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
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 Spears and liana nets have been replaced by shotguns and steel snares.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."