by Ofir Drori
Our third morning in Yaoundé, I fed Future and rushed across town because my visa was expiring. I stopped at the cyber café. Karl Ammann had written me back. He was precisely the man whose help I needed; in the late eighties, Karl had exposed the bushmeat trade. He wrote, “I can help find a place for the chimp. We need to talk about your ideas. I’ll be in Cameroon in three weeks.” I banged out responses to urgent emails, made phone calls, and hurried out the door, not stopping to eat before I walked up a hill to Police Frontiere.
In a dirty unlit office jammed with stalagmites of paper sat three officials at three desks. One read a magazine. A fat man was sleeping, head down. The third man had glasses so thick, his eyes looked like tiny black stones. I explained that my tourist visa was about to expire and I said, “I want to stay and help Cameroon protect its wildlife.”
The man in glasses motioned for my passport, then held up his hand. “Wait,” he said and put the passport on the desk atop a stack of papers. He turned and made small talk with the man who wasn’t sleeping. For twenty minutes I stood in front of him. Then he grabbed a plate of rice from the edge of his desk and began to eat.
“Should I go and come back?” I said, anxious to check on Future.
“I told you to wait.”
Half an hour later, he opened my passport. “It’s not possible,” he said. “Take it.”
“I just want to stay so that I can help.”
“I told you, ‘It’s not possible.’ Now go back to your country, white.”
“Is there someone else I should talk to?”
He laughed and said, “Speak French, I don’t understand you,” and turned away.
Behind barbed wire at the World Bank, my meeting with an official was not in an office but a hallway. Though I wore a white dress shirt I’d bought at Marché Melen, I was sure the man standing in front of me thought I was just a traveler. “Enforcement is the role of the state,” he said. “I don’t think you understand. NGOs advise. They are engaged in sensitization, capacity building, and workshops.” My argument about what NGOs ought to do got me interrupted. “What you propose,” the man said, “contradicts the nature of Development. Your idea will not work. Sorry.”
Ignatius and I sat at the Nlongkak bar outside the cyber café. He was buttoned up perfectly in an ironed shirt and had more food in his whiskers. A meat man roasted beef on a grill. A car honked; I jerked awake and began to rock again in my wobbly metal chair. For three nights, I’d been too stressed to sleep.
“Consider this name,” Ignatius said: “The Cameroon Association for the Promotion of Wildlife Law Application.” His face puckered as he pronounced the acronym, causing the food finally to fall from his moustache.
“Ignatius, we’re about action, not administration.”
The man beside us was yelling at the waitress over his bill.
“Cameroon Wildlife Enforcement Organization,” Ignatius said.
“What’s that when we shorten it?”
He scribbled in his notebook and looked up. “CAWEO.”
“No. No CEEWIF or APLOE or anything that sounds like a hand cream.”
“Okay. Okay. Cameroon Organization for Wildlife.”
“Catchy. But shortened—doesn’t work.”
“The Last of the Great Apes,” Ignatius said without looking up.
I nearly leapt from my chair. “Fantastic! The Last Great Ape Organization.”
Ignatius wrote in his notebook and grimaced. “Wait. That would be TLGAO.”
“We’ll make it LAGA.”
“It doesn’t work like that! You can’t invent rules for initials! What about the O?”
At Police Frontiere, the man in glasses made me wait for an hour and then said, “Let me see if I can do something for you.”
“I’m staying because I want to contribute. You can talk to the zoo’s conservator. I’m going to work with the government. I have to extend the visa.”
“Okay, okay. Wait.”
He put the passport on the desk precisely where his hand fell on a stack of papers. The fat man, awake today, pointed to the man in glasses and said to me, “He is hungry.”
I stood before them for half an hour, completely ignored.
“Maybe I should come in the afternoon?” I said.
“Yes,” said the man in glasses. “Come at one o’clock.”
When I returned, my passport sat exactly where it had been, and the devil in glasses was gone. The fat man said, “He’s out. He’s not coming again today.”
The woman in overalls swept near the lions, who had the scarred, fly-covered ears of street dogs, and I felt as dejected as they looked; nothing I did could stop Future from bashing his face against the cage. Monkeys charged and made off with one of our pineapples. The woman smiled, then turned away when she found me staring at her. Future intentionally spilled his milk on me, to say I wasn’t giving him enough attention. I pulled off my wet shirt, and Future peeled a scab off one of my insect bites. The cleaning lady stepped forward. Future watched, didn’t bark. She held out a letter and walked away with her broom.
“I liked you from the moment I saw you,” she’d written among sketched flowers. “I really want to be with you. Love, Leocadie.”
I walked over to her, with the chimp riding on my back and my shirt in my hand. Leocadie was too shy to lift her gaze from the grass. I said, “You’re very nice. I’d really like to be your friend. But there’s someone I love.”
“You married?”
“No. But I am in love.”
I had conversations going in nearly all the countries I’d ever been. Phone calls led to new contacts, which led to emails and meetings and more phone calls, an administrative atom bomb that just made me anxious. Shahar had designed a logo for LAGA, using an image of Future’s face. Udi Ran at Teva Hadvarim was running an ad for volunteers and he’d offered my father the use of his lawyers for help establishing the organization. At the EU Program for the Environment, a Dutchman named Jaap said, “Your idea could be a solution, but it won’t work. The government will never allow it.”
“I know it’s possible to extend the visa,” I said to the man in glasses at Police Frontiere. “Who is the person who signs the visas? I have one day left.”
The man in glasses stared at me with an indifference bordering on hatred.
The fat man cackled.
A beautiful woman arrived, dressed in black, her hair straightened. She was Nigerian. She said, “Do you have the visa for my brother? He came two days ago.”
“We didn’t look at his dossier,” said the man in glasses. “Maybe—next week.”
The fat man folded up his newspaper and pushed back his chair, the full measure of his girth revealed when he stepped around the desk toward her. He extended an arm and smiled, and his hand worked down the woman’s back. He pressed his stomach against her and they moved up the hall, and I realized her beauty was the reason she’d been sent.
Future’s face was oozing blood. I turned and whipped pineapple rind at the monkeys. “He cry cry cry every time when you go,” Leocadie said. I told her I wasn’t sleeping at all out of worry for him. She said she had a cousin with an empty apartment, and we rode in a taxi to the neighborhood of Mendong. At Carrefour Banane women sat in the grass, selling clusters of bananas and recycled Johnny Walker bottles filled with peanuts. Beyond the end of the paved road, on a hill offering views of jagged, forested mountains, Yaoundé looked like a clearing in the rainforest.
Leocadie climbed a set of stairs leading up from the clay road into a three-room apartment with a green concrete floor. The kitchen was but a counter with a metal sink, and all the windows were barred. “I have to rent it,” I said to Leocadie’s cousin Antoinette, who lived next door.
It was pitch black with the power out when I returned the next night carrying my backpack and Future. He rushed from room to empty room, his ahs and oohs echoing off the walls, the child in the shack across the road screaming as she was beaten by her mother. I sat on the floor in l
antern light. The apartment was an empty concrete shell as cold as the forest floor, as inhospitable as Cameroon. I opened a disposable diaper, a gift from CWAF, and spread Future’s legs to wrap him up. Within an hour the diaper was wet and it fell around his ankles like the saddle off Konjo and he jumped free and ran diaper-less into the next room. Then peed on the green floor. I called to Antoinette through the barred window, and she arrived in the darkness to give me a lesson on cloth diapers.
I was woken in the night by Future’s head jerking, his eyeballs twitching against my chest. He woke and cried and sucked my neck until he fell back asleep on top of me. Ignatius had spoken of gorillas taught sign language, of Michael, an orphan from Cameroon, who’d signed the story of his mother’s killing. I woke again when Future’s pee seeped from his diaper to my underwear. At five A.M., he bounced on my crotch, sat on my stomach, and squeezed a pimple on my chest. I woke for good when he tried to yank off my nipples. I slogged to the balcony and mixed a cup of Nescafé for myself and a bottle of milk for Future. I felt beaten down and exhausted. With my visa now expired, I might be forced to leave Cameroon, and if I were allowed to stay, I lacked the money to pay for the apartment. Problems were mounting. The NGO application in Israel had been rejected. My first volunteer, Noa, who’d seen the flier at Planet Safari, was turned away at the Yaoundé airport for arriving without a visa, the frustration and stress of everything heightened by a chimp with emotional needs nearly as extreme as those of a child. Who would care for him if I was deported?
Weeks earlier, I’d wandered into a village near the park that CWAF ran, and the villagers hadn’t so much as offered me a cup of water. In every village I’ve ever been to, such an omission would have been unthinkable. The possibility was real here that I would fail to help Future, that saving him from the hunter would amount to nothing, that the supposed ideals that had led me to Cameroon would be crushed by a place both vicious and broken—as I struggled not to drown in the problems I sought to repair.
I was late returning to Mendong. I picked Future up from Antoinette’s. Her daughter, off from school, had been babysitting. In the night, the older sister in the shack across the street had died in a failed abortion performed in secret with knitting needles. Antoinette, a nurse, had rushed over when they woke her but she hadn’t been able to stop the bleeding.
The power was out and I jammed a candle into an empty bottle, lit it. I pulled off my reeking black shirt, and a knock echoed into the empty house. I turned the key in the metal door, figuring it would be Antoinette, hoping she’d have food. But it was Leocadie. She wore an old-fashioned dress and held out a gift of two plates, a fork, and a big red spoon. She put them in the kitchen. “Did you eat, Ofir? You need to eat.” And she inspected the living room. “I need to wash this floor.” She picked up a saucepan in the kitchen and scrubbed.
“Stop, it’s okay.” I took her hand and we sat with Future before us, watching.
“Leocadie, you’re a good person.”
She lowered her head and looked up at me. She was as kind as Elizabeth, who on the plateau overlooking Lake Turkana had sung to me as she’d sung to her siblings. Leocadie reached out and tucked my hair behind my ear.
“You’re tired,” she said. “You look too tired.”
“Leocadie, I can’t. I’m just going to hurt you.”
But I didn’t say it loud enough to mean anything. We stood and moved toward the bedroom, my hand working down her back. I closed the door and sat beside her on the bed frame. Leocadie looked down. As I reached over and unzipped her dress, she jerked with my touch, giggled, and whispered, “Sorry. Go on.” Future whimpered outside the door. I reached out to touch Leocadie again, and the bed frame broke loose at a joint and we crashed half a meter to the floor. As I fixed the bed, my mind went back to young Elizabeth, whom I never considered touching. Leocadie sat down and didn’t move. I shimmied her dress above her waist, and she jerked, giggled, and whispered, “Sorry. Continue.” It was obvious she was just trying to please me. I couldn’t look at Leocadie’s eyes. Man is nobler than the forces that destroy him. I knew I was ugly when I pulled off her dress and unzipped my pants.
AFRICA’S MOST DANGEROUS JOURNALIST
In Mendong, the pipes were waterless for days and I wouldn’t have been dirtier lying in goat dung. The season’s first rain pinged on tin roofs and swept over the house, blowing a box of sugar cubes out of the windowsill and into the kitchen sink. I shuttered the windows, grabbed a towel and a bar of soap and stripped to my boxers, and I descended the stairs in the downpour. The steep clay road was soon a raging red river of mud. I held my breath and stepped into the cold cascade pouring out of the gutter, arcing down some eight meters from my roof to the road. I closed my eyes as the water hit my shoulders and back. I was nearly overwhelmed by the gifts I’d received from Africa, gifts for which I was too often unworthy. Africa had left me with the untouchable, irrational hope that no cause worth saving was lost. I’d tried to repay the kindness of villagers on my journeys by dancing in village parties and wielding a hoe in the fields and teaching science at ramshackle schools. In writing about war zones, I’d tried to share the virtue that had arisen from suffering. It was time now for far more. And far more, eventually, than just animals. It was time to reciprocate the generosity of the hundreds of families who’d hosted me, who’d shared their lives and made me a member of their communities, who’d come to me without walls or expectations, who’d given up their beds and fed me from their pots with food they’d grown themselves.
The steam of rainwater washed the soap off my back. I dashed up to the kitchen and carried down the plastic garbage can I’d bought for storing water. Half a minute after the storm passed, the flow from the gutter was just a drip. I lugged the half-full garbage can back to the kitchen, swiveling it up a step at a time and pouring out what I’d been too ambitious to lift. The skepticism I’d heard about my plan and the seeming impossibility of collaborating with the Camer-oonian government had strengthened my resolve. I’d stopped looking for signals from the environment that I would succeed and started focusing on targets.
Future was waiting when I opened the door, and he shadowed the heavy trashcan I dragged inside, then determined it wasn’t a threat and shuttled through the flat, opening windows. Newly confident, Future no longer needed to be held at all times. He charged a giant beetle and flicked it into the wall. I sat at the coffee table to work on LAGA’s budget. Future, more interested in my hair now that it was growing long, combed his fingers through it. He cleaned beneath my fingernails, peeled dry skin from the pads of my feet, put his finger in my mouth when I yawned—an act of trust. Then turned his back to be groomed.
Ignatius brought a retired military adjutant named Christopher to Mendong. He was heavy of breath and as hulking as the Rock Man from The Never-Ending Story. One look at Future in the living room and Christopher put his hands over his head, shouted, and backed away through the door. When he finally stepped forward again, he mumbled, “Good morning, sir. Pleased to meet you, sir.” He repeated nearly everything I said, which doubled the length of the interview.
“Ignatius, this won’t work,” I whispered when Christopher descended to the road. “We need young men. He’s old.”
“Ofir, that’s his advantage. No one will suspect he’s working undercover.”
At Ignatius’s office, a small old man cruised in with his shoulders swinging as though he’d just dined with a king. The office was narrower than the front seat of a car and we had to pull the table out so Vincent could squeeze through to a chair. Vincent Gudmia Mfonfu, an Anglophone, was the journalist for MINEF. He was nearing retirement but he disdained his boss, who played favorites, who’d adopted Hinduism, and who burned incense in her office and put up an Ohm sign people took to be witchcraft.
“Okay, Vincent,” I said, “Ignatius tells me you’re talented. But we have to build a team of journalists. We need to get stories into newspapers, onto the radio and TV, so we can broadcast our news after w
e make arrests.”
“You don’t need a team. I can do it all.”
“Alone? That’s not possible.”
He shrugged.
“Vincent, we need half a dozen people. I’m talking about getting spots into the press every day!”
“Yes. So I can give you my CV when we’re together again. I’ll show you some articles I wrote.” He leaned back in his chair and flashed the wry smile of a prankster.
“Vincent, I know Ignatius told you, but I want to emphasize that we have no money.”
He nodded.
It was too hot to close the door of the office, and outside a man was repairing a tape deck playing music at triple speed.
“So explain more about how you want the organization to run,” Vincent said.
“Okay. LAGA is focused on results and on measuring them. How many prosecutions. How many media pieces published. How many investigations. The ratio of investigations to arrests. If we fail, let the donors and the public kick us out. If we succeed, we may help more than wildlife. By embarrassing the corrupt development system and setting a new standard for what counts as work, we might help the system to change. NGOs, if they measure anything but the number of jeeps they give away, have been in the business of measuring the problem. Whether it’s health, poverty, conservation, it’s all the same. In the conservation business, they measure how many animals have died, how much bushmeat is moving. When the trend is positive, NGOs take credit for the success and ask for more money. When the trend is negative, they use it as proof that they are even more needed and they ask for more money. They act like the money given to them is theirs. But it’s not. Billions of taxpayer dollars and donations from well-meaning people have been thrown into conservation for elephants and apes, but the race to extinction still accelerates every year.”