In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  I'm confused. If I can stumble across bushmeat stalls all over Yaounde, and it's clearly illegal to sell the stuff, why don't the police close them down? And in any case the animals on sale may have looked gruesome, but they weren't endangered species. Louis explains, 'We didn't see gorilla or chimpanzee because the stallholders keep them out of sight. You have to ask for them and they only give if they trust you. Gorilla is very illegal and very expensive.'

  There are three legal categories for protected animals: Class A are species threatened with extinction (such as gorillas, chimpanzees and mandrills) and to kill or keep one requires signed authorization from the minister in charge of wildlife. Class B species (such as buffalo, parrots and African civet) are not necessarily threatened, but may become so, and you need a permit to hunt or sell them legally.

  The tricky bit comes in the last category: Class C, which is wide-ranging and contains blue duiker (a small antelope), porcupine, cane rat and all manner of other bushmeat. There can be many reasons why animals are in category C, but certainly these three species are far from endangered (all listed as 'Least concern' in the IUCN Red List, a register compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources). The meat on the stalls all appears to be in this third category and by all accounts it's very popular.

  A terrifying problem that's been looming in recent years is zoonosis: diseases jumping from wildlife to humans. The origins of HIV-1 lie in the central common chimpanzee right here in southern Cameroon, and almost certainly transferred to humans through hunting or butchery of bushmeat. Ebola and the glamorous-sounding simian foamy virus are also known to have made the jump.

  But if it's illegal to sell them and extremely dangerous to butcher them, why don't Cameroonians just eat something else? Louis explains that 'Cameroon doesn't have a tradition of animal husbandry, mainly because it's always been so easy to catch animals in the forest. Why would anyone go to all the effort and expense of keeping animals when you can just go and lay a trap?'

  Mme Pascaline has a simpler line: 'People like bushmeat. It reminds them of living in the forest.'

  Delicious Little Porcupine

  We drive to Mme Pascaline's house in the slum area of Yaounde called Moloko. It's notoriously dangerous here, but she is well respected (and our guide is the size of a small, semi-detached house), so it feels safe. She has a little shack to serve food from, and behind it, in a rubbish-strewn alley, is her kitchen – really just a place where she leans a fire against a rock.

  It turns out that the cute furry creature I thought was a vast guinea pig is actually a 'porc-epic' – porcupine. I don't think I've ever even seen one of these before, but I thought they were covered in vicious quills rather than fur, so I stroke it. I scream with agony as the thick fur turns out to be vicious quills indeed, several of which are now protruding from my hand. Must check my rabies jab is up to date when I get back to the hotel. I dig out Kingdon's Field Guide to African Mammals (essential reading for anyone planning to eat out in Cameroon) and identify our little friend as a bush-tailed porcupine. Apparently he's a type of rodent and he's far from endangered.

  I help to de-quill the porc-epic by pouring boiling water over it to loosen the quills, then scraping them off with a knife. Around its legs and head the quills seem to be so small as to resembe fur, but they are still angry little things that attack me at will. Underneath the quills the skin is thick, pinky-white and rubbery. It now looks like a huge bald guinea pig.

  I ask Mme Pascaline if she's concerned about some types of bushmeat becoming extinct, but she says, 'I know they can never disappear, no matter the amount that we eat.'

  I say that there's been a lot of research that says many of the popular species will be locally extinct in Cameroon unless people change their eating and hunting habits.

  'Hmm?' she says. She really doesn't care.

  'What about gorilla?'

  'I've eaten it, and I serve it here, but I need the help of another person – I can't do it all by myself,' she shrugs. 'My favourite is porcupine. And chimp.' Blimey.

  'Why's chimp so good?'

  'Because it almost smells like human flesh.' Her brother tries to stop her talking, scared that she's taking things too far, but she insists, 'Yes, it's true.'

  I ponder her frame of reference, but she hurries me along so that we don't miss the afternoon trade. We chop the porc-epic up into small pieces and lay it in a pot with a few fragrant leaves that I've never seen before. They smell of the best bits of Cameroon: sweet, flowery and dungy. I add a few onions and a little water and the pot goes on the fire for 45 minutes. Meanwhile, Mme Pascaline puts me to work peeling plantain (like bananas, but taste like sweet potatoes).

  She unties little wraps of white peppercorns, cloves, fennel seeds, chillies and chick peas, and I grind them to a paste using a large, flat stone. The pot's beginning to smell delicious.

  Mme Pascaline lifts a little hatch and declares her restaurant open. It's got bench seats for about ten people, and in a few minutes the place is full. I have to reserve a portion for fear of lunch running out. It's the first time I've eaten porcupine, and I'm very excited. It has a thick layer of tough, fatty skin marked like a honeycomb from where the quills were pulled, but then: tragedy! It's disgusting, like chewing a gamy mouse-mat. The meat is pretty hard to get off the bones, and it's tough and pungent, like . . . like . . . I'm eating engine oil. This doesn't seem to bother the punters, who can't seem to get enough of it.

  The customers are all boisterous blokes, dropping in on their way back from work. They sing a little song about the porc-epic for me: 'Hey delicious little porcupine, be kind and don't injure me with your little thorns.'

  One of the men says, 'Bushmeat is important. It's what we grew up with. In villages and even cities some people can't afford beef, so you just go in the bush and catch whatever and eat it.' They admit that it's very expensive but 'It's a treat – although it's not just rich man's food, we can't afford to eat it every day.'

  I'm joined by Ofir Drori who runs the Last Great Ape (LAGA) organization. LAGA tries to encourage the Cameroon authorities to prosecute people who trade or traffic Class A endangered species, filming undercover footage to incriminate traders. Ofir is really an ape man, and doesn't care so much about Class C bushmeat, but he mentions that eating it 'does create a problem of harming the overall biodiversity in several areas'. More importantly, because Class C animals are now considered contraband, the price of bushmeat has risen, and traders are often linked to Class A animals, drugs and people trafficking, so even porcupine is inevitably part of the wider problem.

  I worry that making bushmeat illegal when it's clearly enormously popular in Cameroon just pushes the industry underground and creates a new world of criminality – as with Prohibition in 1930s' USA. Ofir throws his hands up in the air and says, 'I don't care. It's illegal and people shouldn't do it.' However, he says that there's a world of difference between the illegal commercial bushmeat trade in the city and legal subsistence hunting and eating of bushmeat in rural communities. But he adds that, 'The most important problem is corruption, no doubt about it. And again it is not [only] Cameroon; Central West Africa is all the same.'

  Snake-oil massages and other miracle cures

  Louis takes us to meet Bobu, a traditional healer who uses extraneous bits and bobs of endangered animals to heal all manner of ailments from gammy legs to rows with the missus. He's got gorilla legs, leopard skulls, various horns and tusks, and a wide array of wood shavings 'from very rare trees', all of which look spookily like the same bit of wood that's been ground to a dust.

  'I'm a doctor and I can cure any kind of problem. People often come to me when hospital medicine has failed. I have lots: all the mystical medicines. For instance, if someone has mental problems, or if you fall out with your boyfriend, I can help you and put you back together,' he claims.

  He is also the most magnificently smelly man I've ever met.

  He shows me around his war
es – gorilla bones, lion limbs, panther skulls and all manner of bird bits. 'That's the panther's skull, it's an antidote against poison. That's the arm of a lion. It's to heal fractures. This is gorilla bone, which is for mystical illness that they can't cure in a hospital.' He offers to make me an aphrodisiac that will keep me going at it for a day and a half. I tell him that Mrs Gates is more into tenderness than competition-level endurance pounding, but he waves away my objections and lazily throws several handfuls of sawdust into a scrap of paper and demands that I pay him 15,000 francs.

  He's obviously a total and utter charlatan, which would be fine, but I prefer my charlatans to have a bit of charm or grace. Worst of all, he has a gammy leg of his own, which you'd have thought he'd have been able to cure himself. When I ask why he hasn't, he laughs uproariously and swiftly changes the subject. He asks me to suggest an ailment to cure, so I confess that I've had a dodgy shoulder from too much swimming, and he prescribes a three-week course of python-fat massages. I tell him I've only got an hour, so he thinks for a moment and says, 'That'll do fine.'

  He takes me back to his shack in a nearby slum to perform massage on my gammy shoulder. It's one of the sweatiest, smelliest, seediest rooms I've ever been in, and I'm not very keen on the idea of this snake-oil salesman laying his hands on my flesh. But it might be interesting and, to be honest, if he does cure my gammy shoulder with his pseudo-spiritual claptrap I'll be enormously grateful. You see, I'm falling into his smelly trap – these holistic therapists are crafty buggers, aren't they?

  He shows me around the tricks of his trade, including his mystic telephone – a gourd in the shape of a 1970s' trimphone that he uses to summon the spirits. I promise I'm not making this stuff up. He says he's going to use python fat to rub into my shoulder, which is priceless – a snake-oil salesman actively selling me snake oil. He gets a little fire going, then rubs the python fat on his hands. It stinks – like rancid butter mixed with week-old BO, then mixed with skunk juice. I'm almost certain that it's chicken fat, which would be great because python is a Class B 'slightly endangered' animal. He also has sand on his hands, which makes the whole experience utterly, utterly unpleasant. He rubs it in with a great deal of force, taking my breath away.

  I wonder why he doesn't use more commonly available animals, but he says, 'People want rare animal cures because they are powerful, symbolic, exotic, and you just don't get that with a chicken. The chicken isn't important at all, it's only good for eating, and the bones aren't mystical.' It's all part of the bushmeat jigsaw – this stuff has a greater resonance here in Cameroon.

  Monkey Business

  Joseph finds me an area with a bushmeat stall, but the woman who owns it is angry and covers the monkeys and pangolins with a tarpaulin, so I walk away. I spot a woman sitting behind a bowl of enormous wriggling grubs and I ask her what they are. 'Palm weevils,' she says. 'They live in the palm oil tree, and we collect them by cutting palms down and inside you find the weevils.' They look as aggressive as an insect could look. I have to try them. The stallholder advises me to 'Boil them for a few minutes, then grill them over charcoal. They are delicious.' They are also pretty expensive, so I buy a small bag, enough for a snack for all of us, and set off to find a stallholder who can help me cook them.

  The central Yaounde railway station is a major hub for the capital, milling with people. It also has endless stalls fronted by charcoal stoves where you can buy freshly chargrilled fish. I ask several stallholders if they will help me out but most refuse. Finally I convince a woman to help me in return for a few thousand francs.

  I get out my bag of weevils and take a closer look at them. They are the size of my thumb, with large pincer-like mouths, black faces and hairy chins and they wriggle like frenetic sex toys. I must get that thought out of my head.

  She helps me boil and grill them, after which they become a little shrunken, but the grill-marks make them look oddly appetizing – as though they've been photographed for an aspirational food-and-interiors magazine. Joseph and I tuck in. They are crunchy yet sloppy on the inside, and taste slightly sweet and meaty, with a texture very much like shrimps. The heads are gritty, and the overall effect is, I'm sorry to say, quite repulsive. I keep eating them, hoping that my reaction is just fear and prejudice, but after twenty or so, I still can't enjoy them. Joseph, needless to say, can't get enough of them.

  Suddenly a man in a uniform barges in on us and starts shouting. Apparently we haven't asked permission to film here. Joseph squares up to him like a fighting cockerel and starts shouting straight back, which doesn't seem to me to be the cleverest approach, especially as the other guy has a gun. After much shouting and gesticulation, the uniformed man drags Joseph away to inspect our filming permit. Another man demands my passport. This has suddenly become very messy. The only person who looks happy about the situation is Louis, who clearly blames Joseph for the mess and wears an 'I told you so' expression.

  We look around and spot a group of angry policemen sitting drinking beer a few stalls down from us, and Louis explains, 'They think you have filmed them drinking beer while they are on duty.' The head of the railway station's police department is there, and he looks furious.

  All of a sudden we are arrested and told to drive to the police station. Oh dear. We follow the police cars to their compound, and while we're in the car, Joseph hurriedly calls his chief-of-police friend to see if he can pull a few strings. When we get out, we are made to wait for two hours until the railway police chief calls us into his office. He has been bullied into letting us go, and he hates us more than ever. He wishes us luck through gritted teeth, gives me back my passport and tells us to go on our way. It's very odd, an exercise in bullying and low-level corruption. Luckily we came out on top this time. I hope our luck continues.

  • • • • •

  Louis takes me off to meet some bushmeat sellers who've agreed to set up their stalls away from their normal location so that I can talk to them and see their meat. When we get there, however, chaos ensues with women grabbing the meat, yelling and threatening us, and pushing each other. We persevere and eventually manage to speak to a stall owner while everyone harangues us. 'The bushmeat ban is just white men meddling in African affairs: leave us alone,' he says.

  He's selling python, blue duiker, porcupine and rats, plus several breeds of monkey and one live but terrified, hissing pangolin curled into a ball that he constantly prods. He says that none of them is endangered (although python is actually a Class B endangered species) and that he doesn't know or care what the classification is anyway.

  I ask why everyone is so aggressive and he says, 'People are shouting because when you come and film like this it can make the forest guard come and arrest us.' Then he himself threatens me: 'I don't want to get arrested for appearing on TV. If that happens, then next time you're here, I'll just take a machete and cut you down, and break the camera.' Time to leave.

  Into the Bush

  I get up at 3.30 a.m. and pick up a very grumpy, arrogant gendarme called Albert. I know you shouldn't judge people on first impressions, but this bloke definitely eats babies. I have paid for him to join me on a trip to the rural forest areas because he should be able to avert potential violence and extortion and head off any difficulties I might have with local bureaucracy. He clearly isn't happy about babysitting me, but he's had no choice in the matter. Despite his grumpiness and my misgivings, he works wonders: on our way we get stopped at endless checkpoints by obscure officials, and it's not clear what they are looking for, but as soon as Albert grimaces at them, they wave us past. You don't mess with a bloke who eats babies.

  As dawn breaks we arrive at a small collection of huts to meet Andre, a local hunter and his wife, Estelle. People like him are the poorest in Cameroon, and in rural areas there's a great deal of poverty, but of course, there's also an abundance of wild animals.

  Andre takes us out hunting in the forest immediately behind his house. Only five or ten minutes into our hike we discover a can
e rat lying dead in one of Andre's traps. Half an hour on, another of Andre's traps has caught a 'chat-tigre': a palm civet cat according to Kingdon's Field Guide. It looks like a small leopard crossed with my own tabby, Tom Gates. We return to Andre's hut and I help Estelle cook the civet cat. Defurring it is one of the more horrific experiences of my life – not because it's gruesome, but because I keep imagining that I'm skinning Tom, who's been a faithful friend to me for years.

  We eat the cat sitting outside their mud and lathe hut and chat about bushmeat. The cat's good, but dry like rabbit and with a strange, catty skin. As we chat, the Baby-Eater comes over and demands a bowl – he's a serious fan of bushmeat, despite being a policeman, but Andre is terrified of him. I ask the Baby-Eater to sit away from us so that Andre can speak openly and he harrumphs off.

  Andre admits to having hunted and killed gorillas and chimpanzees, but he has to hide it from everyone in the village for fear of being grassed-up to the authorities 'When I kill a gorilla by myself, I hide it because if news is out that I killed a gorilla, they'll try to catch me.'

  He's a little unsure about whether he feels guilty about hunting gorillas – he's clearly well aware that they are endangered and that it's illegal, but he points to his small, grimy hut. 'Look, I'm not a rich man,' he says. I'm just making some money for my family. If I had caught more than the cat today, I would have called a woman I know who buys the meat from hunters and sends it to the city for sale.'

  Few activists say that people like Andre shouldn't hunt to feed their family. But it's in the commercial hunting – when Andre sends his bushmeat to town for sale – that the burden on forest biodiversity becomes a problem. Hunters lay extensive traps and hunt the more valuable endangered species, which traders then buy and transport to places like Yaounde where they can get a higher price. And from what I've seen in Yaounde, it's happening on a huge scale.