At six o’clock every morning, 55-year-old Sunday Abang rides on a motorcycle from his house in Boki, a farming community in Cross River state in southeast Nigeria.
It takes him at least two hours before he gets to his destination, his cocoa farm, where he spends most of his day carefully cutting down pods and collecting them in baskets.
This usually was his typical day until one Monday morning in March when he arrived at his farm and found his crops damaged by wildlife.
“What I saw made me weak,” he recalled. “The animals destroyed everything in my farm.”
A Cross River gorilla, a distinct subspecies of which fewer than 300 still exist. (Courtesy of WCS Nigeria)
Abang, just like every other farmer in Boki, relies on farming to meet his family’s daily needs and pay for the education of his children. Now that his livelihood has been destroyed, meeting these needs is his greatest concern….