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Late one night, while teaching at the University of Virginia, I was researching graduate schools on the Internet when the words “USU Department of Environment and Society” appeared on my screen. “That’s the theme of my research!” I thought. That night I couldn’t sleep. I knew this was the place. At 8 the next morning I called. Because of my accent the conversation was stiff. But once I showed up in person, the admissions process went faster than usual. It was June. The temperatures were mild; the hillsides in Cache Valley, green, and I knew that this was the place where I belonged. I told the professors, “If you reject me, I will keep asking until you accept me.”
It has taken me eight years to develop my thinking. At USU my thinking ha really changed. You don’t see your own house until you sit outside and see it from another vantage point. While I continued to sympathize with the animals and the forests, I now understand the connection between the plight of wildlife and the economic realities facing our people.
Gombe National Park was established by Europeans for Europeans and the ruling class. Today it resembles a zoo—20 square miles surrounded by degraded forests and unsustainable farming practices. Poaching is an indication of local resistance to park policies. One chimpanzee is worth $3,000 in neighboring Burundi, and the villagers are hunting the chimps to extinction. Subsistence farming has taken over the forests near the park, and the remaining stands are scavenged for fuel and bricks.
The decimation of the forests is not only endangering the chimpanzees and the viability of local communities but unleashing deadly epidemics of previously unknown diseases. A century ago 2 million chimpanzees lived throughout tropical Africa. Today they are mostly confined to central parts of the African range, and their number has withered to 150,000. If this trend continues, the chimpanzees will disappear from the continent in my lifetime.
If our Garden of Eden were well cared for, we could grow anything in its fertile soil—tropical fruits, vegetables, peanuts. But the villagers cannot grow enough food or forage for edible plants when the wooded hills along Lake Tanganyika and where we used to graze our goats and cows have been turned into a desert that is drier than the dry season before the deforestation.
On December 9, 1961, Tanzania gained its independence from the British Empire. But the people are not free. You can’t have political freedom without economic freedom.
In my youth I planted seedlings but few of them survived. You can’t plant trees among poor, uneducated people. You have to plant trees in their hearts and minds. In Africa one educated person can do so much for so many people. Light one candle in the middle of darkness, and the bright light can be seen by many people from a great distance.
The survival of the chimps in the wild depends on the stability of the people who surround them. The Gombe School of Environment and Society will promote community-based education, conservation and self-help. It will be a school without walls, an outdoor laboratory. It will be a school of peacemakers who live in harmony with each other, the animals and the environment. It will blend sustainable agricultural and natural resource management with practical small business development so the people will no longer have to resort to logging, brick making and poaching.
Many people in the United States have helped me along the way as mentors and patrons, and some continue to help by contributing donations and serving on the international advisory board of the non-profit foundation I set up in Tanzania. But the solutions won’t come from outsiders; they must come from within. Once the local people recognize the value of the forests and the wildlife, they will take their lives into their own hands and become truly independent. They will no longer blame the deadly landslides on witchcraft. They will understand why we need the trees.
Some of the wisest people in my village have no formal education. Every night after dinner the elders gather at the campfire to tell stories that toast the past and celebrate the future. One of their stories is about a five-headed monster in the forest who swallowed a troop of soldiers dispatched by the king to protect the villagers. He sent a bigger army and they were eaten too. Then the orphaned children approached the monster with flattery and song and dance. By befriending him they won his trust, and he willingly went with them to the king’s palace where he was transformed into the best protector in the history of the kingdom. The message was this: Sometimes wisdom is required rather than force.
The day I was born a lioness killed a villager near our house, and she roared through the night. My parents almost named me Simba, Swahili for lion. Now there are no more lions near our village and very little wildlife. We don’t have to harm the animals with power, with guns. We can handle them with wisdom and co-exist. We can live even with the king of the forest, the lion.
As this school takes root and grows, it is my hope that it will be replicated elsewhere in Tanzania and the world. Perhaps within my lifetime a university will be built on the edges of Gombe Park. A university of sustainability and peace in a region beset by crushing poverty, political disenfranchisement and genocidal warfare. As more candles are lit in the forest, the Garden of Eden will be restored. You can eat all the fruit but one, and that one must be left behind for the others. A
For more information about Yared Fubusa’s project, visit www.goseso.org.