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Navigating cultural narratives to provide meaning to a human-wildlife conflict situation

Encompassing an area of 1067 km2 in southwestern Guinea-Bissau, the Cantanhez National Park, situated in the peninsula of Cubucaré, incorporates mangroves, forests, and savannahs, but also cultivated land. People with different cultural and religious backgrounds and ethnicity live in the national park. The national park also contains small-scale farming areas interspersed with forested areas in a dynamic landscape. Groups of chimpanzees Pan troglodytes verus inhabit various patches of forests within the park. Their presence means they often lived in close proximity to the inhabitants of Cantanhez. As a result, the chimpanzees sometimes foraged on the inhabitants’ crops. Although direct interactions between chimpanzees and the inhabitants were rare, when they did occur, they could result in physical injury and death to either the inhabitants or the apes.

In 2009, a PhD student conducted research in Cantanhez National Park to explore the human-wildlife interface and the people-park interface from the perspective of the park’s inhabitants. This case study focuses on how these investigations revealed that encounters between chimpanzees and people, as described by the park’s inhabitants, generated two parallel narratives. Two narratives coexist—one attributing the actions of a chimpanzee to a person who supposedly shape-shifted into a chimpanzee, while the other attributes the chimpanzee’s actions as a response attributable to the conservationists.

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