Copyright 2001 Daily Mail&Guardian
July 10, 2001
By JAMES ASTILL

The head is bubbling in its own ooze over a fire. A mouth-watering smell mingles with the eye-watering wood smoke. It is lunchtime. But in the gloomy mud hut, the stewed chimpanzee looks not so much like one of man’s closest relatives, as one of mine.

“He was clever, almost like a man. He was difficult to kill,” says Pascal Nkala, who shot the animal a day ago.

In Yaounde, Cameroon’s capital, European conservationists have talked of “sensitising the population” against eating the world’s last great apes. But the message has obviously not reached Bizan, a straggle of huts 400km to the south.

From next door Pascal’s brother Jean brings a huge, meaty hand, with black nails and a leathery palm, half-smoked. “This is the most dangerous monkey of all. Only a warrior as ferocious as me can kill him,” says Pascal, who has returned, drunk. The hand is from a gorilla. Pascal says he dispatched the gorilla with a machete after snaring it.

Cameroonians, like virtually all the people of the great Congo basin, consider chimps and gorillas fair game. For thousands of years they have eaten them and anything else in the forest, subsisting in a harsh but abundant environment.

Now that environment is changing. Logging companies are opening up the forest and hunters are following them in. Spears and liana nets have been replaced by shotguns and steel snares. Forest dwellers who once hunted to eat now sell bushmeat by the tonne to traders from the cities of Yaounde and Douala. Hunting has become an industry, the rainforest a killing ground.

Until four months ago, Bizan was on the edge of virgin rainforest, at the end of Cameroon’s south-easternmost logging road. Then came the bulldozers of Sami Hazim, a Lebanese logger. A track now runs 80km into previously impenetrable forest. Thousands of 1 000-year-old tropical trees will eventually be carted down it, destroying about 20% of the cover. But for now the main export is meat.

Pascal has built a hunting camp 16km down the road and 45m off it. On the way there he waves at the logging trucks thundering past: the wheels of the bushmeat conveyor belt. “It’s a fair deal,” says Pascal. “They’ll carry you and your meat if you leave some for them — meat is money here.”

At the camp, Jean Sanjap is sitting by a smoky fire. “If only you’d come a bit earlier,” he says as he reaches into the ashes for a heavy gorilla’s skull, still flaked with meat, and another smoke-blackened hand. “We’ve already eaten the head. But we’ll kill another one tomorrow if you’d like.” The rest of the meat has been sent to the nearby village of Messok, where many of the logging workers are billeted. The size of the skull suggested a silverback male, the sort most commonly shot as they charge to defend their females. A large silverback earns the hunter about R275.

Gorillas and chimps are on a long list of species protected by Cameroonian as well as international law. But Denis Koulagna, the beleaguered director of fauna in the Ministry of Environment and Forests (Minef), admits they are not in fact protected. “Minef is completely unable to provide control,” he says. “I don’t have enough personnel; I don’t even have one car for Yaounde.” A series of World Bank-enforced stringency measures is to blame, says Koulagna. “We have not been allowed to recruit for 10 years. Our salaries have been cut by 70%. There is no incentive to stop corruption and do the job.”

Others disagree. “Minef bought 30 cars last year,” says the World Bank’s Laurent Debroux. “I’m not sure what they’re used for, but you see them around town. Probably the ministry prefers to have no cars as a pretext for not working well. The money is there, but first you must have political will.”

Of that there is little sign. Despite vowing to stamp out poaching two years ago at the Yaounde summit, Cameroon’s government allows three tonnes of meat to arrive at the capital’s four bushmeat markets every day, mostly by train.

Pascal does not think much of Minef. Neither is he impressed by the 50 “Ecoguards” paid by the European Union to crack down on poaching around the Dja national park: “I went to school with those boys. They wouldn’t dare touch my meat.”

The forest glistens from a sudden shower as we continue down the flogging road; bulldozed trees are heaped either side. Pascal has sobered up.

A steady stream of men and boys, carrying locally made shotguns, spears and reed panniers full of dead animals, passes. About 300 men work on the logging concession. But at least as many again hunt on it, says Pascal.

Laoue Adyapit has two forest antelopes strapped to his back. He has bought the animals from a hunter for about R22 each and expects to sell them in Messok for R66 each. When he has made enough to pay his fees, he will return to the forestry school in Abong Mbang, 120km north. But Laoue is a shining example. At the biggest roadside hunting camp, 30 men are drunk. Swaying like a zombie, one of them proffers not a mug of local palm wine, but a smart bottle of Guinness. “This is what the traders bring,” Pascal chuckles.I

n Bapile, a celebrated hunting village 80km west, Louis Eno, introduces himself as the bête noire of gorillas. Unlike Pascal, he is familiar with Western sensibilities. “But gorilla meat is good; gorillas are animals — if not they’d be living in the village,” he says.

Eating gorilla is a cultural imperative, says Louis: “Gorilla is prestige meat — if your father-in-law visits, you can’t give him chicken.” And yet, 85% of Bapile’s bushmeat ends up in Yaounde, eaten as a faddish luxury. There was almost no bushmeat for sale in the city until European loggers started slicing open the rainforest 15 years ago.

Louis knows the economic argument too. “If we have development, we will stop going into the forest. But if you tell us to stop eating cassava, you must give us bread,” he says. No one would starve for want of protected species, which account for a small but lucrative 5% of all bushmeat. Certainly, for poor Cameroonians, earning about R100 a day, a great ape a month can make the difference between educating a child and not. But the problem is, very soon there will be no apes left.

A hundred years ago there were about two-million chimps in the vast central African rainforest, stretching from Sierra Leone to Tanzania. There are now at most 200 000, living in patches of forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Gabon and Cameroon. Estimates for the bonobo, or pygmy chimp, whose isolated habitat is on the front line of Congo’s war, vary between 50 000 and 100 000.In the same forests there are at most 100 000 western lowland gorillas, while on the Congo-Rwanda-Uganda border there are a few hundred of Dian Fossey’s mountain gorillas. And nearby there is an almost extinct population of eastern lowland gorillas, whose national park home has been devastated in the past two years by mining for coltan, a mineral used as a hardening agent for metals in hi-tech industries.

Most of Africa’s rainforest, home to these last great apes, is earmarked for logging. It amounts to less than 20% of the original forest belt; and yet, terrifyingly, it remains the world’s second-biggest tropical forest. Cameroon and Gabon will soon be logged out. So as Congo begins to reopen, the loggers will move there to finish the job.

Most are European: three French firms control more than 30% of Cameroon’s logging. But Asian firms are increasingly entering the bidding. And with them there is no discussion of wildlife management. “The big trouble is the non-European companies,” says primatologist Jane Goodall. “They just clear-cut. They don’t seem to have any ethics at all.”

Goodall predicts that at the present rate great apes will be practically extinct in 10 to 15 years. “Though in logged areas it seems more likely to be five years,” she says.

Even if Cameroon’s government is not interested in stamping out the bushmeat trade, regulating the logging industry would go a long way. By law, the pace of logging is strictly controlled, with a limit of 2 500ha a year on any concession. If upheld, this would prevent vast tracts of forest being opened up to hunters, and would allow forest animals to move safely out of the logged area. And there is no reason why they should not return. Gorillas thrive on the changed ecosystem of secondary, logged, forest.

“The basic problem is that the government doesn’t enforce its own laws,” said Mark van der Wal of the Dutch development agency SNV, which has spent the past two years trying to habituate two groups of gorillas to the forests around Messok, for the purpose of eco-tourism.

In Lomie, the capital of south-eastern Cameroon, a woman has gone into a new line of business. Solange usually smuggles Congo gold and bushmeat up to Yaounde, but now she has moved into babies. Her two-week-old gorilla purchase is sighing in its sleep. Solange reaches into its box to cradle it, it goes rigid — and begins screaming in terror.

Solange says she bought it, illegally, from an EU Ecoguard she has regular dealings with. She paid R250 for the gorilla, expecting to sell it for three times that to Chris Mitchell, a British conservationist who runs Yaounde Zoo.

The baby gorilla is impounded the next day, but it is certain to die anyway. Baby gorillas cannot survive without their mothers. And this infant’s mother has become a small part of the one million tonnes of bushmeat being harvested in the Congo basin this year.

“It’s a tragedy, but it’s just part and parcel of what we’re doing not only to animals but to ourselves,” says Goodall. “I’m afraid there seems to be something about us which is cruel, greedy and terribly selfish.” Error: Unable to read footer file.