In the Danger Zone (8 page)

One of the men says, 'Bushmeat is important. It's what we grew up with. In villages and even cities some people can't afford beef, so you just go in the bush and catch whatever and eat it.' They admit that it's very expensive but 'It's a treat – although it's not just rich man's food, we can't afford to eat it every day.'

I'm joined by Ofir Drori who runs the Last Great Ape (LAGA) organization. LAGA tries to encourage the Cameroon authorities to prosecute people who trade or traffic Class A endangered species, filming undercover footage to incriminate traders. Ofir is really an ape man, and doesn't care so much about Class C bushmeat, but he mentions that eating it 'does create a problem of harming the overall biodiversity in several areas'. More importantly, because Class C animals are now considered contraband, the price of bushmeat has risen, and traders are often linked to Class A animals, drugs and people trafficking, so even porcupine is inevitably part of the wider problem.

I worry that making bushmeat illegal when it's clearly enormously popular in Cameroon just pushes the industry underground and creates a new world of criminality – as with Prohibition in 1930s' USA. Ofir throws his hands up in the air and says, 'I don't care. It's illegal and people shouldn't do it.' However, he says that there's a world of difference between the illegal commercial bushmeat trade in the city and legal subsistence hunting and eating of bushmeat in rural communities. But he adds that, 'The most important problem is corruption, no doubt about it. And again it is not [only] Cameroon; Central West Africa is all the same.'

Snake-oil massages and other
miracle cures

Louis takes us to meet Bobu, a traditional healer who uses extraneous bits and bobs of endangered animals to heal all manner of ailments from gammy legs to rows with the missus. He's got gorilla legs, leopard skulls, various horns and tusks, and a wide array of wood shavings 'from very rare trees', all of which look spookily like the same bit of wood that's been ground to a dust.

'I'm a doctor and I can cure any kind of problem. People often come to me when hospital medicine has failed. I have lots: all the mystical medicines. For instance, if someone has mental problems, or if you fall out with your boyfriend, I can help you and put you back together,' he claims.

He is also the most magnificently smelly man I've ever met.

He shows me around his wares – gorilla bones, lion limbs, panther skulls and all manner of bird bits. 'That's the panther's skull, it's an antidote against poison. That's the arm of a lion. It's to heal fractures. This is gorilla bone, which is for mystical illness that they can't cure in a hospital.' He offers to make me an aphrodisiac that will keep me going at it for a day and a half. I tell him that Mrs Gates is more into tenderness than competition-level endurance pounding, but he waves away my objections and lazily throws several handfuls of sawdust into a scrap of paper and demands that I pay him 15,000 francs.

He's obviously a total and utter charlatan, which would be fine, but I prefer my charlatans to have a bit of charm or grace. Worst of all, he has a gammy leg of his own, which you'd have thought he'd have been able to cure himself. When I ask why he hasn't, he laughs uproariously and swiftly changes the subject. He asks me to suggest an ailment to cure, so I confess that I've had a dodgy shoulder from too much swimming, and he prescribes a three-week course of python-fat massages. I tell him I've only got an hour, so he thinks for a moment and says, 'That'll do fine.'

He takes me back to his shack in a nearby slum to perform massage on my gammy shoulder. It's one of the sweatiest, smelliest, seediest rooms I've ever been in, and I'm not very keen on the idea of this snake-oil salesman laying his hands on my flesh. But it might be interesting and, to be honest, if he does cure my gammy shoulder with his pseudo-spiritual claptrap I'll be enormously grateful. You see, I'm falling into his smelly trap – these holistic therapists are crafty buggers, aren't they?

He shows me around the tricks of his trade, including his mystic telephone – a gourd in the shape of a 1970s' trimphone that he uses to summon the spirits. I promise I'm
not
making this stuff up. He says he's going to use python fat to rub into my shoulder, which is priceless – a snake-oil salesman actively selling me snake oil. He gets a little fire going, then rubs the python fat on his hands. It
stinks –
like rancid butter mixed with week-old BO, then mixed with skunk juice. I'm almost certain that it's chicken fat, which would be great because python is a Class B 'slightly endangered' animal. He also has sand on his hands, which makes the whole experience utterly, utterly unpleasant. He rubs it in with a great deal of force, taking my breath away.

I wonder why he doesn't use more commonly available animals, but he says, 'People want rare animal cures because they are powerful, symbolic, exotic, and you just don't get that with a chicken. The chicken isn't important at all, it's only good for eating, and the bones aren't mystical.' It's all part of the bushmeat jigsaw – this stuff has a greater resonance here in Cameroon.

Monkey Business

Joseph finds me an area with a bushmeat stall, but the woman who owns it is angry and covers the monkeys and pangolins with a tarpaulin, so I walk away. I spot a woman sitting behind a bowl of enormous wriggling grubs and I ask her what they are. 'Palm weevils,' she says. 'They live in the palm oil tree, and we collect them by cutting palms down and inside you find the weevils.' They look as aggressive as an insect could look. I have to try them. The stallholder advises me to 'Boil them for a few minutes, then grill them over charcoal. They are delicious.' They are also pretty expensive, so I buy a small bag, enough for a snack for all of us, and set off to find a stallholder who can help me cook them.

The central Yaounde railway station is a major hub for the capital, milling with people. It also has endless stalls fronted by charcoal stoves where you can buy freshly chargrilled fish. I ask several stallholders if they will help me out but most refuse. Finally I convince a woman to help me in return for a few thousand francs.

I get out my bag of weevils and take a closer look at them. They are the size of my thumb, with large pincer-like mouths, black faces and hairy chins and they wriggle like frenetic sex toys. I must get that thought out of my head.

She helps me boil and grill them, after which they become a little shrunken, but the grill-marks make them look oddly appetizing – as though they've been photographed for an aspirational food-and-interiors magazine. Joseph and I tuck in. They are crunchy yet sloppy on the inside, and taste slightly sweet and meaty, with a texture very much like shrimps. The heads are gritty, and the overall effect is, I'm sorry to say, quite repulsive. I keep eating them, hoping that my reaction is just fear and prejudice, but after twenty or so, I still can't enjoy them. Joseph, needless to say, can't get enough of them.

Suddenly a man in a uniform barges in on us and starts shouting. Apparently we haven't asked permission to film here. Joseph squares up to him like a fighting cockerel and starts shouting straight back, which doesn't seem to me to be the cleverest approach, especially as the other guy has a gun. After much shouting and gesticulation, the uniformed man drags Joseph away to inspect our filming permit. Another man demands my passport. This has suddenly become very messy. The only person who looks happy about the situation is Louis, who clearly blames Joseph for the mess and wears an 'I told you so' expression.

We look around and spot a group of angry policemen sitting drinking beer a few stalls down from us, and Louis explains, 'They think you have filmed them drinking beer while they are on duty.' The head of the railway station's police department is there, and he looks furious.

All of a sudden we are arrested and told to drive to the police station. Oh dear. We follow the police cars to their compound, and while we're in the car, Joseph hurriedly calls his chief-of-police friend to see if he can pull a few strings. When we get out, we are made to wait for two hours until the railway police chief calls us into his office. He has been bullied into letting us go, and he hates us more than ever. He wishes us luck through gritted teeth, gives me back my passport and tells us to go on our way. It's very odd, an exercise in bullying and low-level corruption. Luckily we came out on top this time. I hope our luck continues.

• • • • •

Louis takes me off to meet some bushmeat sellers who've agreed to set up their stalls away from their normal location so that I can talk to them and see their meat. When we get there, however, chaos ensues with women grabbing the meat, yelling and threatening us, and pushing each other. We persevere and eventually manage to speak to a stall owner while everyone harangues us. 'The bushmeat ban is just white men meddling in African affairs: leave us alone,' he says.

He's selling python, blue duiker, porcupine and rats, plus several breeds of monkey and one live but terrified, hissing pangolin curled into a ball that he constantly prods. He says that none of them is endangered (although python is actually a Class B endangered species) and that he doesn't know or care what the classification is anyway.

I ask why everyone is so aggressive and he says, 'People are shouting because when you come and film like this it can make the forest guard come and arrest us.' Then he himself threatens me: 'I don't want to get arrested for appearing on TV. If that happens, then next time you're here, I'll just take a machete and cut you down, and break the camera.' Time to leave.

Into the Bush

I get up at 3.30 a.m. and pick up a very grumpy, arrogant gendarme called Albert. I know you shouldn't judge people on first impressions, but this bloke definitely eats babies. I have paid for him to join me on a trip to the rural forest areas because he should be able to avert potential violence and extortion and head off any difficulties I might have with local bureaucracy. He clearly isn't happy about babysitting me, but he's had no choice in the matter. Despite his grumpiness and my misgivings, he works wonders: on our way we get stopped at endless checkpoints by obscure officials, and it's not clear what they are looking for, but as soon as Albert grimaces at them, they wave us past. You don't mess with a bloke who eats babies.

As dawn breaks we arrive at a small collection of huts to meet Andre, a local hunter and his wife, Estelle. People like him are the poorest in Cameroon, and in rural areas there's a great deal of poverty, but of course, there's also an abundance of wild animals.

Andre takes us out hunting in the forest immediately behind his house. Only five or ten minutes into our hike we discover a cane rat lying dead in one of Andre's traps. Half an hour on, another of Andre's traps has caught a 'chat-tigre': a palm civet cat according to
Kingdon's Field Guide.
It looks like a small leopard crossed with my own tabby, Tom Gates. We return to Andre's hut and I help Estelle cook the civet cat. Defurring it is one of the more horrific experiences of my life – not because it's gruesome, but because I keep imagining that I'm skinning Tom, who's been a faithful friend to me for years.

We eat the cat sitting outside their mud and lathe hut and chat about bushmeat. The cat's good, but dry like rabbit and with a strange, catty skin. As we chat, the Baby-Eater comes over and demands a bowl – he's a serious fan of bushmeat, despite being a policeman, but Andre is terrified of him. I ask the Baby-Eater to sit away from us so that Andre can speak openly and he harrumphs off.

Andre admits to having hunted and killed gorillas and chimpanzees, but he has to hide it from everyone in the village for fear of being grassed-up to the authorities 'When I kill a gorilla by myself, I hide it because if news is out that I killed a gorilla, they'll try to catch me.'

He's a little unsure about whether he feels guilty about hunting gorillas – he's clearly well aware that they are endangered and that it's illegal, but he points to his small, grimy hut. 'Look, I'm not a rich man,' he says. I'm just making some money for my family. If I had caught more than the cat today, I would have called a woman I know who buys the meat from hunters and sends it to the city for sale.'

Few activists say that people like Andre shouldn't hunt to feed their family. But it's in the commercial hunting – when Andre sends his bushmeat to town for sale – that the burden on forest biodiversity becomes a problem. Hunters lay extensive traps and hunt the more valuable endangered species, which traders then buy and transport to places like Yaounde where they can get a higher price. And from what I've seen in Yaounde, it's happening on a huge scale.

So who's to blame? From where I'm standing, Andre is a man who's struggling to feed, house and clothe his family, he lives a poor and difficult life, and I can entirely understand why he hunts and sells bushmeat without a licence. How else is he going to get by? You could lecture him until you're blue in the face about biodiversity and ecological responsibility, but like you or I he'll need money tomorrow, and in the absence of any other means, he'll nip back into the forest behind his hut, thanks very much.

It's often claimed that the logging companies are at the root of the trade. First, they cut roads deep into formerly impenetrable forest, which destroys the habitat for animals, and at the same time opens up new areas to commercial hunting. Second, they provide the transportation for bushmeat when it's smuggled on their trucks.

I say goodbye to Andre and Estelle and drive a few miles east to the disingenuously glamorous-sounding Auberge de Moins Coin hotel in the sleepy village of Ayos. It's got a rudimentary bathroom but no running water and no electricity (although the smiling owner says that he's hopeful that both the power and water might return later). I take a look at the sink, and there are a couple of huge black, hairy feelers waving out of the overflow hole – they clearly belong to some enormous hidden insect that is right now laying plans to visit me tonight and tear me limb from limb. I smile at the friendly owner and say that I'll take it. I've stayed in worse places, and in any case, there's no other option.