,000 nests in palm trees in the south of the country, as well as several populations of wild chimps in the north. As we talk, a hail of stones sprays over me, thrown by a wily fellow keen to establish his territory.
“Jimmy is the one to watch. He’ll hit someone nine times out of 10,” warns Amarasekaran as I spot another human-like hand clasping a sizeable stone and nodding his beady brown eyes in my direction. “‘Who’s watching who?’ It’s the same question I ask myself all the time.”
The daily tours are $10, while accommodation is $80 a night or $120 for the treehouse, including a tour. You can sponsor a chimp for $79 or $149 a year. Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, +232 76 611 211, www.tacugama.com
