The Last Great Ape Page 18

  He did find a woven white sack and he took it to the roadside MINEF cabin, along with the woman who claimed it. Takam’s co-worker slept, arms folded on his desk, head down. Empty beer bottles lined the wall. Takam opened the sack and dumped the bushmeat onto the floor. The cabin filled with the potent, oily smell of burned, rotten meat, a smell that was sticky in the throat. The meat had come from the national park near Lomié, the Dja. In the pile were hunks of blackened flesh, ribcages, limbs, here a shoulder, maybe a leg, though whether I was seeing it upside down or from the back or front I didn’t know. Rising above the pile was the contorted hand of a charred monkey with its fingerprints intact.

  As Takam penned a complaint report, the minivan continued into Yaoundé without the woman. A dozen fuel tankers and logging trucks rolled by the checkpoint without inspection, trucks that often carried hundreds of kilograms of meat because they came from the front lines of deforestation. Takam closed the book of law, put down his pen, and smiled at the woman as though he might pour her a drink. They bargained. She bought the meat back from him, then loaded her white sack and boarded the next van.

  In hopes of finding people fighting such abuse, I talked to a dozen Cameroonians who directed me, not into the field, but to Bastos, Yaoundé’s neighborhood of embassies, consulates, NGOs, and the houses of the expatriates paid to work behind high walls and razor wire. It was a world of Mercedes, swimming pools, servants, and model-thin Cameroonian girls wearing their hair straight in hopes of making boyfriends of white men. I tried to book interviews with wildlife NGOs said to be working to stop the slaughter of endangered species. I called the Cameroon office of the World Conservation Society (WCS), the World Bank, the environmental departments of the EU and the UN, but I couldn’t get an appointment to see anyone, much less a director or a man or woman down in the trenches fighting to disprove Goodall’s dark prophesy.

  I visited the massive headquarters of the World Wildlife Fund. A Cameroonian woman met me at the front door, which led into a foyer as luxurious and large as that of a fine hotel. The woman just stared at me.

  “I came two weeks before now and last week,” I said. “I called the director. I’m working here as a photojournalist.”

  “There’s nobody you can talk to today,” she said. “We have a library.”

  When I finally got inside WCS, a man told me, “We do workshops with government officials and help in management plans. We help the government in the acquisition of materials, like buying jeeps. We build capacity.” When I asked him about simply enforcing the law against killing endangered species, he said, “That’s the work of the government. We don’t tell the government what to do.”

  An EU official said that Cameroon had never had a single prosecution for wildlife crime. “The one case we know of was over a black rhino,” the man told me. “It happened only because a researcher had embedded a transmitter in that rhino’s horn.” A directional antenna had led researchers to the house of the army captain who’d ordered a horn from the bush and paid for the animal to be shot. Western Black Rhinos in Cameroon numbered no more than a dozen at that time.* Nothing came of the trial, and the captain was promoted afterwards. The EU official said to me, “Look, it’s difficult to work with the government here.”

  I was lost in problems far greater than I’d imagined. There was so much to fix in Cameroon that writing an article about apes, even a series of articles, was a meaningless response. I had written an article. But it lacked an ending, lacked any hero or hope for solutions. I was frustrated and overwhelmed. The system of NGOs and the expatriates paid to protect wildlife seemed to do little more than put on workshops for corrupt officials. The situation echoed Lokichokio, where million-dollar NGOs couldn’t save the Sudanese from humiliation just outside the camp. When I left Old Julius and boarded the bus for Abong-Mbang, I felt that I stood on the rim of a gorge with no way across.

  One hundred and forty-five kilometers east of Yaoundé, the paved road ended at Ayos, a truck stop of a town full of idling logging trucks, bars, and women grilling over open fires. Three signed contracts to pave the road beyond Ayos had failed to generate a single kilometer of tarmac, as the officials who’d made the deals had likely divided the money with the contractors. My minivan rattled on, up the narrow clay road, over ridges like those on a beach at low tide. The logging trucks came one after another, truck after truck, the forest slowly making its exit for the port in Douala, some of the trees as big around as my van, most headed to Europe and Asia for a future as furniture.

  It was dusk when the bus bounced into Abong-Mbang. A curtain of trees, dark in twilight, rose to the north of the road. Abong-Mbang was bordered by forested swamp whose water had saved some of the area from logging. I squeezed through a line of motorcycle taximen waiting on their bikes for passengers and I sat in a metal chair at a roadside bar where Congolese jazz played on the stereo, the bright guitar riffs perfect for the tropics. Two men were drinking Guinness, holding their palms over their bottles to keep away the flies. They struggled with my English when I asked about bushmeat in town. A motorcyclist, with a manicured moustache and flip-up sunglasses, had been listening. He stepped off his bike and said, “Bon, of course there is bushmeat, boy. In the market.”

  “Chimp and gorilla,” said one of the men with a beer.

  The motorcyclist listened to the two men speak French, then he pointed up the road. He wore one black driving glove, on his left hand. “They say we also have two live ones.”

  “What live ones?”

  “Bon, one small gorilla, one chimp.”

  I took a long sip of Coke, not wanting to betray my eagerness to know more, though I doubted that finding live apes was as easy as getting off a bus. I scratched my neck and took my time and finally said, “So, it’s possible to see them?”

  The motorcyclist, who was in his forties, tilted his head to the side and lit a cigarette. “The name’s Calabash, boy. We can go tomorrow.”

  “Do you know a cheap hotel?” I said. “The cheapest hotel.”

  Calabash flashed a smile that said he’d been waiting for me to ask. I climbed onto the back of his bike and we rode off, the wind blowing into my eyes. We stopped at a hotel by the police station, and he ushered me inside to ensure the price of the room was fair. “No,” Calabash said to the clerk. “That’s too much. Ofi is my friend.”

  The next morning, Calabash was waiting outside the hotel like a man who knew how the day would end. He flicked aside his cigarette and straddled the engine. “Bon, come. Let’s go, boy. We go.” He kick-started the motorbike, opened the throttle and flipped down his sunglasses, and we rode through Abong-Mbang, the engine growling under us, the sun shining through the dust as we zipped south from the hotel. I’d barely slept pondering what I’d learned from the men at the bar. If they were right, then we were on our way to save a baby gorilla. I smiled and let the air whistle into my mouth. Back in Yaoundé, I’d volunteered at the Cameroon Wildlife Aid Fund (CWAF), which ran a shelter for orphaned apes, the same place Rachel had volunteered in the time after our split in Ethiopia. While I was pouring concrete one day, the power died in the electric fence of a chimp enclosure, and half a dozen chimps stormed out through the gate, running on their fists. They sprinted forward, jumped and hugged me, clung to my chest, our species linked effortlessly in that moment of shared joy. In the jungle, baby chimps and gorillas were often killed by the bullets that killed their mothers. When infant apes did survive, it was often because they lacked the meat to justify a bullet. Survivors were helpless and clung to their mothers’ bodies. Baby chimps were tougher than gorillas. Captured chimps died of dehydration, malnutrition, disease, but some survived in captivity. Orphaned gorillas, though, even with their physical needs met, tended to let themselves go, to break down and die without warning.

  Calabash swerved through Abong-Mbang’s alleyways. We passed small farms full of papaya trees and cassava. I gripped the rack over the bike’s rear wheel. Gnats like drops of water smashed and died agai
nst my cheeks. We turned in at a cinderblock house and motored over the red hardpan to the door. A woman appeared, drying her hands on a towel. A man with a bad leg limped around from the trees behind the house. They greeted us warmly. In French, Calabash asked about the gorilla. His mouth opened as he listened, then he shook his head. He sighed before turning to me.

  “Boy, they say this gorilla, bon—they say it is dead two months ago.”

  “What? What did they do? How? Did they eat him?”

  Calabash started to ask this last question but frowned and climbed onto the bike, to make clear he hadn’t brought me along to interrogate people. “We’ll see more, boy.”

  I just lost a gorilla, I said to myself. I should have come sooner.

  Calabash cut the engine as we coasted up to another house. A friendly old man came to the door buttoning his shirt. His living room was full of kitsch: a plastic giraffe, a hologram waterfall hanging near the television. The man left us and returned carrying what I thought at a distance was the skull of a human. But it was gorilla skull. The canines were long, the ridges over the eyes as thick as a child’s arm. The back of the skull was smashed. The man said that two years earlier, the silver-back had wandered out of the jungle and into Abong-Mbang. Locals had called the old man because he was a retired gendarme and had a rifle. He’d shot the gorilla as it was walking past the hospital.

  “I have a picture from that day.”

  “Bring it,” Calabash said.

  The man dropped the photograph on the table in front of us. The gorilla was sprawled out on his back, a giant monster of a man who seemed to have been plopped down against the fake backdrop of a staged photograph: a rudimentary brick building and a crowd. In the style of a Western trophy hunter, the retired gendarme posed with his rifle and with his hand on the head of slain ape.

  “Take a picture of it,” Calabash said to me.

  I pulled out my camera. I was staring at the front-page photograph that a week earlier I’d dreamed of getting, the photograph that would have landed my article in a major magazine—if publishing would have done any good.

  We said good-bye, and in the road Calabash lit a cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs. He wore a faded red T-shirt and a smudged tan jacket, and his gray pants held many weeks of dirt.

  I asked about his motorcycle and his job as a taximan.

  He pulled the cigarette from his lips and smiled slyly. “Bon, it’s vacation now, boy, so I move people on my engine. I am the head teacher of the school here.”

  Calabash watched me, to gauge my response; I didn’t want him to know I thought he might be joking. He flicked away the cigarette and straddled the engine. “Come, boy, Let’s go. The chimp is there, boy. The hunter has him.” He flipped down his sunglasses and we rode off. The line of motorcycle taximen near the market swung their heads as we shot by. A girl sweeping out a bar looked up and dropped her broom. The sun was nearly as hot on my skin as the engine block was against my boot. We drove downhill and then climbed to an empty checkpoint just west of town. The rushing wind seemed to take hold of my eyelashes and close my eyes; I was tired enough to doze in the open air at fifty kilometers an hour.

  We arrived sooner than I was ready for. Calabash parked his Honda beside a solid house. Children appeared with the engine’s roar but did not come to greet us—as they would have in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique. Men stood back with their arms crossed, all wearing coarse clothes save for one, who had a sleek, colorful shirt of yellow and red. His jaw line was sharp, his face thin. He glanced at me and stepped toward Calabash, who spoke in French, gestured, mentioned the chimp.

  “Oui, oui,” the man said as if welcoming customers to a shop. “We have it.”

  In the living room sat a thick mahogany table and the plush couches of a man doing well. We exited a door in the rear of the house and crossed the dirt to a cinderblock kitchen. The walls were blackened from old fires, the air sour with oil burned in a thousand dinners. The kitchen’s soot seemed to drip with grease. On the ash-coated floor were burned hunks of firewood, and, tied to a log, near banana peels and a beer bottle, was a baby chimpanzee.

  The chimp gripped the log as we stepped toward him. He was drooping, staring at the ground, withdrawn, half-dead compared to the chimps at CWAF. His belly was round, bound with sisal rope. His eyes sagged like those of someone who hadn’t slept. The hunter untied one end of the rope from the log and dragged the chimp across the filthy floor. The chimp gripped the rope as he slid and got to his feet and walked through the door on his back legs, his right hand touching the ground for balance. The poacher, like a shopkeeper giving me a proper view of his goods, pulled the tiny ape into the sunlight on the front porch. He secured the rope to a table leg. Men threw shreds of cassava at the chimp, held the food close, laughed, yanked it away, making him lunge. The wrinkles of the chimp’s face and his short white beard bestowed him with a look of wisdom. One man poked the chimp’s stomach, poked him again, and the chimp snapped and bent over until his stomach was on the concrete, arms and legs folded under him, head jerking side to side. Back and forth. Like a rat.

  He looked sick.

  Calabash leaned against the house, watching the chimp, watching me. I fought the instinct to push the men away.

  “How often do you get one?” I said through Calabash.

  “I have them all the time,” the poacher said. “I sold one to a white man. I can get you more. Two more if you want.”

  The hunter seemed savvy, though perhaps he was just trying to impress. He was not a village hunter, not a man used by bushmeat dealers for his knowledge of the forest or a man who needed a dealer to supply money for guns, bullets, and porters. He was a businessman. The chimp was still with him, though, and not moving toward the international market where he was worth thousands of dollars. That meant the hunter wasn’t well-connected. There was no mention of price. Calabash climbed onto the motorcycle, flipped down his glasses and said to the hunter, “We might come back. We might not.”

  On the western edge of Abong-Mbang, the checkpoint was now manned, and a bamboo pole blocked the road. As we waited for a policeman to pull the pole aside, I said to Calabash, “I’m not going to buy the chimp.”

  Calabash raised his sunglasses.

  “I’m going to take him,” I said. “He needs to be in a reserve. Let’s go to MINEF.”

  The corners of Calabash’s mouth curled into a smile and he looked at me anew as I’d looked at him. “Okay, boy. Okay. If that’s the program, then we go to MINEF. But you know, boy—bon, these people at MINEF are very difficult.”

  “I don’t expect much.”

  The paint was peeling on both the outer and inner walls of the MINEF station. Two men sat in an open room, one without a uniform, the other sleeping, arms folded on his desk and his head down.

  To the man who was awake, I said, “I’ve just seen a chimpanzee—”

  “No no no, boy,” Calabash said and led me to the office of the chef du poste.

  The chief looked up from a stack of papers. He wore an unbuttoned green uniform. On the wall was a poster printed by the German aid agency GTZ, which showed animals grouped by the class of their protection. Chimps were class A.

  The man greeted me in French.

  “I’ve just seen a chimpanzee,” I said, standing in front of him.

  The chief didn’t respond to my English. When Calabash began to translate the man raised his hand. “Yes, I understand.”

  “This chimp needs to arrive to Yaoundé, to the zoo,” I told him, “and the poachers need to be arrested.”

  The chief glanced at Calabash for some indication of the kind of problem that had just arrived in his office.

  “The poachers need to be arrested,” I repeated.

  “No, we can’t do it.”

  I pointed at the poster of protected animals next to his desk. “The law is written here: anyone caught with an endangered species is supposed to go to prison. This law needs to be applied. You are the Ministry
of Forests.” I tapped my finger on the poster atop the word, MINEF.

  “That’s not our job.”

  “This chimp needs to move to the zoo of your ministry.”

  “That’s not our job and we can’t do it.”

  “So do we need to call the ministry in Yaoundé and tell them you are unable to get the chimp?”

  “Look,” he said, pretending to browse documents, “we are not just leaving the office to go to the field. If you want us to do this, you need to provide the means. We don’t have the means.”

  I pointed to rips in my trousers, to my arms, which were covered in moot-moot bites from the jungle at CWAF. “You’re not going to get anything from me. I’m in Africa now a total of three and a half years. Look at me. I’m not a tourist. I have no money to give you.”

  The chef du poste stared at Calabash and frowned.

  “We need money for transport,” the chief said.

  “What money for transport? The chimp is in Abong-Mbang!”

  “For us to go and do this work we need motivation.”

  “I passed three days of arrest in Liberia because I wouldn’t pay a bribe. You’re not getting any money from me. We need to take this chimp today!”

  “We are not the police. We don’t have guns. Poachers are dangerous. These people can kill us. The poachers will not just give us this animal.”