11. The Kasokwa Forest chimpanzees:
a breakdown of trust
I guess this has to be the moment when I’m most at peace with the world, and, yes, with myself.
The fig tree is, for half an hour, a glorious orange colour as the western sun paints its branches each
evening. The hornbills weave in and out, moving from the trees to the Broussonetialine. The
monkeys jump from branch to branch. Behind me in the house Andy enters data — he’s been doing
it since 7 a.m., a 12-hour stint. Over at the staff houses logs are being split and dinner prepared by
Priscilla and others for the field assistants, still not back from their full day in the forest. Sounds —
the caw-caw of the hornbills, the crickets, the frogs, children, an axe on wood, a ball being
bounced, the wings of a hornbill beating the air, voices of men and of women — nothing jars here,
no telephone rings, no TV domineers, no cars flash by, what incredible luck to be in such a harmo-
nious little world. Mind you there are realities here too. Like setting the rat-trap at bedtime: I’ll try
cheese tonight. Last night the rat ate the potato without setting it off (6 p.m., 31 March 1995).In September 1999 I was introduced to Richard Kyamanywa, who lived in a village
along the main road to Masindi. He told me he knew of a population of chimpanzees
living in a forest fragment just outside the main Budongo Forest block. These chim-
panzees were in some danger from local people. Soon afterwards he joined the staff of
BFP as a field assistant.^87
Kyamanywa told us that a small community of 13 chimpanzees was living in the
Kasokwa Forest Reserve, a riverine forest 73 ha in extent, which was an outlier to
the south of Budongo Forest not far from his home village, Karujubu (see Fig. 11.1).
Since May 1999 he had been taking an interest in these chimpanzees since, he said, they
were in danger of being killed by local people who were angry at their crop-raiding
habits, they were also being displaced by the growing human population in the area. The
Kasokwa Forest Reserve is located just east of the huge Kinyara Sugar Works. It is a
riverine strip of forest following the line of the Kasokwa River. In fact it is part of a
series of riverine forest strips lying to the south of Budongo, and was in the past joined
to Budongo Forest main block along the line of the river. Today the human population
has spread, creating whole new villages such as the village of Zebra, and has cut down
the trees for 2 km between the main forest and the Kasokwa Forest Reserve.
(^87) This was possible thanks to a grant from the National Geographic Society.