In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  I ask the loggers if they worry that they are doing lasting damage to the forest, but they don't want to talk about it. I persevere until they finally say, 'There are millions of other trees here. If we cut one down, it makes way for more.' I should be clear: this logging isn't a scorched-earth concept that leaves behind a ragged field – they cut down only the most valuable trees, which are often hundreds of metres apart, so the place doesn't look particularly less forest-like to my eyes, but it's lacking in mature hardwood trees. I'd say that the tree they've cut down is probably at least a hundred years old. The loggers move on because they have a quota to fill – twelve trees have to be cut down today.

  Midnight Train to Yaounde

  We drive back to Bilabo and wait for a train that's due at midnight. Thankfully we are avoiding the gruesome drive all the way back to Yaounde, and instead we are going to go out with the forestry soldiers who inspect the train for bushmeat smugglers. This train used to be the main smuggling route into the capital, so in an attempt to restrict the trade, bushmeat has been entirely banned. It's not just a conscientious move – the World Bank has provided funding to help Cameroon railways and it's partly contingent upon halting the bushmeat traffic.

  Just before we get to the station the Baby Eater stops a man on a motorbike who has a porcupine strapped to the pillion. He wants to buy it to take home to Yaounde – the man is a bushmeat maniac – and this porcupine is half the price he'd pay in town. But we're travelling on the train, I tell him. It's illegal to carry bushmeat.

  'Yes, but no one will search me – I'm a gendarme,' says the Baby Eater.

  'Exactly. We're making a film about bushmeat and about people smuggling it. You can't drag us into this.'

  The Baby Eater is furious, but lets the man on the motorbike go.

  The station is crammed with people on the platform selling all manner of foods from baskets carried on their heads. At around 2 a.m. the train finally arrives, jam-packed with people. Louis has to bribe the conductor of the train to get us four berths so that we can leave our kit with the Baby Eater and head off with the forestry soldiers searching the train for bushmeat.

  The train is extremely smelly, with people lying over the floor in several layers. The soldiers tiptoe through the carriage trying to avoid treading on feet and hands. The passengers are all resentful, and reluctantly let the soldiers go through their luggage, but they shout and heckle me, saying that I should take my colonial attitudes back to the UK. At one point we pass a high-ranking army officer who argues with the forestry soldiers, asking why they are bothering to criminalize ordinary Cameroonians.

  The soldiers search some lively-looking bags and everyone seems to have food of some description, especially smoked fish, in their luggage. That's why the train smells so bad. After a few carriages, however, they discover an abandoned sack of monkeys and cane rats, all blackened with smoke. No one claims the sack (funnily enough). Then, a few seats along, we find a woman who has a large bag of bushmeat crammed next to her on the seat. But when challenged, she just denies that it's hers, and no one around her is willing to say different. The soldier says that it's obviously hers, but of course they can't prove it, and if she admits to owning it, she'd face prison, so we'll never know. The woman is, however, very unhappy. If it was hers, she's probably just lost several weeks of potential income, and may now be in serious debt. I don't know if she deserves my sympathy or not.

  We finally collapse in our cabin and manage a couple of hours kip as the train crawls painfully slowly towards Yaounde. When we arrive, I feel a sense of relief tinged with sadness. The bushmeat problems seem as complex and unresolvable in the countryside as they are in the city, and the laws seem to be punishing poor and vulnerable people who have few other opportunities.

  The Chicken of Love

  We drive a little way out of Yaounde to visit a cane rat farm where they breed rats of James Herbert proportions – they are the size of small dogs, but infinitely more aggressive, like psychotic Jack Russells. It's actually a nascent training and research centre for breeders, and they have only 50 or so rats at the moment. It's a commercial centre, set up in the hope that there'll be a big cultural shift and people will turn to setting up their own cane rat farms. I'm sceptical to begin with – these vicious little rodents are armed with industrial-strength incisors so they need immensely strong (and expensive) concrete-and-steel cages that look way beyond the means of an average Cameroonian.

  Paul, the boss, says that cane rats could be one of the solutions to the bushmeat problem, especially as a 6-kg rat fetches 20,000 francs at market – that's about £20, a huge amount of money around here. Maybe Paul's onto something. We find a particularly well-fed specimen and take it to Paul's house where his wife, Louisette, shows me how to prepare it. First knock it over the head to render it unconscious, then cut its throat and bleed it. After this, the process is similar to the porcupine, and I prepare myself for another meal that tastes like engine oil. We douse it in hot water, after which the fur comes off surprisingly easily, then butcher the little fella into 12 or so pieces, and fry it briefly, then boil for half an hour with onions, spring onions, chilli, garlic, green pepper and salt. She serves it with a sauce made by simmering tomatoes with onions, chilli, garlic and peanut oil, and beautiful wraps of manioc (cassava) paste that's been wrapped into thin bundles and boiled.

  But here's the lightning bolt: cane rat tastes absolutely fantastic, one of the best meats I've ever tasted: unutterably succulent, moist yet with a full, fragrant flavour – like the best Label Anglais free-range chicken thighs money can buy. I've tried a lot of strange and unusual foods on my travels, but the cane rat is far and away the best meat I've ever found. I tell Louisette (known to everyone here as 'Mami') that it's fantastic, and she's rightly proud.

  Raising cane rats is one possible way of shifting from a reliance on bushmeat hunted in the forest regions, but it's currently a drop in the ocean, and the industry is tiny. Paul says, 'My dream is that this will be one of the international meats that could be eaten in Europe, on the plane when people are travelling.' I agree, but tell him that he has a marketing problem. I can't ever see supermarkets in the UK stocking their shelves with meat that has the word 'rat' in the label (more's the pity). But there are some horrendous substances that they do manage to sell by the million simply by giving them different names: take crabsticks, for example. So I suggest renaming cane rat as 'heaven toad', 'dream horse' or 'the chicken of love'. Paul tells me he'll think about it and get back to me.

  The Dangers of Bushmeat

  The next morning I set off for one last interview before leaving Cameroon. On the way I chat with Joseph about the anti-colonial feeling in the country, and the sense I got on the train that Cameroonians think that Europeans are making a fuss over nothing, that we can't stop meddling with a place we don't really understand.

  Joseph explains, 'We tend to hate the French, but we quite like the English.' The country was governed as two separate entities – as League of Nations mandates – from 1919 until independence in 1960. 'Most of us think that the French clung onto power to take as much – they could from the country, and to retain a bit of influence. And they come back here now with the Italians to run logging companies, and they know that the money they pay for licences goes straight into the pockets of the politicians, and they don't care.'

  As we drive through Yaounde, I spot a bus with two live goats tied to the roof. They look surprisingly calm about it.

  Matt LeBreton works in possibly the cleanest place in Cameroon. Admittedly it's a laboratory, but even so, it's difficult getting somewhere to be this spick and span in a place like Yaounde. Matt researches wild animal ecology and disease in Cameroon, and he's at the really scary end of the bushmeat trail: species-jumping diseases that evolve in animals and mutate to infect humans. We're talking about the really nasty stuff: Ebola, Aids, anthrax and that one I really hope I never get – simian foamy virus.

  He makes big claims about what his res
earch might be capable of: 'There's a whole world of pain waiting to be prevented . . . we like to think we could've stopped HIV if we'd been doing this a while ago. It's a big problem, but what you have in Cameroon is people having contact with all sorts of animals that people don't mix with elsewhere.'

  I mention that I had squirrel for lunch, so I ask if that's likely to be a problem. Matt says, 'The thing to remember is that preparation is what causes the trouble . . . the most viruses are killed by cooking, although diseases particularly associated with squirrels and other types of rodents are things like monkey pox. Maybe call me to tell me how you are in a few months' time.'

  Gulp.

  • • • • •

  I wonder if there aren't better ways to solve the bushmeat problem because whatever's being tried ain't working, and instead there's a climate of fear, resentment and confusion. Perhaps the government should be stricter about applying the laws they already have, but there may be a more radical solution. Rather than criminalizing bushmeat and driving it underground (and away from the authorities and researchers who can keep an eye on it), perhaps it would be more effective if the government legalized bushmeat and taxed it. That would provide income and a market that's open and therefore easier to regulate. The trouble is that Cameroon isn't the squeakiest-clean of countries – languishing at 138 out of 163 in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index – and maybe more bureaucracy, tax and income offers more potential for gerrymandering and corruption. But it could be said that the bushmeat trade couldn't be much worse than it is already. And it's not just a problem bubbling away on another continent: officials estimate that 7,500 tonnes of illegal bushmeat are smuggled into the UK every year, too.

  What has affected me more is the anthropomorphic connection I felt with that sodding chimp, Sambe. I didn't expect to be carried away so much by her sweetness, her playfulness, her . . . there's no way of getting around this . . . her humanness. My carnivorousness has been based on a clear moral line, where I feel able to kill (or at least take responsibility for the death of) and eat anything that isn't human. But Sambe has blurred the line for me. It's not just that it's illegal and immoral to eat an endangered species: those issues aside, I wouldn't have been able to eat her anyway because she reminds me so much of my kids. And the trouble is that once that line is blurred, the whole specious edifice of a carnivore's moral justification is in doubt. I'll just have to extend the moral fence to include primates and stick my fingers in my ears and hope it doesn't get any more complicated and start including pigs. Oh, God, am I going soft? Perhaps I'm going to have to cook my cat just to keep me on the right side of the tracks.

  • • • • •

  Cameroon has a complex story, but my next destination has a simple history writ large. Twenty-five years ago the Ethiopian famines were, quite simply, the biggest food event of my lifetime. A grand-scale tale of human destruction, a story of global guilt, global redemption and back to global guilt again. I am terrified at the idea of going there, of trying to do justice to the gravity of the subject, and of trying to understand the human impact of such horror. Is it really appropriate to sit down for lunch with someone who's lived through a famine?

  ETHIOPIA

  Famines and Feasts

  POPULATION: 77 million

  PERCENTAGE LIVING ON LESS THAN $2 A DAY: 78%

  UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX: 170/177

  CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION: 130/163

  GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA: $177 (176/179)

  FOOD AID RECIPIENTS: 5.6 million

  MALNUTRITION: 46% of the population

  'Hello Addis ABABA!' [25,000 people cheer.]

  'I've heard people say that Ethiopia is a poor country. Ethiopia isn't a poor country!' [25,000 people roar.]

  'Because Ethiopians have LOVE in their hearts!' [25,000 people go wild.]

  • • • • •

  It's the last day of my trip to Ethiopia and I'm standing in an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time. In a few seconds it will be the dawn of the second millennium, which is weird because according to my calendar it's 11 September 2007, but Ethiopia is a little different. You see, back in the 16th century Pope Gregory brought in a new calendar that shifted the date of Jesus' birth (according to the old Julian calendar) by seven years, nine months and 11 days. The Ethiopians, being an orthodox bunch, and historically never particularly keen on embracing the modern world, decided to ignore Greg and stick with what they had. After all, who wants to go around replacing the stationery and resetting the video recorder?

  And this extraordinary place is a vast warehouse built especially for a party in the centre of Addis Ababa. A warehouse party might not sound extraordinary, but this one has been financed to the tune of $10 million (plus whatever else the government has added – rumoured to be another $10 million) by Ethiopian-Saudi billionaire Sheikh al-Amoudi, and it's crammed with 25,000 people who've paid around $160 a ticket to be there. It seems a little snide to mention that the average Ethiopian annual income is only $177, but I'm currently feeling a little . . . conflicted. And the big shocker is that this warehouse is temporary, to be dismantled in a few months' time to make way for another building project.

  I don't want to piss on anyone's millennium parade here, but $10 million is a lot of money, and when you're in one of the poorest countries on the planet, you can't expect to shell out that kind of cash on a warehouse, some nibbles, beer and a half-decent band and not get me asking a few difficult questions.

  But there's no time for that now: the bloke up on the stage is only Will.i.am of the popular beat combo the Black-Eyed Peas! Hoh yes! And he's counting us down to the Ethiopian millennium and giving up the love, and there are 25,000 of us down here who've cast our reservations aside to party like it's 1999, and hey, if there's one thing Ethiopia needs, it's a thick, meaty slice of optimism to get the country back on its feet. So we all shout: Five! Four! Three! Two! One. . .

  Mekele. Two Weeks Earlier

  The flies. No one warned me about the flies. Persistent, fizzing, ticklish, swarming, disgusting. They crawl over my face, my eyes, lips, ears and hair. I spend the first couple of hours angrily swatting them away, but my skin slowly gets used to the sensation, and I eventually give up and let them wander over me, more irritated by my own swatting than their tickling.

  I'm in Mekele in northern Ethiopia, one of the notorious dustbowl fields of death in 1984 where over I million people died. The names Korem, Bati and Mekele have had a diabolical, holocaustic resonance for me ever since I saw the famous footage of the Ethiopian famines on BBC news. These were the three worst camps where Michael Buerk uncovered a horrific scene of mass starvation and aid workers tearing their hair out with nothing to feed millions of desperate people and few medicines available to treat any who had enough strength to make them worth saving.

  But from the ashes of death, misery and torment grew an unlikely hero: the world. Television made the world stand to attention, and for once the world proved ready and willing to take responsibility for an isolated nation it barely knew anything about, staging the biggest single peacetime mobilization of the international community in the 20th century. The outpouring of shock, sympathy and cash was remarkable because it came from individuals as much as from governments and politicians. Kids were mobilized, rock stars got recording, trucks were driven across the world, and people dug deeply into their pockets. Food started flying through the air, dropping in bundles from planes, thrown out of the back of trucks, and millions of people's lives were saved.

  And yet . . . and yet. Despite the good that was done and the heartfelt sympathy and the vast donations, Ethiopia's luck didn't change. Despite everything Ethiopia is still a broken country today, and I can't understand why, in the 21st century, nearly 25 years after those great famines, there is such widespread chronic food insecurity, why there are twice as many hungry Ethiopians as there were in '84. Why today over 37 million Ethiopians are malnourished and why the country still n
eeds $1.6 billion of aid every year.

  There are legions of statistics declaiming Ethiopia's poverty and desperation, but the one that really sticks out is Ethiopia's ranking in the UN Human Development Index (I call it the Happiness Index): 170 out of 177. When you're that low down, being one place higher or lower means little. Basically, life in Ethiopia is, for most people, bloody awful.

  So I'm in Mekele to find out what the hell is going on. I must admit that I was apprehensive at the idea of coming here, where the ghosts of a million starved souls haunt the land. But of course our nightmares invariably disappear when we confront them, and so it is with Mekele. This place is nothing like I imagined. There's no dustbowl, no bony lethargic cattle; instead the undulating hills and fields are a lush carpet of vegetation so green that it looks like Devon in spring, a sensation only strengthened by the light but persistent drizzle that's falling and the flowers that seem to blossom everywhere.

  I had heard that this year the rains didn't fail, as they have so catastrophically five times in the last 20 years. But even so, I wasn't prepared for this place to look quite so fertile – not when the World Food Programme is expecting to feed 5,640,794 Ethiopians this year. But there's another side to this: my guide Dawit points out that it's green now because we're here just after the rains. Underneath that greenery lies poor, infertile soil. The reality is that much of Ethiopia suffers from soil erosion and soil exhaustion, unsustainable farming practices and wildly erratic rainfall that brings floods and droughts. Yet despite this, 85 per cent of the country's labour force works in agriculture, and they are often locked into a vicious cycle of poverty brought about by low-return agriculture causing food insecurity, and a consequent lack of access to the education that might break the cycle.