The Last Great Ape

by Ofir Drori

  John beeped me. He was outside, waiting for the guard to open the gate. Frogs croaked in the crocodile pond. Monkeys cried out. I got a whiff of urine. The night watchman passed the reptile room holding a flashlight. John was with him. I could hear keys jingling in the darkness as John took them from his pocket and handed them to the guard. We crept closer. The guard set a sack on the concrete that rattled with metal tools. He struggled to work one of the keys into the lock. He tried a second key. With intent to break in and steal proven, the captain jumped out and rushed the guard, grabbed him, and put him in handcuffs. He radioed his people and said, “Wait for us at the gate.” Two of the minister’s aides were also waiting nearby in a Mercedes, and when I called they were pleased with my report. Before leaving the zoo, I made sure to grab the keys John had given to the watchman to open the cage, because without them I wouldn’t be able to open my front door; they were just my house keys.

  Eunice was a short young Cameroonian working as a maid for the director of Global Witness. A nature photographer told her about our work and she came to me, wanting to join LAGA. On her first mission as an investigator, Eunice called from Bertoua in the East. “I haven’t seen anything, Ofir.”

  “Eunice, if you open your eyes very well, you will see something.”

  “How long do I need to stay in this place to see it? And how much money are you giving me for myself? Enough not even for two meals!”

  Within a few days, though, Eunice located men with two live apes.

  “These people are powerful,” she said. “Ofir, I’m afraid. They can kill me and bury me without anybody knowing. They can do it physically but also mystically.”

  “I’m worried, Eunice,” I said. “Is there something traditional you can do from your own village to combat their powers?”

  At MINEF, I entered the office of the anti-poaching chief, Etoga. Though LAGA had prosecution dates set for five cases, Etoga was trying to bury at least as many more, including the case against Agora’s owner. Etoga had received money at various times from seven projects funded by the international community and he had his own NGO, a governmental-non-governmental organization.

  I leaned over his desk and said, “I verified with the minister’s office that you have delivered no complaint reports to him. The cases should already be in court. Some are more than a month old.”

  “The files are with me,” Etoga said. “I am seeking advice from the minister.”

  “It’s illegal for you to keep the files.”

  “Don’t tell us what to do.”

  “The law tells you what to do.”

  The following day, Vincent and I wrote a letter to the minister.

  Samuel Nguiffo of Center for Environment and Development (CED) offered his advice, “For now the ministry will let you play because no one here believes you can win. Cameroon is Cameroon. You can fight corruption in the field, but then it has to come to the courts, and in the courts corruption can be even worse. They believe you don’t know this. They probably think it’s easier to wait until you give up. That explains why, besides blocking some cases, they don’t stop your activities. But all this will change when—if—you get the first prosecution. Then you will see the system fighting back. Use all your time now to prepare yourself for this moment.”

  Etoga moved two of our seized elephant tusks from MINEF’s storage room to his office. Like a man with a kingdom, he stood one on either side of his leather chair.

  Eunice called. “My phone is sick, so I’m calling from a callbox. Ofir, I told these people I need help to deliver the apes to my buyer in Yaoundé. But they are strong in wanting to do the deal in the village. So I said, ‘Could you buy a chicken in a bag? Not even a white man could do such a thing.’ After that, they agreed to come. A lady said we cannot travel without her performing a magical act. She said it is to prevent us from danger. Then before my eyes she is disappearing along with the gorillas.”

  “Eunice, take good care of those magicians not to enter any traps,” I said, still confused about what bags had to do with chickens.

  Eunice said, “Death has a hundred hands and a thousand ways.”

  She called the next night en route to Yaoundé. Then called again. “There’s a change, Ofir, a different vehicle. The number of the car is CE 4535. A white minibus, Alliance Voyages. The man wears a red cap and squared shirt. Did you get it? A red cap and—”

  The line died.

  Julius, Temgoua, and I headed to Nkoabang. There were three MINEF officers in the station. We brought two more policemen. Out of seven men, only Julius and Temgoua knew Eunice was undercover. She beeped me at two in the morning just before her bus appeared in the cold night, the moment of conflict coming, as always, sooner than I was ready for. Julius strolled into the road and shined a flashlight at the driver’s face. The bus stopped and Julius stepped onboard and searched it. I stood near the front fender with Temgoua as Julius climbed back down and whispered, “I don’t know where the animals are. I don’t see them inside.”

  We could make no arrest without connecting the red-capped man directly to the apes. I moved to the bus’s open door and pretended to talk on my phone. “Yes, we got the small one. Yes. The small woman, right? Like a pygmy. And there’s a man with her?”

  Julius then pulled tiny Eunice off the bus and into the road.

  “Take this pygmy to the station,” I yelled at another policeman. Then I turned to Eunice. “You’re a thief. You’re going to prison with your husband!”

  While Julius was checking luggage in the hatchback, Eunice whispered to Temgoua that the gorillas were in a box between the man’s feet, a broken wet box so small that Julius hadn’t considered that two gorillas could fit inside it. He pulled the red-capped man down to the road, and I sent the bus on.

  “Separate these two,” I said to Julius in the two-room MINEF cabin. “I want to talk to the pygmy alone.” I closed the door. Eunice, seated in front of me, looked traumatized. I whispered, “We’re going to arrest you now and release you later.” I shouted, “If you don’t want to admit, don’t admit.” I opened the door. “Julius, this one needs to be behind bars!” I mixed in a few French words to ensure that everyone understood. “I’m finished with her. Now bring the man in. I want to see how he helped her.”

  The baby gorillas were hugging each other in the tiny mashed box.

  Michelle, a MINEF officer, escorted Eunice to a waiting taxi.

  We finished interrogating the man and sent him and Eunice to the police station in town. As Julius put them into a jail cell, Eunice said to the red-capped man, “Don’t worry. I’m soon calling my boss. He’s a big man and has money to get us out of this trouble.”

  “Please do something,” the man said. “I’m counting on you.”

  Eunice stayed in the cell without food or water for half a day. She told me later that Michelle, the MINEF officer charged with guarding her in the taxi outside the checkpoint, had said, “Run! Run fast now! Don’t be stupid. It’s dark. The white man won’t catch you.”

  Eunice said, “Ofir, I’m never doing this again.”

  The media was humming with Vincent’s work, with radio, television, and print pieces placed, on average, every other day in the national media. Christopher met me around the back of Hotel Azur in Bastos with footage he’d just shot, and I watched, on the tiny screen of the video camera, as Christopher said to the dealer, “You call her how? Kita, eh?” Christopher was at the gate when the dealer arrived and he signaled for us to charge. Julius and I sprinted out to arrest Tonye Nken. Kita, the mustard-eyed chimp, was now living with me, another overgrown child in constant need of attention.

  I was interviewed over the phone by an Israeli journalist. And I did a radio interview in Yaoundé, which was heard by my Israeli friend Eran. He said, “You talked too loud and too fast. Important people don’t speak like that here. To be respected, lower your volume. The lower the volume, the more powerful the person.” And I thought of Foday Sankoh’s quiet, chilling voice when h
e’d spoken on the radio in Freetown.

  The gown-wearing ivory dealer Adamou Ndjidda and his three associates appeared at the court. Outside, several men approached our legal adviser, Marius, and squeezed him into a corner. One of them said, “We’re going to get you for doing this to our brother.”

  As we left the hearing, Marius said to me, “These are people who can kill me—all of their friends from Briqueterie. This is a dangerous neighborhood they come from.”

  “Marius, this is what we do,” I said. “Of course, we are taking risks. But I’m sure if they try to kill someone it will be me.”

  Marius was not easily intimidated and he’d dreamed of opening an NGO to prove to his family that he could succeed on his own. “You know what?” he said. “I’ll study wrestling.”

  “Fantastic. LAGA will sponsor it.”

  Bill Clark, an Israeli involved in wildlife law enforcement, had met with Koulagna in Geneva at a UN conference. Bill declared that he and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) were ready to donate to projects in Cameroon. I could only imagine Koulagna’s glee when Bill told him he’d personally delivered five Cessnas to Mali for wildlife surveying. “If Ofir’s plan can work, then it’s proof of political will,” Clark had told Koulagna, “and it would mean we could invest in Cameroon.” IFAW was ready to give $35,000 to LAGA, a year’s funding, as soon as they received a written endorsement from the government, the kind of regulatory step meant to prevent conflict between governments and NGOs. I brought Koulagna my project proposal, our budget, and the letter Bill had drafted for him to sign.

  “Director, Bill told me he talked with you.”

  “Yes, yes, there’s no problem.”

  I returned a few days later. Instead of handing me the signed endorsement, Koulagna gave me a piece of paper titled “Budget for IFAW Proposition.” My detailed budget had been reduced to half a dozen lines. For the wildlife department and the anti-poaching unit, both under Koulagna’s control, he’d allocated $10,000. Protected areas, also under his control, $17,000. Sensitization campaign, $3,000. Of the $35,000 meant for LAGA there was but one budget line: LAGA intelligence operations, $5,000.

  Half my blood rushed to my head. I said, “What field equipment do you want to buy for the wildlife department, which sits in offices? It says ‘$7,000—equipment.’”

  “Just equipment,” Koulagna said. “We haven’t decided.”

  “$1,000 for office consumables for your office: is that for law enforcement?”

  I was angry enough to burst. I’d heard stories of envelopes passing between NGO directors and high-level officials, but this did not lessen my shock.

  Koulagna, ever calm and respectful, said, “Negotiate this with my collaborator.” He meant Etoga, the anti-poaching chief.

  “Director, this isn’t a market. I’m not negotiating anything.”

  I went straight to the cyber café, scanned the document, and emailed it to IFAW. I wrote, “This is exactly the reason I’m here. If you are able to get me the funding without a letter from the government, I would be very happy. If you can’t, it means you are probably not ready to be our donor.”

  “This is the game,” Karl wrote. “The government wants to give LAGA a 15% commission for bringing them free pocket money.”

  IFAW neither responded nor sent the donation.

  JULY 23, 2003

  THE PROSECUTION

  Yaoundé’s court complex was as neglected as the law. Rusty front gates slumped on their hinges. Umbrella-shaded women sold plantains and peanuts next to policemen lounging at the entrance. A broken sidewalk led into a courtyard of dirt and weeds. Marius and I climbed stairs stained at the edges with algae. He was wearing an ill-fitting suit bought with money I’d loaned him, and sight of him in the baggy suit conjured thoughts of the army, the rookies and I stepping on the hems of our first uniforms, rolling back the sleeves to find our hands. Marius had a masters in law and would have already been a lawyer had the Cameroon Bar Association not frozen all exams in order to prohibit the accreditation of new lawyers.

  The Court of First Instance had a milk-thin coat of paint that was half-peeled and washing away. Policemen at a table waved us up a damp staircase. The massive wood doors guarding the courtroom were open. Light shone through patterned slits in the concrete walls, compensating for the unlit fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling. Beneath the thin soles of my five-dollar loafers I could feel sand on the floor.

  We sat. In the next aisle was Temgoua, wearing his beret, leaning forward and listening to the court clerk. Ntolo, our lawyer, sat near the female judge, who wore a black robe and the colonial relic of a curly white wig. In the packed gallery was Tonye Nken’s son, the boy who’d ridden to Mendong with Kita and me after the arrest of his father outside Hotel Azur. I’d tried to approach the boy at other court hearings, but he’d waved me off.

  The case against Alliance Voyages over Eunice’s gorillas was blocked by the anti-poaching chief, who then reported that the file had been “lost.” The owner of Agora restaurant was said to have contacts in President Biya’s office; the case never arrived to court. The two elephant-meat dealers from Mvog Mbi had received negligible fines and suspended sentences. The skinny woman had emphasized poverty and her single motherhood in her defense, mitigating circumstances that made it too easy for a bribable judge to let someone off. In the case against the sub-director of human resources, there were aggravating circumstances, but the ministry buried the case. We had eighteen other cases now pending in the courts.

  Marius was sweating. He wiped a tissue across his cheek and forehead, and the tissue tore, leaving bits of paper stuck to his face. All those accused in the day’s trials entered, their lawyers wearing black gowns and ornamental ruffles. The state counsel wore a sash of red, yellow and green, the colors of the flag. The judge pulled a file from the stack of papers beside her, and the clerk called a new case.

  I’d spent many days in different courts. Once, in the High Court, a poorly dressed boy no older than fifteen had approached the bench. A policeman removed his handcuffs.

  “I’m sorry,” the boy said. “I stole just one shoe.”

  “So you have only one foot to steal just one shoe?” said the judge.

  The courtroom burst into laughter. But the laughter ceased when the judge ruled that he was delaying the case for a month. Back in handcuffs, the boy was returned to jail. Ten minutes later that same day, three men were ushered in. The clerk read that they were accused of being members of a criminal gang who’d robbed room after room at Yaoundé University. They’d been arrested in the act, and a judicial police officer approached the judge and placed stolen cell phones and a pistol on the bench. The judge asked no questions and delayed the case for a month but this time granted provisional liberty, allowing the men to go free. The gallery murmured in protest as the men walked out of the courtroom, but the judge silenced them with the gavel.

  On the hot July afternoon, with Marius sweating beside me, the court clerk finally said, “Ministere publique contre Tonye Nken.”

  I tapped Marius’s hand. “Listen well. Listen well.”

  Temgoua turned and nodded.

  The accused walked forward and faced the judge, slumped over, wearing glasses.

  “Tonye Nken, you are found guilty of the illegal detention of a protected animal. You are sentenced to a one month imprisonment, 500,000 francs in damages to the government, and a 100,000 franc fine.”

  Tonye Nken lowered his head.

  “Marius, did she say what I think she said?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Temgoua was smiling.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s go!”

  Outside, Temgoua laughed, slapped my hand and straightened his beret. I looked up at the sky and thought of Father Albert dancing in a sea of Turkana grandmothers. Indeed, a tree had grown.

  “You see now?” said Barrister Ntolo. “I told you we’d get a prosecution.”

  Vincent arrived with Tansa Musa from Reut
ers and a camera crew from Cameroon Radio Television Corporation (CRTV). Vincent said, “Tansa, you can start by interviewing Ofir, the director of LAGA. He is here.” Vincent turned to me. “Ofir, I briefed Tansa on the significance of this first prosecution and on our collaboration with the government. I’m sure he has some good questions to ask you about our collaboration with the government.”

  Vincent led the CRTV crew to interview Barrister Ntolo.

  I called Julius and the Jane Goodall Institute and a Cameroonian judge named Magistrate Tejiozem who’d advised us on methods for fighting corruption in the legal system. I called contacts at the World Bank and the EU, requested that they send letters of congratulations to the ministry as fast as possible. Media attention now was sure to highlight a decade of non-application of the law and the workshop business that had masqueraded as progress. The government had to be credited for change, not criticized for the past.

  The next morning, the smile fixed on my face was a detriment to drinking coffee. I felt such contentment—that a minor, improvised effort by a handful of people had accomplished what the government and a professional industry of NGOs and millions of dollars had not. And it had been captured, in articles by Reuters and the BBC.

  I met Vincent at the Nlongkak bar that night. He sipped from a Castel beer bottle thicker than his arm. “Up to now,” Vincent said and frowned, “the minister has granted no interviews.”

  “But that’s what we expected. Who do we have now at the ministry?”

  “Cameroon Tribune is still waiting there,” he said. “BBC called twice. The Herald called. Reuters was with me. We’ll keep the story in the air as long as we can, Ofi. As we’ve said, if the ministry wants to kick us out of the country, they have to ignore this. They can’t denounce it. If they comment at all on the prosecution, they have to endorse it because it’s in line with their policy. And if they do endorse it, it will be more difficult to put you on a plane next week.”