Will Self - Great Apes

‘“H’huu” do you think we should be grooming the driver?’ Bob, the swaggerer, inparted Simon’s shoulder as they lurched and bucked together.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘It could be a mistake — you know all of this region is riddled with AIDS “hooo”.’

“Euch-euch,” Busner coughed in the front seat, then gestured, ‘I hardly think you can get CIV from grooming — let me “chup-chupp” see if I can help the fellow out.’ The eminent natural philosopher — as he still styled himself — put his fingers in the bonobo’s muddy chest fur, and was instantly rewarded with a great clack of teeth and a sloppy kiss on the muzzle. This Busner received only just without wincing.

The flight from London had been long and bumpy. Busner had no idea why it should be that Air Lanka had the only scheduled service to Dar es Salaam, unless it was on the bizarre assumption that chimps in one crisis-torn part of the world might want to check out what it was like in another.

The Busner–Dykes group then got stuck in the city for three days while permission for internal travel was secured, together with a guide-cum-driver who could get them the eight hundred miles from the coast to Lake Tanganyika, where Camp Rauhschutz squatted on the shore. They were three days of getting to grips with a country in more than its usual disarray. The hideous massacres in Rwanda were still going on and even as far away as Dar es Salaam refugees were everywhere. If they had money, taking up whatever accommodation was available, and if they didn’t whatever trees were still standing. The Busner–Dykes group had to put up in a brothel, where they were asked to pay by the half-hour.

This gave Busner an opportunity to lecture them all on curtailing mating activities while they were in Africa. ‘It may not be the case that heterosexual mating is the most efficient means of transmitting the virus, but the females here have often been subject to “euch-euch” infibulation — and even swellingectomies. Not only that “hooo”, but as far as we know the virus itself is still mutating. We are in the tropics — where the greatest “chup-chupp” biodiversity on the planet is to be found; there are more species here than anywhere else, species of virus as much as any other organism. And with this “hooo” dreadful business in Rwanda and Burundi, you can be certain that all kinds of “euch-euch” infections are on the move.

‘Nonetheless.’ He continued to wave his long arms about. ‘I’m not too worried about any of you, because apart from these “euch-euch” working females, I don’t think you’ll find that much in the way of mating opportunities. The bonobos, as you are — with the possible exception of Simon — no doubt aware, are rather “euch-euch” perversely non-penetrative, preferring frottage to a good, sound insertion. A fact which helps to explain their woeful fecundity — with no alien sperm roaming around inside their uteruses the females conceive with ridiculous alacrity.’

Simon found the reality of chimpanzee-dominated Africa far too overwhelming even to consider mating. It was as much as he could do to pick out an individual female from the bustling black multitudes swarming over the crumbling concrete buildings of Dar es Salaam, let alone see whether she had a swelling on her. He kept his head down and followed his alpha’s scut.

The driver-cum-guide recommended to Busner was trusty enough, but signed nothing but pidgin ES, making gesticulation difficult. As the group headed north the downpours grew worse and the country wilder. The road dwindled first from a pot-holed warped multi-lane highway, to a pot-holed warped strip of blacktop, and then eventually to the pot-holed warped track which ran from Kigoma, north to Nyarabanda, a mere five miles short of the Burundian border.

Refugees were thick on the ground here, and in the palm trees as well. They brachiated beside the road, limply hauling themselves from frond to trunk, or they knuckle-walked in the morass that constituted the verge, risking a mud bath every time a vehicle slewed by. Simon wondered how the humans could possibly be faring in this world turned upside-down — with chimpanzee life so cheap, who would care about a few miserable animals?

Simon’s anxiety over the fate of humankind was only compounded by the suave bonobo he’d had a brief grooming session with in Kigoma. A bonobo who, judging by his neat tunic and designer sunglasses, must have been a party cadre. He showed Simon that human meat was more in demand than ever. ‘It don’t matter what they sign about protected species here, chimp,’ he fingered, ‘those humans still try and get our infants — so we go out and get “grrn’yum” theirs. And with this business’ — he waved northwards — ‘there’s even a market for bush meat.’

But Busner — who’d seen this, reassured Simon. ‘Don’t pay any “chup-chupp” attention. The truth of the matter is that the human reserve is better protected than anywhere else in this benighted country — although I’m afraid the same can’t be signed for the Virungas Mountains reserves on the Rwandan–Ugandan border where Dian Fossey set up the Karisoke Research Centre to study gorillas. But here it’s an “h’-h”’ irony, which I’m sure hasn’t escaped the locals, that while chimp is killing chimp with such relentlessness, humans go about their business undisturbed.’

Busner had sent sign to Ludmilla Rauhschutz that they were coming. As with almost any chimp he needed assistance from, Busner had discovered a useful connection. Rauhschutz’s alpha, it transpired, was the opera impresario Hans Rauhschutz, whom Peter Wiltshire had directed several productions for in the past. Wiltshire pant-hooted Rauhschutz and he gave them a letter of introduction to his offspring, which was duly faxed on.

Ludmilla Rauhschutz was, even by the standards of anthropology — a branch of zoology which had always attracted zealotry — extreme in her belief that wild humans were both sentient and intelligent. In her book Among the Humans she had written that her fieldwork with wild humans led her ‘… as close as I will ever come as a chimpanzee to understanding the mind of God’.

While her work with the Gombe humans had been recognised initially as being of profound importance, both for anthropology itself and for the understanding of chimpanzee origins, as she continued to insist on their abilities and their claim to some form of chimpunity, she was sidelined by the scholarly hierarchy.

There were flutterings that the reintroductions of captive humans she was undertaking were little more than a pretext for getting more tourists to visit Camp Rauhschutz. Tourists wanted to see humans, and the formerly captive humans, unable to fend for themselves in the wild and often meeting with considerable aggression from their feral conspecifics, tended to stay close to camp for feeding and photographing. One anthropologist, who had visited the camp, gesticulated with Busner before they left for Africa signing, ‘It looks more like a petting centre than a place where animals are rehabilitated.’

Busner had also seen worse things about the female herself. It was signed that she was ‘a horrible fat female who treats her pet human as if he were a chimpanzee’. Other flutterings included a similar slur to the one fingered on Fossey and many other female anthropologists. Namely that Rauhschutz, whose swellings were so small as to be insignificant, sought out humans as nestmates because of her inability to get chimpanzee suitors. The further — and obvious — bit of tickle-slapple, was that the only reason Rauhschutz had achieved any position in the hierarchy, let alone research alpha, was because she was sterile. But this was what males always signed about successful career females.