The China Mail - In remote Senegal, chimp researchers escape gold mines' perils

He is among five people from local villages, all but one without a high school diploma, working on a project focused on the area's highly unusual savannah-dwelling chimpanzees.

Not only has it proven a deep dive into science, but for several of them, it has also offered an escape from the mines.

"It's really a stroke of luck," Sadiakhou told AFP of his involvement in the Fongoli Savanna Chimpanzee Project, which was founded by US primatologist Jill Pruetz in 2001.

Pruetz has made a number of discoveries while studying a community of about three dozen West African chimpanzees, which she dubbed the Fongoli chimps.

The group lives in the bush -- rather than the forest as is more common -- alongside other similar chimp communities in Senegal's Kedougou region on the border with Mali and Guinea.

The Fongoli females are the only documented animals in the world to regularly hunt with tools, fashioning branches into spears for killing smaller primates known as a bush babies.

On a recent morning, Mike, a charismatic, middle-aged chimp, ambled along the savannah floor, baobab fruit dangling by a stem from his mouth -- a snack for later -- as Sadiakhou watched.

Every five minutes, he and his fellow researchers take notes, singling out one of the group's 10 adult males to follow each day.

From vocalisations to food intake, social interactions to rhythmic beating on trees, known as buttress drumming, they note down everything.

The four researchers and project manager are from the region's Bedik and Bassari ethnic groups.

After leaving high school, Sadiakhou, a 37-year-old Bedik father of four, worked in the gold mines, known locally as the dioura.

Seeing Pruetz and others repeatedly driving past his village he decided to apply for work and was hired to the project in 2009, having never seen a chimp in his life.

Now head researcher, he describes the apes as a "second family".

"When I'm with the chimpanzees, even if I'm alone, it's like I'm with other people," Sadiakhou told AFP reporters, who spent two days with the researchers at the primates' home range.

- 'Dioura' boom -

Fellow researcher Nazaire Bonnag, 31, also put the dioura behind him.

One day "I saw someone go down there (into the mines) and he never came back up", Bonnag told AFP from the study's permanent camp -- a cluster of thatched roof huts inside the Fongoli range.

When the man was determined to have suffocated from gas and his body pulled out by a rope, Bonnag decided "no, I can't continue like this".

The Kedougou region, where the Fongoli range is located, accounts for 98 percent of Senegal's gold mining sites, a 2018 government study said.

It is also one of its poorest regions, with a poverty rate of more than 65 percent, according to statistics from 2021-2022.

At one of several dioura sites on the Fongoli chimps' range, a gaping hole in the ground leads to a deep tunnel where tired, dirt-covered men entered and exited.

More than 30,000 people work in Senegal's traditional gold mining sector, according to the 2018 study.

Aliou Bakhoum, head of the NGO La Lumiere in the regional capital of Kedougou, said the number had only increased in the last few years.

The dioura can be lucrative for those who find gold but it is down to "luck", Bakhoum told AFP, saying the work is dangerous, with long tunnels that are far too deep and subject to cave-ins.

- Adaptations to extreme heat -

A gold mining boom since the 2010s has lured not just locals but people from neighbouring west African countries too and presents new hurdles for the chimps such as increased water pollution, deforestation and the spread of human diseases.

The Fongoli chimps, who today number 35, were the first and for a long time only group of savannah chimpanzees to be acclimated to the presence of researchers.

Pruetz's findings have been startling: Living in the extreme savannah heat, the Fongoli apes have learned to soak in natural pools, rest in cool caves and are calm in the presence of fire.

Their adaptations to a landscape at the edge of what is possible for their species can help shed light on human evolution and the early hominins living in similar climates millions of years ago, according to Pruetz.

Dondo "Johnny" Kante, the study's project manager, comes from a nearby Bedik village and believes that including local workers helps the wider community take "interest in the project".

With any luck, he said, the researchers' involvement will inspire other locals to "continue to support, protect and truly work for the well-being" of the Fongoli chimps.

W.Cheng--ThChM