The Last Great Ape

by Ofir Drori

  Yaoundé had police roadblocks like some towns had traffic lights. With the risk high that my expired visa would be discovered on a random taxi ride, contacts in the Israeli community put me in touch with a Cameroonian military officer; Cameroon’s presidential guard was trained by the Israeli Army. The officer told me, “You won’t solve your visa problem at Police Frontiere. We’ll do something else.” We went together to an immigration office in a different part of Yaoundé, where I paid the standard fee for a resident permit that gave me the right to stay in Cameroon for two years.

  Nearly every dollar I had I spent on Future’s milk powder, leaving me with barely enough money to fry one plantain and an egg for dinner. In town for lunch I ate either a tiny Mambo chocolate bar or puff-puff donuts and beans. The NGO’s application was approved in Israel, but only after Dad and Udi Ran drafted a letter stating that “human monkey” was the only Hebrew translation for ape; the director of charities was an ultra-orthodox Jew and he saw the NGO’s name as blasphemous. Karl Ammann wrote his contacts, hoping to build enthusiasm for my project. David, who I’d been emailing almost daily, wrote from Ghana that in a small village he’d met a man who claimed to be 140 years old. David was about to cross Nigeria to come and help.

  I ended my first two interviews with policemen the instant they asked about money. The third interview was with a clean-shaven and happy man named Julius, a policeman who lived near Marché Melen. Julius wore an olive green uniform with the sleeves rolled back to the elbows, and he greeted me in the doorway of Ignatius’s office with his beautiful wife, Pierra. Though slender, Julius carried himself in a way that made him seem threateningly strong. Here was a man who could lift the Wedding Stone.

  “In our country, many policemen use their jobs to harass people,” Julius said after we sat at the table. “Most have no values. My education and my faith would never allow me to do such things.”

  “You know wildlife law is not enforced,” I said.

  “It’s more than wildlife law, Mr. Ofir, let me tell you. I caught a white man in his car with a twelve-year-old Cameroonian girl. He was touching her. In the station, she talked and told everything. She was just a small girl. No question, the man needed to be behind bars. Then there were a few phone calls to my chief. My chief released the man, just let him go.”

  “Julius, if I say tomorrow that we have to storm a market and arrest two people and get them to the station, are you able to do it?”

  He didn’t break eye contact. “Yes. No problem.”

  I woke at dawn and planted my feet on the floor—into two centimeters of water. I sloshed into the bathroom and closed the faucet I’d unwittingly left open while the pipes were dry. Back on the bed, too tired to deal with the flood, I slapped Future’s hand away when he tried to peel the scar off my neck. He did a somersault and lay, as I was, hands behind his head. I finally squeegeed the water out through the second bedroom and off the balcony.

  I left Future at Antoinette’s and skated down the muddy hill to Carrefour Banane and caught a shared taxi. Miles of winding neighborhoods, rattling with cars, led inward to the city center. Outside the post office was a secondary market of magazines stolen from the mail. There was an abandoned tall shell of a building with “Vote Biya” scrawled on its top floor. In power since 1982, Paul Biya moved in Yaoundé under protection of snipers.

  I arrived at Ignatius’s office. Four days after our first meeting, Vincent strolled in with nothing in his hands but a Cameroonian newspaper. He flipped the paper onto the table, the Herald, opened to an article adorned with a photograph of a mandrill. The headline read, “New NGO to Enforce Law.”

  Vincent tried to conceal a smile.

  “An Israel-based organization,” said the article, “The Last Great Ape (LAGA), is intensifying law enforcement in the country. The director of LAGA, Ofir Drori, said, ‘In Cameroon there has never been a prosecution for wildlife crime. Without decisive action …’”

  Vincent’s laughter poured out of him.

  “Shit. I can’t believe it. Vincent, I mean, were you interviewing me? You were interviewing me! The NGO is not even registered yet in Cameroon. There’s a picture of the minister in the next article.” My panic eased, but just slightly. “I have to careful with you, Vincent. I’m impressed. You’re the most dangerous journalist in Africa.”

  THE NEW TEAM

  My taxi swung left at Carrefour Banane. Women sat on buckets by the road, hawking peanuts and bananas. Fish ladies grilled mackerel. The field around the elementary school had been cut in my two days away, likely by machete-wielding students. I’d traveled to Abong-Mbang to get Kalebass’s advice, to ask him to work as an investigator for LAGA, and to give him back the 10,000 francs he’d gambled on.

  A last, lone tree rose like an antenna from the ridge above my house, hinting at the height of the old forest. As I stuck my nose out the window and smelled the wet grass, I wondered whether Kakuya, Isaac’s old father, was still alive. Corn was coming up along the tarmac’s edge. The belly of my cab scraped through a muddy pothole, and I told the driver, “Move left; that next one’s deep.” We passed a bar run by a giantess who served soup too spicy to be edible, too spicy to let the mouth know in what week it had been cooked.

  “Stop here,” I said to the driver at the pavement’s end. “You’ll get stuck climbing up to my place.” I wiggled out of the cab.

  “Hey, ‘Mr. Follow Follow!’ I come with greetings from the land of Fela.”

  “I can’t believe it! David, I was sure you’d be stuck in the mud for a week.”

  He’d called two mornings prior from Lagos.

  “What mud? I took a boat.”

  “How did you find me? We don’t have street numbers. We hardly have streets.”

  “Finding a mzungu in Mendong? Not exactly my toughest mission.”

  We walked to Carrefour Banane and ordered mackerel from a woman grilling on a metal grate set over a wheel drum. “No pepe but lots of green sauce,” I told the fish lady. David and I toasted and clinked our Cokes. I said, “Man, I need you here.”

  “Yesterday I wasn’t sure I’d make it. The boat from Oron to Idenau—if we took it a hundred times, we’d die at least once. The Nigerians knew their rowboat was a drowning machine. They were so protective of me, they made me buy and inflate a tire tube. I rode all the way across the Gulf of Guinea with a tire tube around my waist.

  “There were storms that were black, end-of-the-world black. The engine of our boat kept stalling. Huge waves. Nigerian patrols kept stopping us in the middle of the ocean. One soldier had an Uzi and a helmet that kept slipping over his face. He put his foot on our boat and stared at me with no hint of anything happening in his brain. I thought, If you could keep a gun away from one man out of a million, here’s your guy. His captain said to me, ‘Oibo, can you swim?’ You know Fela’s people—they took care of me and stopped the soldiers from giving me trouble. But they weren’t much help to the Cameroonians, who had to empty their pockets paying bribes to boats full of soldiers. ‘Pay or turn back.’ Once we reached Cameroonian waters, it all evened out and the Cameroonian soldiers emptied the pockets of the Nigerians.”

  I ripped the fins off my fish.

  “So tell me the real stuff,” David said. “How is it here?”

  “Daud. In Nigeria, you know, a cab driver can invite you to his house for dinner. Dar es Salaam, we walked half a block for bread and got greetings from a dozen people on the way. Here? You say hello to a child and she ignores you. Can you imagine this? Even in Liberia I had fun playing with children. Four days in Cameroon and I knew this place was different from any country I’d ever entered. It’s like there’s nothing holding the people together. The breakdown feels complete, like we could be in Kenya but fifty years in the future with no tradition left. War or no war, this is the worst place I’ve been in Africa. Maybe that’s why I’m here.”

  Four volunteers arrived—Dan, Hadar, Ravit, and Tom—Israelis inspired by Future’s story to purchase plane t
ickets and leave their lives behind. I promised myself that I would harness their optimism and ignite in them the urge for action. They’d come hoping to make a difference, and I wanted to help them prove to themselves that they could.

  I’d rented Antoinette’s house with my father’s help, and she’d moved her family into the two-room apartment beneath my flat. The volunteers and I sat for our first morning meeting at the long wood table in Antoinette’s living room. Dan’s feet were propped on the table, dreadlocks bundled in his hand. Hadar had arrived from the airport wearing knee-high leather boots and dragging suitcases through the mud. Tom, within minutes of first reaching Mendong, had picked up Dan’s guitar and started singing. There was a different energy in each one of them.

  “Our primary goal is to bring the NGO into existence,” I said, “while working toward the first prosecution. We’ll move simultaneously on many fronts, developing strategies for investigations and operations, identifying sources of funding, linking up with NGOs and institutions that can help us politically and help us gain legitimacy for what we are about to do. We’ll be training personnel as we build our team.”

  Future, on my back, leaned around and took my finger, sucked it for a second, then tossed it aside.

  “Short term,” I said, “read all the information in the packets I’ve given you. Educate yourselves about enforcement. Think about initiatives of your own. As you grow into your roles, I want to become less essential to LAGA’s existence.” As this last phrase left my mouth, I knew I didn’t fully believe it.

  “One project we need to begin immediately is to turn this house into our headquarters. We need to organize it, paint the inside, put our name on the outer wall.”

  “Yeah, man,” Dan said. “Maybe we can get plants in here to soften up the house. You know, man, it’s totally concrete.”

  “Good. Write it down.”

  Tom tapped his pen on the table. “I’ll start working on ideas for the legal unit.”

  “Good. Write it down. I want to stress that you have the space to act on your own, so long as you coordinate your work with the group. You have the space to be yourself within the work. And you have the space to make mistakes—even costly ones—so long as your commitment is total. Understand?”

  I met Karl Ammann in Mont Febé. He locked his hotel room door after I stepped inside. “I can’t afford to be in Cameroon more than a day or two,” Karl said. “I’m not wanted in this country.” He was Swiss, in his late forties, and he was squinting at me, his bangs messy on his forehead. “This government is completely dysfunctional. NGOs are dysfunctional. It’s all a big joke. I’m just coming from Central African Republic. The shiny NGO 4X4s there are used to transport elephant meat. We documented all of this.” A too-short moustache gave Karl’s mouth the appearance of never being closed. “Ofir, you’re an outsider. That’s why I want to support what you’re doing. But you know the NGOs will never want you to succeed. NGOs diffuse the pressure of actually doing anything to fix a problem by saying they can take care of it. It’s feel-good conservation at its best. Band-Aids for cancer patients. These useless NGOs are worse than corrupt governments.”

  Facing Karl’s criticism and seeking to improve its image, CIB, a logging company in northern Congo, had created a partnership with WCS. Karl sent an undercover investigator to measure the progress of the collaboration. The investigator started his fieldwork by filming employees in the logging company workshop who were manufacturing bullets to kill elephants.

  “When the crazy war started in DRC,” Karl said, “the expats fled and flew away. The NGOs were the first to disappear, leaving behind all the people they were paid to help. As long as they can play in their swimming pools, everything is great. The only ones left are the missionaries. At least those people care about what they’re doing.” Karl was nearly out of breath. “Ofir, I don’t have a solution for your chimp. I hope at some point one of the shelters here will take it. If it were a gorilla, everyone would jump for it; it’s all about the politics of their funding. There’s an Israeli named Bill Clark who does a lot for wildlife law enforcement. He works with Interpol and he can help you.” Karl scanned a draft of the program I’d written. “You need to give me a clearer budget so I can get you funding. There’s so much money in conservation—millions completely wasted. You’d expect there’d be a small amount to get the bloody law enforced.”

  So thrilled was I after the meeting that I ran the two kilometers to Bastos.

  A few days later, I was sick with malaria for perhaps the fortieth time. Future counter-attacked the toilet, barking “Ooh! Ooh!” as I vomited into it. I wiped my mouth and stepped to the sink, spit. Future scaled my leg to my shoulder and continued his oral assault on the toilet, as if it had caused my illness.

  “You all right?” David said and handed me a Coke.

  I shrugged, lowered a tied tie over my head. A friend at the British High Commission had loaned me a suit, and at an outdoor market I’d bartered for loafers that felt as flimsy as ballet shoes after years of stomping around in hiking boots. We were following Vincent’s roadmap for building a relationship with the government. “Shine your shoes,” he’d said. “It’s the first thing they’ll look at when we enter MINEF. And shave very well. It’s all part of the French way.”

  I left Future with the Chadian houseworker of Antoinette, whom I’d hired to be his caretaker. I trudged through the heat to Carrefour Banane and scraped galoshes of red mud off my loafers before climbing into a shared taxi. My nausea swelled with the swerves of the cab as we motored through Yaoundé. Fearing my fever was about to spike, I wrote thoughts in a notebook to distract myself, and the driver spun around and pointed at my pen. He said, “Are you spying on me?”

  Across from the Hilton was MINEF’s modern headquarters, eighteen stories of metal and glass that dwarfed nearby government buildings with proof of the importance of logging in the national economy. Vincent stood at the entrance of the monolith with a newspaper under his arm. “Ofi, you have to take out the earrings,” he said. “Remember to address the Minister as ‘Your Excellency’ and say it at the beginning of any response to him. First, we pass through the protocol.”

  “What’s the protocol?” I said, shivering from the malaria.

  “No. The protocol is the man who manages the meetings of the minister. It’s quite French. You’ll see.”

  We rode the elevator up into the nerve center that had sired all the MINEF outposts with empty beer bottles and sleeping men. Vincent led me into a luxurious air-conditioned office where a man in a dark suit greeted us and said, “The minister will be with you shortly.” Vincent led me to a couch and whispered, “Ofi, our main goal with the government is not to make mistakes. At all costs we must avoid a total no from the minister. That would be a very quick ending for us.” My aching stomach felt like it was digesting flakes off a rusted pipe.

  “The minister will receive you now,” the protocol said. “You will wait until I announce you. You will shake the hand of the minister, you first, he second. Do not speak to His Excellency unless he addresses you. Be brief. His Excellency is very busy, and still has to appear in the National Assembly later today. You enter first, he second.”

  Sylvester Naah Ondoa, MINEF’s minister, oversaw the largest stream of revenue in Cameroon after petroleum. He waved us to his fine couches as he might shoo flies.

  “Thank you, Your Excellency,” I said in English.

  “Yes.” He nodded, looked at the ceiling and yawned.

  I leaned forward and spoke loudly to break his indifference.

  The minister folded his hands together. He said, “Collaboration is very important. My ministry regards the protection of wildlife as an extremely important ingredient in the protection of the environment and forests.” He looked over his shoulder for five seconds. “As you well know, in 1999 I convened an international meeting resulting in the Yaoundé Declaration. The international community lauded us for our commitment to biodiversity, conservation, and the
sustainable management of forest ecosystems. My twelve points are well known to have advanced the entire sub-region, and we have seen tremendous improvement in building up the protection of our forests.

  “Concerning this collaboration,” the minister said, “you can meet with the director of wildlife on the needs of the ministry.”

  Future hunted shoes under the table at the morning meeting, then climbed up behind Hadar to eat her hair. A video camera was running; I was documenting the experience of the volunteers. I said, “It’s now ten after seven. We meet at seven o’clock sharp. Understand?”

  “We came to Cameroon because we want to help,” said Hadar, who wore a black turtleneck. “It’s okay if we don’t wake up at seven.”

  Her knee-high leather boots sat against the living room wall.

  “This is not summer camp,” I said. “Conditions in this country demand that we work day and night. In the procedures of work—waking up, meeting each morning, creating and completing missions and meeting again at the end of each day—there is only my way. In the work, you have room to find your own way.”

  Ever so slightly Hadar shook her head. Before her arrival, she’d met my father in Tel Aviv, designed our letterhead, and organized a meeting for the incoming volunteers. Tom was tapping his pencil on the table. Ravit sat slumped in her chair. Arms wheeling, Future skated across the floor on his diapered ass.

  “Shouldn’t we use disposable diapers for Future?” Hadar said. “They’re cleaner.”

  “What? Who cares if they’re cleaner?” I said. “We’re not buying expensive diapers for a chimpanzee when our neighbors have to use cloth diapers for their babies.”

  “Future has a rash the way it is now,” she said. “The diapers don’t cost so much. We may even get them for free; Ravit thinks she can get them donated.”