Monkey business
They are mankind's closest relatives. But Africa's great apes are being
butchered to extinction as logging
companies open up swaths of the continent to hunters trading in bushmeat.
James Astill reports from the
rainforests of Cameroon
James Astill
Wednesday July 4, 2001
The Guardian
The head is bubbling in its own ooze, over a smouldering fire, deep in the
African rainforest. 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 very clever, almost like a man. He was difficult to kill," says
Pascal Nkala, 35, who shot this animal a day ago. Beside
him, his two nephews wait impatiently, looking hungry.
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 250 miles to the south. "So you like
monkeys?" asks Pascal excitedly, running out to see what else is cooking.
Chimpanzees share almost 99% of our DNA. They
use tools, laugh when they are tickled, and live for 60 years. But to Pascal
they are monkeys. Dead, they are "beef".
>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, lightning-fast. 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Spears and liana nets have been replaced by shotguns and steel snares.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 sell bushmeat by
the tonne to traders from the cities of Yaounde and Douala. Hunting has
become an industry, the rainforest a killing ground. And
Pascal is delighted to show how. The gorilla hunters in Bizan have never had
it so good, he says.
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 slippery ochre track
now runs 50 miles 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 10 miles down the road and 50 yards off it.
On the way there, he waves at the bright yellow
logging trucks thundering past: the wheels of the bushmeat conveyor belt.
"It's a fair deal," Pascal explains. "They'll carry you and
your meat if you leave some for them - meat is money here."
At the camp, Jean Sanjap, 27, is sitting under a rickety shelter of palm
fronds, by a smoky fire, rubbing his red eyes. "If only you'd
come a bit earlier," he says, looking touchingly concerned 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 £25.
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), readily admits they are not in fact protected at all.
"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," he says.
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 very 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 chaired by Prince Philip,
Cameroon's government allows three tonnes of meat to arrive at the capital's
four bushmeat markets every day, mostly by train. On
the station steps, traders jostle every morning for the pick of the day's
ape, elephant, panther, buffalo, monkey, warthog, pangolin,
antelope, porcupine, snake, bat, cane rat. It is illegal to trade any
bushmeat in Cameroon; and during the current six-month
off-season, it is illegal to hunt at all.
Pascal does not think much of Minef, having been laid off by the ministry
five years ago. Neither is he impressed by the 50
"Ecoguards" paid by the EU to crack down on poaching around the nearby Dja
national park: "I went to school with those boys.
They wouldn't dare touch my meat." The green forest glistens from a sudden
shower as we continue down the logging road;
bulldozed trees are heaped either side. Pascal has sobered up, and shivers
in his ragged, red-soiled T-shirt and jeans.
A steady stream of men and boys, carrying locally made shotguns, spears and
reed panniers full of dead animals, passes the
other way. Around 300 men work on the logging concession. But at least as
many again hunt on it, Pascal says. Laoue Adyapit,
19, has two forest antelopes strapped to his back. One of the heads bounces
on his shoulder as he walks. He has bought the
animals from a hunter for £2 each and expects to sell them in Messok for £6
each. When he has made enough to pay his fees, he
will re turn to the forestry school in Abong Mbang, 80 miles north. But
Laoue is a shining example. At the biggest roadside hunting
camp, 30 men are staggering 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.
Hunting camps are dotted along the road every mile or so, either Bantu or
Pygmy. Each hunter might lay 200 wire snares, says
Pascal: "I usually check mine twice a week; but there's often something the
next day." Pascal thinks he kills on average three or
four chimps and two gorillas a month. "But it depends," he says. "Sometimes
I get four in one day. I have killed too many!"
In Bapile, a celebrated hunting village 50 miles west, Louis Eno, 42,
introduces himself as the "bete 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, like the kindly cannibal chief in the Flanders and Swann song
("Look son...people have always eaten people.") 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 - mostly French - 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
£1 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 an estimated 2m 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 (DRC), the Republic of
Congo, Gabon and Cameroon. Estimates for the bonobo, or pygmy chimp, whose
isolated habitat is on the front line of DRC's
convoluted war, vary between 50,000 and 100,000.
In the same forests, there are at most 100,000 western lowland gorillas,
while on the DRC-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 (colombo tantalite), a mineral used as a
hardening agent for metals in hi-tech industries. This was in short supply
last year, leading to a worldwide shortage of Sony
PlayStation 2 video games.
Almost all 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
- as little as 5% of Cameroon's primary forest is still standing. So as the
DRC begins to reopen, the loggers will move there to
finish the job. Most are European: three French firms - Coron, Bollore and
Thanny - control more than 30% of Cameroon's logging.
But Asian firms are increasingly entering the bidding - fresh from
flattening south-east Asia and pushing the orangutan to the brink.
And with them there is no discussion of wildlife management. "The big, big
trouble is the non-European companies," says Jane
Goodall, the eminent British primatologist. "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 10-15 years. "Though in logged areas it seems
more likely to be five years," she says. According to one estimate, 800
gorillas are killed each year in only the south-eastern
corner of Cameroon. Along Hazim's short road, we find the parts of four
freshly killed gorillas, almost without looking.
"It makes me feel really sad," says Goodall. "We've exterminated all the
other branches of hominoid, and now we're doing the
same thing to the only slightly more distant."
For a vision of the future, Pascal could hitch 100 miles north, to the
French company Pallisco's long-running concession. The
three-hut villages that line overgrown logging tracks around it were once
hunting camps. Now there is nothing much left to hunt.
Georges Aloue, 27, produces the skull of a chimp that he says he shot two
weeks earlier, though it was dried-out grey and
crumbling. "You have to go far to find monkeys," he says. If he is lucky,
George kills a chimpanzee every two months, a gorilla a
year.
Things have got so bad for Simon Ndah, from nearby Mboumo, that he has taken
a job on a research/conservation project run by
Antwerp Zoo. "These days animals are a bit scarce - I haven't had a gorilla
for more than two years," he says. Simon, 35, has
killed more than 300 gorillas over the years. Now he collects their faecal
samples.
Pallisco built a model village of neat wooden chalets when it opened the
concession nearly 10 years ago. Several hundred workers
arrived with their dependants, totalling about 3,000 new mouths to be fed.
And with bushmeat costing around half the price of
farmed meat - in the cities, it is the reverse - the question of what to eat
was simple. They were glory days, says Simon. "Of
course everyone ate bushmeat, because there was nothing else. The workers
gave us guns to use; we bought wire from the white
men in the company shop."
Belatedly, Pallisco has cleaned up its act. It has banned its trucks from
carrying bushmeat, and puts up the Belgian primatologists
for free. Antwerp Zoo's Jef Dupain salutes this as an effort to get a good
technical report from the World Bank, a recently imposed
condition for receiving further concessions. "Pallisco will never be
wildlife managers, but they believe in the power of the technical
report. It's very encouraging," he says. Yet Pallisco's Simon Alin says
there is actually no incentive to prevent poaching: "Look,
Minef doesn't operate at all, and Ecoguards are selling bushmeat in the
village. The technical report is not important: getting
concessions is just about who offers the most money."
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 2,500 hectares 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. "You have guys like Hazim violating all the rules, blatantly, exceeding
all the limits, massively."
SNV has spent the past two years trying to habituate two groups of gorillas
to the forests around Messok, for the purpose of
eco-tourism. The mayor of Messok agreed to the project on the strict
understanding that he would still be eating gorilla, his
favourite dish. Subsequently, although none of the gorillas has actually
been seen, SNV's trackers say at least four have been
poached. The local Pentecostal pastor is the prime suspect.
SNV's director Jan Schmeitz, like most of the conservationists in Cameroon,
seems to have little hope left. "Your worst nightmare
is that you're just talking, talking, and all the time everything is being
destroyed," he says. And of his own project: "I suppose there
might just be some people crazy enough to make this terrible trip to
Cameroon, to be eaten by mosquitoes, to make their way
through Douala's customs." Last week, the project's independent evaluator, a
Kenyan, was denied entry to Cameroon after being
detained by Douala airport police for two days. Minef has since ordered SNV
staff to leave the country, accusing them of fomenting
rebellion among the Pygmies around Messok.
In Lomie, the capital of south-eastern Cameroon, Solange has gone into a new
line of business. She usually smuggles DRC gold
and bushmeat up to Yaounde. But now, she jokes, she has moved into babies.
Her two-week-old gorilla purchase is sighing and
murmuring in its sleep, stretching out its arms with clenched fists. Then
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 £25 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,
unless they are given highly specialised care. And this infant's mother has
become a small part of the 1m 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."
Full article at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,516424,00.html
Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
