In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  So who's to blame? From where I'm standing, Andre is a man who's struggling to feed, house and clothe his family, he lives a poor and difficult life, and I can entirely understand why he hunts and sells bushmeat without a licence. How else is he going to get by? You could lecture him until you're blue in the face about biodiversity and ecological responsibility, but like you or I he'll need money tomorrow, and in the absence of any other means, he'll nip back into the forest behind his hut, thanks very much.

  It's often claimed that the logging companies are at the root of the trade. First, they cut roads deep into formerly impenetrable forest, which destroys the habitat for animals, and at the same time opens up new areas to commercial hunting. Second, they provide the transportation for bushmeat when it's smuggled on their trucks.

  I say goodbye to Andre and Estelle and drive a few miles east to the disingenuously glamorous-sounding Auberge de Moins Coin hotel in the sleepy village of Ayos. It's got a rudimentary bathroom but no running water and no electricity (although the smiling owner says that he's hopeful that both the power and water might return later). I take a look at the sink, and there are a couple of huge black, hairy feelers waving out of the overflow hole – they clearly belong to some enormous hidden insect that is right now laying plans to visit me tonight and tear me limb from limb. I smile at the friendly owner and say that I'll take it. I've stayed in worse places, and in any case, there's no other option.

  At about 9 p.m. the power suddenly kicks in, and a small but harsh fluorescent tube that I hadn't noticed before flickers into life, revealing the cloud of mosquitoes that I also hadn't noticed. I put up my mosquito net. But then the power spreads to the rest of Ayos, and the sleepy village starts to party. Pumping, banging, yelping Congolese and Cameroonian music fills the air. Ollie (producer and cameraman) and I grab Louis, our driver Nfor and the Baby-Eater, and wander out in search of beer and food.

  The night is hot and sticky and the streets are now full of people strutting their stuff. Girls arm-in-arm flirting with the boys, groups of men arguing ferociously, women declaiming gossip and laughing like bassoons, bars blaring music far louder than their sound systems can really handle, plumes of hearty fishy smoke pouring from all the fish-grillers lining the road. It's Hollywood Africa, and it's thoroughly uplifting. Ollie and I find the only quiet bar, with gentle lilting Cameroonian music, couples chatting, and three fish-grillers set up outside, so we take a seat.

  We order some local beers, whereupon the owner turns his stereo up to supersonic volume and puts on some screeching, shouty music. Louis orders a bottle of Guinness (oddly enough, Cameroon is the fifth largest market for Guinness and Nigeria is second only to the UK). After a few beers, the Auberge de Moins Coin seems eminently acceptable, and I hum in tune with the mosquito cloud until I sink into a deep sleep.

  The Sanaga-Yong Chimp Sanctuary

  We stop off at the Sanaga-Yong Chimp Sanctuary the next day. I have mixed feelings about this: it's great to save an animal from unnecessary pain, but these places rescue a tiny percentage of vulnerable animals, and spend a lot of money on giving them a strange, if safe, domestic life spent accompanying their handlers. If I was being harsh, I'd say that sanctuaries are sentimental places where the cutest animals in the world are cared for by rather wet animal lovers, but they do try to highlight the problems of the bushmeat trade. I had asked Andre what he thought about chimp sanctuaries, and he just laughed. A waste of money for white people to play with animals, he thought, although, as a dedicated hunter, he perhaps isn't their target market. Often the overall intention is to return animals to the wild, but it doesn't always work.

  I'm shown around the sanctuary by a gorgeous young French lady called Agnes, who shows me the baby chimp pen full of cheeky little chimplets rolling around, laughing and whacking each other with sticks, in much the same way that my daughters do. I let out an involuntary paternal 'aaah'. Then we go out to the forest to play with an older, but just as gorgeous chimp called Sambe, who is attended by a ridiculously gorgeous Cameroonian volunteer called Sophia. The wall-to-wall gorgeousness of the place is making me go all soft around the edges.

  I ask Agnes if Cameroonians are really aware of chimps and how endangered they are. 'No, they're not aware at all. Chimps and gorillas have been eaten for centuries, throughout central Africa. We have to make them aware that they're eating their cousins, and we have to stop them. Scientists predict that in 15-20 years they'll be gone.'

  I like Agnes, but that emotive phrase 'eating their cousins' clangs horribly, like the common assertion that we share 98 per cent of our DNA with chimps. We also share around 50 per cent of our DNA with bananas, so does that make soft fruit our second cousin?

  I wonder if people who work in sanctuaries have their heads in a lovely but sentimental cloud, so I ask Agnes if it's realistic to stop people-eating bushmeat when it's such a core part of Cameroonian culture and there's no realistic alternative. She says, 'At least we can start with great apes. I'm pretty optimistic for great apes. If the population doesn't stop growing, and people continue to burn the forest to make fields, there'll be nothing left, so it has to be sustainable. Also, it's illegal, but most people are ignorant of the law. To give you the whole picture, there were 1-2 million chimps at the beginning of the last century, and now there are only 100-200,000 left in the whole of Africa.'

  Sambe does somersaults over me, and climbs up on my head. She is remarkably child-like in her facial expressions, her teasing and playing, and she really does remind me of my kids. I have to wear a surgical mask so that Sambe and I don't swap diseases, but Sambe has decided that her main task in life is to pull it off. Then she manages to get her finger in my mouth, and even Agnes curls her lips up and says, 'I wouldn't let her do that. Chimps have a habit of putting their fingers up their bottoms.' I gag.

  Hunting, Shooting . . .

  After a final night in the Auberge de Moins Coin, today is one of those grin-and-bear-it days. We drive flat out for seven hours at a breakneck pace on dreadful dirt roads to try to get to a remote town called Bilabo before sunset. Our driver Nfor insists on keeping up a ridiculous speed in order to fly over the potholes. I toy with the idea of asking him to slow down, but think better of it, and instead try to muffle my involuntary gasps as we skid around blind corners. It's painful, boring and relentless, and made worse by the fact that there are now four of us in the back seat, three of whom (I don't want to point fingers) smell awful. The Auberge de Moins Coin may have been rudimentary, but it offered a bucket to wash in, and it seems a little selfish not to avail yourself of it when you're going to spend an entire day squeezed in the back of the car.

  By the time we get to Bilabo I smell as bad as the rest of the back seat and my arse has taken a fearful battering. We find a dodgy bar that a passer-by thinks may have rooms. I get out of the car but stand curled over like an old man for about 15 minutes until I can finally creak my spine back into shape. Nfor has to prise his hands off the steering wheel and he looks to be in as much pain as me. The barman tells us that he has one room available, but it's big, so we could all fit in it. We take a look at each other and imagine the combined stench of our fetid bodies. Without a word, we shuffle back to the car, creak our bodies back into a sitting position and drive off.

  Eventually we find Le Giraffe, an extensive but entirely empty warren of filthy rooms attended by a taciturn fella who'd rather not have the bother of us staying, thanks all the same. But we are desperate men, and the light is going so we insist he shows us a few rooms. Ye gods, I didn't know a bed could sustain that much fungi. It's like an out-of-control Petri-dish experiment. Resigned to our fate, the Baby-Eater negotiates the price of the rooms down to £2 a pop. In the circumstances, it's a rip-off.

  We drop our kit amidst the mildew and wander into town where loads of women are cooking fresh fish. We all order some, along with some wrapped cassava, and settle down in a bar opposite to wait for it as the heat of the day wanes ever so slightly. The bar is full and ha
ppy, and the beer is a welcome relief after the day's low-level agony. The fish arrives, and I swear that a Michelin-starred chef couldn't have cooked it better. The combination of charcoal, fresh whole fish, warm sticky air and strong cold beer is a magical thing, and there's not much you can add to it. The bar owner cranks up the stereo and we listen to Makossa music by Petit Pays – a mixture of salsa, funk and African harmonizing that's a bit '80s, but none the worse for it. It's another wonderful, sticky African evening that makes me feel alive and glad.

  I don't sleep a wink during the night, despite going to bed on a headful of beer. It might be the smelly, damp bed but whatever it is, the last thing I need now is to get back in that flipping car again. Nfor guns the throttle and once again we're tanking along the dreadful dirt roads at 100 reckless km/h. After three long hours we get to Deng-Deng, a village of 3,000 people deep in the Cameroonian forest.

  The village is a muddy, sprawling, higgledy-piggledy collection of tiny mud-and-wood shacks. At a distance, the place looks wretched and impoverished, but on closer inspection, it's not so bad – it's just the mud that makes it look so grim. The village kids are bright-eyed, happy and healthy, pointing and yelling at us as we walk past.

  I meet Philippe, a hunter who has agreed to let me live with him for a few days, and he takes me straight off to pay my respects to the village chief. The chief seems like a nice guy and we chat for a while about the mosque he's planning for the village and his hope that Deng-Deng will receive some development help in the near future from a nearby dam project, but he's actually more excited to talk about a football match planned for this afternoon when Deng-Deng take on another local village. 'Make sure you're back in time for that!' He tells me that Philippe is one of the best hunters around and then gives me his blessing to film and stay overnight in his village, and to eat with Philippe.

  Back at Philippe's mud hut, though, everything has started to go wrong. The Baby Eater has been throwing his weight around, and has demanded that the villagers bring him some food. He sits in the shade with a big smile on his face, spitting the bones of a small rodent onto the floor and ordering Philippe's wife Eli around. I sigh: I can't help thinking that the petty abuse of authority is as ugly a problem in Cameroon as it was in Uganda. This isn't just an irritation for us – Phillippe is so freaked out by Albert that he has said that he can't go hunting with me for fear that Albert will arrest him. Louis takes him aside to reassure him, whilst I send Albert off to finish his lunch on the other side of the village.

  Eventually, after calming Philippe down and staying and chatting with the villagers for a few hours to let them get used to us, Philippe agrees to go hunting, but claims that he doesn't have a gun. Louis says he's not telling the truth – he's got a gun, but he thinks that the Baby Eater will try to confiscate it from him. Eventually Louis has a brilliant idea. Let's borrow a gun from the village chief – that way no one can fret about getting into trouble.

  We head down the road that bisects Deng-Deng, and a few miles out of the village a track veers off to the left. Philippe tells me that this is an old illegal logging road, and he's grateful for it because it allows him to get deep into the forest where the animals are. Like most people I've met in Cameroon, he is sceptical that bushmeat hunting is harming the ecosystem – 'Look at this forest,' he says, 'it's full of animals and plants. This isn't dying out just because I hunt a few animals.' We pass an abandoned camp used by the illegal loggers, littered with rubbish and old fires. It looks as though it has recently been used.

  We hike through the jungle for five long hours in search of animals, checking traps and stalking birds, but we're out of luck. Frustrated, Philippe decides to teach me the distress call of the blue duiker: a nasal warble that sounds like 'neep, neep' squeaked by Roadrunner in a fluster. I'm pretty good at a range of strange animal sounds, including paranoid sheep, neurotic cows, horny frogs and bored ducks, so Philippe is surprised at the quality of my duiker impersonation. He puts me to work, neeping away, while he waits for a charitable duiker to come to my aid. Eventually, one creeps through the undergrowth and Philippe takes a shot at it with no success. It's the nearest we get to catching anything – the traps are all empty, and the birds are all perched so high in the jungle canopy that it would be a waste of bullets trying to hit them. This hunting business is clearly a lot harder than I imagined.

  . . . Football . . .

  Back at the village there's an extraordinary football match going on – Deng-Deng are playing a local team, but it's far from Sunday football back home, where a few overweight blokes bluster around trying not to snap their Achilles tendons. These guys run around like greyhounds, flying into tackles and generally playing as though their lives depend on it. They are encouraged by the fact that every single woman in Deng-Deng has turned out to watch the match, cooing, cheering and jeering in equal measure. The match is markedly better and more exciting than the last time I went to see Arsenal play (not much of a surprise, really), and I can see why Cameroon have done so well in the World Cup.

  Deng-Deng lose the match 5-4, but no one seems too upset. I go back to Philippe's hut where Eli shows me how to make their version of couscous. It's nothing like our couscous, which is a type of pasta (most people think that it's a grain like bulgur wheat, but they're wrong). Instead it's processed cassava, a root vegetable a little like sweet potato. We pound the boiled cassava into a dry porridge the consistency and colour of crumbled feta cheese, and lay it out on a basket. This will be dried on the roof of the hut and used to make a starchy paste to accompany bushmeat. At this stage, it tastes slightly chalky, slightly vomity and extremely sour.

  As soon as dusk arrives, a nearby hut throws open its doors and bursts into raucous life. It turns out that this is one of two bars in the village. I buy a round of beers from the bar and we settle down outside to eat a meal of yesterday's leftover porcupine stew and the prepared couscous (less sour, but still nicely vomity). Almost as soon as we have started to eat, a furious row breaks out. A very drunken bloke from the visiting football team accosts Philippe and tells him that as we are visitors, we should be eating with the village chief rather than with him. He tries to explain that the chief has given us his blessing to eat here but drunkie has got his beerphones on and won't have any of it. There's a horrible scene of pushing and shoving tor a while then, as if by magic, the chief appears to join us for supper, and the troublemaker hops onto a motorbike and hoons off into the dark. I pity anyone out on the roads tonight.

  The chief apologizes for the kerfuffle, and tucks into a spot of porcupine with us, then takes me off to the other bar in the village, which has power, and so serves cold beer. He reminds me that he isn't allowed to drink alcohol because he's a Muslim, then orders a beer anyway, but in a whispering voice (I guess that makes it all right). We have a rare old time chatting about hunting and village life over our cold beers, then the chief's friend asks if I fancy having sex with any of the village ladies tonight, because he knows several who'd be happy to oblige. I thank him for the kind offer but say that I'm too tired from our jungle trekking for that sort of thing. He shrugs and tells me I don't know what I'm missing, before the Baby Eater takes him aside to find out a little more about what's on offer.

  We get back to Philippe's place, and the bar nearby is pumping out some good ol' Congolese soul music. My room for the night is a few yards away from their speakers, so I'm blessed with all the elements of a drunken, slightly aggressive African village party in my room, but with none of the fun. Sometime after 3 a.m. the bar calls it a morning, and I get a couple of hours' blissful sleep.

  In the middle of the village I find the referee from yesterday's football match, who also happens to be the village representative of the local logging company. I visit him on the off-chance that we can see the logging operations. He makes a couple of calls using my satellite phone and, miraculously, he manages to get permission from someone for us to visit. The logging companies hate the BBC and are usually very wary of letting anyone
see what's happening on their plots, so I'm amazed that we've been given access.

  . . . and Logging

  We drive to the logging concession with one of Philippe's hunting friends who works there driving trucks. Like many of the locals he is very much in favour of logging because it brings much-needed jobs to poor villages like Deng-Deng, and he rarely if ever thinks about the long-term consequences. He does, however, admit that, 'None of the money paid by the logging company to the government ends up in the hands of the people who live in the forest.'

  The statistics are terrifying: between 1990 and 2000 some 90,000 sq km of forest were cleared in Cameroon, and logging concessions covered 76 per cent of all protected and unprotected forests. Forest products generate around 20 per cent of Cameroon's export revenue.

  The companies all want ventes de coupe (freedom to cut) licences, which entitle them to log an area of 25 sq km of permanent forest over a short three-year period with no management plan to limit environmental damage, so there's high potential for destructive logging methods. There arc many reports that the companies actually use the licences as cover to illegally cut a much larger area.

  We drive deep into the forest through roads cut specifically for logging. These go for miles, deep through the trees, passing impenetrable flora and fauna that, by rights, we shouldn't be able to see. We drive for an hour through this logging concession, passing vast tree-moving trucks and piles of massive tree trunks ready for shipping. I find the sight deeply unsettling.

  We come across a team of two men who let me watch them chop down an enormous red-brown tree. They make deep cuts into the trunk and stick branches in the cuts. Call me a lily-livered, hand-wringing liberal, but the whole operation makes me feel sick. They tell us that the tree is going to fall due south, but at the last minute it starts to creak and the loggers panic. It's falling north instead. We scamper around the tree and back off as it begins a slow-motion fall. It takes a long time to come down – maybe 30 seconds of rumbling earthquake noises building up to a huge crashing crescendo as it hits the forest floor, bringing down scores of other trees and vines as it falls. Then an eerie silence.