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Mist hangs low over the forested slopes of Kahuzi-Biega national park, where the canopy still shelters one of the last strongholds of the eastern lowland, or Grauer’s, gorilla. It is a landscape of immense biological wealth and equally immense political fragility. For 54-year-old Dominique Bikaba, it was once home.
His family was among those displaced when their ancestral land was incorporated into the park in the 1970s. The protected area, in the lowlands of South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), harbours elephants and a remarkable range of wildlife, but it is best known as the principal home of the Grauer’s gorilla, the largest subspecies of primates, known to grow up to 250kg (39st) in weight. It is one of five great ape species found in the DRC’s vast forests, including mountain gorillas, which are also found in other parts of the Great Lakes region, such as Rwanda and Uganda.
Conservation, for Bikaba, the founder and executive director of Strong Roots Congo, has always been entwined with memory, dispossession and survival.
He grew up on the park’s periphery, close enough to remember walking in the forest as a child. “My grandmother used to take me to the forest, and we could see how the gorillas lived,” he recalls. His upbringing straddled worlds: alongside his biological mother, he was raised by a Batwa (pygmy) mother and his grandmother. Much of his childhood was spent within the Batwa community, whose cultural and spiritual life is deeply rooted in the forest.
From them he learned about medicinal plants, wildlife and what coexistence means in practice. “My grandmother taught me to be ‘a man’, but my pygmy mother taught me how to coexist with the forest,” he says.
At the time, Grauer’s gorillas were not yet classed as critically endangered. Gorillas and humans shared space in a wary but workable balance. “Sometimes they would come out of the forest and feed on our crops. Baboons would come for our bananas,” Bikaba says. It was an uneasy proximity, but not yet a catastrophe. War would change that.
Bikaba began his conservation work in 1992, aged 20, after finishing his studies and responding to a call from community leaders to help mediate tensions between park authorities and people who had been displaced since the park was opened. Two years later, the 1994 Rwandan genocide triggered a mass influx of refugees into eastern DRC, fuelling the first Congo war in the late 1990s, followed by the second Congo war. Fighting continues today.
The consequences for wildlife have been devastating. Before the conflicts, the eastern lowland gorilla population was estimated at about 17,000. By 2016, surveys suggested roughly 3,800 remained. “We do not know what the situation is with the gorillas right now. Maybe after the war we might be in a better position to do observations on them and see what has happened,” Bikaba says.
An IUCN report published in 2016 highlighted that the widespread practice of slash-and-burn and hunting for bush meat contributed to the decline of the population – and the country’s ongoing conflicts have continued to aggravate the issue.
Bikaba speaks quietly of his own narrow escapes. “I escaped death quite a lot of times, but my friends and relatives were not so lucky.”
In 2009, he founded Strong Roots Congo with the aim to reconcile conservation with community rights around Kahuzi-Biega national park. The organisation worked alongside the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) during renewed state efforts to safeguard the forest. But Bikaba’s focus remained broader. “We wanted to go beyond these forests,” he says, describing how communities themselves pushed for stronger protection of gorillas and other species.
An expedition in late 2010, working with about 70 chiefdoms (traditional local governance units) outside protected areas, crystallised a more ambitious vision to create a biodiversity corridor linking Kahuzi-Biega national park with Itombwe nature reserve. The aim was (and still is) to secure 1m hectares (2.47m acres) for wildlife and Indigenous communities, knitting fragmented habitats back together while formalising customary land rights.
So far, Strong Roots has helped establish 23 community forests, covering about 600,000 hectares. Through partnerships with international conservation groups, it supports communities to convert customary tenure into legally recognised community forestry concessions. The model echoes approaches trialled in parts of Latin America, where Indigenous stewardship has proved to be compatible with forest protection.
“Importantly, we want to also improve the livelihoods of people,” Bikaba says. Conservation here sits at the intersection of ecology and geopolitics. The park is a sanctuary for species and a theatre of conflict that has simmered for more than three decades.
The insecurity complicates everything. “We have never really had peace,” he says. His office was looted after M23 rebels took Goma, and fighting has at times made field sites inaccessible. Travel that once took 30 minutes by air from Bukavu to Shabunda can now stretch into a four-day journey through multiple transit points.
The planned corridor will not only protect other large mammals but also reconnect isolated gorilla populations, improving the chances of breeding and recovery. Crucially, it will be co-managed by Indigenous communities, whose relationship with the forest predates colonial boundaries and modern conservation law.
For Bikaba, raised on the forest’s edge and shaped by displacement and tradition, the work carries a sense of restitution. “What we are doing is putting communities back together, so they can thrive together as they have done for centuries,” he says.
He is wary of conservation models that cast local people as threats. “Western conservationists say that Indigenous populations destroy the forest because they are poor, and there is a tendency to try to separate animals from humans,” he says. “But humans are also part of nature. There is a lot of wisdom we can learn from the communities that live in the forests.”
As fighting continues in eastern DRC, the future of Grauer’s gorillas remains uncertain. For Bikaba, the lesson of three decades is stark. “If there is one thing we should avoid in life, it’s war,” he says. “If there is a way we can stop war in this region, we should do it. No matter the cost.”
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