Inza Koné: Advocate for the monkeys of West Africa

Inza Koné is Director General of the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques en Côte d’Ivoire (CSRS) and the very first Ivorian primatologist. He has been looking into the lives of primates on the African continent for over 20 years. Thanks to his in-depth study of primates, he is no longer a stranger to human emotions, he confesses.

A s is so often the case, scientific careers begin with a tragedy. Eight-year-old Inza Koné is on vacation with his family in a village in the northwest of Côte d’Ivoire. He makes the acquaintance of a captive baby baboon. They become playmates. The affection is mutual. And so strong that Inza Koné’s father decides without further ado to take the monkey home with him. At home, the baboon is the king of the backyard and an attraction for the children in the neighborhood. But as time goes by, he gets stronger and stronger and takes his animalistic moods out on his visitors and the dogs. The animal remains an animal. It has turned into a danger. It must be tamed, put in chains. Chains that he knows how to break more and more often. In the end, there is no other solution than to kill the animal. “This was a big shock

for me,” recalls Inza Koné.

The Taï Monkey Project

The death of the baboon gave Inza Koné’s life a decisive turn: he decided to devote himself to the study of human conspecifics from then on. At the beginning of the 1990s, there was still no primatology course at the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Abidjan. But Inza Koné knew how to help himself. He studied zoology and approached Jakob Zinsstag, researcher at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) and the director of the CSRS at the time. Zinsstag introduced him to the Dutch primatologist Ronald Noë. The latter had set up the Taï Monkey Project in the Taï forest. The 25-year-old Koné became part of the team

and spent years studying the behavior of monkeys in their environment. And realized how important the well-being of primates and other wild animals is for the well-being of hu-

mans. “Non-human primates are the gardeners of the forest,” he says. By eating fruit, primates spread the seeds of trees and plants over long distances. Some seeds can only ger-

minate if they have passed through a primate’s stomach or have been dropped far from their parent tree. Scientific conservation and human welfare: In Inza Koné’s intellectual

universe, these are not opposites, but mutually dependent. “People’s health is linked to the health of the forests and their biodiversity,” he says.

In the Tanoé-Ehy Forest

One possible key to reconciling nature conservation and people’s needs lies in the swamps of Tanoé-Ehy Forest. The primeval forest in the south-eastern border region between Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana is a unique treasure trove of biodiversity. The Tanoé-Ehy Forest is home not only to rare insects, beetles, and amphibians, but also to around 270 bird species and several critically endangered monkeys. Some researchers even dare to hope that Tanoé is still home to a few specimens of Miss Waldron’s red colobus, which has not been sighted by a scientist since 1979 and has been declared probably extinct since the the early 2000s.

The fact that the trees of Tanoé-Ehy Forest still grow into the sky at all is not a matter of course, but is thanks to Inza Koné and his team. The fate of the forest was actually already sealed. An oil palm plantation should have taken its place. But Inza Koné campaigned to stop that project. His cogent argument: The palm oil company carrying out the project

would create jobs and build infrastructure, but the benefits of the project would be quickly outweighed by the problems associated with the loss of the forest, which represents the

natural capital guaranteeing the sustainability of any development scheme. On the other hand, if the people living around the forest were included in a comprehensive conservation program, the proceeds would benefit the local economy and the local communities and the forest could continue to exist.

Today, eleven villages are involved in the conservation of Tanoé-Ehy Forest. Joint conservation projects with neighboring Ghana are being planned. The local population monitors animal populations and the level of biodiversity using state-of-the-art drones and DNA analyses. But why would they invest time and effort in reforestation and protection of

this unique natural habitat? Because their efforts are financially worthwhile. Poachers who used to hunt monkeys and other wild animals to serve a growing bushmeat market are

now working for the survival of the forest. “The knowledge of the former poachers is crucial, because they are the only ones who know the paths through the swampy thickets of the forest,” says Koné.

The primate researcher and his team also support local initiatives. They supported the construction of a small cassava processing unit, which is mainly run by women and enables

them to increase their income fivefold. “We don’t tell people to give up farming, but encourage them to pursue alternative strategies that don’t endanger the forest,” Koné says.

Loving like the bonobos

Thanks to the study of primates, Inza Koné can better classify human behavior: Aggression, sex (albeit partially sublimated), infidelity, power: Nothing under the sun that we humans have not adopted from primates. “There is almost nothing that still amazes me about the behavior of my fellow human beings,” says Inza Koné with a laugh. And he points out that he sometimes takes the behavior of bonobos (Pan paniscus) as a model. Unlike chimpanzees, bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees) are peaceful contemporaries. Instead of aggressively asserting themselves against other males and intimidating females, successful bonobo males seek

to be close to females and make an effort to build an intense relationship with them. “It is not aggression and submission, but closeness and affection that guarantee reproductive success in bonobos,” says Koné. “An insight from science that we should take more to heart.”

NInza Koné – Inza Koné is the first primatologist in Côte d’Ivoire and heads the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques en Côte d’Ivoire (CSRS). He has been closely associated with the CSRS since the very beginning of his career as a scientist. Inza Koné held many senior positions within the CSRS before being promoted as the first

Ivorian Director of the CSRS in 2018. In 2024, he was awarded the prestigious “Rolex Award” for his work in the Tanoé-Ehy rainforest.