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01 A border nobody drew
The reason is simple and has to do with the river itself. The Congo is one of the highest-volume watercourses on the planet, and neither species swims. For a primate that does not cross water, a river like this is not an obstacle to be gone round: it is a wall that never ends.
And one detail rounds off the map: the bonobo is not only bounded to the north. Its range is described as the territory south of the Congo and north of the Kasai, one of its tributaries. Which is to say, it lives boxed in between two rivers.
02 Eight hundred and ninety thousand years
DNA evidence places the split between the bonobo and the common chimpanzee at roughly 890,000 to 860,000 years ago. Before that date they were the same thing. After it, two distinct species, each on its own side, without contact.
Almost nine hundred thousand years of separation, and all there is between them is the water in front of you when you look at the river in this city.
It is worth saying this with the caution science asks for: the river is the barrier that today separates the two ranges, and that correspondence between the barrier and the split is what the sources describe. Exactly how that isolation came about nine hundred thousand years ago is a question still being researched.
03 An ape from a single country
The consequence of living boxed in between two rivers is that the bonobo has the most restricted range of all the great apes: it is found only in the humid forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are no wild bonobos in any other country on earth.
Population figures are uncertain and conservative estimates put it at between 29,500 and 50,000 individuals, though some sources go as high as 60,000. The species is classed as Endangered on the red list, with habitat loss and hunting as the main threats, and its populations are believed to have declined sharply over the last thirty years.
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04 What to do with this fact
First: you do not need to go anywhere. This fact works from any point on the Kinshasa bank. It is enough to look at the water and know that that line, as well as dividing two countries, divides two branches of the primate tree that have not seen each other for almost a million years.
Second, and this is what gives it the value of a trip: you are on the bonobo side. Kinshasa spreads along the river's south bank, inside the species' range. Brazzaville, opposite, is on the chimpanzee side. It is the only capital in the world from which you can look at another capital and be looking at another ape as well.
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And third, for anyone wanting to move from the fact to the visit: on the city's outskirts there is a sanctuary dedicated to this species, and it is the only one in the world. But that is another article, and for that you do need a car.
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