The Last Great Ape Read online

  Archie walked with the Liberia Peace Council (LPC) rebel to his camp. “They gave me food and a place to sleep. Then they gave me an AK. They took it apart and I had to put it back together. Then they taught me how to shoot.”

  They gave him a war name, Bad Child.

  “When they caught people they made me shoot them. I was small and whenever I shoot somebody I was falling back on the ground so I started leaning against trees not to fall. The first time I killed someone was not with a gun. They tied the man and made me stab him in the chest. I took the knife—choo!” Eyes narrowed, Archie thrust his hand out, twisted it. “I was stabbing him real hard. He died and I was crying. They shouted at me, ‘Stupid! When you kill you can’t cry. Next time we kill you too.’

  “They gave me black shoes. My feet were too small so I put lots of paper inside. I got army trousers and name plates from dead bodies.

  “They were too bad doing nasty nasty things. They were making ‘surgeries.’ One time they chose me to do it. If I say no they shoot me. They tied the pregnant woman. I cut her and pulled out the baby. I was holding his legs and waved him in the air, voom, voom, bang, I knocked it on the wall!” He mimicked the motion with his arm. “The whole brain scattered. Everybody laughed. I didn’t laugh. I was wiping the blood from my face and tried hard not to cry. Everybody was laughing a bad bad laugh, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ One day we captured a truck full of whites coming to fight us. So we took them and fucked them in the butt. All of them. Then we cut them to small small pieces. We threw them back to the car where they came from.”

  The war had ended in 1996 with more than 150,000 dead and half a million refugees. At war’s end, most of Liberia’s resources were in the hands of Charles Taylor, warlord, rebel leader of The National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) and a man as brutal as Sankoh. Ahead of post-war presidential elections, the scepter of the African “Big Man” had hung over Liberia. People knew if Taylor didn’t win, war would return. Fear spawned a saying that reached into the voting booth, “You killed my ma. You killed my pa. I vote for you.” Taylor won, of course, and international observers declared the election “free and fair.”

  Archie escaped from the LPC but was captured by other rebels.

  “The group was called Super Duper,” Archie said. “The soldiers caught me and I knew if I didn’t join them, they will kill me. I lied and told them I was a lieutenant. They were afraid and got me to their leader, Super Duper King. He liked me. He gave me an AK and a new knife. I was his bodyguard. Being the bodyguard of the King you have to be wicked. He would always choose me to kill people with the knife, vish-vish-vish, till the man is bleeding, then we had to lick the blood. If you don’t lick they will beat you.

  “We were eating human bodies, even raw ones. I took it and said I need to go pee-pee. That’s how I threw it away most times. One time the King made me sit, and I was eating the human being.

  “They made me use more drugs so I’ll be brave. They put drugs in the food. They mixed gunpowder and sugarcane juice. It makes you do bad bad things.

  “One time, when we caught a village and everybody had to go and make bad things, I heard a baby crying. I didn’t want him to cry so I tried to feed him with cassava. He didn’t want to eat, so I said, ‘If you don’t want to eat you want to die and I chucked him to the fire.’ They gave you cocaine, so you start doing bad bad things.”

  Charles Taylor had been president of Liberia for three years by the time I arrived. When he was discovered to be an engineer of the war in Sierra Leone, and a major player in the trade of war diamonds, the EU cut off funds for the reconstruction of Liberia. The four-story Eurobank building, of the country’s largest bank, was a burned husk with a papaya tree growing out of its second floor. Afternoon thunderstorms that deluged Monrovia seemed they might wash the decrepit city into its lagoons.

  Taylor had suffocated the country’s newspapers and shut down all radio stations save for two, one owned by his government, the other by him. International media, which Taylor couldn’t control, he attacked with messages on billboards throughout the capital. They were straight out of Orwell: “Unbalanced news is also a human rights abuse.” “Words can do more harm than bullets,” was a message adorned with a cartoonish scene of bullets flying out of the mouth of a radio broadcaster to kill politicians—the oppressors made into victims. Taylor’s face adorned billboards. He seemed to watch from everywhere. Liberians told me the world was against them. “Taylor will not be pulled by the nose,” said a seller in a market. “He is his own man. He will not be manipulated.” They said Leoneans were evil: “Those people deserve the war they got; they are war-liking people.” Liberians were skittish in conversation, scared of being reported to the government, the country full of people turned into agents. War had erased families and villages, roads and buildings. Could it also erase the memory of what it meant to have rights?

  Archie earned the rank of second lieutenant and commanded soldiers much older than he was. His troops were near the coast one day, and a ship of the Nigerian-led West African forces was visible offshore. Archie snuck away alone in hopes of reaching it.

  “This time I took a small .45,” he said. “You can’t stay without a gun; everybody will harass you. When I came to shore I met a fisherman with a boat. I told him to get me to the ship and he said, ‘I can’t do it; you’re a child.’ I put the .45 to his ear and told him, ‘You can’t do it? I’ll kill you.’ He took me to the ship and I climbed and hid in a tire.”

  When the West African peacekeepers found Archie, they thought he’d gotten his fatigues from his parents and they took care of him without suspecting he had a weapon. Archie reached Monrovia and surrendered his pistol and found his mother. But fighting broke out again in Monrovia, and Archie’s mother left him. She fled to Guinea.

  “It was too dangerous so I ran to the barracks,” Archie said. “I didn’t want a gun but they told me I should fight. I fought hard. Everybody knew me. I killed lots of people. I got shot in the back. I was in the hospital and then went back to the fighting.”

  When the war finally ended, Archie was adopted by a neighbor. “People were afraid of me. They called me Rebel. Some of them tried to chase me. Even now when I cross the street, some people still call me Bad Child.

  “The people I killed, they come to me in my dreams. They run after me and say, ‘What did you have to kill me for?’ Sometimes in the day I fight them. I’m the only one who sees them. People see me fighting the air. Sometimes, I can just sit and I see them hanging in the air, dead.

  “When I went to school they gave me a pencil to write. I just drew; I didn’t know how to write. One time I don’t know what happened. I was tearing the notebook then I started beating the teacher real hard.” Archie was swinging his hands. “You see, I have two hearts; one is good and one is bad and makes me do bad things. The good heart is saying, ‘Stop! Stop!’ The bad heart is saying, ‘You can’t stop! You can’t stop!’”

  Archie’s story hit me like an illness. I had no choice but to write it. I had the ability to share such a story, thus writing became a responsibility. I was motivated by love for him but also by hatred. I wanted to take his words, a testimony of everyone’s failure to help, and hit people with them. There were hundreds of thousands of boys like Archie still fighting across the world. The high of publishing the first article on Sierra Leone, of being heard and sharing a message, had morphed quickly into obligation. At night in Monrovia, I lay awake on the straw-filled mattress, unable to sleep and trying to cling to thoughts of things that were pure, Archie as a baby—adopted by Rachel and me.

  Archie’s story was published immediately in Teva Hadvarim.

  Rachel wrote from Israel, “I thought you were not going to answer my emails and then I received this one and then the others and I thought, I’m going to die because of the excitement. My god, you always knew how to do this to me … I thought you forgot me … Ofir, I miss saying your name. They tell me I should step out of this mode, but I can’t �
� It’s not good for the soul but it’s good for the poems …” A week later she wrote: “Can you take a picture of lightning? A reminder of rainy days. Do you know my favorite color is electric blue? Once I thought I could light the world with my anger. Now I am not sure if I can throw fire to the sky. Have beautiful dreams and be happy—this is the path you chose.”

  I returned to Archie with a soccer ball. He shouted and smiled and held his head against my chest, then looked down as we released from the hug. A kid with dreadlocks, Archie’s friend, sat on the bench with us. Archie’s foster father stepped out of the house and said to the friend, “Do you have it?” The boy gave the elder a handful of marijuana joints and took his money.

  I wrote a postcard to Archie before I left Liberia: “Some people will say that you’re a child. But you are not. You are grownup and strong—I don’t mean in the muscles and in the shootings but in your heart. I know you’re going to win. I know you’ll find a way to be left in the end with only one heart—your good heart. Your brother, Ofir.”

  2000

  Nigeria

  A DETOUR TO HEAR THE VOICE OF GOD

  Niyi Gbade, the missionary who’d written “hostile animists” on the report in Pastor Leo’s hut, crisscrossed Nigeria to outposts hundreds of kilometers apart. But I found him under my nose in Lagos, across the rail line from Fela’s old neighborhood. A year after starting my search for the man, I entered a dark office in one of Africa’s largest cities. I told Niyi I wanted to find the Achipawa and learn from them, that I believed the wisdom and beauty in old ways needed protection.

  “No. I understand you,” Niyi said, “but my heart tells me not to give you the information you are looking for. I am afraid your encounter with them will strengthen their local beliefs. I think our interests conflict.”

  I thanked him for being honest and direct.

  “You know, the funny thing,” I said, standing and pointing to my scarred neck, “is that I almost got killed just trying to meet you. Good luck in your mission.”

  I closed the door and walked down the dirty corridor.

  I heard Niyi running.

  “Listen,” he said, catching his breath as he reached me, “all I will tell you is that you can find them between the Niger and Kebbi states.”

  The forest on the road to Leo’s village was bright green, all the more vibrant after my time in half-ruined cities. The soil surrounding the huts was sandy, freshened and washed by rain. Fulani women wore elegant blue gowns as spotless as the cone-shaped flowers of yams.

  Pastor Leo came out of his hut holding a machete and he hugged me.

  “Ofir, you’re just in time to help with the groundnuts.”

  Men gathered, their skin tones, noses, and the shapes of their heads as varied as migrants from a dozen different ages. Fulani girls in fine dresses encircled a chicken who escaped onto Leo’s roof. A woman came with nono porridge, which they offered to Leo, who bought some for me. After one taste of the sour nono, I handed it back to Leo. Two Fulani girls were staring at me. The shorter one spoke and pointed at my face and Leo translated her words: “Even if he is very poor, I would still marry him.”

  I’d stopped to see Leo because he lived on the way to the Niger and Kebbi states and because he knew Nigeria well. I said, “Leo, do you think I should search in the bush in those areas? Or go first to the towns? Should I try to find other missionaries?”

  Leo was surprised by the information I’d gotten. “There are people here who have been in those states or close to them. We’re bound to find herders who’ve taken their cattle there. Maybe. We can try.”

  The next morning we followed a sandy path into woodlands. At the first village, people led us into the hut of an elder.

  “Sanu,” Leo said, greeting him.

  “Lafia,” said the old man.

  They began a quick-draw of greetings, which I joined until I lost the rhythm. “Lafia-sanu, sanu-lafia lo, lafia-lafia lo, sanu-sanu, sanu da aiki, lafia.”

  We sat in the shade. The man handed a kola nut to Leo. He broke it in two and gave half to me. Eating a kola nut was like chewing on an eraser, and I dipped mine into a spice-filled gourd. In Hausa, Leo explained our purpose in coming. The man shrugged, shook his head. “But we have food,” he said to us. “Stay.”

  Leo looked over at women coming with the sour nono. He glanced at me and smiled. “Thanks. Maybe we’ll stop on the way back.”

  The elder handed me one hundred naira as we left his mud hut; honors in the bush were endless.

  In another village that afternoon, Leo and I exchanged long greetings in Hausa with the elders and accepted kola nuts and asked about the Niger and Kebbi states. We were pointed from one man to the next until there was no one left to talk to, and we were then invited to stay for a ceremony. Two men played stringed gourds and another sang like a storyteller, to a crowd of people sitting on mats. I was brought into a hut to take photographs, of a priest with a scalpel shaving all but a patch of hair on the head of an eight-day-old girl. The father, smiling and proud, sat outside in a ring of men. The mother held the shrieking bloody infant as the priest made cuts on her tiny belly and chest, protection from spirits, cuts that were barely scratches compared to the brit milah, the circumcision, of my eighth day in the world.

  Leo and I continued. Farms on the edge of the village yielded to forest, which an hour later yielded back to farms and then to a cluster of huts. After twenty minutes of greetings and kola nut chewing, we learned in one sentence that the village elder knew nothing of the north and no one who did. The man asked us to stay for food just as a woman arrived with masa, rice donuts with sugar that Leo knew I loved.

  “Of course we can stay,” Leo said.

  Villagers gave me money after I took their photograph. I said, “I don’t think I can get the photos to you. There’s no post office anywhere near here.”

  “We know. We’re just happy you took our picture.”

  The following day, after trekking through many villages, we passed a boy selling lead shot in a pouch and then arrived at a hut. It was damp inside, the hard clay cold. A man with a rectangular gray beard and a face as thin as mine sat on a woven mat. Leo spoke in Dukawa, the language in which he preached. As soon as the words “Achipa” and “Achipawa” left Leo’s mouth, the man swung his head toward me. He asked a question of Leo, his body language wholly different from the men who’d shrugged and offered us food. He leaned backwards as Leo spoke. Then shouted, waved his arms, and pointed at me. Leo pulled me up and we rushed out and sat on stools outside the door.

  “He knows,” Leo said.

  A man did not often shout in his own house, especially in cultures in the bush, and we waited for him. He was stroking his beard when he finally walked outside. He thanked us for coming and told us to go in peace.

  “He knows of the Achipawa but won’t tell,” Leo said as we strode into the forest.

  “What? Why?”

  “He doesn’t want you to be killed, and he doesn’t want to be killed.”

  “What does it mean he can be killed? Who will kill him?”

  “It’s not someone that will do it. He meant he will be killed traditionally.”

  I didn’t press Leo to explain. In Nigeria, even politicians and priests had witchdoctors, and it pained Leo to acknowledge witchcraft.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, knowing of my urge to return to the man. “We’ll find someone. You’ll see.”

  I was in the forest with three teenage boys when we saw what looked like a birthday cake on a rock: a coiled bitis viper. The morning was still cool and the sun hadn’t reached the snake and he didn’t move, except to inflate and hiss. I asked one of the boys for his machete and I severed the snake’s head, which tumbled into the grass. The boys then insisted I cut off the tail. When Leo spotted me walking toward him with the snake dangling from my hand, he said, “Now you are the one bringing dinner.” And he chuckled. “Ofir, the people here believe the tail is where the venom is.”

 
Leo and I crossed the river, and I told him about the firefight and coup I’d been caught in in Ivory Coast after leaving Liberia. By late afternoon, we reached a village where people were angry over a Fulani whose cows had eaten a man’s crops. They explained the conflict to Leo in hopes that his knowing might affect the reparation.

  Leo turned to me and said, “The man I’ve been looking for is here.”

  He hadn’t told me we were searching for anyone in particular.

  “The man was born in Kebbi state,” Leo said. “People say he has seen many things.”

  The old man was napping when we arrived at his hut. He jumped off his bed when he saw us, excited to have visitors. Green tattoos stretched from his face to his chest. Even his eyebrows were tattoos. Women began smashing wood under their feet, building fires. A boy ran off to get eggs. In the corner of the man’s hut was a homemade gun that might have dated to wars two centuries in the past.

  Leo spoke to the man in Hausa, then listened and translated for me.

  “If you reach the mountain of the Achipawa,” the elder told us, “you will meet a man who when he speaks you will hear thunder.”

  “Thunder?” I said to Leo. “Are you sure it’s the right word? As in lightning and thunder?”

  “Yes. He says you’ll see what he means when you get there.”

  Then he gave us the names of two towns near Achipawa territory.

  Donkeys and goats stood in the garbage-filled road of the northern town my bus wobbled into. Taxi mopeds, kabu-kabus, puttered by. I happened on an ECWA church and waited for someone to invite me inside or to invite me into his house. A man approached, greeted me, and within three sentences I exhausted my Hausa. Then he went off in search of the pastor, an English speaker. The pastor led me into his living room, where on the wall was a large colorfully drawn poster of Jesus knocking out Satan in a boxing match.