‘I escaped death a lot of times’: one man’s lifelong work protecting gorillas and communities in Congo

As a child, Dominique Bikaba, was displaced by a new national park in the DRC. Now he is helping to secure land for wildlife and Indigenous groups against the backdrop of ongoing fighting 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 onc...

By Tam Patachako