Museum of the Dead

Baby chimp in formol

We leave our friends to visit the building aside. Long alleys of arcades link the buildings with one another. I could close my eyes and imagine the times when those alleys where storming with busy people. Nowadays, the fainting yellow paint is a joyful host of the numerous spiders whose nets seem to be untouched and well conserved for the past years.

A funny character, yet taking himself very seriously, is a person that takes care of the feeding schedules of the chimps and is a self appointed researcher in wildlife. I will refer to him through the hand-written inscription on his Sherlock Holmes like coat: Detective Hal Oweinen! He insists on telling us that he haq studied primates in Atlanta, in Georgia, yes in the USA! Yet he has mistakenly identified a 2 year old chimp as a 12 year old... He is kind enough to show us around his personal pride: you guessed it:  The Museum of the Dead or should I say Museum of horrors.

We should have been prepared morally before he opened the door, but how could we have guessed? On the door is written ‘Museum’, nothing to warn us of what we would see. "Aaaaaaaahh" was the only sound I could utter as a collection of skulls, of several types of animals, of all sizes lay in front of us on all the shelves one could fit in the room: the man could tell you that this is a chimp that lived in the sanctuary and that was euthanased during the war or this was a tromoniscus glindi or some kind of carefully selected Latin denomination for a species. There are primates, leopards’ skulls, bush pigs, bats, elephant bones, and even gorilla skeleton whose final position funnily seemed like he was caught at the time of a Muslim prayer.

The second room is to unfold another series of collections: skins, tons of them! Skins of mongoose, civet cats, porcupine, enormous rat species, buffaloes, antelopes, leopard like species whose name was only written in Latin. There are also stuffed animals I could not recognise such as the chimps and gorillas lined on wall like criminals. An impressive one is the flying fox with no real wings, but detaching skin that helps it fly and stick to tree branches.

I am lead to the third room by the emanating smell. The formol is used to conserve animals from baby chimps to big pythons in a poison green liquid. Some seems to come out of horror films.

At the end of our visit we pass to the nearby hotel that used to accommodate the expatriate researchers and the tourists coming to the center during colonial times. The building has not lost a lot of its splendour apart from some flowers growing between the roof tiles. We are welcomed by a very nice man who seems eager to show us around. The leather chairs in the lobby are at least 50 years old; the interior is decorated in hard wood. One could imagine the Belgian colonists here smoking their pipes while talking about politics and mundane issues. We sit outside for a drink before hitting the long road back to Bukavu.

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[kim]

I visited Lwiro with our WCS team and had a day there of training. Check out the article and photos:

http://drcongo-wcs.org/page.ui?id=39&page=content&lg=en