Road toll

Natural History, July-August, 1998 by David Wilkie, Gilda Morelli

The poor roads of the Ituri forest were bad for people but great for wildlife.

May 1996: "Sukuma, sukuma [push, push]," yells Samueli, leaning half out of the window of his ancient Toyota to egg on his helpers. Thigh-deep in muddy water, we and four others are heaving mightily to try to pry the pickup truck out of yet another huge hole in the road. We are in the Ituri forest in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (at that time, Zaire).

The engine roars, and the wheels do nothing but spin wildly, covering us with a slurry of brick-colored mud. "Sukuma tena! [push again!]," yells the driver, who seems oblivious to the fact that for the last thirty minutes, the truck has not moved one inch. It is our fifth trip to the Ituri forest since 1981, when we began to research the socioecology of hunter-gatherers and farmers. We are three days out from the town of Bunia, having traveled all of seventy-five miles, and we still have about twenty miles to go to reach Mambasa, beyond which the road reportedly gets even worse for the last seventy miles to our field site.

In 1981, we were able to drive from Bunia to the field site in a single day. It was often hard then to believe that we were in a tropical forest, for along many stretches of the dirt road, all we could see were villages, farms, and plantations. Later, we were struck by how the lives of the Ituri people and the abundance of wildlife are influenced by an element that we did not anticipate when we first started working there: the road.

With each return visit, the road showed progressive symptoms of aging: potholes grew larger and more numerous; wooden bridges lost their planks; clogged culverts blocked streams, which flooded and washed away the road. As it slowly fell apart, fewer and fewer truck drivers were willing to incur the cost of repairing vehicles that were battered by mud, potholes, and fractured bridges. With a dwindling number of trucks arriving each year at roadside villages to buy agricultural produce from farmers, fewer and fewer farming families could afford to buy the clothes, pots, lamps, radios, and bicycles that had become part of the local economy. Progressively, the families slid back to a precolonial standard of living. Villages along the road were abandoned as whole families moved to the towns of Mambasa, Isiro, and Wamba in search of a living--or, more typically, young men and women left to look for work while their parents stayed behind.

The forests of eastern Congo, which include the Ituri, are also at the mercy of the roads. They cover roughly 70,000 square miles and host a stunningly diverse array of animals and plants. The biological significance of these forests has been recognized since colonial times. Over the last seventy-two years, four major protected areas--three Of them UNESCO World Heritage Sites--have been created in the region. The most recent, the 5,100-square-mile Okapi Wildlife reserve, was established in 1992 in the heart of the Ituri forest. Although these parks and reserves have the potential to protect much of the region's diverse fauna, they are all severely threatened.

Most luridly, the civil war that engulfed the country in October 1996, exacting thousands of human casualties, also took a toll on the forests. The Ituri region did not see the worst of the war. However, people there suffered the theft of seed crops and other goods by retreating government troops. Already weakly enforced regulations on the hunting of bushmeat completely collapsed. Also, gold and diamond miners, commercial game-meat hunters, and poachers operate illegally in all the protected areas. The scale of incursions and the level of damage they are capable of visiting on these areas are directly linked to accessibility by road.

The Ituri forest is home to chimpanzees and twelve other primate species. It is also home to the forest elephant and buffalo, two species of wild pig, ten species of antelope, the leopard and golden cat, several species of genet, and the okapi--a short-necked relative of the giraffe, unique to the area--not to mention hordes of scurrying smaller creatures, a great diversity of birds, and spectacularly colorful flurries of butterflies. Although farmer's fields could have been a veritable supermarket to hungry elephants, pigs, and primates, the density of villages along the road and the vigilance of farmers' children used to keep the animals at a distance--most of the time. But as the forest reclaimed roads and deserted villages alike, elephants, antelope, and other herbivorous animals quickly took advantage of the dense flush of regrowth vegetation that grew up roadside; it was more accessible and palatable than the toxic, tannin-rich leaves of the tall trees typical of undisturbed forest in the Ituri region. Foraging animals also found a short-lived but abundant food supply in the bananas, papayas, and oil palms in abandoned fields.

Although we have watched the road decay over time, when we return in 1996, we are truly stunned. It has never been this bad. By 5:00 P.M., it's clear that we are not going to get the truck out of the mud before dark. Samueli and his helpers stay with the vehicle; we grab our backpacks and tell him that we are going to find a village to sleep in tonight. Even walking along the road is hard. The sides of the track are piled high with slippery red clay dug out of holes by truck crews looking for dry soil to give their vehicles some purchase in the mire. We teeter along the edge of chasms, some of them hundreds of yards long.