Jane Goodall Visits Kinshasa

In 1990, and again in September of 1991, Jane Goodall visited Kinshasa, with the goal of convincing the Zairian government to confiscate apes being sold as pets on the open market. (Always ready for a group photo, my workers posed proudly in front of a monkey habitat built for a breeding pair of owl-faced monkeys, Cercopithicus hamlyni).

By a strange coincidence, Jane got caught up in the 1991 looting that paralyzed Kinshasa for three days. Holed up in the sixth floor of the USAID building apartment with Dr. Dumont, the U.S. embassy doctor and his wife, she watched the chaos in the streets below, and fretted about the fate of the chimpanzees at the Zoo at N'Sele.

It took three days for things to calm down enough for the embassy to evacuate Americans and also Jane Goodall. One evening at the Dumonts, I watched the video they’d taken, showing French commandos infiltrating in order to stabilize Kinshasa during the looting. From Grains of Golden Sand:

"Inadvertently, the film captured the death of one of the soldiers as he was shot in the neck at the intersection below. His comrades leaped to his aid and, as quickly, commandeered a pastel blue truck to carry off the body. It was sobering to observe from above, the looters running in and out of the back of the grocery store called SEDEC. The people came out with the goods piled high in shopping carts and quickly scattered down the side streets.

"I’ll never forget something else in the video—an overloaded military truck piled high with furniture that tried to navigate at high speed the circular intersection in front of the train station. Like a heavy-bodied goose slowly taking wing, the uppermost mattress lifted off. Narrating voices in the film’s soundtrack tittered as the wind gripped the bed and it flapped in undulating animation. It hovered in an air pocket over the truck and then gently lifted up and pitched over the side. That wayward mattress symbolized to me the irreversible path of self-destruction that Zaire seemed so determined to take."