Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  “He’s driving like a lunatic, Estelle!” I spurted at her, like it was her fault. They were both French, after all. “I can’t take it anymore. Either he quits killing animals, or I want out of the damn car!” I drew my line emphatically, although I knew getting out of the car on a rural road in Cameroon wasn’t a viable option. I also knew that Liboz couldn’t understand my English, so my speech wasn’t entirely reckless.

  “Les animaux . . . une docteur veterinaire . . . une vegetarienne . . .” I understood some of Estelle’s rapid-fire French descriptions of me as she tried to explain my sensitivity to a confused Liboz. I knew that she too was upset about him hitting the animals, and quite happy to have me to blame for the intervention. Liboz slowed down a little in acknowledgment of my feelings. Although he only maintained the slower speed for about a minute, he used his brake more liberally afterward, meeting my eyes once in his rearview mirror when he did so to spare a goat.

  As my blood pressure normalized, I mulled over the fact that Liboz’s thoughtlessness wasn’t only toward the animals, but also toward the people in the villages who had so little and who relied on these animals for their livelihoods. I imagined how they felt watching three white people fly so recklessly through their villages. Few white people passed through here, and Liboz was doing his part to establish our bad reputation, I feared.

  This time Estelle and I had come in the little blue 1990 Pajero that I had bought for the project a month earlier when I couldn’t find a pickup we could afford. I pampered it across the bumpy washboard road and took twice the time to drive from Yaoundé that Liboz did. I was delighted to have wheels after taking public transportation for five months, and I was still too naive to realize just how inappropriate the small SUV would be for the construction work we would be doing in months and years to come.

  That night over cocktails, through Estelle’s translations, I heard Liboz speak of his efforts to minimize the impact of his company’s activities on wildlife. He prohibited his employees from transporting bushmeat in or on his company vehicles, although he knew his policy was ignored in his absence. Even having the policy was somewhat progressive for the time. He told us that he had discovered his employees transporting the body of a forest elephant across the Sanaga River on the company ferry, which he himself had built, and he dumped the dead elephant in the river, depriving everyone involved of financial benefit. Involving Cameroon law enforcement in a wildlife issue—with the inherent delays in production and the police expenses he would be expected to cover, along with local political problems that would stem from it—wasn’t something Liboz would have considered.

  He admitted little culpability for habitat destruction. “Coron takes an average of only one tree per hectare (about 2.5 acres),” he told us. I knew the number sounded more benign than the practice it described. Each tree the company cut likely brought down others on the way down, and the loggers caused a lot of damage to the forest as they accessed and removed cut trees. Nonetheless, Liboz argued that encroachment by village farmers was much more damaging to habitat than logging.

  “Overpopulation is the real problem. Local farmers are the problem,” he insisted.

  I could see his point. The last few months had provided me with a fast-track education about Cameroon’s conservation issues. Estimated birth and death rates indicated that the population here was probably increasing by about four hundred thousand people per year, while job opportunities were not increasing. I had seen firsthand that people were pushing farther and farther into the forests, hunting and farming to survive. Staking a claim to Cameroon’s “free land” offered a better quality of life for many than trying to survive in urban areas without jobs or government assistance. From a conservation perspective, the burgeoning human population was a big problem, but new human settlements often followed the logging roads into the forests. The roads sliced into pristine forests for which inaccessibility had once afforded protection, and some of the people who eventually settled along the roads came first to work in the logging companies. Others came to hunt and provide meat for the logging company employees. The logging roads came first, then the new settlements and the slashing and burning for subsistence agriculture that followed. Without the logging roads, I speculated that Cameroon’s people wouldn’t have spread out so much, would have chosen to live closer together in larger rural communities where they might have relied more on farming than on hunting. To be sure, my compassion extended to the Cameroonian people I was meeting, but my perspective was that of a conservationist who saw huge advantages in keeping wildlife habitat inaccessible.

  The increased forest access provided by logging roads also dramatically increased the pressure from commercial hunters, who used the logging roads, and often the logging trucks, as conduits to transport bushmeat to urban centers. These poachers were driving species extinct, rendering forests silent, and creating primate orphans in need of sanctuary. I kept quiet, though. Self-serving logic aside, Jean Liboz was a gracious host to us and was trying to do something good for conservation. I didn’t see any advantage in annoying him, and I guess Estelle agreed because she was uncharacteristically diplomatic in the conversation, as far as I could tell.

  During much of the three or four hours we visited with Liboz that night in the logging camp, he and Estelle chatted away in French. After a while, she quit bothering to translate unless their conversation concerned our work. It was boring for me, and the constant noise of their unintelligible chatter was nerve-racking. My lack of French seemed a ridiculous obstacle, and it was extremely frustrating for me. We had moved out of Cameroon’s Anglophone area to begin looking for our sanctuary site in the Francophone zone a couple of months earlier.

  In the late 1800s this geographic area of Central Africa was colonized by the Germans, but British and French troops forced them to leave during the First World War. In 1919, soon after the war ended, the former German Kamerun was partitioned, with France gaining administrative control over the largest share and the United Kingdom getting a smaller section. French Cameroun achieved political independence in 1960, and in 1961 a UN-sponsored referendum allowed the British Cameroons to decide their fate. The southern third voted to unite with French Cameroun to form the Federal Republic of Cameroon, while the northern two-thirds voted to join with Nigeria. A new constitution in 1972 changed the name of the young country, with its eight Francophone and two smaller Anglophone provinces, to the United Republic of Cameroon.2 While the government claims both French and English as its official languages, and many urban schools now teach both languages, it is still very rare to find anyone who speaks English in the rural Francophone provinces of Cameroon.

  I had been trying to pick up the French language, but at the age of forty, the language acquisition part of my brain seemed to be completely atrophied. I was trying to learn from Estelle, sometimes working on pronunciation of words during our long rides, but French wasn’t coming easily to me. I would have excused myself from the conversation with Liboz, but I had run out of books to read. At least I was enjoying the gin and tonic, and the cool night air in the open hilltop den was breezy and pleasant. I managed to stay lost in my thoughts for much of the time, but at one point I heard Liboz say “Americaine,” and I knew he was referring to an American woman or women.

  “What did he say?” I asked Estelle.

  “He said French women are much prettier than American women,” she told me without hesitation and then cracked up laughing at my openmouthed, stunned expression. Evidently, her newfound diplomacy did not extend to me. I chose not to interrupt them again, and we all went to bed soon afterward, as Estelle and I planned to get an early start the next morning.

  There were sixteen small villages around the Mbargue Forest. After stopping briefly in two of them, we arrived by noon in the tiny village of Bikol. Although surrounded by the lush green forest, Bikol itself was another brown village. The houses, the earth upon which they stood, and the new logging road passing through the village’s center were variou
s shades of reddish brown. No grass, which could conceal snakes and scorpions, was allowed to grow in the village.

  The infrastructure of Bikol consisted of twelve small rectangular houses, the walls of which were made of sticks and mud. Rain had melted a twenty-inch section of mud plaster from the front wall of one of the houses so I could see its frame—a latticework of wooden and bamboo poles laced together with strips of tough plant fiber. The roofs were made of raffia palm fronds woven together into long shingles. The land and its forest had produced every building material. Like thousands of village houses we had seen in rural Cameroon, they each had one or two rooms with swept dirt floors. Inside some of them, I knew that women would cook over open fires without chimneys, creating a haze of choking wood smoke that would exacerbate respiratory problems in their children.

  We drove slowly through the village, careful not to hit the chickens and goats that lingered casually in the new road and perceived no threat from our approaching vehicle. The village looked mostly deserted. Just when it seemed that we would pass through without seeing anyone, we spotted four men sitting on low bamboo benches around the smoldering embers of what had been a small fire. A roof of woven raffia palm fronds shielded them from the sun. We stopped the Pajero and got out. Two of the men stood and approached us. A handsome man of medium build who looked to be in his fifties introduced himself as Chief Gaspard. He introduced the other man, who was slighter, younger, and missing several of his front teeth, as his brother Colbert. They both wore loose, ill-fitting Western clothes.

  They spoke to us in French, a much slower cadence than Estelle’s. Everyone in Cameroon has a local language that they learn at home as their first language. The country has many different ethnic groups and more than 270 local languages. People who live only a few miles from one another can speak different local languages. Although the country claims French and English as its two official languages, French is the language taught in rural schools. Most people who have attended even a year or two of primary school speak basic French. Very young children, orphans who didn’t go to school because they had no one to pay for it, and many older men and women speak only their local language.

  The two men invited us to join them under their raffia roof, gesturing for us to sit on one of the three benches that formed an incomplete square around the slender snake of smoke. Small fires were the focal points of family gatherings in the evenings. They provided light and warmth when the temperature dropped after dusk. The people woke up with the rising sun, when it was still cool, and started their fires again. As the days warmed, the fires were allowed to die out. Before sitting, Estelle and I both shook hands with the two other men, who smiled warmly and said, “Bonjour.” Estelle explained our mission—that we were looking for a site to set up a new chimpanzee sanctuary. Like rural people in other places we had visited, Chief Gaspard and Colbert agreed that they would be happy to have a chimpanzee sanctuary in their forest. For them, it meant the possibility of development, of income in their village.

  “Are there wild chimpanzees living here?” Estelle asked them.

  “Yes!” They all answered at once. “A lot.”

  “What about gorillas?”

  “Yes! There are gorillas, too.”

  I knew they thought we would be happy to hear chimpanzees and gorillas lived here, so I wasn’t sure whether to believe them, but Liboz also had told us that chimpanzees and gorillas still survived in the Mbargue Forest, despite intense hunting in the area.

  “How many people live in this village?” Estelle translated my question.

  “Ten,” Chief Gaspard answered immediately.

  “How many women and children?” I knew from my previous exposure to the small village culture that his number probably didn’t include women and children.

  For several minutes, the four men spoke unhurriedly among themselves in their dialect. Their language had a lot of “B” sounds, which they pronounced emphatically. In years to come, the hard, forceful syllables of Bamvéle, the main dialect of villages on this side of the Mbargue Forest, would give me the impression that the speakers were angry, until a smile or laugh would put me at ease. At this moment, the men were trying to count the women and children who lived in the village, but they were perhaps disagreeing on whether to classify some as residents or visitors. Men in Cameroon can legally marry up to four women, but in the villages they often took in women they called wives without having a formal ceremony.

  Estelle smoked while we waited more or less patiently. I was beginning to wonder whether I should have asked such a complicated question when, suddenly, they seemed to agree that it was not a thing they could know. “I don’t know,” Chief Gaspard shrugged unapologetically, not even venturing a guess. The topic was finished for them. Estelle and I exchanged confused glances. It was many seemingly nonsensical social exchanges like this one that led us to joke, between ourselves, that Cameroon was a logic-free zone. We adopted the phrase from Peace Corps volunteers we had met in Yaoundé.

  “Where are the rest of the men, and the women and children?” Estelle moved on.

  “Some of the men have traveled. The women are working in the farms and have the small children with them. The older children are in school.” Colbert answered this time.

  After this bit of small talk, we determined that Colbert could be our guide on a trek into the forest. He welcomed the opportunity to make the 2,000 Central African francs (about $3.50) we would pay him. This was well over Cameroon’s minimum daily wage for people in rural areas. We left the Pajero in the village and set out walking along the road. Wearing hiking boots, with backpacks of water and snacks, Estelle and I followed Colbert, who wore flip-flops worn very thin at the heels and held his machete like a comfortable appendage near his chest. When he led us onto a footpath into the forest, the noticeable drop in ambient temperature, the receding sunlight, and the symphony of insect song under the tall forest canopy added to my pleasant sense of otherworldliness. Colbert easily outpaced us, and Estelle asked him twice to slow down. It was difficult to keep his pace and appreciate the forest at the same time. At one point he stopped suddenly with some information. “One of the hunters in our village shot a gorilla right here in this spot last year,” he boasted matter-of-factly, clearly proud that his village was the home of such prowess. He didn’t yet understand where we would be coming from on the issue.

  “How many people in the village have guns?” Estelle asked him.

  “None.” He shook his head as he answered, without hesitation or explanation.

  I was still registering the inconsistency, wondering how someone shot a gorilla without a gun, when he started walking again. I wondered if he had lied about one or the other of his statements. Another option, which I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to consider and which was probably the truth, was that a bushmeat dealer had placed a command and provided a gun temporarily to an experienced village hunter who did not himself own a functional gun.

  When we returned to the village in late afternoon, it was much more populated. Some women came to greet us, smiling as they shook our hands. They wore traditional wraparound skirts, pieces of cloth called pagnes, the swirling blues, oranges, yellows, and greens of which, despite years of wear and harsh soap, lent some faded color to the drab surroundings of the village. Chief Gaspard approached and introduced a pretty woman standing among the others as his wife, Christine.

  I noticed some young children peeping at us from the corner of a house, smiling and giggling, staying mostly hidden. One boy of about six years came out and sauntered bravely toward us, head high and arms swinging. I turned to face him with my big reassuring smile, from which he turned abruptly and ran screaming back to the cover of the house where his cowering comrades squealed and giggled in excitement.

  “They’ve never seen white women before,” Chief Gaspard explained. “Only white loggers.”

  He told us we could stay the night in a room of one of his houses, and we gratefully accepted. We had been prepared to
set up a tent, but we were tired and happy to be spared the exertion. He issued a command in the dialect and two teenage boys appeared, each carrying a narrow bamboo cot, and indicated for us to follow them. We followed the boys and beds into a small windowless room, the only light entering behind us through the door. The boys left, and we laid out our sleeping bags on the hard cots and unpacked candles, flashlights, mosquito spray, toilet paper, soap, towels, and wine to share in the village. We had mosquito nets but couldn’t see a way to easily hang them in the mud house, so we didn’t use them. We were both on malaria prevention at that point so we weren’t too worried.

  As we were about to go out, we peeked out the door and realized that the people were eating dinner. I would learn later that the people of Bikol ate only once a day. Six men and older boys, under the roof where we had joined some of them for conversation earlier, huddled around a communal pot of gooey green stew—this mix of cassava leaves and peanuts would later become one of our staples—while eight women and several young children circled another pot several houses away. Each person had a heaping glob of “couscous de manioc,” a doughy white mix of cassava flower and water. They used their fingers to pinch off bite-size morsels of the couscous to dip into the pots of stew. Hovering and patient fingers waited their turns at the pots, and between mouthfuls people chatted happily. Mothers pinched smaller morsels from their plates for young children.

  “The family dinner, village style.” I said to Estelle. I was surprised at how the men and women ate separately in this village. For us to join either group now would have been an awkward intrusion into an affair that impressed me for its sweet casual intimacy. Village people generally shared everything among themselves and were typically generous to outsiders, too. The people of Bikol didn’t make an effort to offer us food, and I felt sure they thought it wouldn’t be good enough for us. It was certainly true that we would not have eaten it from the communal pots. After a nasty case of dysentery a few months earlier, I had tried to avoid eating in villages. Estelle and I agreed to wait in the house until they were finished eating. We lit a candle and filled up on olives, bread, and peanuts we had brought with us from Yaoundé.