by Ofir Drori
The men in the station were stalling.
“Let’s wait,” a gendarme said. “Let’s wait.”
“This area where Ikama lives is a difficult place,” said a man in a blue army jacket. “These old rebels are there. We can’t enter with just five men.”
The gendarmes were pacing with their rifles when the captain arrived wearing Adidas warm-ups. A lean man with a shaved head, he did not break my gaze when I briefed him on the situation. “We go now,” I said. “Now. Before word is out he’s arrested. There’s no other option, and it’s better we do it quick.”
The captain looked at my boots and then back at my face, and I imagined he was wondering why I was talking like his commander.
“So we’ll take more men,” the captain said.
Fifteen gendarmes loaded into two open-backed vehicles and a private car. Over Bonaventure’s protestations that I shouldn’t go because of the risk, I climbed into the back of one vehicle, and we headed out. The men gripped rifles as we raced through Brazzaville, everyone quiet and many staring at their shoes. Daylight was fading, and we zipped in and out of traffic, our drivers honking, flashing their lights. I was the only man without a gun.
“Maybe we don’t have enough people,” one officer said.
“You know if they come we’ll have a fight.”
Ikama’s neighborhood, the 5th district of Brazzaville, was dirty, potholed, and full of mud-brick houses. We turned, turned again, through alleys narrow enough to be blocked by a single car. And I lost all sense of where we were. I flashed to Sierra Leone and tried to call on old moments I’d been able to pass with a little determination and heavy doses of luck—when I’d dragged myself bleeding up to the road in Nigeria and stormed markets with Julius. Cameroonians had told me I was making bigger and bigger enemies. LAGA had uncovered high-level corruption in Cameroon’s ministry; the number two man, the secretary general, had been suspected of involvement in a CITES fraud scheme and the illegal export of thousands of African gray parrots. I’d been threatened, told my days were numbered, and I slept with the lights on and a Maasai knife beside my bed. As our trucks raced through the alleyways, I knew the risks I was taking were pushing me closer to a violent end. The life of every man heading toward Ikama’s house was on the line. But for me it was okay to die doing what I was meant to do on the continent I loved. I leaned back and opened my eyes and looked up at the sky darkening over Brazzaville.
I’m too fond of stars to be fearful of the night.
We stopped at a metal gate. I gripped my teargas and jumped down with the gendarmes, legs shaking, the men gripping rifles with both hands. Stay close to the guns, I told myself. A soldier pounded the gate as gendarmes flared out around the house. A young man opened the gate and backpedalled with his hands in the air. The captain and I crossed the courtyard to a workbench fitted with clamps. There were grinders, a saw. “This is where he cuts the ivory,” I shouted. “Look at the dust.” I grabbed a sack from the ground and yanked out three chunks of cut ivory, dropped one. “You see? There is more here at the house.”
We sprinted to the living room. Three leopard skins lay on the floor. The ceiling was festooned with a fancy pattern of stained wood, this one room twice the size of many huts along the road. We bounded into a bedroom. Against the wall stood an old man with a small boy, and they swung their heads to watch the captain and me dash through a doorway. Two gendarmes ran in with guns raised. The captain shouted through a window to those at the perimeter.
“Where’s the ivory?” yelled a gendarme at the old man. “Show it to us.”
“I didn’t do anything,” the old man said. “I’ll collaborate.”
I sprinted outside to search. There had to be more ivory. Men shouted orders back and forth. We were taking too long. We needed to be gone. Behind the workbench in the front was a small window blocked by blue curtains. Through the gap I could see into a room filled with carvings. “Captain!” He ran out and looked to where I pointed. Five seconds later we were back in the living room, and he was staring down the young man who’d opened the gate.
“Get us into that room!” the captain said.
“I don’t have the key. I don’t have it.”
The captain looked at the door. Scratched his neck. He was thinking it was better to leave. I stepped around him and kicked it. “This door can be broken,” I said. “Let’s do it together.”
The captain took one step back and rammed his shoulder into the door, which splintered open at the hinges. There were two exhibit rooms full of worked ivory, statues, jewelry, a long finely carved tusk, necklaces on the walls. Unprocessed ivory lay on the floor. Everywhere we looked was ivory. The rooms were like temples.
“We have to move,” the captain said to the men. “Fill up those sacks. Let’s go.”
The soldiers spun their rifles onto their backs, and the four of us tossed pieces of ivory into the grain sacks like men in a bank vault. The soldiers kept glancing toward the door, yelling to men beyond the room.
“Wrap it up,” we heard from outside.
The captain said, “We have enough. Let’s move out.”
I picked up a few last pieces, tucked the leopard skins under my arm and raced through the compound. Troops at the gate turned and yelled to those beyond.
“We can move! Start the trucks!”
A man was standing in the back of one vehicle, rifle ready. Men hopped in around him. “Come come come,” they said to us. The drivers gunned the engines as we tore away from Ikama’s house through muddy alleys, the men watching behind us, everyone breathing hard, our heads wobbling with the potholes. I watched ahead of us, as far as the headlights allowed, fearing we would find our path out the neighborhood blocked.
When Marius returned from France with his Ph.D., we began building a new NGO, Anti-Corruption Cameroon (AC), with the aim of establishing anti-corruption law enforcement built on the same model as LAGA. The international community had long framed corruption as a technical problem and not a problem of accountability; the fight against corruption ignored people, and in Cameroon people died in hospitals because they couldn’t pay bribes to doctors.
In the ministries in Yaoundé, at the court, in immigration and Police Frontiere, we pasted up posters that read, “If you are a victim of corruption, call this number and we will help you fight back.” An investigator searched for victims. He approached people on the steps of different ministries to ask if they’d been refused services. Marius, working without salary, began taking calls on a dedicated cell phone. Wildlife could never fight for itself, but a single prosecution over corruption, we believed, might unleash a surge of emotion and all at once re-empower a people. AC was to give Cameroonians the option to launch cost-free court cases against corrupt officials using our legal team, which had documented and overcome bribing attempts in eighty percent of our court cases.
Marius and I sent an undercover investigator to the media school at Yaoundé University along with a bailiff who, being sworn in by the court, could give admissible testimony of an act of corruption. A presidential decree had fixed a low price for higher education, but the director of the media school had forced students to pay an amount more than ten times that price. The assistant university director pointed to a piece of paper and said to our investigator and the bailiff, “If you want to register to study, you need to deposit this amount into this bank account.”
We drafted a complaint. The students’ association registered the complaint with the court and signed it as an organization, because students feared that signing the complaint as individuals would endanger their lives. They were demanding damages on behalf of all students who’d paid bribes and the poorer students who’d lost the opportunity to study because they could not pay. Marius was working to ensure that the case wasn’t bribed into oblivion. And I was allocating more and more time to new initiatives related to democracy and human rights, hoping to build and nurture a community of activists and thus focus not just on enemies but allies.
Ikama had collaborated with a long-time Japanese mistress in trading ivory.
The room went quiet.
Bonaventure turned his head toward the entrance. Every man in the station was focused on the door. The rebel leader Marien Ikama wore a khaki suit with a short-sleeved top. He was a large man with broad shoulders and a French moustache, and he spoke to the officer nearest the door, in a voice so soft it was nearly inaudible.
The captain stepped forward and extended his hand. Everyone stared as the captain said, “Your father was caught with this merchandise, which is illegal by the authorities of the Ministry of Forest Economy. The wildlife authorities have taken his statement. The state counsel is aware he is being held. We are instructed to keep him in the station until his case arrives to court.”
The rebel leader stood quietly, hands at his sides. Anxious officers seemed to be wondering, as I was, whether he had men waiting on the other side of the door.
“You can talk to your father now,” the captain said, “and I advise you to speak to the state counsel.”
I doubted there was an officer in the room who didn’t respect the captain for how he composed himself, defusing much of the tension without being apologetic.
Marien Ikama walked over to his father, spoke briefly with him, and exited.
Several days later, I waited at the Brazzaville courthouse. It was Friday. The court was closing early. Bonaventure was late bringing the complaint report and the transmission letter signed by the director general of the ministry. He was also bringing Ikama, who the state counsel had decided would be moved from the holding cell at the police station to jail.
A skinny old man in glasses worked the desk at the registrar’s office.
“Don’t close, please,” I told him. “We need just a few minutes more.”
He smiled from behind a mountain range of files.
The court’s corridors were covered but open to the air. The concrete was swept clean, the paint fresh, the shade as cool as if it had just rained. I leaned against the railing and thought of the team back in Cameroon. The guilt and stress I figured I’d feel being away so long from LAGA was absent. I felt relief, actually; LAGA functioned even without my calling to check in. Mostly gone from the time of the first volunteers, when I’d struggled with my ego, was the feeling and fear that I’d couldn’t minimize myself for the cause. There was joy in this new freedom. I could cross borders to spread the fight and to find new ones. But it was less and less likely I would ever have the space in my life to let one day on the savannah stretch into a hundred.
Bonaventure arrived in a fine suit. Ikama, not handcuffed, was ringed by family members. His daughters or nieces were talking to him, one woman crying, pleading. The rebel leader followed in khaki, moving with the slow heavy steps of a man who knew he was a presence. Bonaventure led the elder Ikama into the registrar’s office. Everyone followed except Marien. Five meters from where I stood, the rebel leader leaned against the concrete railing of the corridor and stared at my face.
I stared back, arms crossed to stop them from trembling. Whatever he might do, he could not do it at the courthouse.
Bonaventure and Ikama exited the registrar’s office and moved off toward the jail, trailed by the family. The rebel leader joined the entourage for a few paces and stopped. With no choice but to walk past him to exit the court, I moved forward, my heart thrashing. The rebel stepped away from the railing and stopped in front of me.
“This is not your country,” he said in a quiet, chilling voice. “Be careful. You don’t know this country.”
I reached into my suit pocket and pulled out a business card. I put it in his hand.
“This is my work,” I said. “My name is there. You can find me at that address.”
I walked down the corridor and swallowed. The road was but a few steps beyond the edge of the court but it might have been all of Central Africa. As I stopped a rattling taxicab and climbed inside, I fought the urge and did not look back.
POSTSCRIPT
Ofir and I began writing at Tel Qazir in July 2008, the kibbutz where his mother moved after she and Azaria divorced. At that time, we were already best friends. The technique we developed in working together was half therapy, half interrogation, as I pushed Ofir to reach into the past and look at himself in new ways. The rush of neurotransmitters released throughout a life of intense experience has preserved his memory down to staggeringly small details, like the colors of chairs. Some days as we worked, the conversation was akin to friends telling stories, as when we planned scenes of his time with Leo in Nigeria and reminisced about walking between villages. Other times we argued for hours, as when we tried to capture the feeling of being charged by hyenas. Then there was Rachel—Rachel and Ofir’s quixotic, eternal devotion to all things concerning her that I tried and failed to free him from. To tell Ofir there was no space for scenes of counting her freckles was to invite the risk he might lunge across the table with a knife.
In Israel, as I got to know his mother, Keti, I understood that her son’s story could only have arisen from the rare household where courage, individualism, and compassion had been emphasized. “My energy and my children’s energy were like wood and fire,” Keti told me. I watched her wash random cars at dawn, give falafel to strangers, scoop up a weak fledgling egret on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. So affected was I by Keti, who fits nearly all her possessions into a single small bag, that I returned to the U.S. and gave away much of what I owned. It was my attempt to erase some of what I’d inherited: the distinction between what is mine and what is not.
Since we met in 2000 on the rundown rooftop of Planet Safari in Nairobi, Ofir has nurtured in me the courage to live by my own rules and then to break them, and I hope in writing together I have helped him to know and love more fully who he is. Ofir can be difficult and argumentative and, like all of us, he is often far from the man he was walking the shores of Lake Turkana. But our friendship is a brotherhood, intense and yet full of laughter, forged in the common voice of this story.
Throughout our writing, Ofir insisted we break all illusions of heroism, his belief that it is the stories and details no one wants told that are the truest. It was essential, also, to reject the myth that to aspire to do beautiful things requires nothing more than a motivation of love. We worried, also, that if the book ended merely to encapsulate Ofir’s life and work, that our message might die on the page. Even if we did succeed in inspiring anyone, was inspiration without a resulting action too fleeting to have value?
So we close with a conversation from Thailand, where we went to write for a month and visit his father. “Daud,” Ofir said, “when I was with you in Texas, remember I did that French radio interview on the phone, with my French, my really horrible French? I got emails from people saying they were inspired. Some people wrote, ‘Where can I give a small donation?’ It’s really gratifying to hear this. But giving money is the way out. It’s a way of releasing the pressure to do something positive. So I wrote back, ‘If you’re inspired, there are better things you can do with this feeling. Use this energy to do things in the same spirit. It doesn’t have to be in Africa. It doesn’t have to be big. There are so many things that are waiting for you to come and change.
“The difference between an activist and a non-activist is understanding you have the ability to make a change. Most people are not participating in shaping the communit
ies they live in. They minimize it to voting. Everybody is pissed off about something: a billboard put up in front of their house, a park in their neighborhood that was bulldozed, something they heard about on television. But they move on. Activism is understanding that you’re able to do something as an individual. It doesn’t feel like altruism. It feels natural. You recognize your right and your responsibility to participate.”
Ofir participates in his first “bush” wedding with the Maasai in Kenya. The groom and the bride stand to Ofir’s left.
The bride who, seen up close, reveals different feelings about her marriage than the celebrants around her.
Maasai shoot a dull arrow at the neck of a cow and then collect the blood for drinking in a calabash.
Isaac Olukupai in his manyatta. Isaac worked for three years in a safari lodge and then chose to return to his village to be with his father.
Kakuya, Isaac’s father of ninety-four years, the oldest Maasai in the area, who remembers the first arrival of white men.
Maasai children play a game at night moving charcoal from hand to hand.
Elephants drinking in Kenya.
A baby elephant protected by adults.
Ewaso Nyiro, Brown River in KiMaasai, which Ofir follows into the bush.
A male lion stirs.
Cheetahs after a kill.
Giraffes.
The elephants in northern Kenya that charge Ofir when he sneaks close with a camera.
Lapa, the stubborn, spitting camel resisting Ofir’s efforts to move.
