On a quiet afternoon atop the rainforest hills that sit above Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, Bala Amarasekaran leaned against the railing of the sanctuary he built from scratch. His eyes scanned the treetops where rescued chimpanzees swung between ropes and wooden pillars, grinning through the openings of half-buried rubber tires. “I’ll get a text from an anonymous number, and they’ll tell me they’ll burn this place down,” he said. “Sometimes hooligans will come here and make some noise.”
His voice was calm, but there was tension under the surface, like a man who’s been staring down threats so long they’ve become part of the landscape.
Though the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, tucked in the misty hills of the Western Area Peninsula National Park, feels like a world apart, Sierra Leone’s weak rule of law and the demands of a burgeoning metropolis are gnawing at its edges. Since this cornerstone of the country’s conservation and ecotourism efforts opened in 1995, the terrain on which it sits has been slowly encroached on by developers in search of high-priced real estate. Those attacks — in the form of arson, illegal construction, vandalism and threats — have steadily intensified and are now coming to a head.
When Amarasekaran founded Tacugama in 1995, he wasn’t just rescuing orphaned chimps but staking a claim for something that barely existed in Sierra Leone at the time: a national conversation about conservation. In the middle of a civil war, Sierra Leone’s environmental policy was virtually nonexistent. Yet here was this small sanctuary in the hills of Freetown, quietly building something beyond human politics.
Over the years, Tacugama has become a symbol for what conservation can look like in a country where survival often takes precedence over sustainability. It trains rangers, educates schoolchildren, partners with local communities and draws international attention. The renowned primatologist and zoologist Jane Goodall visited Tacugama in 2006, lending her global influence to raise the sanctuary’s profile and champion its conservation work. Her support helped to inspire a movement that led to the chimpanzee being officially declared Sierra Leone’s national animal in 2019, following years of advocacy by Tacugama to link national identity with wildlife protection. As a result, the sanctuary draws thousands of tourists and houses researchers from around the world. Or, rather, it did, until encroachment on its land forced it to shutter its doors to visitors at the end of May.
Tacugama occupies terrain that was once “community forest,” land that was used freely by anyone according to traditional laws. But in 2012, the 23-square-mile plot it sits on — and a buffer zone around its structures — was designated a national park, a status that forbids private development on the land. Despite its protected status, unauthorized construction and deforestation are rapidly eroding the sanctuary’s buffer zone, threatening both wildlife habitats and critical water sources for Freetown.
The Guma Dam, located just a few hundred yards away from Tacugama, is the primary reservoir supplying clean water to Freetown’s more than 1 million residents. Built in the 1960s, it harnesses rainfall and mountain streams to provide a crucial lifeline for the capital city below, where access to potable water remains a daily struggle for many residents. The surrounding forest acts as a natural filtration system, protecting the watershed from erosion, sedimentation and pollution. The growing wave of illegal land encroachments puts that at risk. Deforestation, unregulated construction and bushfires create a serious threat to the water’s integrity. As vegetation is cleared and hillsides are destabilized, runoff increases, degrading water quality and reducing the dam’s long-term viability. Conservationists warn that if the destruction continues unchecked, Freetown could face not only a biodiversity crisis but a water crisis, too.
“Today, with more people living in the city and more parts of the forest considered ‘available,’ some community members have begun selling parcels of land,” explained Sidikie Bayoh, Tacugama’s communications officer. He said the sanctuary has been receiving reports that some of the people selling land are not the rightful owners — a common issue in Sierra Leone. Those who are buying up the plots are “constructing whatever structures they choose without oversight.”
Bayoh explained that, like a lot of new settlements and development in the country, the encroachment is very haphazard, with little planning involved. “Within the national park boundaries, you will find a range of both completed and incomplete structures — from permanent residences to commercial outlets and entertainment facilities like bars. Many of the buildings are still under construction, but a significant amount of land clearance has already taken place,” he said.
As the population of Freetown has burgeoned in the postwar years, with people moving to the capital looking for better economic opportunities, informal communities have popped up and expanded, “most of which remain largely unregulated,” Bayoh said.
After months of petitioning, Amarasekaran was able to get some traction. Earlier this year, the government launched a zero-tolerance crackdown, installed boundary markers and engaged local communities to reinforce the sanctuary’s protection.
Last February, Sierra Leone’s National Protected Area Authority, the Guma Valley Water Company, the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone and other community leaders trekked up to the park to inspect the aftermath of several bushfires. Local media reported that the “team discovered the devastating consequences of fires allegedly set by local communities but orchestrated by high-ranking government officials,” including senior military personnel.
The government demolished several structures after the visit, but that only increased tensions between the illegal land developers — and their elite clientele — and the conservationists doing everything they can to keep the nation’s only dedicated and regulated primate sanctuary alive. The harassment the sanctuary has received is carried out by lackeys of what Amarasekaran says are “professional land drivers” — intermediaries in the business of buying and selling land, who have “connections in high places.” In Sierra Leone, where gross domestic product hovers around $8 billion and the average annual income per capita is just $1,100, the only people who can afford to develop land in the serene hills of the park are government officials, their associates and a handful of wealthy foreign investors. Decades of corruption and resource exploitation have concentrated wealth in the hands of a small political elite, making the government not just the country’s lawmakers but often the only land developers, investors and enforcers, too.
When asked if the government had been more or less supportive of Tacugama’s predicament, Amarasekaran said, “Well, government at the highest level.” The situation has become so dire that Amarasekaran managed to get a meeting with the president himself to discuss what actions could be taken.
“The president was furious when he saw the pictures I took to him,” he said, “But the real issue here is that there are already policies in place, there are already departments created by the government to address this. There are already people being paid with taxpayers’ money to prevent land encroachment.” Yet the policies and departments are not managing the encroachments. “They should be ashamed because you shouldn’t have to go to the president for something like this,” he said.
Over 30 years ago, Amarasekaran and his wife, Shamila, found a sick baby chimpanzee tied to a tree in a remote Sierra Leonean village. They bought it for $20, named it Bruno and unknowingly sparked a determination within themselves that would change the course of their lives forever.
By 1988, the couple had rescued seven chimpanzees, using their private home to shelter these abused animals. As the numbers kept growing, they were forced to find a bigger solution.
Amarasekaran took the idea to the Sierra Leonean government, arguing that if the country wanted to enforce its wildlife protection laws, it needed an official rescue center. The government agreed, offering him a piece of land: 247 acres of dense forest in the Western Area Peninsula Forest Reserve, just outside Freetown. Amarasekaran secured seed funding from the European Union, but with conditions: He had to build the sanctuary, train a local team and run it successfully for several years before it could officially be handed over.
In 1995, Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary opened its gates. Amarasekaran personally oversaw the construction of the first cages and enclosures, all while navigating immense logistical and financial challenges — worsened later by Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war. During the conflict, Tacugama was attacked by rebels, but Amarasekaran and his team refused to abandon the chimps.
Before it was forced to close to visitors at the end of May, hundreds left the traffic-choked streets of Freetown each month to visit the sanctuary. Scaling the hillside, the air cools, the road narrows and the noise of motorcycles and shouting vendors fades into a hush of rustling leaves and birdsong that eventually gives way to the shrieks, grunts and pant-hoots of the more than 100 chimpanzees that call Tacugama home.
The area is peaceful and lush, free of the heat and grime of industrial Freetown. These are highly sought-after lands, and there are indeed many private homes in these hills built legally, outside of the sanctuary’s buffer zone — the government-sanctioned demarcation zone that provides critical protection.
The buffer zone surrounding Tacugama is far more than an invisible line on a map — it is the sanctuary’s first and most critical layer of defense. This stretch of protected forest acts as a shield, keeping human activity — housing developments, fires, logging — at a safe distance from Tacugama’s sensitive chimpanzees. It offers essential breathing room for the sanctuary to respond to emergencies, be they fires, an escaped animal or a disease outbreak. Beyond the chimpanzees themselves, the buffer preserves vital habitat for other wildlife and safeguards the dams that supply water to much of Freetown. Without this green barrier, those who run Tacugama say it would be trapped, exposed and vulnerable — a sanctuary in name only, overwhelmed by the encroaching chaos of a growing city.
Just beyond Tacugama’s entrance, not more than a mile away, the first signs of encroachment appeared. It felt like walking between two worlds: on one side, a lush jungle draped in thick canopies, where Tacugama hides beneath a chorus of rustling leaves and distant animal calls; on the other, a barren stretch of yellow and brown straw, the earth’s skin scorched by endless sun, the heat rising sharply with every step away from the sanctuary.
“At one time, we had a tree planting initiative here because the land-grabbers had burned this area. The land-grabbers literally came back to destroy the holes we had made to plant trees here,” Bayoh said.
“This is all disputed land,” he added, waving his hand toward a large, barren swath of hillside, peppered with concrete developments at various stages of completion. “But this is all supposed to be a part of the national park.”
“The ministry has installed signages and forest guards to tell people that this is a protected area,” said Alieu Kondoh, information officer at the Sierra Leone Ministry of Tourism and Cultural Affairs. “But our biggest challenge is people showing up here with documents claiming they own the land. They are being referred to the Ministry of Lands for verification of those documents.”
Kondoh said the sanctuary’s abrupt closure to visitors raised alarms among civil society actors and that several ministries were coordinating to address the problem. “Tacugama is of immense importance to Sierra Leone tourism and conservation efforts. The ministry will ensure that their concerns are addressed and get them back running.”
Conservation efforts are often forced to justify protecting primates not by appealing to their intrinsic worth but by framing their value in terms of human security or promoting animal education — a strategy that can sometimes pressure sanctuaries to morph into consumer-friendly, family-oriented theme parks. Amarasekaran understands this reality all too well. He knows that, in order to garner public support, he must remind people of the potential consequences if the sanctuary continues to lose land within the buffer zone.
“You don’t want to bring humans very close to the sanctuary. Just like any other wildlife preserve all over the world, you must give them a buffer zone, where they can breathe. You cannot allow people to come and build along your enclosures,” he says. “And when something goes wrong, then they will blame always the wildlife, but they forget it’s the humans that caused the problem.” In 2006, 27 of the sanctuary’s chimpanzees escaped the compound and, in a frenzy, mauled pedestrians, killing a taxi driver.
While approximately 30% of Tacugama’s 99-acre sanctuary has been adversely affected by illegal land encroachment, the problem Tacugama faces is part of a larger environmental crisis in Sierra Leone. Between 2001 and 2020, the country lost approximately 6,500 square miles of tree cover — 30% of the area that was forested in the year 2000.
“It’s disheartening knowing that, in my lifetime, even if we stop everything now, it would be impossible to get it back to where it was. I will die and never see that,” Bayoh said.
In the urban area, deforestation is accelerated by intense demand for valuable land, but in the rural provinces, it’s driven by small-scale agriculture, fuelwood collection and mining; activities for which economic alternatives are limited or completely unavailable.
Sitting above the enclosure, chimpanzees swung effortlessly from ropes, chasing each other with playful intensity, sticks in hand. Birds perched high in the trees gazed down, watching the agile creatures below with almost envious eyes as they moved swiftly across the ground, kicking up dust in a tornado of action.
As the sun set over the sanctuary, casting the Freetown sky in its signature hues of pink and gold, Amarasekaran paused to reflect on the country he has called home for more than four decades.
“Sierra Leone is blessed with all the natural resources, and many countries cannot even boast about 10% of what we have here, but it has been mismanaged over the years,” he said.
“I just came back from a quick tour to Singapore, a small country that was only a fishing village when Sierra Leone was called the Athens of Africa. Now, you go there, they’re a million miles away” from their humble past, he added.
“They moved on. We’ve just gone backwards.”
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