by Ofir Drori
The sub-director motioned for us to sit on the leather couches in his carpeted office. He wore a pinstriped suit and wore his stylish hair an inch thick. He was in charge of the river of money running through payroll in MINEF.
“How can I help you?” he said.
Though filming inside the ministry was prohibited, I shoved my video camera into his face, put the letter in front of him and said, “Did you write this letter?”
He looked away.
The staff member was shocked. He stuttered, “Mr. Director, excuse me, but the director of wildlife told me to accompany this man—”
“Did you write this letter?” I said again to the sub-director.
He showed his crooked bottom teeth. “Ah, I don’t know.”
“But it carries your signature. Is it your signature? Are those crocodiles with you?”
The man looked to the staff officer for help, as the poacher in Abong-Mbang had looked to Kalebass.
I said, “You sabotaged an operation of my organization and the department of wildlife of this ministry—by taking those crocodiles.”
“Yes. I took them.”
He looked at me, then at the camera, as if realizing he’d just made a mistake.
“This is what we’re going to do,” I said. “We’re going to take your car, go to your house right now and move your crocodiles to the zoo.”
The ride in the sub-director’s new sedan wouldn’t have been more awkward had he caught me with his wife. In the sealed, air-conditioned car, I could smell that I hadn’t washed in days—the smell of Future, bananas, sawdust, sweat. The sub-director’s house was a palace, and around the back was an open crate. One crocodile had been set on the concrete. Its legs were contorted and bent back over its spine, bound with strips of rubber.
“I didn’t know about the crocodiles,” the sub-director said after we arrived with the animals at the zoo. “I received them as a gift. A man said I had a package at the checkpoint and I needed to come and pick it up. I didn’t know what was inside.”
“So who is the person? He gave you a gift without knowing you? You usually receive gifts from people you don’t know?” I moved the camera up to his nose.
“No, it’s the chef du poste of Kagnol.”
Kagnol was a MINEF station at a logging operation in the East.
“So where is the chief now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know him.”
I grabbed the sub-director’s cell phone from his hand. On the chance he’d last spoken to the chef du poste, I hit “last dialed calls” then “talk.” I was just trying to shake him up when I handed the phone back and said, “Why don’t you talk to him?”
The sub-director looked at me, exhaled, swallowed and then, to my surprise, actually began speaking to the chef du poste in French. Unable to hide a smile, I had to turn my head. I understood from the conversation that the chef du poste was in Yaoundé.
“Tell him to meet us in your office in thirty minutes,” I said.
Back at MINEF headquarters, I managed to get both men to confess and write statements. Had the minister entered and seen me bullying two of his officials, I would have been driven to the airport and expelled from Cameroon. I folded the signed statements into my bag. And at the zoo I untied the crocodiles. The first slid into the water. The mangled legs of the second were paralyzed, and the other crocodiles killed him.
After the arrest of the elephant-meat dealers, Karl Ammann wrote, “This is only markets; you’ll never get the big people.” After the case of the sub-director and the chief of Kagnol, he wrote, “This will never arrive in court. You can make arrests, but the people will just go home. There’s no use in waiting to release the footage of the sub-director admitting to ordering the crocodiles.” In no email had Karl given feedback about my proposal or news about funding for LAGA. I wrote back, “Karl, we’re just starting. The prosecutions will come. I’m going to give the minister a chance to do something about the case of the crocodiles.”
Vincent and I sat before a television at the Nlongkak bar. He was wearing tribal clothes. We’d edited film of Future with moments from the arrests at Mvog Mbi that I hadn’t erased, and the piece was broadcast on the evening news, with Vincent narrating. Vincent sipped his third Castel beer and watched, not the television, but my face. “Vincent,” I said, “you are a magician.”
We recruited Barrister Ntolo to work our case against the elephant-meat dealers. She had handled the failed case of the army captain and the rhino horn, and, in theory, the ministry paid her an honorarium for each case. Delayed and often nonexistent payments made a system rife with corruption only more vulnerable. When the skinny elephant-meat dealer arrived to Barrister Ntolo’s office with a bribe, the barrister refused her. The skinny woman said, “If you don’t want the money, someone else will take it.”
Karl wrote finally that he had a man ready to make a $10,000 donation, the first to LAGA. I hammered out emails to Ofer, David, and Dad from the Nlongkak cyber café and bounded up and outside, feeling the urge to hug the meat man cooking beef over a metal drum. I breathed in the sweet cloud drifting off his grill. People were drinking in the bar. Music was playing. But I found I wanted to be home in Mendong. As I stopped a shared taxi, I was struck with the realization that I was sad, again—my old companion. But why? It wasn’t until the cab reached Carrefour Banane and I slogged and slipped up the muddy hill to my house, that I understood the melancholy was entangled with loneliness. I unlocked my front door, cringing as the mother in the shack across the road shouted at little Mattou. How could I share the relief and pride I felt in landing the first donor, in making LAGA self-sufficient, when the people I loved seemed so far off, when they lacked the language even to discuss my life in Cameroon? And each day I didn’t share it, the bridge between us became harder to rebuild. How was it possible, anyway, to share experiences like speaking with the Womo or sensing changes in the way my mouth had reacted to food along the Gibe River? Wasn’t story a poor imitation?
We live, as we dream—alone.
The money from Karl’s donor brought the sting of responsibility, perhaps a completion of the shift from absolute freedom to its loss. I had no choice but to continue building LAGA, but in doing so I was losing control of time, drifting away from so much of what I was. I missed the days of pure fun, dancing with Ofer and Shahar until exhaustion peeled away all but the love of being together. I put on music in the living room in Mendong, Peter Murphy’s “Strange Kind of Love,” and I danced alone in the darkness.
I strolled into Agora, an expensive restaurant in Nlongkak. I had just enough energy for an easy operation; earlier in the day, through the obstacle course of a crowded market, Julius and I had sprinted after a man cradling a crocodile like a football.
At Agora, people dined at half a dozen tables. The menu, full of protected species, was painted on the wall: crocodile, viper, boa, giant pangolin.
“Give me one Coke,” I said when the waiter came. “Very cold. And for dinner, please, do you have crocodile today?” I pointed at the wall.
He nodded.
“Then I’ll have the crocodile.”
The dish came. The meat was covered with bumps. I took a bite and called Julius, who was on standby at the Nlongkak bar. Julius arrived, tipsy, with Temgoua and two policemen to my table. I turned on the video camera and began to film. Julius called to the waiters and said, “Where is the woman who owns this restaurant?”
“I don’t know if she can come,” said one of the waiters. “What exactly do you want? She has no problems with the police.”
Temgoua started in on a wordy explanation of wildlife law, and Julius interrupted him. “Please bring her.”
A waiter disappeared into the kitchen. For several minutes, we stood around the plate of crocodile, listening to slow soft music playing on the restaurant’s stereo.
A large woman burst through the kitchen door, screaming as she staggered between tables and rushed us. I grabbed the camera. Silverware flew int
o the air as Julius and Temgoua fled. The woman’s shaved head was colored orange. She grabbed a chair and chased me around tables where people were eating. And she yelled, “I want the head of the white man on a plate! On a plate! You’re going to pay for this.” She lunged for the camera in my hands. Temgoua tried to reason with her about the plight of animals. The woman and I circled the same table three times, knocked into a couple eating a meal. “Get out of my restaurant! You don’t know who you’re messing with. I will talk to your minister and you’ll see what will happen!” I dodged her fist. “You’re going to die. I will kill you! Kill you!”
I woke in a terrible mood with no ongoing operations. The anti-poaching chief, Etoga, was trying to bury all our cases. Thoughts of Rachel arrived and I remembered her saying I was like a rock. “Yeah,” I said, “like a rock submerged in a river.” And she said, “What you want to be requires that you feel nothing.” I’d made a ceremony of playing guitar before I went to sleep each night, the same songs I always played when I thought of Rachel, songs to help me hold on to the feeling of what it was like to love her.
I attached a small microphone to my shirt with Scotch tape and went to town, determined by day’s end to make an arrest. The artisana was a curio market controlled by Muslims. Elephants in ebony, carvings from Kenya of Maasai and hordes of bronze statues made me wonder how all the sellers stayed in business in a country with no tourists. Hanging from a post was a mask made from the shell of a sea turtle. On one side was a mosaic of tin and bronze. The backside looked like the ribs of a skeleton.
Men in robes—Hausa men—watched me from behind the fortress of statues and masks. I’d seen ivory for sale on another visit to the artisana—rings, necklaces, tiny carvings. Today, I was looking for what was concealed, a door behind the stalls, a closed shop. I bartered and paid for a bracelet adorned with a carved nutshell, so as not to seem suspicious for coming to a market and buying nothing.
I descended stairs through a narrow passage, ducked through a tiny doorway, and found myself in a room filled with curios. Two men passed a calculator back and forth, the taller man wearing a light blue gown. The basement was so crammed with objects, I feared I would knock into them: carvings the size of small boys, ebony chairs embedded with cowry shells, a mask with five red horns and devilish eyes—the artifacts of a hundred cultures collecting dust in a windowless room.
On two wooden bases stood long elephant tusks. I closed my eyes. Then stepped back and pointed at the five-horned mask. “Where is it from?” I said.
“Congo,” said the man in the blue gown.
I nearly tripped into a foot-high wooden man holding a spear for attack, his body stuck with hundreds of rusted nails like a fetish of black magic.
“This is nice,” I said of one of the polished tusks. “Do you have more?”
“Yes, of course,” he said in a deep voice.
The dark Hausa man had a fat face and a round stomach, a gold watch on his wrist and prayer beads in one hand. Next to him was an elephant foot with three giant toenails that looked less like an object that could be sold than a hacked-off limb. The skin was cracked and wrinkled, the top adorned with leather and the fur of what looked like a Colobus monkey.
“How much for the tusks?” I said.
“150,000 each.”
“This isn’t the first time I’m buying ivory. I’m not a tourist. I’ll give 200,000 for both.”
He didn’t answer. He picked up a pencil and glanced at the door as if another customer might walk in. His hand entered his hip pocket, probably to check on his cash.
“And what about the elephant stool?” I said. The foot was surprisingly light, likely hollowed out and dried with sawdust.
The Hausa man said nothing.
“If you have more ivory, bring it,” I said. “I’ll buy it all.”
He looked up with the smile of a man pleasantly surprised, then scribbled on a piece of paper and punched the calculator. “I have two more pairs here,” he said and sent the other man out of the shop. “And I have two pairs at my house.”
“If those are smaller, I’ll pay less for them.”
“No, they’re big, the same. Polished. Everything.”
“It’s possible to ship these to my country? I have a big business in the U.S.”
“Yes. No problem.”
“I won’t get any trouble from the Cameroon side?”
“No, it’s easy. We do it all the time.”
The young man returned with two tusks and then two more. Temgoua said ivory in Yaoundé was worth $30-40 a kilogram, and the stash of tusks was probably worth $1,500. But I agreed to a price of $2,000.
“I’m John,” I said and wrote down my cell number for him.
He handed me his card, which was glossy with images that changed in the light. “Adamou Ndjidda,” it said. “Trader in gold and ivory.”
“I’m not carrying all this out of here,” I told him. “Can you deliver it to my house?”
He worked the prayer beads through his fingers. “If you’re paying for everything, we can deliver it.”
“I’m in Bastos.”
We shook hands and I climbed the stairs, and I couldn’t believe what I’d stumbled into. Once out of the market, I turned off the hidden microphone and called Julius and then ran to Bastos to search for a place to serve as my home. A one-story house with an open gate was under construction, mostly finished, the workers absent. All we had to do was get Adamou through the gate, and we could block him inside.
I returned to Nlongkak to brief Julius and Temgoua.
Then I called Adamou Ndjidda. I said, “Can you deliver it now?”
“Yes.”
“When you arrive to Bastos and you’re near the Chinese embassy, call me.”
Julius, Temgoua, and I rode in two taxis to the house. And we found that the gates had been locked. I ran up the street, frantic, searching for another place and hoping Adamou wasn’t about to phone to say he was near. I scanned both sides of the road. Bougainvillea grew atop high walls. Razor wire. A Mercedes passed. A driveway: it led to a closed orange gate. The driveway was blocked on two sides by tall shrubs and deep enough for two cars to park end to end. Whether people were inside the house, I didn’t have time to care. I called Julius. We talked strategy. I hid my bag in the shrubs. Adamou phoned, and I directed him toward me. When the taxi appeared up the street, I waved it into the driveway.
Adamou wore his the light blue gown. He and another man climbed out of the cab, chewing gum. I pointed to the gates and said, “I don’t understand why my guard is keeping my gate closed.” I pulled out my cell phone. “I’ll give him another minute to open it. Adamou, you have everything?”
His prayer beads swung in his hand when he motioned toward the car. The cabdriver unlocked the trunk. The ivory was there, the elephant foot and twelve tusks, more even than we’d agreed on—six elephants, the size of the herd in Kenya that had flattened acacia trees chasing me after I’d tied up Lapa.
“I’ll call this stupid guard,” I said.
I dialed Julius’s number.
“Why do I pay you to keep me locked out of my own house?” I said. “Are you coming to open this gate or not?”
Julius and Temgoua arrived in our two cabs, blocking Adamou’s exit from the driveway. I pulled the video camera from my bag. Adamou and the second man stood, unresponsive, chomping their gum. Julius inspected the ivory.
“You think this is normal?” Adamou said.
Both men held their arms out and hands up in a perfect gesture of guilt as Temgoua recited the wildlife law.
“What law?” Adamou said. He took two steps toward me and raised his chin. “You say the law. Are you the law?”
Adamou told us that the ivory belonged to him and three others. The next day, the three men, figuring they would get the ivory back, came to the station with falsified documents claiming they had the legal right to possess ivory. We arrested them all. The ivory went into a storage room on the seventeenth floor at MIN
EF, and Koulagna signed a letter to transmit the case to court.
Karl Ammann’s donor, Hans, sent two wires of $3,000 each. Then Hans wrote, “I wouldn’t mind if you bought a watch for the anti-poaching chief so he stops being an obstacle to moving your cases to the courts.” Livid, I responded that he should keep the rest of his donation and I would gladly refund the $6,000 he’d sent, for it was this casual culture of bribes that kept anything from functioning.
Vincent published an article about our operations at Agora and at two other restaurants. He wrote, with the usual theatrics, that a government crackdown on restaurants was sweeping the nation. Reuters picked up the story. A few days later, Elad was on the Underground in London, listening to music and reading Metro magazine, when he spotted a small headline on the back page: “Gorilla Stew Coming off Cameroon’s Menu.”
At MINEF’s zoo in Yaoundé, animals were disappearing—boas, parrots, tortoises—along with building materials. The thefts had become a publicity problem for MINEF’s minister. On the hunch that the night watchmen was involved, I worked up a plan and sent John to investigate. After loitering for two days, John approached the night watchman and said, “Can you supply chimps?”
“Yes.”
“How do I get one?”
“For small animals we cut the fence. For big ones we need to unlock the cage.”
“Don’t worry about the keys,” said John, in whose pocket was a cheap walkman on RECORD mode. “I can ge ge get keys from the veterinarian.”
“It will cost you 100,000 francs for me and 25,000 that I give to the other guard.”
At ten minutes to midnight, the police captain of Quartier Melen and I sneaked through the darkness to the zoo’s outer wall, near the lion enclosure. I joined my hands. The captain put his foot into my locked fingers and held my shoulder, and I hoisted him up. He got balanced, his stomach atop the wall, legs hanging inside the zoo. He reached down and pulled me up after him. As we crept through the zoo together, the shadow of my gaunt face and my frizzy hair looked like a skull following me along the ground. In a market, an investigator had recorded a bushmeat vendor claiming I had traditional powers; the only people in Cameroon who wore nothing but black, as I did, were witch doctors.
