One of the biggest ever illegal animals shipments in Africa involved senior conservation officials, suggest documents seen by African Arguments.
Top officials from the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) conservation agency were undergoing a training session on combating wildlife trafficking, on 2 December 2023, when they received deeply embarrassing news. Forty primates, including an ultra-rare species only discovered to science in 2007, had been intercepted in Togo's Lomé airport, en route from Kinshasa to Thailand.
The seizure went relatively unremarked, but it was one of the largest ever of live primates in Africa. Lomé airport staff had stumbled upon a huge smuggling operation allegedly involving a major Congolese wildlife trafficker and a senior Congolese official who, paradoxically, had administered the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in the DRC until last year.
The airport staff called in help from anti-trafficking specialists from the EAGLE Network (Eco Activists for Governance and Law Enforcement), an NGO who helped to identify several monkey species not listed on the manifest. Packed inside filthy crates, they found owl-faced Hamlyn's monkeys; L'Hoest's monkeys, endemic to the Congo basin; and, rarest of all, Lesula monkeys, a species with expressive humanlike eyes that was unknown to the international scientific community until 2007.
"To the best of my knowledge, this is the largest illegal shipment in Africa this century," says Ian Redmond, a tropical field biologist who's conducted undercover investigations into African poaching rings.
Unusually for the shadowy world of wildlife crime, the traffickers in this case left a clear trail. According to copies of export papers seen by African Arguments, the shipment of monkeys was registered to a Congolese company named Domap-Zaire.
The papers were signed off on by Augustin Ngumbi, the former director of the DRC's CITES management authority. CITES is an international treaty designed to regulate the trade of wild animals and plants in order to protect against unsustainable trafficking. Ngumbi is also a law professor at the University of Kinshasa, specialising in environmental jurisprudence.
In August 2023, the US had issued a visa ban for Ngumbi as well as two other Congolese conservation officials: Cosma Wilungula Balongelwa, the former director of the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation (ICCN); and Leonard Muamba Kanda, another former director of Congo's CITES management authority. All were accused of abusing their positions to traffic protected wildlife "using falsified permits, in return for bribes".
Ngumbi did not respond to questions from African Arguments other than to say that inquiries should be directed to the ICCN. Wilungula denied ever being involved in trafficking and pointed out that, in the case of the Lomé seizure, the forty primates had been smuggled out of the DRC after he left the ICCN.
The ICCN did not respond to several requests for comment.
The attempted trafficking operation exhibited a high degree of sophistication, involving poaching in different parts of the inaccessible Congolese interior and bringing the animals together for export. Ofir Drori, co-founder of the EAGLE Network, believes a large Congolese criminal organisation was behind it.
"There's corruption in the heart of an international convention that is supposed to control the trade," he says, referring to CITES. "All it takes is one corrupt official."
In Lomé, the monkeys were discovered in a pitiful state. Many were younger animals that poachers had ripped from their parents. Two died before their return to Kinshasa on 6 December, according to an unpublished report conducted by an independent investigator, seen by African Arguments.
The monkeys' ordeal continued when they returned to the DRC. A member of the suspected trafficking ring accompanied an ICCN team to Kinshasa's N'djili airport in a bid to retrieve the cargo, says the report. Two sources with close knowledge of the case, who requested anonymity, confirmed this account. The trafficker's company, Domap-Zaire, also paid for the conservation team's journey to and from the airport, according to a copy of an ICCN document seen by African Arguments.
"They were pressured. Some monkeys needed to go back to the traffickers because they were worth a lot of money," says a source with close knowledge of the case. They say the animals were eventually transferred to Kinshasa Zoo under the insistence of some ICCN agents.
On 18 December, the conservation agency released a statement saying it had questioned the exporter, but it is not clear if an investigation is ongoing.
The ICCN administers about 13% of the DRC's vast and lushly forested landmass. In these areas, it is tasked with managing national parks and protecting endangered wildlife. But the government body is grossly underfunded. In remote areas, their rangers are sometimes gunned down by militias.
Kinshasa Zoo, run by the ICCN, is notorious for its dire conditions. In the middle of a bustling city market, it features a few tumbledown buildings and a lawn dotted with tiny cages containing forlorn-looking monkeys.
The zoo was quickly closed once the trafficked monkeys arrived. One died the first night. Others briefly escaped into the treetops. An ICCN official, who declined to be named, said the situation was chaotic when the monkeys were delivered. The staff had neither clarity about what to do nor money to care for the animals.
Three red-tailed monkeys ended up being handed to a private Congolese sanctuary under murky circumstances, according to the independent report and two sources. The remaining animals, it was eventually decided, would go to a specialised primate sanctuary in the southeastern Congolese city of Lubumbashi. Only 24, however, reached their destination. At least 11 monkeys remain unaccounted for.
What happened to the missing monkeys is unclear. Some, or all, may have died due to stress, poor weather, or malnutrition. Adams Cassinga, a Congolese wildlife activist and founder of the NGO Conserv Congo, visited the monkeys while they were at the zoo and describes the conditions as "despicable".
Several sources also suspect that the traffickers may have taken advantage of the confusion to seize back some of the animals. The species of monkeys that vanished or died is not known either, because a reliable inventory was made only once the animals reached the J.A.C.K primate sanctuary in Lubumbashi.
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Franck Chantereau, a Frenchman who founded the sanctuary with his wife Roxane, says the animals arrived "traumatised". A baby baboon, he says, had a bullet lodged in its head, indicating a violent seizure in the bush. The animal subsequently died of its wounds.
"About ten years ago in the DRC, traffickers realised that there were all these species of monkeys that existed only here," says Chantereau. "So they opened the trade. They created demand in Asian countries. And it doesn't stop".
Two of the rarest monkeys from the group, the Lesula, survived. "We know almost nothing about this species," says Chantereau, explaining that poachers have nevertheless begun to target it. "It would have been better if it had never been discovered."
Hervé Kimoni, a Kinshasa-based expert in wildlife trafficking and environmental law, says a single monkey can fetch up to $100,000 for Congolese smugglers. This is an incredible sum in a country where, according to the World Bank, about 60% of the population survive on under $2.15 a day.
He describes the trafficking affair in December as "outrageous", but points out that the scandal had one silver lining. It pointed to the existence of trafficking rings that had previously been dismissed as fantasy. Ultimately, many of the monkeys were also saved.
"Even if there are a lot of impostors in the field of biodiversity, there are some people who are fighting body and soul," says Kimoni.
Emmet Livingstone is a freelance journalist based in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
