The Last Great Ape

by Ofir Drori

  I smiled. I vomited.

  Though I’d never felt weaker, I realized I was already stronger than I’d ever been.

  And ready.

  2000

  War Zones

  SIERRA LEONE & LIBERIA

  Sierra Leone

  CAN ACTIVISTS WRITE?

  Freetown lay on a hill, a mosaic of trees and rusted roofs that at first glance looked more like a remote river outpost than a capital city on the Atlantic. Everywhere stood men in fatigues. There were buildings scarred by rockets, buildings reduced to blackened shells. Legless boys rented wheelchairs so they could beg. I sat on the balcony of my hotel room one night. The stars were nearly brighter than the lights of the city, and the evening breeze off the Atlantic was merciful in sweeping away the heat.

  Sierra Leone was a country no one chose to visit, so visas were not issued to people without “reasons” for entering. My first application at the embassy in Ethiopia was denied; I couldn’t very well write on the form: Can’t stop thinking about Sudanese refugee crying. So I’d flown closer, to Ivory Coast, and found a man to write his aunt in the ministry in Freetown on my behalf. I declared that I was a writer researching children’s games, the most innocuous “reason” for visiting I could conjure. And the visa came. I’d nearly died in Ethiopia for no cause but my own. And in a sense I wanted to enter Sierra Leone to relieve the lingering shame of the instances I’d failed to act for others, especially in Lokichokio. The tests I’d faced on the Gibe River had strengthened me, along with my urge and ability to give. It was April 2000, nine months after a peace accord had brought stability following a decade of war. Fast approaching was the country’s Independence Day, a test of the fragile peace and of the process of the disarmament of the rebels that had not actually occurred.

  From the moment I arrived in Freetown I was shadowed by secret service agents, who wrote in their notebooks about everything I did, forcing me actually to pretend to research children’s games. When the agent got bored watching my impromptu “work” at Christ Church PR School and walked away, I asked the boy in front of me, Momoh, a slightly different kind of question: “What is your wish?”

  “I want to be president,” Momoh said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to rule the country. Because I want to do good things. Because I will give money to the people and I will bring the children to school.”

  “Now, not all of them are in school?”

  “No.”

  “So what are they doing?”

  “They cook or they fight.”

  I made notes in Hebrew, careful not to mix in English words; misrepresentation in a dictatorship was synonymous with threat.

  A guard opened the gate, and I entered the Amputees’ Camp, a community fenced off from the capital where banana trees grew in red soil. A one-armed child lost control of the UN food bag atop his head, and it fell onto the checkerboard on which two men played. Camp shelters had been assembled from bricks, scrap, and tree branches. Living in the camp were the families of nearly four hundred people slashed to pieces in the war.

  Community chairman Mukhtar Majairu was play-wrestling with a woman in a house made of plastic “UNHCR” tarps. He jumped up and offered his right stem to shake. When I hesitated to grab it, the woman chided me for being flustered. The dull stump of Mukhtar’s forearm looked like something born without a face.

  “Laughing and playing around,” he said as an apology, “it’s the only way of dealing with the trauma.”

  As we strolled through the camp, Mukhtar told me his story. “It happened about two years ago. Rebels took our town, and we ran and hid in the forest. After some months, we were hearing West African forces were in control again. We tried to get back. On the way to town we came into an ambush. One after the other, rebels ordered civilians to put their heads on a tree stump and they cut their heads off. They murdered six. Then their commander said, ‘Bring me the livers and hearts.’” Mukhtar breathed deeply, and his voice grew strong. “They were telling me to lie down. I did. They tied me and took me to the tree stump. They told me to put my right hand on that tree. I did. And they tried to chop it. But the machete wasn’t sharp, and it took them two more blows to cut my hand off.

  “And you know the next thing these people did? When I lay half-fainted on the dirt, they cut my right ear off. Then they put a letter addressed to President Kabbah in my pocket. It said, ‘We’ve got the power.’

  “I got up and I ran. Rebels were coming after me. I hid and then I heard them turn back because they thought I would die from these injuries. I managed to find West African troops and get medical care. I joined the community here and they elected me chairman.”

  Several months after the signing of the new peace accord, Mukhtar spotted two men in central Freetown. “I went to them and asked if they knew me. One of them said, ‘No.’ I showed my stump and I said, ‘You held me,’ and I pointed to the other, ‘and you cut my hand off.’ They were shaking. They were shocked. One of them took money from his pocket and held it out. I told him, ‘I don’t want your money. I begged you not to do this, but you went on. You thought you killed me, and here I am. But I let you go in the name of peace. I forgive you.’”

  Independence Day, April 27th, seemed to pass without incident. I found a pamphlet filled with the kinds of photos that were seldom published—mutilated bodies, a vulture perched by a corpse outside the Freetown morgue—scenes of the carnage from the prior January when Foday Sankoh and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) fought their way into Freetown and terrorized the population for six days, leaving behind a decimated city and five thousand massacred. The UN-backed peace agreement that followed was called by some “a deal with the devil,” for giving amnesty to rebels and leaving them in control of diamond mines. Now, sixteen months after the Freetown slaughter, rebels remained active in remote jungle, smuggling diamonds into Liberia. Foday Sankoh, from his fortress in Freetown, was said to be commanding them and trading diamonds to Liberian president Charles Taylor for arms.

  Freetown’s commercial center, P2, had three shops, one of them a diner whose owner looked Lebanese. I sat at a table just as he said, “Where are you from?”

  Hesitant his friendliness might change, I said, “I’m from Israel.”

  “Ah, Israel! I’m from Lebanon, my brother. Lebanon, Israel—here, everything is different. Here, we are together. We are all friends.”

  I ate chicken, a great luxury in Sierra Leone, and the taste of the grease and the meat and the roasted skin reinforced for the hundredth time how lucky I felt to have experienced hunger in Ethiopia.

  Wissam, the restaurateur, brought two coffees and joined me at my table.

  “Ah, thanks!” I said and sipped. “The perfect amount of sugar.” Almost.

  Wissam cleaned his teeth with a piece of wood. He said, “I settled here eight years ago because of the problems in Lebanon. Me and my brother do a good business. Alhamdulillah. These people are blessed with quick forgetting. If you punch one and apologize, tomorrow nobody remembers. Look at the street. It looks almost like there has never been war. Everything is calm. This is their fortune.”

  In Freetown I’d heard story after story of nearly inconceivable tolerance and forgiveness. Save for a brutal few, Leoneans ought to have been held up as an example to everyone, especially to those of the region of my birth, because men like Mukhtar were no doubt carrying old seeds.

  “But you know how it is in Africa,” Wissam said, patting his bald head. “Everything can change in a day.”

  The morning after Independence Day, I headed toward the library of the British Council to learn more about the war. The streets were eerily empty, the shops at P2 shuttered, most Leoneans out of sight. An armored car passed. Near the charred, abandoned courthouse was a woman who appeared to be in a fight. I was anxious out on empty streets but I moved closer. The woman chased a car and threw a rock at the road. Her brown clothes were rags, her hair fuzzy and gray with ash-colored dust. She was youn
g, maybe eighteen, and she threw another rock as if hurling a spear at the sea. But the rock dropped at her feet. She cried out to the characters fighting around her in the air.

  More than eighty percent of Leonean women had been raped during the war. How many people knew this? I thought she might strike me, but I stepped in front of her. She dropped her arms to her sides. Her mouth was open, one shoulder slumped. Her wide eyes bore the distress of all she carried. And what they said was that the war had not ended and would never end.

  I wanted to hug her, to take her someplace safe. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “God will help you,” I said, stalling, reluctant to disconnect from her eyes.

  She was like an atom spun loose from the world.

  I walked on. Near the cotton tree roundabout, not far from P2, was a soldier at a post holding an RPG. “You! Come here.” The sandbags he stood behind were leaking. He searched my small backpack and sent me to another post, which seemed to mark the entrance of a military base. Men beyond the gate were sorting ammunition.

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “Trying to get to the library.”

  “Everything’s closed now,” said another man. He had a Mickey Mouse sticker on the magazine of his rifle. “Do you even know what’s happening?