The Last Great Ape

by Ofir Drori

  The Reuters article quoted a man outside the courthouse who’d said, “If we are killing animals, they’re our animals. I don’t know why a white man should be so concerned when our own government is not disturbing us.”

  “The minister has to speak,” I told Vincent. “He has congratulations from the EU, NGOs, the World Bank. We have articles in the international press …”

  Four days after the prosecution, the minister had still given no interviews. Vincent was hounding MINEF, “like the rainy season.” He said, “Ofi, we’ll eventually find our way in.” We were on the phone for hours, directing waves of reporters to the ministry, giving interviews, sending video footage to any news outlet who might run a piece, trying to show that what we’d started was too strong to be stopped. Voice of America was calling the ministry over and over again, and Francis Ngwa, the Cameroonian correspondent for BBC, was as tenacious as Vincent. “The government needs to change,” Francis said. “I want to see the minister take a stand on this. What you’re doing is a very brave thing. I’ve never seen anything like this—pulling tricks on the government!”

  My mother rang my cell phone while I stood in Ignatius’s office.

  She was so enthusiastic about the prosecution that I had to hold the phone away from my head. “But Mom,” I said, “it’s possible I’ll be sent out of the country.”

  I’d reached acceptance, though. LAGA had earned the first prosecution under wildlife law for all of Central and West Africa. If there had been a wildlife case somewhere, it was not known to us. Smalltime poachers had been jailed, but for possession of illegal arms and threatening security, not for killing endangered species. Still, both the prosecution and the thrust of LAGA were less about conservation than about fighting corruption. Every major problem I’d seen in Africa had been linked to corruption, from soldiers abusing refugees to broken education systems where teachers’ salaries and funds for building schools were stolen. LAGA had taken an ineffective legal system and gotten it to function and thus exposed the failure of the workshop NGOs, by proving they had not done what they could have. I’d been in Cameroon one year. And the joy of the success was as much my own as the memory of walking all those months in Turkana.

  The fifth day after the prosecution, Vincent appeared at the door of Ignatius’ office. He shuffled in, two quick steps, and tossed a Cameroon Tribune on the table. Vincent opened the newspaper to the centerfold and leaned back against the wall with his arms crossed, his attempt to conceal a smile failing as his teeth appeared above the curve of his bottom lip. I put my hands on the table and leaned over the paper. On the right side was an interview I’d given the day of the verdict. On the left was a picture of the minister, Clarkson Tanyi Mbianyor, with an interview praising LAGA, the prosecution, and the law enforcement process.

  “Vincent! This is incredible. I can’t believe we pulled it off.”

  “Ofi, it’s a convention,” Vincent said softly, touching one page and then the other. “Our informal convention with the government.”

  DECEMBER 2003

  Boumba River

  IN THE PACK, IN THE POT, IN MY STOMACH

  Tsetse flies swarmed the canoe.

  “Ofi, you really ought to put on a shirt,” David said from the bow.

  The armored insects cruised out from the banks of the Boumba River to crawl up David’s sleeves, to bite him through two pairs of pants, to burrow into his boots and suck blood from his ankles. He slapped his neck and said, “I’m not saying clothes are perfect, but this Tarzan underwear thing is absurd; you have so many welts on your body, you look like you’ve been whipped.”

  Old-growth forest rose from the banks of the winding Boumba. Vines hung down to the water. Monkeys clattered in the canopy, the red and green leaves fluttering around them like a massive colony of butterflies. In two days on the river, floating just faster than we might have walked, we’d seen no one. David had spent nearly a year in Texas mediating a dispute between family members, then returned to Cameroon to rent the two-room apartment beneath my flat in Mendong. He’d found the canoe, bought it from a man living in isolation on the river, and gotten word to me that he was waiting back in Lomié. I met him on Christmas Day after learning that my grandfather Moshe had died on Hanukkah Eve and been buried in Israel.

  Downriver, though how many days ahead we didn’t know, was a waterfall, the Chutes de Medoum. David had been making himself dizzy trying to match the river’s curves with the topographic maps he’d bought off the wall of a government office. The maps dated to the year of his birth, 1972, and I’d offered to burn them for him. North of the river was a logging concession owned by Frank Biya, eldest son of the president. The jungle’s original inhabitants, the Baka Pygmies, had been forced to abandon their way of life as hunter-gatherers and settle in destitute roadside villages—to prepare the jungle for logging. Under Cameroon’s two presidents since independence in 1960, Ahmadou Ahidjo and Biya, more than eighty percent of Cameroon’s forest had been logged or allocated for logging.

  Yellow and purple butterflies swirled over the canoe. Rapids hissed up ahead with the threat of fast or falling water. We powered to the banks in a burst of half-panicked strokes, our brittle, waterlogged boat so heavy that we had to paddle for ten seconds before it began to respond.

  The days on the Boumba were the first I’d taken off from LAGA since I’d moved Future to the Belabo shelter more than a year earlier. LAGA was growing, and Galit Zangwill, a pistol of a woman, had joined. Inspired by the prosecution, she’d sold her car, emptied her Tel Aviv apartment, and flown to Cameroon. Within two days of arriving, Galit corrected me on directions I gave to a taximan. She matched my intensity and thirst for action, and our conversations sounded to others like fighting. Galit coached Eunice, now our office manager, in administration. She trained a legal adviser named Horline who was working alongside Marius. And she went undercover as an ivory buyer.

  Modernization was coming to Mendong in the form of motorcycle taximen who shuttled passengers from Carrefour Banane up the hill past my house. Yaoundé was pushing ever outward, a frenzy of building colored the gray of cinderblocks and sheet metal, the forest reverberating with hammering and chainsaws. One evening when Galit and I were walking home from Carrefour Banane, a motorcyclist zipped past and while staring at Galit said, “Cherie,” and made a kissing sound. The motorcyclist U-turned and buzzed us a second time, saying to Galit, “Cherie! Cherie!” The driver motored up the road and turned. As he shifted gears and roared toward us again, Galit reached into her bag for a canister of teargas and sprayed it over her shoulder into the air. The motorcyclist drove into the cloud and spun off his bike.

  I tried regularly to ask Galit whether her missions were satisfactory and challenging, whether she was enjoying our work. After a meeting at the British High Commission, I asked her what I’d done well and what I’d done poorly. Galit looked at me and shook her head. “You kept on saying ‘I I I,’ and we are two people.”

  Gray parrots whistled their surreal language as they flew in flocks above the canopy. How invigorating it was to enjoy the pull of the Boumba, to reconnect to the bush in a way that LAGA made difficult. We paddled ashore and hacked down brush on the riverbank to make room for the tent. Then David struggled with damp kindling to light a fire.

  “Just pour kerosene on it,” I said.

  He looked up. “You’re a man of contradictions, nature boy. If it were minus-twenty and you’d gone through the ice, then I’d use kerosene.”

  The armada of tsetse flies had mostly disappeared with dusk.

  “So tell me,” David said, chopping garlic after his fire caught, “what kind of self-respecting adventurer starts a fire with kerosene? Your whole code needs tweaking. The meal I’m cooking, like all the others I’ve cooked, is my refutation that you have to live on untreated river water and seaweed to prove you’re having an adventure. Your story in Ethiopia just kills me. You had a horse! And you took just four days of food! You could’ve taken 20kg of rice.”
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  “Daud, listen. If you’re in a village and you have a giant can of peanut butter that you eat in the dark so you’re not hungry, you haven’t cut the safety rope. You’re either participating fully or you’re not. Keep a foot in your own world, and it changes your interaction with everyone and everything. Once you connect your fate to the bush—that’s when you become open.”

  “But you don’t know the environment of the bush you’re traveling in, what plants to eat if you’re hungry, where to get water—”

  “So you learn. Either you have a safety net or you don’t.”

  David added sardines to the garlic, onions, and boiling oil. He said, “Then should we not carry malaria medication because villagers don’t have it?”

  “Had I kept traveling, I would have stopped carrying medicine. I’m sure. And probably, eventually, everything else. Just a shuka and a knife.”

  “In terms of dinner tonight, Ofi, I’m happy to eat your half of the safety net.”

  Back in August, Vincent met me in Mendong, put down his old-school tape recorder, and said, “There’s a conference coming in Cameroon, AFLEG (African Forest Law Enforcement and Governance). We need to be in it.” We then began what Vincent called “Another long game of chess.” We wrote a letter to the minister asking to participate. We met with the director of wildlife. We met with the minister’s technical adviser to learn who was organizing the event and began a dialogue with him. We called the EU and the World Bank and asked them to push for our inclusion. The multi-front effort—our model for mere survival in Cameroon—led not just to an invitation to the conference but to inclusion on the Cameroonian delegation.

  “International legitimacy and political stability,” Vincent said over a beer at Nlongkak. “These are our goals. Everyone must know that the Cameroonian government made the brave decision to go forward with the LAGA experiment.”

  AFLEG convened at the Congress Palace in Yaoundé, on a hill that gave views of thunderheads darkening the jungle beyond Mendong. The palace was full of meeting halls, garish in décor and adorned with portraits of Paul Biya. There were simultaneous translations of the meetings, for participants who’d come from across Africa, the U.S., Germany, France. Wearing a tie tied by Vincent’s wife, I lobbied for independent monitoring of all protected bushmeat, even in logging concessions. I handed out media kits that were the work of Galit and the team: a description of our court case tracking system, methods for achieving total transparency, and a detailed proposal of LAGA’s future plans that David and I had hammered out during many long nights of argument.

  “CED and Greenpeace,” said Cameroon’s minister to his Congolese counterpart, “these are nothing but liars and bandits!”

  I brought two letters to AFLEG, one naming LAGA to the government’s delegation, the other, written to me after Tonye Nken’s prosecution, titled “A Call For Order.” It said, “I would like to remind you that wildlife law enforcement is an activity that falls within the sovereignty of the state … We urge you to restrict all of your activities to the collection of information and to communicating it to MINEF for its exploitation.” The letter had originated in Koulagna’s office.

  I sat down with World Bank forest adviser Giuseppe Topa, set both letters in front of him, and said, “If you think what LAGA has done is what is needed, then we have two options—two letters. Who makes the difference between one course and the other is the international community. Without you I have no power.”

  Topa said, “The Bank will do what it can to ensure that LAGA continues its work. I would ignore this second letter.”

  David and I were on foot, scouting the Chutes de Medoum.

  “Ofir, there’s no way I’m letting you run this.”

  “We take everything out of the canoe and I ride it over the falls.”

  “You’re looking at two kilometers of rapids! In a canoe too heavy to steer.”

  “But we can’t just leave the Moshe behind,” I said.

  The canoe we’d named after my grandfather. It was so waterlogged, it would have taken ten men to carry it around the falls.

  “If you run this,” David said, “you and the Moshe will be in pieces. Do you hear that sound of water crashing into rocks? I’m not keen on sharing the story of your last minutes with your mother.”

  “But you know what she would say.”

  “What I say is that the sanctity of Drori family passion and personal choice is invalidated when the chance is greater than ninety percent that you’ll smash in your face.”

  A small viper slithered across the trail.

  “Remember,” David said, “I’ve had my own problems in the bush: the bog, brush fires, the tropical storm atop that volcano. But I do owe my mother not to risk my life in any way greater than I already have by traveling through the jungle with you.”

  I hadn’t given up on riding over the falls, but we fetched our gear from the boat and followed a trail inland. We came upon two thatched huts where men lounged in air thick with flies and bees. One man said he was the son of the chief of Pana, a nearby village. A woman sat on a stool in front of a small pot filled with an uncooked stew holding some twenty species of fish and crustaceans that David counted. He said, “Here in one pot is proof of what it means for a river to have never been fished.”

  There was food already cooked, and we had to ask for a bite.

  Nestor, a suspicious old man, spoke of the people who’d last tried to run the Chutes de Medoum. “Three Germans. Fifty years ago. They didn’t make it.”

  David laughed and looked at me, knowing it only made the challenge more appealing.

  Two hunters appeared from the trees, one with an eye so misaligned it seemed to be turned inward toward his brain. Both men wore large backpacks made of bamboo. Jutting through the gaps in one pack were hands and hooves of antelope and monkeys—more than the sum of the animals we’d seen along the Boumba, now mashed together, entangled and turned almost into charcoal. The meat smelled of burnt hair. The second pack held pieces of a dismembered mama gorilla and her baby.

  It was impossible to escape the reasons I’d come to Cameroon.

  Two more pack-carrying hunters arrived. In one of the packs rode half the mama gorilla, her head split down the middle by a machete, both halves of her face pressed against the bamboo. The skin was dried and shrunken around her eyes, as if the heat of the fire had affixed to her an expression of horror. My mind flashed to the Freetown street girl whose eyes had told the story of the war. I didn’t want this. Not now, not when I’d come to rest, not with the LAGA team hundreds of kilometers away and Julius beyond reach. The feeling of impotence amplified my anger.

  The main hunter appeared, swinging a double-barreled shotgun. His name was Kelgy Djep, and he wore a new pair of rubber boots. He wiped sweat from his brow and laughed a nervous, quiet laugh. An old man walked beside him.

  David asked to see the gun and then read the barrel, “‘Made in the USSR.’”

  “I’m from Yokadouma,” the old man said. “These are my hunters.”

  He was a dealer. He activated hunters to slaughter all the animals they could find. Poaching did not originate in the forest; it was driven by the commercial trade. The old man had likely come into the bush—a rarity for a dealer—because it was New Year’s Eve; and the hunters might be tempted to sell meat on the sly to fund a celebration.

  The hunter with the owl eye removed hunks of gorilla from his pack. Then he pulled out a gorilla hand twice the size of his. The son of the chief of Pana bartered with the dealer, then stuffed the hand and a piece of meat into his bag.

  We have to do something, I thought.

  In the caravan of hunters, we headed for Pana.

  Earlier that month, Born Free and the British High Commission sponsored my trip to London for a conference—Bushmeat and Livelihood—and I rode the Underground to the meeting hall. Intimidated by all the Brits, I pretended to have a reason to make a phone call and just rang Elad, on whose couch I was sleeping.* I spotted our del
egation in the crowd, Koulagna among them, his arms wrapped around his shivering body. We shook hands and laughed that we were together here.

  “Can you believe how cold it is in London?” I said.

  “The only thing worse is the food,” Koulagna said and laughed.

  A stream of conference-goers approached me when they saw I was part of the delegation, which was headed by the minister. Koulagna and I stood shoulder to shoulder and together we emphasized the importance of law enforcement. Koulagna was from Cameroon’s Muslim north but he was a Christian. He’d been my best teacher in the art of politics, and even when I’d left his office feeling out-maneuvered, I’d never failed to appreciate his craft.

  A Ghanaian king in native dress, flanked by spear-bearing guards, stepped up to the microphone to address the delegates. Though the weather outside was near freezing, half his chest remained uncovered. Conservation is already African, the king said in words reminding me of Isaac. Nature is a gift we were given to preserve.

  On the advice of Francis Ngwa, I went to Bushhouse London to record an interview with the BBC, which was broadcast internationally. Vincent called when he heard me on the radio in Cameroon. “You’re terrorizing people here with your powers! All our enemies in the ministry are shaking.” Galit, who was running LAGA in my absence, called to say that the ivory dealer Adamou Ndjidda had received a month in jail.

  In my backpack was a video camera, and David and I concluded that the only meaningful outlet for our anger was filming the hunters on a hunt. If we had footage of Kelgy Djep splitting open the head of the next mama gorilla he killed, we could bring the world down on Cameroon. To gain the trust of the hunters, we needed to be who we weren’t, and David was posing as a man enthusiastic about hunting and working to convince Kelgy Djep to take him on his next trip into the jungle; whites did come to the forests of eastern Cameroon to hunt elephants and leopards. But getting any indication from Kelgy about his plans was nearly impossible, because he and the hunters, since returning to their villages, had been drunk to the point of incoherence.