Over the past four years or five years, I’ve been a regular visitor to the Bomassa headquarters of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park (NNNP) in northern Congo. NNNP is the flagship project for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Congo Program, and as the director of that program, I travel regularly to the site to host visitors, meet with staff, and generally make sure that the site is running well.
The most recent visit came at the end of November 2018, when I spent a brief weekend visiting with some technical staff from Brazzaville. The site has increasingly become a haven for wildlife over the years, with several species of monkeys and birds often spotted in the canopy of the large tropical hardwoods that are dotted around the camp. For a number of years now, De Brazza monkeys have become increasingly comfortable with the presence of humans in the camp, to the extent that they will often sit just two or three metres above your head in the trees. Other small monkeys such as moustached guenons are equally common, while larger-bodied black and white colobus are often seen in the higher reaches of the trees. During this most recent visit, I also got some amazing photos of a pair of black-casqued hornbills, who were feeding on the fruit of one of the palm trees in the camp.
Occasionally over the past couple of decades, one of the more charismatic large mammals has habituated himself (it is invariably a male) to the base camp. In the mid to late 1990s, a male silverback gorilla was a regular visitor to the base camp. Named Ebobo by local villagers, as ebobois the word for gorilla in the lingala local language, he would regularly enter both Bomassa village and the NNNP headquarters, feeding on vegetation and fruits for a few hours before disappearing back into the forest. He would re-emerge every few weeks over a number of years, before being seen for the final time in mid 2000. Ebobo was quickly replaced by an elephant as the area’s resident charismatic large mammal, as a male that was quickly nicknamed Gentil started visiting. A slightly more dangerous proposition than ebobo because of his size, Gentil would wander around the camp at all times of the day and night, and was a regular until around 2010.
Conservationists from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Congo’s Ministry of Forestry Economy first arrived in Bomassa village in the early 1990s, and at the time they were intent on exploring an area of forest that lay to the east of the village. This forest lay within the Nouabaléforestry concession, and so was slated to be logged at some point in the future. The concession lay on the eastern banks of the river Sangha, and was one of a handful that had not yet been attributed to a logging company. This meant that the project team had a small but important potential opportunity to save the area from logging, and conserve its forests and wildlife.
Bomassa quickly became the centre of operations for the effort to transform the Ndoki forest into a national park, and a partnership was established with the local village to launch a conservation project. At that time, in the early 1990s, Bomassa served as a staging post for elephant poaching, with guides from the village taking poachers as far as the banks of the Ndoki river, and across the river to Mbeli bai to shoot elephants. Although local villagers rarely entered the area that would eventually become the national park, elephants in the area were mercilessly targeted by poaching operations. The effort to launch a conservation project was therefore the classic case of ‘poacher turned game keeper’.
Of course, the project was successful, and the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park was created in 1993. Today, the NNNP lies at the heart of one of the richest and most biologically intact tropical forest ecosystems in Africa. This area is home to a diverse range of globally threatened mammals, reptiles, birds, insects and plants – forest elephants, chimpanzees, western lowland gorillas, and bongo antelope are just some of the species of large mammals which roam the forests. The national park also boasts old growth forests containing mahoganies and other tree species which are many hundreds of years old. It is one of the world’s few remaining remote, undisturbed wilderness areas.
The community of Bomassa itself has benefitted enormously from the presence of a conservation project over the past two and a half decades. One of the first things that project staff did in the early 1990s was construct a school and a hospital in the local village, bringing much needed basic services to the previously impoverished area. Local children were able to attend school on a regular basis for the first time in the village, and as they got older, they benefitted from scholarships to attend high school in the nearest provincial centre. A handful of the most gifted children went on to attend university in the capital city, Brazzaville, and today the village of Bomassa boasts its very first university graduates.
The presence of the national park has also generated a significant amount of income for local people, both in terms of salaries for direct employment (70% of households now benefit from some form of employment with the protected area) and other revenue that is generated from activities such as tourism, and which is shared amongst the community in the form of a village development fund. Additional benefits include a well to provide clean water, financial and other support for elderly people, and medical evacuations to the nearest provincial centre in the most serious cases. Above all, the fact that the conservation project has helped the local village to manage their natural resources sustainably for the past 25 years means that today hunters from the village can still find an abundance of antelope and other target species close to the village limits. While inhabitants of larger towns in the area, such as Ouesso, find that their natural resources are so depleted that they have to journey many miles from the town in search of wildlfie to hunt, those species are still relatively abundant close to Bomassa.
