Documentary · Mongabay

Gashaka Gumti is Nigeria’s largest national park — 6,400 square kilometres of some of the most ancient forest on the continent, and a last stronghold for the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee, the rarest chimpanzee in Africa. By 2015, illegal hunting, logging and mining had pushed the park to the brink and international conservation partners had pulled out. Many believed it was beyond saving.

Return to Gashaka Gumti follows Maigari, a researcher who has spent his life with these chimpanzees. The son of a hunter, he learned to read chimpanzee behaviour by tracking them as a boy, and later turned that knowledge to their protection — rallying his community to drive out poachers even after the scientists and the funding were gone. As new management takes hold, his camera-trapping survey sets out to discover what hope remains for Africa’s least-studied chimpanzee.

Produced for Mongabay, the film is Forest Spirit Media’s kind of story: a single, determined person at the heart of a much larger fight for a place and a species the world had almost given up on.