Schadrack Hardelin Ivonguele

Schadrack Hardelin Ivonguele grew up in Brazzaville, a city that gave him no particular reason to end up in the forest. In 2016 he left it behind for the stretch of rainforest where Congo, Gabon and Cameroon meet, arriving knowing nothing of the wild he was walking into. He learned it the way it has always been taught there: from local hunters, not guidebooks. How to mark a trail with a snapped branch. How to leave your sandals at the forest's edge so you can find your way home in the dark. How to drink clean water straight from a vine - no filter, no bottle - just knowing which vine. Underneath all of it sat a single realisation that never left him: the forest already provides everything a person needs to survive.

His guiding career took proper shape at Odzala-Kokoua National Park, training in animal behaviour under Michael Rosati, another APGN guide, through Kamba African Rainforest Experiences. Odzala is not a place that goes easy on new guides. The canopy closes overhead for most of the day, sightings are earned rather than offered, and the animals that matter most - forest elephant, gorilla, bongo - are heard and smelled long before they are seen, if they are seen at all. It is a different discipline from open savanna guiding, closer to tracking than spotting, and it rewards patience over instinct.

One lesson from that period he did not learn in a classroom. Driving back from Lango Baï, his vehicle was surrounded by a pack of twelve hyenas, one of them close enough to stare directly into his eyes. He held still, following Rosati's quiet instruction from beside him, and understood in that moment what a guide's real tool actually is: Self-control - the ability to do nothing, convincingly, while everything in you wants to do something. He has carried that lesson into every situation since.

He has needed it most at Dzanga Baï in the Central African Republic, when a mother elephant charged the vehicle. Schadrack directed his local guide team to move fourteen guests clear of the danger while he stayed alone at the front, holding his position and using low, measured vocal sounds to assert presence without provoking her further. She stood down. It is the kind of moment that does not make it into most websites, because it depends on a guide who has trained himself not to react the way instinct tells him to.

Outside of guiding, Schadrack is the founder of Young Optimists, an initiative born in 2019 out of the Generation Unlimited Youth Challenge and built as a statement about what African youth can build for themselves rather than wait to be given. It funds clean-water boreholes and rehabilitates village schools in communities near where he guides - a direct, practical answer to a tourism model that too often passes through a place and leaves nothing behind in it. With his partner, he is now developing gorilla observation sites at Ebana and Lengui-Lengui, understood to be the first such project run entirely by local operators rather than an outside concession holder. It is slow, unglamorous work - permissions, habituation, infrastructure - done by people who intend to still be there in twenty years. ‘We are the best guardians of our own biodiversity’, he says, and the sites at Ebana and Lengui-Lengui are the proof of that claim rather than a slogan attached to it.

Guests who travel with Schadrack come away with more than a list of sightings. The Congo Basin is not an easy place to visit casually - it asks something of the people who enter it, humidity and patience and a willingness to go slowly - and Schadrack guides accordingly, at the forest's pace rather than anyone elses. What guests leave with is closer to an education: in how to read a trail, how to hold still around something dangerous, and in the fact that the people best equipped to protect this ecosystem have been living inside it the whole time.

Home: Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville)

Guides in: Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic

Languages: French & English

Daily Rate: $$