Culture

Healing Dual Traumas at a Congolese Wildlife Sanctuary


On the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near Lake Kivu and the border of Rwanda, there is a primate sanctuary called Lwiro Primates Rehabilitation Center. It is home to around a hundred rescued chimpanzees, saved from poachers who typically kill the adults for meat and sell the babies as pets on the black market. When authorities are able to intercept such sales, the orphans are sent to Lwiro Primates to recover from the trauma of losing their mothers and their homes.

Nestled amid a conflict zone and at the edge of one of the world’s most important tropical forests, Lwiro Primates conducts work that is vitally important yet fraught with risk. Magazines and newspapers around the world have praised their conservation efforts. But when the filmmaker Pablo de la Chica met a Lwiro Primates staff member in Kampala, in 2014, she shared a lesser-known story of the sanctuary, one that de la Chica immediately knew he wanted to tell. It was about an extraordinary woman named Mama Zawadi di Balanza.

In 2008, Mama Zawadi was leaving school with a friend when they were ambushed by soldiers from the F.D.L.R., a rebel group formed by Hutus who’d fled Rwanda after the genocide. The soldiers raped the girls and then took them into the jungle. In the coming months and years, Mama Zawadi was raped multiple times—both in the wilderness and back at home. During her recovery, she spent time at a center for sexual-assault survivors, where she met Lorena Aguirre Cadarso, a trauma specialist who also worked at Lwiro Primates. She invited Mama Zawadi to come there to rest.

At Lwiro Primates, Mama Zawadi became a vital caregiver to the orphaned chimpanzees. Her bonds with her “babies,” as she calls them, reached unusual depths of love and affection. (The animals benefit from close contact and care, but they are not pets; the staff aims to help them develop the skills they need to survive on their own before reintroducing them to the wild.) De la Chica’s film “Mama” is the story of those bonds, and of two crises stemming from the same root: the ongoing conflict in the eastern D.R.C. has contributed to an increase in poaching, which threatens the habitats of chimpanzees, and extremely high levels of sexual violence, which devastates the lives of women and girls like Mama Zawadi. “These chimps are victims, like me,” Mama Zawadi says in the film. “They need love so that they can forget what they’ve been through, like me.”

“Mama” makes for an emotionally complicated viewing experience. Scenes of pure bliss—Mama Zawadi singing as she prepares bottles for the infant chimps, laughing as four of them crawl over her body—are followed by the gut-wrenching account of her trauma. Moments of tranquility are punctuated by gunshots. A sense of security reigns by day, replaced by a thick layer of anxiety as night falls. But Mama Zawadi’s spirit, de la Chica said, has a way of drawing in the people around her, helping make Lwiro Primates a true sanctuary, a safe refuge apart from the threats outside. “I remember the first time I saw Mama, with a baby chimpanzee jumping on her,” he told me. “I saw her smile, and the energy just changed.”


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