by Ofir Drori
“But this is your work! To enforce the law. Maybe I should write this to the minister.” And Fela’s voice sang in my head, Authority stealing pass arm robbery …
The chief was wholly unfazed. “We cannot do it,” he said. “But if you want to have a chimp, you can buy it. Just give us the money.”
I pulled Calabash toward the door. “This is useless. The fucking man in charge of protecting animals in this region is trying to sell me a chimp.”
In my hotel room that night I paced beside the bed, my notebook on the table, pen in hand, a new Coke open and three empty bottles on the floor. I was anxious and angry and I shoved the table to the center of the room to maximize light from the dim, dirty bulb. I slammed down a chair and wrote and stormed around the table. The chimp will not die in a filthy kitchen. I clenched my teeth and struggled to put into words the grotesqueness of a world turned upside down, where the guardians were the destroyers.
I nearly smashed the Coke bottles lined up by the door.
But how could I be angry at a system?
Then the words flowed. The blockage was kicked free, and I realized how clear the problem was. The obstacle in fighting the bushmeat trade was just corruption. The laws existed and had to be enforced. It was so uncomplicated, it was surprising. The NGOs knew what was happening. Of course they’d seen what I’d seen. And why weren’t they shouting? Why did they pretend that they and the government were working together, pretend that if the international community poured more money into conservation, they would provide the solution? Using public funds, NGOs bought jeeps for MINEF and put on workshops, which they paid people like the chef du poste to attend. And WWF distributed pamphlets with photographs of gorillas depicted as if they were thriving in the wild, but they were actually orphans at CWAF.
I slapped so hard at a mosquito that pain tore through my chest.
I wrote to get my anger on the page. In Lokichokio, it was the NGOs who’d sent a car of security guards to order me to leave. Then Aya came to berate me. Not only did NGOs fail to stand up to governments and men like the chef du poste, they contributed to and reinforced corruption.
Over the next two hours, with my brain firing at the speed of its very best days, I imagined a new kind of organization, staffed by volunteers, activists, fighters. The NGO would run investigations with undercover agents who would locate players in the trade of endangered species. An operations unit would take MINEF officers and policemen by the hands and carry out arrests with them while fighting corruption during the arrests. In the courts, legal experts would track cases through to prosecution to minimize opportunities for lawyers and judges to take bribes. Finally, a media unit would publicize results, help to criminalize the bushmeat trade, begin to steer people toward other businesses, and broadcast that the web of corruption could be beaten.
I gulped down the last of my Coke and it was as sweet as water from a river. I realized I’d just written a blueprint for the kind of organization I’d hoped to find in Cameroon, the project in the field, that longed-for ending of the article. As first light shone through the window, I crawled into bed, satisfied. But there was no article. I had to give the idea to someone.
Where were the people who could undertake it?
Calabash woke me. His glasses were flipped up when I opened the door, the driving glove on his left hand. “It’s late, boy,” he said, tapping his watch.
I packed my small backpack. It was July 29, 2002.
We returned to MINEF and walked straight to the office of the chef du poste.
“Let’s save each other’s time,” I said. “The chimp needs to get to Yaoundé. If you’re too afraid to do anything, I’ll handle the confiscation. Just give me the book of law. And if you know someone who wants to go to Yaoundé, I’ll pay his ride and you give him a document that says we can travel with the ape.”
The chief didn’t lift his eyes from his newspaper. “Yes, okay.”
I was so surprised he hadn’t said no that I repeated myself.
“Okay, whatever, go and do it. If you come back, I’ll find you someone.”
I took the bilingual book of law from his table.
West to the edge of Abong-Mbang, Calabash and I rode over forested hills on his red Honda. When we stopped at the hunter’s house, my heart was thrumming. Not too passionate, I said to myself. Don’t ruin it with rage. I stepped off the bike and breathed and thought, Here, it begins.
“Hello, you came again,” the hunter said from his doorway. “Come inside.”
The other men smiled in anticipation, I figured, of money changing hands.
“So you came back to buy it?” the poacher said in French.
A second man entered and stood beside him in the living room.
“What’s the price of the chimp?” I said, hearing nervousness in my voice.
Calabash translated. “100,000 francs.” $165.
I nodded and closed my mouth to hide that I was breathing hard.
“Sit there,” I said, motioning toward the table.
They sat and looked up as if waiting for me to begin the negotiation. I took a piece of paper from my backpack, wrote my name and put the pen and paper on the table. “Write your name here with the price of the chimp,” I said to the hunter. He wrote and slid the paper back across the table. I folded the page into my pocket and opened the green book of law.
“Read,” I said, pointing.
The men placed their hands on the tabletop and leaned forward. What I’d marked stated that any person caught in possession of a protected species, alive or dead, whole or part, would be liable to a fine of three to ten million CFA and/or one to three years in prison.
The poacher raised his chin and stared at me. The other man was still reading. The poacher looked back at the book as if he’d missed something. Then both men looked at Calabash, who motioned with his hand that they had to deal with me.
Through Calabash I said, “I know very well this article is worth a bribe—of what? Two thousand or three thousand francs? Small money. But that’s why I’m here. My job is to get this law enforced. I work for a big international organization and we make sure there is no bribing. Already, they have sent a car from Yaoundé to arrest you.”
Calabash smiled and shook his head. “Boy.”
The hunter looked shocked, nauseated.
“The car is on its way to your house,” I said, hearing a quiver in my voice with this bluff. “It’s coming to take you to be on trial in Yaoundé.”
The men spoke to each other. The hunter scratched his neck, glanced at the book. The other fidgeted. The hunter raised his hands to his chest and spoke to Calabash, who shrugged and pointed to me.
“It’s true you invited me into your house and allowed me to take pictures,” I said. “Maybe I can see if there is something I can do. If you agree to remain my informers, I can try to explain this to the men in the vehicle and maybe I can convince them to give you another chance—if you will provide information about other hunters and dealers.”
“Of course,” said the hunter. “Please talk with them.”
“And you’ll also give me the chimp.”
“Yes yes.”
The men stood. The second man smiled briefly, jammed his hands in his pockets.
“Let’s take him,” I said and moved toward the back door.
In the kitchen, the chimp grabbed a branch jutting from the stack of firewood.
“Ooh ooh,” I said softly, trying to console him in the way I’d learned at CWAF, though chimps had more than fifteen different versions of “ooh ooh.” I knelt and reached in to untie the rope from his belly, thinking he might bite.
“He’ll run,” Calabash said.
Still kneeling, I unknotted the rope, put it aside and pulled my hands back. “Come. Come here.” I extended my arms and waited for the chimp to reach out to me. He let go of the branch, hesitated, raised his arms and pursed his lips. I wrapped one arm around him and pulled him to me. The chimp locked on to my chest and was
transformed.
I could feel his breath on my neck.
Calabash spoke to the men, who looked puzzled by the affection of the chimp: before a rat and now a baby.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I have to call my associates coming in the van.”
We crossed the house and climbed onto the bike. The chimp buried his head in my underarm. Calabash kick-started the engine, and the chimp clamped down on my nipple, swung his head from side to side, the grip of his arms so strong I couldn’t have pried him loose. The chimp could live half a century, could outlive me.
Calabash was still talking to the hunter.
“Calabash, let’s move.”
He flipped down his glasses, hit the throttle, and steered us into the road.
Calabash left me at the empty checkpoint outside Abong-Mbang on the chance a bus would pass. But, save for logging trucks, the road was empty. Through late morning and early afternoon, Calabash rode back and forth between the checkpoint and town, the growl of his engine announcing his approach long before he appeared. Near four o’clock, he arrived again in a cloud of dust, flipped up his glasses, and lit a cigarette. A MINEF official rode on the back of the bike.
“The chef du poste,” Calabash said, shaking his head, “is a very difficult man. Bon, this time it’s working. We have this man going with you to Yaoundé, and he has the letter, boy, so you can carry the chimp.” Calabash held the cigarette between his lips as he climbed off the bike and dusted off his pants. “We have no cars going anywhere now, boy. But I think there are missionaries who need to move soon. I’ll go back to town to check.” He shook his head when he noticed the chimp sucking on my finger. “Boy, I knew, bon, when I saw you that you are very clever.”
“I don’t know how to thank you, Calabash. We’ve had a great adventure.”
“Boy, the name isn’t ‘Calabash.’ It’s Kalebass. Ka–le–bass. Kamdem Charlie Rostrand le bass.” He mimed strumming a guitar. “That’s how they call me.”
“You’re a musician!”
He smiled and tilted back his head to blow cigarette smoke. “Boy, some time ago, if you were saying Kalebass in this area, people knew me from the radio.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”
“Maybe sometime I can play for you, boy.”
I gave Kalebass 15,000 francs, most of the money I had, which would at least reimburse him for the gasoline we’d burned.
“Bon, I need to go and see on the missionaries. It may take some time but I think you can go with them.” Kalebass tossed his cigarette butt in the dirt. He glanced at the money I’d just given him and then held out 10,000 francs. “Take it back, boy. You need it more than me.”
I didn’t reach for the money.
“Boy, don’t worry. Take it,” Kalebass said and pulled out another cigarette. “I’m a gambler.”
* The Western Black Rhinoceros, once widespread in central-west Africa, was tentatively declared extinct on July 7, 2006 by IUCN.
DOUBTS
“We don’t have space,” said the woman at CWAF when I phoned from Yaoundé. “You stay with the chimp.” And she hung up.
I hadn’t considered CWAF would refuse to take him.
It was midnight, and the mosquitoes were screeching. My MINEF escort raised his eyebrows to ask again if he’d be paid for coming. The missionaries had dropped us at the monastery, and we shambled in the dark through Mont Febé, a neighborhood as empty as the end of town. The chimp, clinging to my chest beneath a towel, had defecated all over my clothes, and I needed a hotel equipped with more than bucket baths, a hotel expensive enough to offer anonymity. I called an Israeli friend, Eran, who arrived in a car, checked into a hotel for me and got the key. And I crept up to the room with the chimp concealed.
A tile floor, a television, and stained wood walls made the hotel room the nicest I’d ever rented. I put the chimp down and pivoted toward the window, and he scurried after me. Future, as I’d named him, pulled himself onto the bed and urinated on my pillow. The MINEF official crawled onto the other side of the bed and passed out in his uniform. Bug-covered and wet, Future streaked the sheets wherever he moved, leaving a trail of brown handprints. The banana I peeled for him he dropped on the tile and mashed under his foot as he followed me whining to the sink.
“Ah ah ah,” I said and sat with Future on the floor. I set my pillow in the nook of an open closet and he climbed on and curled up, the pillow soon brown, the wall smeared, the room fecund with jungle rot. I inched over to the bed, and the chimp whimpered and wobbled toward me on two legs.
“Ah ah ahhh,” I said, shifting back to the floor. Future settled on the pillow, kept his hand on me. I worked my fingers through his hair, grooming him, pinching bugs that I pretended to bring to my mouth. I could feel his heart racing against his fragile ribs. He was as tired as I was, though, and soon asleep. With the sheets in ruin and no change of clothes in my bag, I skipped the shower, lay on the mattress, and shut my eyes.
I woke at dawn, as damp and sluggish as if I’d slept on a Maasai bed in a pool of brown rainwater. The MINEF official was snoring. The skin at my nipple was sore, marked by Future’s teeth. The instant I swung around and planted my feet on the floor, Future climbed my legs and wrapped himself around my stomach. Returning to Nigeria was out of the question. I couldn’t pass the project off to anyone. In writing the plan to fight against the system that was failing great apes, I’d already laid out my path. Or maybe Future had. In the absence of borders, there was no such thing as a voyeur.
He cried, “Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh,” when I shut him in the room with the MINEF official, Future’s voice higher and higher pitched as I bounded downstairs and outside to the payphone and called CWAF. “The chimp and I are in a hotel,” I said to the same woman I’d woken in the night. “I need to put him somewhere so I can get things done.”
After a long silence, she said, “When you leave Cameroon in a week or two, you know we’re the ones who’ll have to care for this chimp!”
“I take all responsibility. Just help me with the next step. I can’t go around town with a chimp on my back.”
“I’ll give you the number of the conservator of the zoo.”
The MINEF man rode with me to the conservator’s house, lingered briefly, and left. With Future’s arms hooked over my shoulders, I lugged a welded orange cage into the grass near the monkey exhibit. I tried to pull the chimp off me, to push him into the cage, but he screamed and wouldn’t budge. Bananas failed as a lure. Neither milk nor papaya induced Future to loosen his grip. The zoo’s curious staff migrated forward as Future and I squeezed together into the small steel cage. The chimp went quiet when he spotted a pair of monkeys sneaking past the fenced pond of the crocodiles; holes in the monkey enclosure made them the lords of the zoo.
When a man wearing an ironed green shirt approached, Future barked, “Ooh! Ooh!” to defend us.
“He loves you too much,” said a woman who stood by the cage.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the man in green.
“I’m Ofir.”
“Sir, might I—”
“Call me Ofir. I’m not a knight.”
His name was Ignatius, and in his moustache were shreds of food. He tried to grab Future through the bars so I could slip out, but Future snapped at his fingers. I reclined against the inside of the cramped cage, my head forced downward, and I peeled a banana for myself; in the last forty-eight hours I wasn’t sure I’d put anything into my stomach besides Coke. With Future clinging to me, I described my plan for an NGO. Ignatius had founded his own NGO to educate children about the environment using board games. As he spoke, it was hard not to focus on the shreds of fruit snared in his moustache.
“You understand,” Ignatius said, “that no one has ever tried to enforce the law.”
“I need volunteers. Lots of volunteers,” I said. “I can’t do this alone.”
Ignatius raised a finger. “The wrong people, you understand, would just look at you as a chance to ea
t money, to chop.” Before leaving, he said, “Ofir, we are together.”
I tried to escape the cage, but Future stumbled toward me like a toddler and I couldn’t risk snapping closed the guillotine door. I propped it open with a stick, kept my legs outside and began a long session of grooming. But I was too slow when I tried to swivel out. A woman with hair extensions, baggy blue overalls, and nice cheek-bones swept the concrete near the cage. She stared, swept, looked up again.
A man walked by, said, “White, it’s good place for all of you in that cage.”
Future trembled as I used a piece of twine to tie him to the back bars. I tore loose, climbed out and lowered the door. “It’s okay. I’m coming back,” I said, untying him from the outside, leaving him free within the cage. “I have to buy your shots, boy.” Future gripped the bars and screamed, his shrieks louder and faster as I hurried away while he banged his head against the steel.
From the cyber café at Nlongkak, I emailed Duncan Willetts, hoping he knew players involved in the success story of Kenyan wildlife. I needed allies outside Cameroon and help building my case against the wrongs I’d found. I designed a flier, a call for activists and volunteers, and emailed it to Lucy to display at Planet Safari and to my father to post in travel shops in Tel Aviv. I asked my father to research how to establish the NGO in Israel and I fired off emails to friends all over Africa. Duncan Willetts responded immediately about a wildlife activist named Karl Ammann. I was two pages into an email to Karl when the power died, erasing my words.
The conservator refused to let me pitch my tent in the grass and sleep beside Future’s cage, so I reached the zoo as it opened the next morning. The chimp’s nose was scraped, bloody. The hunter’s sisal rope had left abrasions on his waist. As I washed him with a rag, he gave me hickies on the neck. I cleaned the cage and hung a rope swing, and a veterinarian administered a tetanus shot, tested him for tuberculosis with an injection in the eyelid, and drew blood for the lab at Centre Pasteur to check for Simian Immunodeficiency Virus and other diseases. I sat on a bench near the cage, mixing water and Guigoz milk powder, then bottle-fed the chimp. The woman with hair extensions and tattered blue overalls smiled as she raked leaves from trees like the Israeli Army’s beloved eucalypti, which shed their leaves faster than anyone could rake them. Two monkeys dashed toward the bananas atop Future’s cage, and he leaned out from my arms to bark, “Ooh! Ooh!”