Word: tusumba
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...town of grass-roofed huts on the edge of the Kokolopori forest, erected around a giant termite mound on which sit two wooden talking drums--still the only way to communicate long distance in central Congo. Close by, in Yalokole's mud-floor, mud-wall, tin-roof church, Tusumba is giving a speech...
...Tusumba, 45, is a straight-backed, teetotaling former deputy governor of Kasai province who never quite fit in politics. He started to come to that conclusion in 2000, when his constituents brought him a baby bonobo as a gift. Tusumba realized the villagers had slaughtered a bonobo family to obtain the little female. Rather than raise her as a pet, he decided to make her part of his family. "I used to eat with her at my table," he says. When Tusumba's term as deputy governor ended in 2004, he started concentrating full time on conservation, knowing...
...long as people have been mindful of the need to protect wildlife, there's been one way to get the job done: separate the animals from the people. To Tusumba, that always smacked of colonialism. Draw lines around any community, and you impose your will on the populations on both sides of the boundaries. "Older environmentalists wanted to preserve the people as well as the animals," says Tusumba, "like they were pickling specimens in a bottle." If this was culturally stultifying for humans, it was lethal for wildlife. Africa's national parks have been historically poorly policed, with officials herding...
...Tusumba and others knew there might be a way to do things differently. As long ago as 1998, villagers in the east Congo community of Tayna came up with the idea of running their own reserve to protect the Grauer's gorilla. The locals determined the areas that would be set aside as wildlife zones, human communities or mixed-use areas. They decided how access would be controlled; and if there was work to be had as trackers, guards or porters, they would do it. In 2001 Mehlman, then working for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, approached his employers...
...that goal sounds utopian, it nonetheless came closer to being realized last fall. Even as Kokolopori sought the government's formal designation as a protected nature reserve (a move that may come as soon as June), Tusumba was leading the charge to apply the new conservation techniques more aggressively still to a third place: the Sankuru area. So convincing was he that President Joseph Kabila allowed the nearly 12,000-sq.-mi. (31,080 sq km) region to jump the queue and earn the reserve designation first. Adding that...