‘Don’t Feed Animals’ a Cruel Joke in Zaire Zoo

At the zoo in President Mobutu Park, the signs still say “Don’t Feed The Animals,” a cruel joke in a place where the animals are starving and soldiers patrol with automatic weapons.

Crocodiles lie motionless, jaws partly open, watching the soldiers.

Two wart hogs raise their bony frames from the ground when a visitor approaches and butt the fence with their tusks.

Chimpanzees scream and hoot when someone gives another a banana. One hangs a deformed hand through the bars of his cage like a street beggar.

“It’s a type of sadism. The ones that are left have got to get out,” said Graziella Cotman, who was a volunteer at the Nsele Zoo for 12 years. She now cares for chimpanzees at the zoo in Brazzaville, across the Congo River, and was interviewed there.

Cotman has not seen the Nsele Zoo since November, when she and about 15,000 other foreigners were evacuated from the Central African country after unpaid soldiers went on a looting spree.

Economic chaos prevails in Zaire. About three-fourths of the workers are unemployed, hospitals lack basic medicines and food prices have soared far beyond what most people can afford.

A zoo in Kinshasa has survived on private donations and the interest of the expatriate community, but Nsele, 20 miles north of the capital, has been virtually forgotten.

President Mobutu Sese Seko built the zoo in 1971 in the park that forms a huge back yard to one of his homes, and used to exhibit it proudly to visiting dignitaries. Now, only seven of the 130 employees remain.

When told that only five chimpanzees were still alive, Cotman broke into tears. There were 13 when she left.

“The chimps had been there since I began working there in 1982,” she said.

Even when she was at Nsele, some of the animals would not have had food unless she had bought it with her own money, Cotman said, “and the government had a budget for the zoo.”

Mobutu’s government allocated about $50,000 a month for Nsele for five years, until 1987, but not much of it actually reached the zoo, Cotman said. After 1987, she raised the money necessary to feed the animals.

During a reporter’s visit, the only zoo employee present said, “I’m here for security, because the soldiers bother the visitors.”

Two rocket launchers were stationed just outside the zoo grounds to protect Mobutu’s home and his river boat, which often docks nearby.

Presidential guards at the main gate demanded identification papers.

Soldiers on patrol inside said no photos were allowed, but it was possible to take one despite the rule.

Repeated attempts over several weeks to speak with the zoo’s director were unsuccessful. First, he was at the Earth Summit in Brazil with about 80 other Zairian delegates. Later, he left for a zoo conference in Johannesburg.

“He wants money, that’s all,” Cotman said.

The only animals at the zoo that did not appear to be starving were the lions and leopards, symbols of strength and virility in Africa. Mobutu is rarely seen without his leopard-skin hat.

When she arrived at the zoo one day in 1989, Cotman said, she found the remains of a lion, feet amputated and the blood drained.

A general and some of his men had visited the zoo on Mobutu’s birthday, Oct. 14, and killed the lion for a special ceremony, she said.