‘I got the African fever’: How a Maltese conservationist found her calling in African jungles
At the edge of the Congo River in Africa, 24-year-old Maltese researcher and conservationist Francesca Grillo is living the life she once imagined through books – researching bonobos, navigating a tropical rainforest, and discovering what it truly means to follow a less-trodden path.
Grillo, a Maltese researcher and conservationist with a Masters in Applied Oceanography, is currently working deep inside the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a vast rainforest that is home to bonobo populations.
She is working on the Bonobo Diversity Project – one of the most ambitious efforts to understand how bonobos, one of the closest relatives to humans alongside chimpanzees, live, move and differ across the Congo Basin.
Her journey to the DRC was driven by years of reading, learning, and slowly realising that her place was not behind a desk, but right inside the forest.
Ever since Grillo was younger, she had been reading Gerald Durrell’s travelogues from his many animal collecting trips around the world.
Durrell was a British conservationist, who worked tirelessly to preserve several species who risked extinction.
“The way he personified the animals and integrated seamlessly wherever he went always charmed me, and reading his books made me realise that I wanted to live my life along those lines,” Grillo told The Malta Independent on Sunday.
Later, she watched Gorilla’s in the Mist by Diane Fossey, and her obsession with primates began.
Grillo said that Fossey detailed life in the jungle, the society and gorilla politics within the group she was studying.
“I found primates fascinating. They have their own cultures, their own societies, their own politics,” Grillo said.
This led her to spend five months in Guinea, West Africa, where she was setting up camera traps in a national park to study a new sickness that had emerged and was affecting the chimpanzees.
Despite the hardships she faced in Guinea, from having a manager who used to mistreat everyone, to barely speaking any French, and a hip injury that left her unable to participate in fieldwork for a month, she always looked back at her time there thirstily and with a longing for more.
“I had gotten the ‘African fever’,” Grillo said.
The start of her journey to the Democratic Republic of Congo
After she came to back to Malta, Grillo got a job that she enjoyed doing – and one whose importance she believed in, which was helping researchers access funding schemes and creating said schemes.
However, she always daydreamed of her time in Guinea; the beautiful African landscape, days spent outside observing rather than inside typing, and a simpler life where the essential things are important and secondary things have no space to exist.
In July of last year, Grillo quit her job, and in August, she started working remotely for the BonDiv project from Malta, while she got everything in order to move to Germany for a month and a half, and then straight after to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for at least a year, likely more.
“The month of August was hectic – updating vaccines, buying whatever field equipment I needed, looking for an apartment for my time in Germany, calling frantically to find where I could apply for my visa for DRC, and worst of all, pulling out my wisdom teeth as I knew dentists were largely inaccessible at my field site, all while working remotely,” Grillo said.
She said she was involved in species identification using videos collected from camera traps deployed at previous BonDiv sites.
This work meant hours of carefully reviewing footage, identifying animals, and contributing to datasets that would later inform much larger ecological and behavioural analyses, Grillo said.
“During my time in Germany, I continued this work at the German Primate Centre, but also began learning much more about the technical backbone of the project. This included organising hard drives, dealing with the realities of long-term data storage, and confronting the inevitable question that follows any large research effort: What do we actually do with all this data?” Grillo said.
She added that while final decisions weren’t hers to make, working closely with a co-director of the project gave her a glimpse behind the curtains of large-scale research coordination.
Grillo said that it was intense, occasionally overwhelming, and most importantly for her, exciting.
While in Germany, Grillo also had to slip away to Rome to get her visa to stay in the DRC, as Malta does not have a relevant embassy or consulate.
“Less than one month before moving to DRC, I got a lead from someone with a Maltese passport saying they managed to get theirs in Rome. After two months of desperately calling the foreign affairs office in Malta and every Congolese embassy in proximity, I clung to this little hope as my journey in DRC depended on it,” Grillo said.
With no possibility of applying for her visa with the embassy in Rome online, and no reassuring confirmation that it was indeed possible, Grillo took a 26-hour bus from Göttingen to Rome.
“I arrived in the morning and went straight to the embassy and paid extra to have my visa ready the next day. I stayed the night in Rome, visited some art galleries, the obligatory Fontana di Trevi, had gelato, went back to pick up the visa, and took another 26-hour bus to go back to Göttingen,” Grillo said.
‘Taking a less trodden path,’ arriving at DRC
On 13 October 2025, Grillo arrived at DRC. She is currently working as a researcher and field manager on the BonDiv project (The Bonobo Diversity Project), a long-term research initiative focused on understanding bonobo populations across multiple sites in the DRC.
Grillo said that the project combines social surveys and fieldwork – camera trapping, botany, sample collection, among other things.
The aim of the project is to replicate a year’s worth of data collection across 30 research sites in DRC, and then compare these results with one another to better understand how bonobos live, move, and vary across different environments, she said.
Grillo added that the holistic result of the 30 sites would then be compared to the results of another project, that had already been carried out using a similar protocol but this time studying chimpanzees, called PanAf.
The aim of this would be to properly understand the differences between chimpanzees and bonobos, Grillo explained.
Bonobos (Pan paniscus) are one of human’s closest living relatives with whom they share a common ancestor, alongside chimpanzees.
Grillo said that they are found in the Congo Basin, south of the Congo River, and are known for their complex social behaviour, high levels of cooperation, and relatively peaceful social structures compared to chimps.
“Unlike chimpanzees, they have a matriarchal society. Despite their ecological and scientific importance, bonobos remain far less studied than other great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans),” Grillo said.
Grillo admitted that in reality, she never chose to come to the DRC specifically.
“I found an interesting project which I liked and applied. I had learned to speak French fluently in Guinea and so the francophone world was a bit more accessible to me now,” Grillo said.
In fact, Grillo said that everyone actually advised her against DRC.
“Every government website with travel advice painted it red and marked it as ‘Do not travel’, it consistently showed up in lists of Worst African Countries to visit, news of the war and rebels in the east of the country were posted on the daily, and news from new diseases and Ebola outbreaks from WHO spread like wildfire,” Grillo said.
She recalled how once, her aunt called and asked that Grillo and her family assemble together to hear her out.
Grillo’s aunt mentioned all the cons, and advised her not to go, however, these were all things Grillo had already seen on the news and had already considered.
“I did not feel like any of them were a big enough reason not to go. Taking a less trodden path leaves more space for adventure after all, and adventure is exactly what I wanted,” Grillo said.
She said that people fail to realise that the DRC is huge, with the war in the east feeling like it is in another country entirely, and Ebola outbreaks are in specific regions.
“Even the park I work and live in, the Salonga National Park, is 33,000km2 by itself – you can compare that to Malta to get an idea of the scale,” Grillo said.
Living in the remotest areas of the forest
Grillo said that to get there, she took a charter plane from Kinshasa and landed in a tiny airstrip in a nearby village.
“Then, we drove down to the riverbank where we took a boat and drove upstream in the Congo River. Our camp is right by the river’s edge which makes it easy to collect water, to shower, and to have things sent to us like our food rations by boat,” Grillo said.
She said that she lives in a camp, while most of the team members there live in mud houses.
“We do not have any permanent structures as the park we work in is also a UNESCO World Heritage site. Despite this, everyone tries their best to make life a bit more comfortable,” Grillo said.
She said that they have even built her a little private shower where she can take a bucket and shower in privacy if she did not feel like going down to the river.
“We have a cook that lives with us and he cooks using wood and fire every day. We usually eat rice, chikwangue, or fufu as a staple, and then the addition of either beans, fish, sometimes chicken, and very rarely domestic pork which are grown in nearby villages,” Grillo said.
“It feels like we have our own little village here. We are about 10 people at camp. I am the only expat and everyone else is a local. We mainly speak French and Lingala at camp. I am slowly learning Lingala, which is the ‘lingua franca’, so that I can better communicate with everyone as not everyone speaks French,” Grillo said.
She added that usually, people who have not finished school do not speak much French.
Apart from her team, which consists of herself, her co-manager and their three assistants, there are also trekkers that have been living there for almost two years, and work in an effort to habituate the bonobos so that someday, tourists can come and have the opportunity to get closer to these wonderful creatures, Grillo said.
Describing the conditions, Grillo said that doing fieldwork is very tiring, and most days when she comes back to camp, she sometimes barely has the energy to shower, especially at the beginning, when she would barely make it past 9pm awake.
“However, your body starts getting used to it. It is still difficult on most days, especially now that it is the rainy season there are a lot of temporarily inundated areas with a lot of mud, your foot sinks in the mud as you step,” Grillo said.
She added that there are a lot of ants, wasps, sweat bees, annoying flies that try to come in her eyes, ears and nose, stinging caterpillars, and more.
“You definitely have to be prepared for discomfort, but it is all part of the experience. It is rewarding when you see bonobo nests, or their feeding signs, or hear their vocalisations,” Grillo said.
She added that even though it is her job to study bonobos, it still fascinates her when she thinks about how these human-like creatures are living in the rainforest.
On camp life, Grillo described it as a “very communal” way of living.
“The only real time you have to yourself is when you go to sleep, so getting along with people is almost more important than your job. You have to be very open and accepting of different cultures and mannerisms, and sometimes European qualities cannot be simply applied because our histories, contexts, and politics are vastly different,” Grillo said.
Grillo said that people there are also extremely resourceful and nothing is wasted.
“A lot of traditional medicine is used as well. Every couple of days there is always some concoction made from tree barks and vines to help cure something,” Grillo said.
What always fascinates her is also how well the local people know the forest.
While Grillo said she can easily disorient herself after 15 minutes of walking and have forgotten from which direction she came, they do not even need a GPS and they will find their way back easily in the forest.
Grillo said that the people there also have a very different perception of time.
“Nothing is too urgent or too pressing. At first this was a bit frustrating, but it is something you have to be flexible with. I remember when we had to buy some things and the closest shops that had what we needed were a good 200km away,” Grillo said.
Coming back to camp, she had asked how long it would take, and the answer she got was around two days if all went well, but maybe even three to four days, Grillo said.
“In the end it took us three days on a small wooden boat, sleeping on the way at fishermen camps that we found, as well as small villages, because our motor broke down twice and there were some heavy storms,” Grillo said, adding that with such travel plans, the team always has to add jours d’imprévu in their planning – unforeseen days – because something can always go wrong.
“Logistics certainly aren’t easy here,” Grillo said.
However, at the edge of the Congo River, Grillo is no longer only imagining the life she once read about, she is living it, step by step, in the heart of the rainforest.
Grillo has recently launched a Substack (a space where writers share work and readers can subscribe to receive it by email) called il-Kawlata.
Named after a humble Maltese war-time dish cooked in communal kitchens, Grillo described her platform as a “literary hotchpotch”, consisting of short stories, field diaries from the Congo Basin, travel writing, and pieces with a political edge – in both Maltese and English.
One can subscribe for free via this link or, if you would like to support Grillo’s writing and adventures, there is an optional €5/month tier.
www.bondiv.org
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