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| Vol. 24., No. 10 | November 20, 1998 |
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| Vol. 24., No. 10 | November 20, 1998 |
By Christopher Leavell
Christopher Leavell is a senior in Columbia College majoring in English and physical anthropology.
I could see his eyes blinking up through a thin slit in the trap. Bound with bark and made of saplings, the cage shook as the monkey scrabbled to and fro, trying to escape. For me, the captured monkey was the focal point of my summer's work. For the poacher, the monkey meant cash, perhaps a meal-scarcely different than the cows or chickens in the nearby village.
Last summer I worked as a research assistant for Columbia's associate professor of anthropology Marina Cords in the Kakamega rain forest of western Kenya. As part of a team of six undergraduate and graduate students, I spent 10 hours each day in the forest, often in the rain, observing and recording the behavior of two groups of wild blue monkeys (Cercopithecus mitis).
Craning my neck and peering through binoculars, I strained to identify the monkeys high in the trees where they spent most of the day. The shape of the ears, the idiosyncracies of each monkey's tail were the subtle, nearly indistinguishable differences that I grew to know well. I also came to know that blue monkeys are finicky about their food, spending hours each day selecting the lush leaves that are the mainstay of their diet.
And in the course of following these monkeys I picked up jungle survival techniques, such as stepping heavily through the brush to scare away vipers.
But beyond the exposure to field research which the job provided, my time in Kenya loosened some of the cultural assumptions I brought with me-and for the first time I knew how it really felt to be a foreigner.
On the afternoon that I found the monkey, called Hook, in the poacher's trap, I felt a mix of emotions. While relieved he wasn't killed in a fight with another monkey (he had been missing from the rest of his troop all morning), I was stunned to learn that someone would want to eat him-this monkey that I spent the last month watching closely, learning his daily habits of eating, grooming, mating and sleeping. What I held as self-evident-the sanctity of primate lives, the necessity of preserving biological diversity-had come in conflict with an idea equally self-evident to those living around the rain forest: that monkeys are a legitimate source of food. And, I began to ask myself, why not? I felt unable to make a more compelling argument against poaching than the fact that I wanted to study the monkeys' behavior.
But my dilemma did not interfere with the work I was there to do. We freed Hook, combed the forest for more traps and kept our eyes peeled for other poachers. Research continued.
Living as an Object of Fascination
Aside from work in the rain forest, all the students spent time adjusting to life in and around the tiny African village (population: 100) at the edge of the forest. The day after arriving, I accompanied Professor Cords on the 40-minute Jeep ride into Kakamega town to buy food and supplies. Having known her only in a classroom, I wondered at the vastly different life she has known for the last 19 summers in Kenya.
Our drive into town had a sensational impact. Every person along the way turned and welcomed Professor Cords. Men waved, children hello-ed in ebullient combinations of English and Swahili, women gathered their skirts to move closer for a better view: Marina Cords had returned, and everyone within a 10-mile radius of the forest was soon aware of her presence.
But curiosity was not directed at her alone. My first morning in the small tin-roofed shack where I slept, I opened my eyes to see a line of silent Kenyan children staring through my bedroom window. After climbing out of bed and opening the wire mesh pane, we quietly exchanged greetings and a few pleasantries. Exhausting my repertoire of Swahili phrases almost immediately, we went on in slow and careful English, and then stood wordlessly regarding each other. For the sake of privacy I later hung an old blue towel across the window. But the daily endeavors of the villagers were of as much interest to me as my binoculars, gumboots and preoccupation with looking at monkeys were to them. As my time passed in the village, friendships were made and gestures and gifts were shared. The cultural divide gradually narrowed.
Dinner and Dry Clothes
Every evening as the sun went down and the monkeys became dark and indistinguishable blots against the dense green canopy, the other researchers and I left the forest. Another day completed, another date on the calendar penciled away, I exchanged my wet and muddy field clothes for my carefully preserved evening attire: a dry shirt and clean slacks that I kept hung against my bedroom wall. Then I ate dinner at Professor Cords' house with the rest of the research team, the part of the daily routine I looked forward to most.
We sat around and talked-about Kenya, about the monkey-doings of the day, about the things we had done and would do upon returning to New York in September. After eating, we drew the kerosene lanterns close to the table and Professor Cords opened her large black notebook. We then spent several hours summarizing, in painstaking detail, the data collected during the day.
The point of Professor Cords' research is to collect, summer after summer, observational data as well as fecal samples for DNA analysis back at Columbia, in order to interpret primate social systems from an evolutionary perspective, i.e., which adult blue monkey males are most successful at fathering offspring, and why? The other students and I spent the summer in the forest, looking for possible answers.
A Reminder of Where I Belong
Near the summer's end, a terrorist's bomb gutted Nairobi's American embassy and U.S. retaliation loomed. Again I felt my presence in the country was not altogether welcome; that I didn't belong in Kenya.
Not that life in the village changed much. Indeed, stationed six hours from the bombing and connected to the world only by the thin crackling of a short-wave radio, it was hard for me to believe, sitting among now-familiar monkeys in the tangly wilds of the forest, that I was in any danger.
But concern crept in: parents sent anxious letters, Newsweek (the one magazine we occasionally managed to find in town) ran bloody photos of the disaster, and Professor Cords cautioned us to keep low profiles, especially in Nairobi where we would spend a few days before flying back to the U.S. As a citizen of a world power, I had always considered my personal safety a matter-of-course. Suddenly, my position as an American living well beyond the borders of the United States seemed precarious, and I began to long for home.
The summer working in the tropical rain forest was different from what I had envisioned. After my romantic notions of following monkeys through the African jungle were tempered by the chronic, indefatigable swarms of mosquitoes, the research became, at times, a test of perseverance. Still, I emerged from the three-month stint with a sense of accomplishment-I got through something unlike anything I'd done in the past. And the opportunity to live in Kenya not as a tourist but as a member of a village was far more eye-opening than viewing the country through the window of an expensive safari van.
Now walking through New York City, only months after leaving East Africa, the contrast between the places goes beyond the mundane reality of having toilets and electricity again at my disposal. Strangely, I know a group of monkeys-some 45 in all-and as I sit today in a morning lecture, they quietly begin examining their afternoon leaves, somewhere halfway around the globe.