The Sanctuary the Law Needed
Sierra Leone has had a wildlife protection act since 1972, but for two decades a confiscated chimpanzee had nowhere at all to go, which is another way of saying the law could not be enforced. The place that fixed it was built by a private citizen in 1995, at the height of the civil war, and the state has been leaning on it ever since.
The road out of Freetown to Regent climbs through the last of the city's building plots and then, quite abruptly, into forest. About forty minutes above the sea there is a gate. Behind it, on roughly a hundred acres leased from the government, live something over a hundred western chimpanzees — almost all of them taken off the pet trade or out of a bushmeat market as infants, and almost none of them ever going back to the wild in the sense that phrase usually implies. Tacugama is the only facility of its kind in Sierra Leone. It is also, in a way that is easy to walk past, a piece of the country's law enforcement infrastructure.
Sierra Leone has had a wildlife conservation act since 1972. It made killing or capturing a chimpanzee an offence. What it did not do — what almost no statute of that kind anywhere does — is say what becomes of the animal afterwards. A forestry officer who takes an infant chimpanzee off a trader at a roadside has, at that moment, acquired a problem rather than achieved a result. The animal cannot be released, cannot be sold on, and will not survive a fortnight in a crate behind a police post. For more than twenty years the practical answer in Sierra Leone was that nothing was confiscated, because there was nowhere for anything confiscated to go.
The thirty-dollar chimpanzee
In 1988 Bala Amarasekaran, an accountant who had come to Sierra Leone from Sri Lanka as a teenager, and his wife Sharmila stopped at a village a long way up-country and bought a starving infant chimpanzee tied up beside the road for about thirty dollars. They called him Bruno. That transaction is not conservation — it is the demand side of exactly the trade the law was written against, and Amarasekaran has said so himself in the decades since. What it produced, though, was a household with seven rescued chimpanzees in it and six years of argument ahead: that the country needed a designated place to put animals seized under its own act, and that until it had one the act was decorative. In 1995 the government agreed and allocated forty hectares inside the forest reserve above the capital. Within two years there were more than twenty chimpanzees in it.
The worst available year
Nineteen ninety-five was not a year in which anyone in Freetown had spare attention for primates. The Revolutionary United Front had crossed from Liberia in March 1991 and the war it started ran until January 2002. The army overthrew the elected government in May 1997 and invited the rebels into the capital; in January 1999 the city was attacked outright and several thousand civilians were killed in a matter of weeks. The sanctuary in the hills above all of this was raided and stripped twice, and on both occasions what saved it was Amarasekaran negotiating in person with armed men over whether his staff and his animals would be shot. Sierra Leonean keepers stayed with the chimpanzees through periods when the road down to the city was not usable. It is worth being plain about the sequence: the institution was not built after the war as part of a recovery. It was built during the war, by people who had every reason to be doing something else, and the state that authorised it barely existed at the time.
A protection law is only as real as the place you can put the animal you have just taken into custody. Everything upstream of that — the offence, the penalty, the signature on the convention — is a press release.
The escape
On 23 April 2006 thirty-one chimpanzees got out. A vehicle was on the sanctuary road carrying three American contractors working on the new US embassy nearby, and their driver, a Sierra Leonean named Issa Kanu, was dragged from it and killed; the passengers were injured and flown out for treatment. Most of the animals came back within weeks, a good many of them of their own accord — twenty-six of the thirty-one inside two months. Bruno, by then the dominant male and the reason the place existed at all, was one of four that never returned, and he has not been seen since. What had to be rebuilt afterwards was not the fencing so much as the relationship with the villages on the peninsula, the people who actually live alongside a hundred large primates and who had just been given the worst possible reason to object. It is the episode Tacugama is asked about least often and the one that explains most of what you walk past today: the double barriers, the moats, the electric line along the top, the rule about the distance you keep.
What a national animal is for
In March 2019, at a ceremony in Freetown, the agriculture minister Joseph Ndanema declared the western chimpanzee the national animal of Sierra Leone — the first country anywhere to give the species that status. Bruno's face subsequently went onto the redesigned national passport. A designation is not a budget, a ranger or a prosecution, and it is fair to be sceptical of it. What it changes is narrower and real: what a magistrate can be told about the seriousness of an offence, and what a minister can be asked in public about a road through a forest. The species behind it is not doing well. The IUCN moved the western chimpanzee to critically endangered in 2016, and a national survey published in 2010 put Sierra Leone's population at roughly 5,500 — a large share of what is left globally, and, awkwardly for everyone, mostly living outside protected areas on farmland, next to people whose crops they raid.
The forest is the problem, not the fence
The sanctuary sits inside the peninsula forest, a colonial-era reserve upgraded to a national park under the protected-areas legislation of 2012. Freetown has grown up the hillsides regardless, because a city of well over a million people on a narrow peninsula has nowhere else to go. On 14 August 2017, after three days of rain, a section of Sugar Loaf collapsed onto the settlement at Regent and killed more than a thousand people in a few minutes. Building on the slopes continued afterwards. Plots on the park boundary continue to be allocated. The threat to the chimpanzees on this hillside has never been poachers coming up the road; it is the cumulative, entirely legal-looking process by which a forest becomes a suburb.
Which is why the argument Tacugama now makes to its neighbours is not about chimpanzees at all. The peninsula forest is Freetown's watershed — the Guma valley reservoir sits inside it and supplies most of the piped water the city gets — and a deforested slope above a dense settlement is the mechanism that produced 2017. Keep the trees for that reason, and the primates are a side effect. It is a more honest argument than the one about heritage, and it puts the country's entire capacity to enforce its own wildlife law where it has been since 1995: in one organisation, on the edge of a growing capital, funded largely from outside, holding animals that will still be alive in fifty years because that is how long chimpanzees live.