Islands of the Apes
the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Trust

"No, no - you've got it all wrong," Stella was saying. "Nugget is Nelson and Nellie's nephew and Nini's grandson. You're thinking of Felix…you know, Frankie's baby."
            After three days with Stella Brewer Marsden I was beginning to despair of ever getting to grips with just who was who in this immense 'family' of hers. There are now 78 chimpanzees in Stella's seemingly hyper-active family yet she recognises each member at a glance and can often identify an unseen chimp simply by its call.
Frankie was one of the few chimps that I had been unable to photograph and I had given up trying when I understood the reason why she was so camera-shy. The telephoto zoom apparently reminded Frankie of the guns of the bush-meat poachers who tied her up while they butchered her mother.
Stella has been caring for orphaned chimpanzees for over forty years. She arrived in The Gambia in 1957 when her father Eddie Brewer became director of the Forestry Department (and subsequently established the Wildlife Department and gazetted three national parks). At that time there were as many as a million wild chimpanzees in Africa, but bush-meat hunting, habitat destruction and baby-snatching was already taking a serious toll on the population. The trade in 'pet' chimpanzees was booming and for every live chimp that reached the final buyer ten died.
Today chimps are extinct or critically endangered in almost half of the twenty-five countries where they once naturally occurred. There are now less than 200,000 individuals left in the wild.
In 1969 Stella set up the Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Trust to give orphaned chimpanzees a chance to grow up in their natural environment. It was essentially a 'survival course' for chimps and, at a time when such an idea had never been attempted, Stella tried to establish a group of rescued chimps alongside a wild chimpanzee community in Senegal's Niokolo Koba National Park. It was reassuring to see that chimps that had grown up as the pampered pets of eccentric millionaires or had suffered as photographic props on the beaches of Spain seemed to be able to adapt to 'chimphood' in the wild. But the experiment was doomed to failure. After five years camping in the bush, the wild chimps became impossibly aggressive (specifically due to a drought) and Stella and her charges were effectively 'evicted.'
            She and her chimps returned to The Gambia in 1979 and the chimps were resettled on three islands in the newly-gazetted River Gambia National Park. Officially, chimpanzees are not endemic to The Gambia but Stella recalls seeing nests just fifty miles upriver from the Senegalese border and maintains that there must have been chimps here at some time.
An early cash injection for the chimp project came from sales of Stella's book about the Senegalese experiment. The Forest Dwellers topped the UK best-seller list for several weeks and was translated into twelve languages. But the royalty cheques did not last long and funding has always been tight. The project has survived almost exclusively from income derived from a sponsorship scheme which became the prototype for so many others in Africa and beyond. Many of the CRT's oldest sponsors have supported their chimpanzee beneficiaries all the way from infancy to maturity...and in one case even into grandparenthood!
The Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Trust is now the oldest continuously-monitored chimp rehabilitation project in Africa and, by most criteria, it is the most successful. In a few years from now the third-generation of wild chimps will be born - the great-grandchildren of the Niokolo Koba 'refugees.'
At the beginning of this year the Chimp Rehabilitation Trust opened its doors for the first time to a limited number of tourists.
"We have something quite unique here and the visitors are delighted to get an insight into the way of life on a working research station deep in the African bush," says Stella. "It's also bringing employment - both directly and indirectly - to the community. If these chimps are going to be looked after in the future, people need to see that they can earn their peanuts."
Accommodation is in traditional Hemingway-style safari tents, on secluded platforms high over the river. The tents have four–poster beds and en-suite bathrooms but the most idyllic feature is the outdoor shower, which opens straight out onto a view of the river. Such is the level of exclusivity that shower–curtains are unnecessary: the only possible Peeping Toms are the 'marooned' chimps on Baboon Island.
            Even before the boat puttered up to the edge of the island - with Edriss, Stella's camp manager, cautiously scanning the reeds to make sure that we were not trapping any of the park's fifty hippos - over a dozen chimpanzees were already gathered on the bank. The eighteen year-old alpha-male Hesus strutted up to the water's edge, swaggering on his knuckles, black hair bristling arrogantly. Behind him came his tired old mother (thirty year-old Hexel). The pink-faced little baby Coco swung from a vine and stared at us in wide-eyed interest, periodically checking that her mother Cracker had not drifted away.
Far back in the shadows the camera-shy Frankie nursed her tiny baby Felix, among a troop of, apparently, equally nervous baboons. Just recently the baboon population on the island had increased dramatically. More than fifty baboons had leapt into the river to escape a mass baboon-drive among the village rice fields and had ended up as 'castaways' on the chimp's island.
"If there was enough food on the islands, the chimps would be totally self-sufficient," Stella explained, "but competition can be tough, so we supplement their diet with daily deliveries of groundnuts and sweet potatoes. Feeding is also our only means of administering medicine and of monitoring the chimps since we can't go onto the islands."
Because they have no innate fear of humans, the chimps could be unusually aggressive towards anyone who trespassed onto their island. Stella's husband David describes the potential dangers in no uncertain terms. "You can’t go on the island because you’d get torn apart by the chimps," he says. "You might escape with just a duffing-up but getting duffed-up by a 130lb chimp could be a very serious duffing-up indeed. Five seconds with claws, hands and teeth might be all it would take."
Even among themselves, chimpanzee community life can be horrendously violent. In the relatively early days of chimp research, scientists like Stella and her mentor Jane Goodall had hopes that peaceful, family-loving, vegetarian chimps could be held up as an example of harmonious living. In The Forest Dwellers Stella explains how she attributed the first 'cruel and degenerate' monkey-hunt that she saw to the fact that the chimps were 'disturbed and deranged as a result of their capture.' Jane Goodall also experienced bitter disappointment in Tanzania when she witnessed infanticide, cannibalism and what appeared to be ritual blood-lust among the wild chimpanzees she studied.
Stella can recount shocking tales of savagery from her four decades with the chimps. Even years later some of the memories are clearly very painful.
As we sat around the dining-table in her riverbank house late one night - with the plaintive call of an African manatee echoing across the river - Stella had told me the harrowing story of a chimp called Boy.
"Boy was getting the rough end of some power-struggles on one of the islands," she began. "So we transferred him to Hesus's group. Hesus and Diao were 'top-dogs' there but they were still young and Boy was big and strong and should easily have taken control. But he was a very nervous old soul and from day one he became a recluse on one end of the island. He built a warren of escape tunnels through the undergrowth and avoided the group at all costs. For 8 years he lived alone while the others grew bigger and stronger…and more suspicious. In hindsight it was easy to imagine that they had been getting increasingly resentful. Plotting against him. Getting paranoid about him. The mysterious old man at the other end of the island.
"Then, one day, our watchman heard screaming from the island and saw the chimps jumping on something in a hollow. He thought one of them had been caught by a crocodile.
"We went over to the island and managed to drive the chimps up to one end so that I could get to the hollow. I still expected to find a crocodile. The hollow was splashed with a lot of blood and there was a little grey ball lying in the bottom. When I picked it up I realised it was a testicle and knew instantly that they'd caught Boy. Apparently, it's not unusual in an attack like this to castrate the victim. I followed the blood trail (finding the other testicle on the way) until I spotted Boy way up in a tree.
 "He was just sitting up there rocking and groaning. I had no idea how badly he was hurt. He'd been up there for 36 hours by the time we managed to find a tree-climber who would go up with a tranquilliser. When we got Boy down he was already dead.
"Apart from being castrated he'd had most of his fingers and toes bitten off. One ear and his nose were also gone. They'd wrenched his arms around so badly that they had not just dislocated them but had actually shattered the shoulder blades. Poor Boy! It seems impossible that he could've climbed the tree in that condition…and then survived for a day and a half..."
Watching Hesus's relatively peaceful little group feeding among the bickering baboons it was hard to imagine such extremes of violence. But we had already seen signs that tension might be building again in the chimp's little island paradise. A group led by a big male called Dash had begun displaying and threatening towards Hesus across the water from the southern end of Island 1 (the only island with 2 chimp groups). Later, we spotted a group of males from the northern end of that island. Led by Gorko and the 37 year-old patriarch Pooh (last survivor of the group who first 'colonised' these islands), they were patrolling southwards. With their bristling hair and grinning expressions they had an air of bravado that Stella well recognised from following chimps on the 'warpath' before.
In the wild they will march together until they hear the other group. Then they stop and listen, grinning at each other in nervous excitement while they try to figure out how many are on the other side. Only if they can manage to catch a lone chimp - and outnumber him by a relatively safe margin - will they attack.
"We won't introduce any more chimps," says Stella. "We've managed it successfully three times recently but there was a huge amount of luck involved and the risk of trying again is really too great to be feasible."
As power-struggles continue as ever on the islands, Stella has been working to secure the future for the chimps far beyond the banks of the River Gambia.
Realising that the chimps will need the respect and support of the local community - and the decision-makers in far-off Banjul - the CRT has been working to spread its influence into the local community. The nearby village of Sambel Kunda now has one of the best primary schools in upcountry Gambia thanks to the influence of CRT (and money raised through a Swedish NGO, Future in Our Hands). There is also a small local clinic and the head-quarters of The Gambia Horse and Donkey Association, which not only improves the working conditions of local animals but is helping the farmers get better productivity.
This July the lady who is now known as one of Africa's most dedicated conservationists travelled to Buckingham Palace to collect a well-deserved OBE, 'in recognition of her long-term commitment to the well-being of chimpanzees in West Africa and the community development works associated with her programme.'
"Like humans, chimpanzees have emotions similar to those we call joy, anger, grief, sorrow, pleasure, boredom, and depression," said Stella as we watched Hesus and his gang settle down to a session of grooming and playing. "They're more similar to us than most people realise.
"Future generations will one day look at what happened to the chimps in the same light that we now view the slave-trade and will realise that it's actually been nothing less than an atrocity."

Visit:

• www.chimprehab.com for information on how you can support the Gambia Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Trust and the affiliated community projects in the area.

The End