‘I escaped death a lot of times’: one man’s lifelong work protecting gorillas and communities in Congo | Democratic Republic of the Congo

MIt hangs above the forested slopes of Kahuzi-Biega National Park, where the canopy still shelters one of the last strongholds of the eastern lowland gorillas, or Grauer’s gorillas. It is a landscape of immense biological richness and equally immense political fragility. For Dominique Bikaba, 54, it was once his home.

His family was among those displaced when their ancestral lands were incorporated into the park in the 1970s. The protected area, located in the South Kivu lowlands of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is home to elephants and remarkable wildlife, but is best known as the main home of the Grauer’s gorilla, the largest subspecies of primate, known to weigh up to 250 kg (39th). It is one of five species of great apes found in the vast forests of the DRC, including mountain gorillas, which are also found in other parts of the Great Lakes region, such as Rwanda and Uganda.

Conservation, for Bikaba, founder and executive director of Strong Roots Congo, has always been linked to memory, dispossession and survival.

He grew up on the outskirts of the park, close enough to remember walking in the forest as a child. “My grandmother would take me to the forest and we could see how the gorillas lived,” he remembers. His education straddles several worlds: alongside his biological mother, he was raised by a Batwa (pygmy) mother and his grandmother. Much of his childhood was spent within the Batwa community, whose cultural and spiritual life is deeply rooted in the forest.

Through them, he learned about medicinal plants, wildlife and what coexistence means in practice. “My grandmother taught me to be ‘a man,’ but my pygmy mother taught me to coexist with the forest,” he says.

At the time, Grauer’s gorillas were not yet classified as critically endangered. Gorillas and humans shared space in a careful but workable balance. “Sometimes they would come out of the forest and feed on our crops. The baboons would come and get our bananas,” Bikaba explains. It was an uneasy proximity, but not yet a catastrophe. War would change that.

Bikaba began his conservation work in 1992, at the age of 20, after completing his studies and responding to a call from community leaders to help ease tensions between park authorities and people displaced since the park’s opening. Two years later, the 1994 Rwandan genocide triggered a massive influx of refugees into eastern DRC, fueling the First Congo War in the late 1990s, followed by the Second Congo War. The fighting continues today.

The consequences on wildlife have been devastating. Before the conflicts, the eastern lowland gorilla population was estimated at around 17,000 individuals. In 2016, surveys suggested there were around 3,800 left. “We don’t know what the situation of the gorillas is now. Maybe after the war we will be in a better position to observe them and see what happened,” Bikaba says.

An IUCN report published in 2016 highlighted that the widespread practice of slash-and-burn farming and hunting for bushmeat contributed to the population decline – and that ongoing conflicts in the country continued to worsen the problem.

Bikaba speaks softly about his own escapes. “I have escaped death many times, but my friends and family have not been so lucky. »

In 2009, he founded Strong Roots Congo with the aim of reconciling conservation and community rights around Kahuzi-Biega National Park. The organization worked alongside the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation (ICCN) during the state’s renewed efforts to save the forest. But Bikaba’s objective remained broader. “We wanted to go beyond these forests,” he says, describing how communities themselves pushed for better protection of gorillas and other species.

An expedition in late 2010, working with around 70 chiefdoms (traditional local governance units) outside protected areas, crystallized a more ambitious vision to create a biodiversity corridor linking Kahuzi-Biega National Park to Itombwe Nature Reserve. The goal was (and still is) to secure 1 million hectares (2.47 million acres) for wildlife and indigenous communities, uniting fragmented habitats while formalizing customary land rights.

So far, Strong Roots has helped create 23 community forests, covering approximately 600,000 hectares. Through partnerships with international conservation groups, it helps communities convert customary land tenure into legally recognized community forest concessions. The model echoes approaches tested in parts of Latin America, where indigenous management has proven compatible with forest protection.

“We also want to improve people’s livelihoods,” says Bikaba. Conservation here lies at the intersection of ecology and geopolitics. The park is a sanctuary for species and a scene of conflicts that have been brewing for more than three decades.

Insecurity complicates everything. “We never really had peace,” he said. His office was looted after the M23 rebels took Goma, and the fighting sometimes made sites on the ground inaccessible. A trip that once took 30 minutes by plane from Bukavu to Shabunda can now stretch into a four-day journey through several transit points.

The planned corridor will not only protect other large mammals, but also reconnect isolated gorilla populations, improving chances of reproduction and recovery. Importantly, it will be co-managed by indigenous communities, whose relationship with the forest predates colonial boundaries and modern conservation laws.

For Bikaba, raised on the edge of the forest and shaped by movement and tradition, the work conveys a feeling of restitution. “What we’re doing is rebuilding communities so they can thrive together as they have for centuries,” he says.

He is wary of conservation models that present local populations as threats. “Western conservationists claim that indigenous people destroy the forest because they are poor and tend to try to separate animals from humans,” he says. “But humans are also part of nature. We can learn a lot of wisdom from the communities that live in forests.”

As fighting continues in eastern DRC, the future of Grauer’s gorillas remains uncertain. For Bikaba, the lesson of three decades is brutal. “If there is one thing we should avoid in life, it is war,” he said. “If there is a way to stop the war in this region, we must do it. No matter the cost.”

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