How a $20 chimp rescue sparked one of Africa’s most impactful wildlife sanctuaries
More than three decades ago, Bala Amarasekaran walked into a remote village in Sierra Leone and found a malnourished baby chimpanzee tied to a tree. He paid $20 to rescue it.
That $20 rescue would change the course of his life and the fate of hundreds of chimpanzees.
“We found this little chimp tied to a tree...very malnourished, dehydrated,” Amarasekaran recalls of the encounter in Matotaka village. “They asked if we were interested. At that time, we didn’t even realise it was illegal or anything,” he told the AFP. Without intervention, the animal would likely have died. He brought it home. That chimp was the beginning of the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary.
But what started as a spontaneous act of compassion quickly turned into a life-changing discovery. “That’s when we started to realise this is not an ordinary monkey. They have jealousy, love, they get angry... just like us,” he said. The human-like emotional depth of chimps drew Amarasekaran deeper into conservation work. He eventually quit his job, intending to set up the sanctuary for “one or two years.” “That never happened,” he says. Decades later, he’s still there.
Today, Tacugama is home to over 100 rescued chimps and is one of Sierra Leone’s most relevant conservation efforts. Yet Amarasekaran admits the sanctuary is treating symptoms, not causes. “We are rescuing chimps, but why are they being poached? Why are their homes disappearing?” he asks.
Habitat loss, illegal pet trade, and bushmeat hunting continue to threaten wild chimpanzees across West Africa. Amarasekaran’s long-term goal is not to grow the sanctuary, it’s to make it obsolete. “Our mission is to stop them coming to Tacugama,” he says. “The moment they are left alone and are a free-roaming population in our forests, that’s the day I can say we’ve done something good for conservation.”
This story is written and edited by the Global South World team, you can contact us here.
