Sierra Leone

Thursday, July 10, 2025

Esther and Rio, two orphaned baby chimpanzees, cuddle tenderly against their caretaker’s chest. These survivors have found refuge in a sanctuary unique in Sierra Leone, but whose future is in turn threatened by alarming deforestation and illegal encroachment on the lands of a precious national park.

For the past year, Hawa Kamara has been caring for Esther and Rio, who arrived at the Tacugama sanctuary for orphaned chimpanzees when they were just three months old. Nestled on her hips, the orphans cling to her neck in infinitely gentle gestures, watching wide-eyed for the high-pitched cries of other primates on the site.

At Tacugama, the dense vegetation, the metallic screech of insects in the precious tropical rainforest are striking, in this country of spectacular biodiversity, home to several protected species.

Located some fifteen kilometers from the capital Freetown, within the Western Peninsula National Park (WAP-NP), the sanctuary is home to chimpanzees under five years of age, whose families have been killed and who must be taught to survive.

They arrive malnourished, handicapped or wounded by bullets or machetes, traumatized, often having been sold by poachers and kept as pets in villages…

The West African chimpanzee is considered “critically endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, threatened in particular by the disappearance of its habitat and poaching for its meat.

Tacugama’s orphans pass through rehabilitation parks, then live in the dozens of protected wild hectares of the sanctuary, which is currently home to 122 primates.

“Over the last two to three years, we have seen an increase in the number of chimpanzees rescued, as there is a lot of degradation within the park where the wild population of these primates lives”, Bala Amarasekaran, a tireless defender of chimpanzees and founder of the sanctuary in 1995, explained to AFP.

“We’ve recently had to deal with a lot of deforestation and illegal encroachment on park land”, including house-building. Traps are also regularly discovered near the sanctuary.

– A cry of alarm –

The threat is so great that those in charge of this emblematic project have issued a cry of alarm: since May 26, the sanctuary has been closed to visitors, in an attempt to inflict an electroshock on the government.

Since 2000, Sierra Leone has lost 39% of its forest cover, according to Global Forest Watch.

Of the WAP-NP’s 18,000 hectares of forest, almost a third has been lost or severely degraded since 2012.

Six kilometers south of the sanctuary, illegal activities and nibbling within the park also threaten the future of a dam vital to the two million inhabitants of Freetown – an overcrowded city – and the surrounding area, from which they draw their only water supply.

After a drive in a pick-up truck on a steeply sloping track, the immense Guma dam comes into view, surrounded by sparkling green primary forest.

But below, you can see the valley being nibbled away by urbanization. The dam’s sanitary safety is under threat, as deforestation favours siltation and sedimentation in the reservoir, which is fed during the long rainy season.

“This neighborhood didn’t exist until three years ago,” laments Maada Kpenge, executive director of the Guma Valley General Water Company. “Every year there are new houses, whose owners claim they own the land legally…. Every year, we lose thousands of hectares of forest; at this rate, in 10 or 15 years, there will be almost nothing left.”

Forests play an active role in the water cycle through evapotranspiration, and also capture and retain water. If nothing is done and the dam level drops drastically, “it will be almost impossible to live in Freetown…”, he warns.

The government deplores the opaque and corrupt land allocation practices of previous authorities, and highlights the new, stricter laws on land ownership.

But activists and experts believe that these laws are not sufficiently enforced on the ground.

AFP was able to follow a team of underpaid and under-equipped rangers as they attempted to intervene during raids.

“In this park, there is illegal production of marijuana, charcoal, logging and people building houses and taking over the land…” says Alpha Mara, the ranger commander for the National Protected Areas Authority (NPAA).

– Erosion –

That day, he and a score of rangers perched on a pick-up truck set off across the region.

They would attack six sites located either within the park itself or in the buffer zone.

With no weapons or equipment to defend themselves against traffickers or illegal occupants, they use their bare hands to knock down the walls of houses or pillars demarcating land reclaimed from the park.

A guard uses a machete to slash the metal sheeting of shacks erected on these plots.

Tension escalates when guards strike one of these structures, from which a young woman emerges in terror, her infant crying in her arms.

Famata Turay explains that her husband is employed as a groundskeeper by a wealthy owner living abroad.

“Here we are in the park: these constructions are illegal!”, Ibrahim Kamara, the guard writing a report, chides her. “I’m not aware of that, sir,” replies Famata.

“I have no other place to live….”, she confides, sobbing after the guards have left, facing her half-destroyed hut.

Due to this deforestation, the already regularly extreme temperatures could become unbearable for the majority of the inhabitants of Freetown and this region, experts point out.

Soil erosion is also accentuated during the rainy season in Sierra Leone, the country having experienced the deadliest landslide in Africa: a mudslide on the heights of Freetown that led to the death of 1,141 people in 2017.

In the sanctuary of Tacugama, Bala Amarasekaran is not displeased with the failings of the institutions. “If someone breaks wildlife laws, there should be fines, prosecutions, this is not the case”.

“Tacugama is the country’s number one ecotourism destination: you can’t boast of having a world-class sanctuary and be unable as a government to protect it,” he says. “This problem of encroachment on park land must be resolved if Tacugama is to continue to exist…”.

Humaniterre with AFP