The Mapuwa family has one of the most precisely documented founding dates of any gorilla group in the Virunga range: August 1, 1998. On that date, the silverback Mapuwa — a son of the Rugendo family’s dominant male — took two females named Kagofero and Kanepo from the Lulengo group and established his own independent family. The act of taking females from an existing group is the standard mechanism by which new gorilla families form, but having the specific date recorded marks how closely this family has been monitored since its beginning. Mapuwa himself had left the Rugendo group three years earlier, in 1995, living as a solitary male — the transitional state that young silverbacks occupy between departing their birth family and establishing their own.
The Leadership Transition — Mvuyekure Takes Over
In 2017, as the founding silverback Mapuwa aged, the group experienced a split: a silverback named Mvuyekure departed with most of the family members to form a separate group. By March 2019, the two groups — now ranging the same area of the Jomba zone — came back together under Mvuyekure’s leadership, most likely because Mapuwa’s advancing age made maintaining independent leadership unsustainable. The reunified group is now led by Mvuyekure, with Mapuwa remaining in the family in a subordinate position.
Family Composition
The Mapuwa family is one of the larger habituated groups in Virunga National Park. As documented by the International Gorilla Conservation Programme, the family includes 3 silverbacks, 8 adult females, 1 blackback, 3 sub-adult females, 3 juveniles, and 8 infants — 26 members in total. The 8 infants within a 26-member group indicate a high reproductive rate and strong social stability under Mvuyekure’s leadership. The family ranges in the Jomba area of the park.
The Rugendo Connection
Mapuwa was the son of the Rugendo silverback — the same Rugendo family that lost its dominant silverback Senkwekwe to militia gunmen in 2007. The interconnection between the Mapuwa and Rugendo families is part of the broader social history of the Jomba area families, whose interactions, splits, and mergers have been documented by park researchers across four decades. The females Mapuwa took from the Lulengo group in 1998 to found his family produced the offspring who now form the core of the group — the social history of these animals is a continuous record of individual decisions that produced the families visitors encounter today.
Current status: Always verify Virunga NP access before planning. The park has faced security challenges due to armed conflict in North Kivu Province.