In July 2014, a large chimp snatched and killed a toddler named Mujuni Semata outside the family home in Kyamajaka village. Over time, the chimps returned to loom menacingly around the house, posing a threat to the other children. After the family fled to another village, the chimps continued harrying Kyamajaka—even glowering at their own reflections in the windows of the vacant Semata house.
Life was already hard enough for Ntegeka Semata and her family, scratching out a subsistence measure of survival on their little patch of garden land along a ridgeline in western Uganda. They could barely grow food for themselves, and now a group of desperate, bold, crop-raiding chimpanzees threatened their livelihood, maybe even their safety.
The chimps had been coming closer for a year or two, prowling all throughout Kyamajaka village, searching for food, ripping bananas from the trees, grabbing mangos and papayas and whatever else tempted them. They had helped themselves to jackfruit from a tree near the Semata house. But on July 20, 2014, scary tribulations gave way to horror—a form of horror that has struck other Ugandan families as well. That was the day when a single big chimp, probably an adult male, snatched the Semata family’s toddler son, Mujuni, and killed him.
“A chimpanzee came in the garden as I was digging,” Ntegeka Semata recalled during an interview in early 2017. Her four young children were with her that day, as she combined mothering with hard fieldwork, but she turned her back to get them some drinking water. The chimp saw his chance, grabbed her two-year-old son by the hand, and ran.
Left: Some villagers set snares in the forest to trap antelope, bush pigs, and other animals for food. Chimps, despite a taboo in Uganda against eating them, become unintended victims. About a third of the chimps in one community in Kibale National Park have suffered snare injuries, including this young male, known to researchers as Max, who lost both feet. Right: Teddy Atuhaire was a four-year-old in Mukichanga village, when a chimp entered the house while her mother was gone and carried Teddy away into a tree. The chimp gashed her head, broke her arm so badly it had to be amputated, and dropped her. The years of recovery have been difficult. With her parents dead, her siblings dead or gone, she lives by occasional labour and care from her aunts.
The boy’s screaming brought other villagers, who helped the mother give chase. But the chimp was rough and strong, and the fatal damage occurred fast. “It broke off the arm, hurt him on the head, and opened the stomach and removed the kidneys,” Semata said. Then, stashing the child’s battered body under some grass, the chimp fled. Mujuni was rushed to a health centre in a nearby town, Muhororo, but that little clinic couldn’t treat an eviscerated child, and he died en route to a regional hospital.
Things are still uneasy in Kyamajaka these days, for at least some people and some chimpanzees. Attacks by chimps on human infants have continued, totalling at least three fatalities and half a dozen injuries or narrow escapes in greater Muhororo since 2014. The main driver of the conflicts, it seems, is habitat loss for chimps throughout areas of western Uganda, forested lands outside of national parks and reserves, which have been converted to agriculture as the population has grown. The native forest that once covered these hillsides is now largely gone, much of it cut during recent decades for timber and firewood, and cleared to plant crops.
Before surrendering their house, the Sematas built a simple bamboo fence for protection around their backyard kitchen. But the chimps still came near, taking papaya and jackfruit from trees close to the house, frighteningly present. So the family left.
Such demographic and landscape changes are happening fast throughout Kagadi District (which includes Kyamajaka), just east of Lake Albert and the Rwenzori Mountains, and in neighbouring districts as well. The soil is volcanic and rich, well watered by seasonal rains, and suitable to support a burgeoning number of farming families that eke out a living on small private plots from staple crops such as corn and cassava, supplemented by domesticated fruits and a little income from cash crops: tobacco, coffee, sugarcane, and rice.
The Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) is acutely aware of the chimp problem, and though chimps outside protected areas (as well as within national parks and reserves) fall under the authority’s responsibility, private forests do not. “Unfortunately, it is hard for us—impossible for us—to prevent clearing of these areas,” UWA Executive Director Sam Mwandha said recently. “We can only plead; we can only educate and hope that people will appreciate them.”
Ntegeka Semata comforts her two younger children, both born since their brother was killed. They left Kyamajaka for an inadequate new home: a rented room, safe from chimps but with no land to farm. More recently, they’ve acquired a farmable plot and started over.
But appreciating a forest for its long-term benefits, such as mitigating erosion and buffering temperature, can be difficult in the face of short-term pressures to grow crops for food. And with chimps in a forest patch, one moment of diverted attention by a mother as she gardens can result in a child being snatched. So the immediate need, Mwandha said, is to “create awareness” among people in such areas that their caution must be high, their vigilance continuous. That’s easier said than done, but the UWA recently assigned four permanent staff to this awareness campaign in western Uganda.
The chimps of Kyamajaka—maybe just a dozen or so in the village environs—nest nightly in the remnant woods at the bottom of a glen, where a small stream runs, or in the eucalyptus plantation nearby. By day, they emerge because their wild foods have largely disappeared, and they feed from the crop fields and fruit trees surrounding village homes. They move stealthily throughout the village, mostly on the ground because there’s no forest canopy left to swing along, high and confident, as they would in deep forest. Despite the stealth, their pedestrian foraging sometimes brings them into close contact with people. They drink at the same stream where village women and children fetch water. When they stand, or walk upright, as they often do, they seem menacingly humanoid.
Chimpanzees, along with bonobos, are our closest living relatives. Their species, Pan troglodytes, is classified endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Their total population throughout Africa—at most 300,000, possibly far less—is smaller than the human population of Wichita, Kansas. As adults, they’re big, dangerous animals—a male might weigh 130 pounds and be half again as strong as a similar-size man. Chimps in productive forests live mostly on wild fruit, such as figs, but they will kill and eat a monkey or a small antelope when they can, tearing the body to pieces and sharing it excitedly. They relish meat. Because chimps tend to be wary of adult humans, especially men, their aggressive (and in some cases predatory) behaviour toward people, when it occurs, falls mainly upon children. In some cases too, a chimp might pick up a small child out of sheer curiosity, as though grabbing a toy.
Clearing of forest, both by small farmers and by giant sugarcane and tea enterprises, has shrunk chimp habitat to patches and strips, such as this stream forest in the Kinyara Sugar Works plantation, near a village called Kabango. According to one source, four children in Kabango have been attacked—and two killed—by chimps during the past decade.
Whatever the motive, it can be terrifying. For more than three years after the trauma of her son’s abduction, Ntegeka Semata and her husband, Omuhereza Semata, a farmer, continued to live in their house. They built a bamboo fence around their tiny backyard, enclosing the cooking shed in what they hoped would be a safe zone for the family. “I am scared all the time that other chimpanzees might come back,” Ntegeka said in that earlier interview.
Chimps swipe corn, mangoes, papaya, and the favorite shown here, jackfruit, from villagers’ fields and trees. This female and her youngsters belong to a group of 22, marooned in a forest fragment along a stream corridor not far from Mparangasi. She carries an infant at her belly and a toddler on her back.
But the fence was flimsy, the chimps kept returning, and the Sematas felt under siege. Ntegeka couldn’t work in the garden. The children were sometimes too afraid to eat. Even their goat made piteous noises of fear. By the end of 2017, their house was vacant, with a broken window above the front door. The Sematas had fled and were living a marginalised existence in a rented room at a compound three miles away. They owned no farming land there. “I feel like we’ve been cast back into poverty,” she said.
Meanwhile the remaining windows of their old house reflected only the faces of chimpanzees, which visited regularly, glowering in, confused and provoked by the chimp images mirrored there, which seemed to be glowering out.
Kyamajaka village has lost three children to chimp attacks during the past five years. Because fetching water from forest sources can be a dangerous chore, these kids from a Kyamajaka school walk to the spring in a group, with an adult, for the safety of numbers.
The death of Mujuni Semata was no isolated event. Police reports from the town of Muhororo (of which Kyamajaka is a satellite village, containing a few hundred families) describe two chimp-on-child attacks during 2017. On May 18, a toddler named Maculate Rukundo was seized in a cornfield while her mother worked the crop. The mother chased the chimps but then backed off, terrified, and ran to get help. A crowd of local people, soon joined by police, tracked the chimps to a patch of forest, where the little girl lay dead in a pool of blood and intestines, her gut torn open by chimp fingernails. Five weeks later, chimps (maybe the same group, but that’s hard to know) took a one-year-old boy from another garden plot, with his mother nearby, and again retreated to a patch of forest. A posse of local villagers pursued the chimps until they dropped the boy, who had a deep cut on his left leg but was alive. The police reported that in addition to this survivor with serious injuries, six young children had been killed in the area by chimps.
More recently, in mid-2018, a five-month-old girl was snatched from a veranda while her mother worked in the kitchen. The mother heard her child’s cries, raised a ruckus, and charged the chimps—and they fled. That baby was found alive, unconscious, in a nearby bush. After going to a well, a three-year-old girl was taken by a male chimp that scared away the child’s older friends and carried her off but dropped her, reportedly when he was challenged by an elderly man, a passerby, who raised the alarm. A 12-year-old boy in another satellite village was grabbed near a garden and suffered a deep arm wound as he struggled to get free.
From elsewhere in western Uganda come accounts of the same gruesome pattern, played out with variations: one child killed by a chimp on the sugarcane plantation at Kasongoire, in 2005; four chimpanzee attacks on children, with one fatality, near the Budongo Forest Reserve, farther north; eight attacks, back in the 1990s, seven of which were probably by a single rogue male chimp, on children from villages bordering Kibale National Park. Of those victims, three children were eviscerated, and some were partly eaten. That male, further demonised with the name Saddam, was hunted down and killed soon after his seventh child killing. He was an egregious anomaly. Most cases are more ambiguous, involving chimps that are reckless at one fateful moment, not repeated killers. This phenomenon is not confined to Uganda: It has happened elsewhere in chimp range across Africa, most notoriously at Gombe Stream National Park, famed primatologist Jane Goodall’s study site in Tanzania, where in 2002 an adult male chimp snatched and killed a human baby.
Chimpanzees in Uganda are protected by law, meaning that it’s illegal to hunt or kill one, regardless of whether it lives within a park or reserve (though permission has occasionally been granted to kill a rogue male such as Saddam). They’re further protected by tradition of the Bunyoro people, predominant in western Uganda, who tend to see chimps as different from other animals and, unlike some Congolese peoples across the border, don’t hunt them as food.
Despite law and custom, there have been killings of chimps too—retaliatory, defensive. The details will probably never be known. Late last year, an adult male chimp in the area was fatally speared. A young female was beaten to death there with sticks and stones. The carcass of another young chimp was reportedly found, decomposing, cause of death indeterminable but fingers cut off. Among communities of angry, powerless people who fear for their children, it’s not surprising. Chimpanzees aren’t the only desperate primates in western Uganda. All these painful ambiguities show up vividly at a place called Bulindi, where one group of chimpanzees and their fraught interactions with people are studied by a British biologist named Matt McLennan.
‘I am scared all the time’: Chimps and people are clashing in rural Uganda
Forest clearing has forced hungry chimps to raid villagers’ crops. At times, chimps kill children, and villagers kill chimps.
www.nationalgeographic.com
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