The Last Great Ape

by Ofir Drori

  “No.”

  “You don’t know?” said the first one. “Go with this man.”

  I was rushed to another post. The base sat on a hill. Government soldiers sprinted across the soil and lined up for inspection.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “It’s all under control. You’d better stay here for now.”

  A soldier checked my passport at another post. “Where do you stay?” he said.

  “The Leone.”

  “You need to get back there now.”

  “Is it safe?” said another soldier. “Maybe he should stay here.”

  “No. Go.”

  I moved with four civilians. We zigzagged through neighborhoods to avoid the main roads. Armored cars zipped by carrying UN soldiers. Leoneans peeked out from doorways. I gathered from rumors that the Nigerian-led West African peacekeeping force was pulling out of the country and UN soldiers were coming in. But conflict had flared during the West African retreat, when they’d tried to take a jeep that belonged to the old Leonean army. A man had been killed, and Sankoh’s rebels, the radio announced, were preparing to attack.

  After a few hours indoors, I returned to the street to search for food. I sat on a corner drinking a Coke and eating bread.

  A civilian appeared. “Show me your ID.”

  I chewed and looked up. “I’ll gladly show any document to a police officer. But why should I stop eating to show documents to civilians?”

  People gathered. An argument brewed. “No one is in the streets but people with the rebels,” a man yelled, and, as the pressure against me intensified, I stood and went with two angry men to the police station. I was passed from officer to officer, from one station to the next, as the men searched and re-searched my bag and read through my documents and every page of my notebook. Then a policeman found within the Hebrew, at the top of one page, the name Foday Sankoh.

  “Do you have contact with the rebels?” the policeman said, newly hostile. “Why do you write his name? Have you met him?”

  “There are Israelis supporting the rebels,” an officer said. “With weapons!”*

  The men surrounded me.

  “Do you have military training?”

  “Yeah. Like all Israelis. But my job on the base was in maintenance, changing light bulbs, cleaning toilets, you know.” I instantly regretted speaking. In a folder back at the hotel was my résumé, which stated that as a first lieutenant I’d commanded forty soldiers for two years. It was a detail that now felt ominous. After four hours of questioning, to my horror, the policemen drove me to the hotel, walked me up the stairs and continued the interrogation in my room. The folder sat on a high shelf in the closet, and I focused the officers on my face and on documents spread out on the table in front of them.

  “I’m just researching children’s games in Africa. How many times can I tell it to you? Look at this,” I said, and held up a diagram of a kite made from bamboo and a plastic bag. “The boy who made this told me he wanted to be a preacher. Just a boy named Sa. I’m spending my time here with children.” I showed them a sketch of a bottle cap game I’d learned of at a school. Then I read a page from the story I’d been writing about Lapa, my old camel.

  A man pointed to the folder on the shelf and said, “Take that down.”

  I fished out a few papers and kept the folder closed and put it on the floor beside my foot. A policeman walked over, picked it up and pulled out a handful of documents, including my résumé.

  I turned my back to him.

  “Tell us again what you did as a soldier.”

  “Okay. I was the one going around changing bulbs, fixing doors, water taps, taking care of maintenance on the base.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Just handling things in the buildings. Scrubbing toilets, painting—”

  “Take off your clothes. The trousers, too, take it off.”

  “How did you get these scars? Are you a mercenary?”

  One of them patted my thighs around my Jockey shorts.

  “Are you sure you didn’t get this from fighting?”

  “It was an accident in Nigeria.”

  “Opoto, I think a machete made this scar.”

  One officer continued to examine documents from the folder. I tried to distract him without looking in his direction, by arguing about the page in front of me, to make it seem suspicious. I got the résumé out of his hands, finally, and we returned to the police station, where the interrogation continued into the night.

  May 8th, thousands of Leoneans marched for peace. They walked from city center past UN-manned machinegun posts toward the home of rebel leader Foday Sankoh. The new UN peacekeepers were a poorly armed, poorly trained hodgepodge of men who answered to command in their home countries. They had a mandate to defend themselves but not to attack. Sankoh and his rebels, testing the UN troops, had taken three hundred of them hostage.

  Marchers sang in the road and waved banners: “RUF be human beings for once and let UNAMSIL do its job.” People watched from roadside houses. Men held radios to their ears. The atmosphere was tense as we waited for an update on rebel movements.

  People chanted, “We want peace!”

  “Sankoh, we want no war!”

  “Release UN soldiers!”

  Three cars zipped through the crowd. A pickup. Men with guns. Another pickup appeared, a white Toyota with “Africare” on its door. Shouting, angry men rode in the back. Machinegunners on nearby hilltops seemed to be guarding Sankoh’s house. An ex-militia fighter wore a brown cloak and a pointed hat that looked like the uniform for an army from a medieval forest. He’d once fought rebels on behalf of the people. Wiping sweat from his nose and waving his disarmament certificate, the man said, “We will fight again and the bullets will pass through our bodies and we will not be killed.”

  A boom thundered in the distance. An explosion. Boom. Boom.

  The forward momentum of the marchers reversed into a chaos of running, the banners abandoned, the street suddenly too narrow. People tripped, fell into each other, screamed. Car horns blared. A fat woman held up her hands, yelled, and ran past me. Women tried to climb over a wall into a compound as if a river were about to sweep them away. A man looked backwards as he sprinted and said, “They shoot! They shoot!” I pumped my arms, ran fast enough not to be trampled, clutching two silver rings I’d bought for Rachel in Addis so they didn’t fall from my pockets. I looked back. People will be killed before me; I won’t be the first.

  Through the massive crowd I saw a man named Anuk who lived near my hotel. He was covered in dust and holding one shoe.

  “This is the end of peace,” he said more to himself than to me.

  Not knowing if people were being killed, I dashed to my hotel, wanting to get indoors. There was a knock within minutes. It was Sa, the eleven-year-old I’d befriended when I’d seen him flying his homemade kite.

  “The rebels, they are bad,” Sa said. “They will now kill many people because the war is coming back. You should go home to your country, okay? They will not kill you there. So are you leaving?”

  “Sa, are you leaving?”

  “No. The border to Guinea is closed.”

  “Do you want to leave, Sa?”

  He looked at me as if I’d said something idiotic. “Everyone wants to leave.”

  In the entrance of Hotel Leone, I listened to the radio with Peter, who ran the hotel. The announcer said, “Violence erupted during the peace rally. Thirteen people were killed, many more wounded. There are rumors that protestors incited the shootings by throwing rocks.”

  The following day, May 9th, hundreds of people waited at the gates of the Guinean embassy. A guard spotted my white face in the sea of Africans and waved me through the crowd. I wasn’t ready to leave, but I wanted options, and the visa came within minutes. I stepped back through the gate, which the guard shut behind me, and I could only respond to the gazes of the people who’d witnessed this favoritism by saying to myself, Tell their story.
Tell their story. Fela was singing in my ear.

  News came in pieces. Sankoh had vanished. Rebels were battling UN troops in the east, seizing towns. They’d taken some five hundred UN soldiers hostage. Embassies were evacuating, the international community leaving again. Peter and I sat in the entrance of the hotel that night, shirtless, slapping at mosquitoes, listening to the radio. RUF rebels were closing in. One hundred kilometers from Freetown. Then seventy.

  “They’re going to capture Freetown again,” Peter said. “You should leave. Don’t stay here.”

  I told him that leaving now would feel like betrayal.

  “No!” Peter said. “You’re more at risk as a foreigner.”

  Sankoh came on the radio and spoke in a chilling voice that was high-pitched and almost too soft to hear. “The UN will not stop us,” he said to the country. “We’ll see what happens when we arrive to Freetown.” He cackled and the radio went silent.

  Morning, the RUF was just fifty kilometers from Freetown, engaged in heavy fighting, battling the UN with their own weapons and moving in armored cars and supply vehicles they’d seized along with the hostages. Rumors spread that a unit of the British army had arrived to guard Freetown. The radio announcer said, “All foreigners still in the country are urged to arrive to the evacuation center.” Barefoot boys of the civilian militia strutted through town with bare chests, holding weapons given back to them by the government and carrying bottles of oil in their pockets to protect them from bullets.

  Wissam’s diner was locked with an overhead metal door.

  “They all went to Guinea,” said a man on the street.

  My father called the hotel. “Listen, Ofirik, you have to leave now. I know what’s happening. Mom already saw it on television: child soldiers and men with RPGs.”

  I packed and left for the evacuation center, an airstrip, where British soldiers stood in body armor, holding M-16’s. My passport got me through the gate, and I approached a commander pointing white civilians to a military plane.

  “I’m an Israeli,” I told him.

  “No. You have to get off the airstrip. Sir, I cannot evacuate you.” He glanced at his clipboard. “Look, I have orders. I don’t know why Israelis are not on the list. Believe me, if I could, I would take you with us.”

  I watched the British unit, who’d supposedly come to protect the city, merely coordinate the evacuation of foreigners. I was baffled. Was the world turning its back again on this tolerant people, a country of millions terrorized by small bands of crazed, drugged rebels?

  I found that I didn’t want to leave.

  I was the last guest at Hotel Leone, and Peter and I stood in the entrance, watching the street for movement. We listened to the radio as if it alone knew whether the city would soon be in flames. By eight o’clock, the rebels were thirty kilometers from Freetown, a distance they could cover that night. I tried to conceal my fear from Peter as I searched for places to hide and planned my escape if a massacre began.

  A boom on the street. People ran. Chairs fell. Doors slammed. Peter dashed inside. I followed, panicked, confused. I tripped. We ducked and turned down a staircase. I watched Peter, tried to remember the places I’d thought to hide. If they come. If they come in. What had I planned? I couldn’t remember. I can jump. I can jump off the balcony in my room. Even if I break a leg I can disappear into the alleys.

  Peter watched the entrance from a higher step and I watched him.

  People shouted outside.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” Peter said. “It’s only the neighbors.”

  I waited as he went to the door.

  “Ofir, everyone is so tense. Two guys had a fight and one fell on a zinc roof.”

  It was a sleepless night of listening to the radio. How nice it would have been just to keep a fire burning to hold back hyenas.

  The next morning, bag in hand, I went the amputee camp to say goodbye to Mukhtar, perhaps because I needed to hear that it was okay for me to go. At the port there were new armed UN posts and hordes of people jamming the dock, a new wave of refugees. When a man told me he’d been waiting three days for a ferry, I figured there was little chance of getting passage on a boat. I walked up the street to a post where two Nigerians in blue UN hats manned a mounted machinegun. I said to them, “You’re looking at an Oibo with Nigerian blood in his veins! I was saved by your people. And why in this country can we not find a single good akara to eat?”

  They laughed. Then one said, “You should go to a travel agency, my friend. Go.”

  The agency was open but all flights were fully booked or had been canceled. The woman at the desk told me to hurry to the airport, because if another plane did fly in, any empty seats would soon be gone. When I arrived at the airport, I said, “I’ll take a flight to anywhere.” Never had I been so relieved to give away nearly every dollar I had—to get a seat on a plane to Guinea. But when we flew off I was torn, thinking of those who had no choice but to stay: Mukhtar, Sa, Peter, and the troubled young woman hurling rocks at the sea.

  I opened a Leonean newspaper, The Vision, dated May 10, 2000, which I’d bought that morning. In the bottom right corner of the front page, I found an article with headline, “Israeli Arrested.” It said, “Ofir Drori, an Israeli national was arrested by a journalist, Abubakar Sesay and handed over to the police for interrogation. His appearance was very suspicious. Ofir Drori was spotted standing by the Immigration department along Rawdon Street, doing nothing. When he was interrogated by the police he claimed to be a teacher. The police was not satisfied with his explanation so his documents were demanded. His passport shows that he is an Israeli national but he had in his possession documents relating to the RUF …”

  The rebels got no closer than thirty kilometers to Freetown. UN troops pushed them back and eight hundred British paratroopers arrived. They took control of the airport and strongholds around the capital. Foday Sankoh was captured.

  I couldn’t get on stage and sing in my underwear like Fela, but I could write the story—of how a fragile peace had nearly descended into anarchy, in a country of people who showed such forgiveness that they ought to have been revered the world over. Whether anyone else could expose the story, I didn’t know. I wrote an article and sent it by speed post to my father with the rolls of film I’d shot. He went to Udi Ran, editor of Teva Hadvarim, The Nature of Things, and the eighteen-page article was published immediately in Israel. Finally my journey had led to meaningful action.

  * I didn’t know that Yair Klein, a notorious Israeli arms dealer, was then serving a sixteen months sentence in the Freetown jail.

  Liberia

  “COFFIN FOR HEAD OF STATE”

  Archie was shirtless and he wore a pink plastic toy on a string around his neck.

  “Hello,” he whispered.

  I sat beside him on the bench but facing the opposite direction.

  “How old are you?” I said.

  “Fourteen.” Archie stared at a puddle by his feet.

  “Is this your house?”

  “Yes, I lived here two years,” he said quickly. He was suspicious of me.

  I’d found Archie through the Red Cross and a counselor working for the NGO Don Bosco.

  “Do you see your counselor much?”

  Archie shrugged and looked at the hut. “Not when it rains.”

  I swung around to his side of the bench and told him I’d been held by the authorities for three days after crossing into Liberia. “I told the police and the intelligence officers and the rest of those people that I worked in the army in maintenance, changing light bulbs, cleaning toilets. But I was really an officer with many men.”

  Archie let out a laugh and then stifled it.

  “I told you this secret because I trust you,” I said. “You can’t tell it to anyone or I’ll get in serious trouble. You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Archie had been a child soldier.

  During my struggle to reach Monrovia from the Guinean border, I’d b
een accused of being a spy, accused of being a pink plump BBC journalist whose picture adorned an article I’d once printed off the Internet. Immigration, intelligence, police, and customs officials had fought over me, shot guns in the air, tried to sneak me away, tried to frame me with drugs. After three nights of harassment, I finally arrived in the capital followed by a secret service agent. A hotel manager, roused from sleep, handed me a key and a lantern and showed me to a dark room with a straw mattress. He said, “The generator doesn’t work. There is no electricity in Monrovia. There is no electricity in this country. And we have no water. Welcome to Liberia.”

  A member of the Liberian community in Abidjan had arranged to get me a letter of invitation from a senator, and my visa was stuck into my passport in a parking lot in the open trunk of a car. I woke early my first morning in Monrovia to find the city far dirtier than I’d imagined in the dark. Vines grew up derelict power lines. The streets were covered with oil-stained sand. On the front steps of the congressional building, where I’d come by compulsion to meet the senator, a soldier aimed his mounted machinegun at my chest. “Wo! Come come come.” After fourteen broken peace accords and a seven-year civil war, Liberia’s rebel factions had been absorbed into the national army. “Don’t move,” the soldier said. “You have no business here.” I gave him the senator’s letter, which he held in both hands. He stared at the page for several minutes. Then I saw he had the letter upside down.

  Archie had the body of a man—broad shoulders and muscular arms. The whites of his eyes were slightly yellowed, which was rare for a child. I’d won his trust and he began to talk.

  “When they came, I was making a hole through the door to look at them,” Archie said. He’d been nine years old at the time. “They burned the house. They killed my grandma and took my pa away. I knew they were taking him to the bridge to kill him. Boom! Into the water like all the rest.

  “I was alone. Everybody was shooting but it only made me brave. I ran to the bridge. When I reached there an LPC man was pointing the gun at me. I told him, ‘I don’t care for the bullets. I came to see if the NPFL man killed my pa.’ The man knew my pa. We saw his body there; I knew because the clothes. There was no head. I cried.”