Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (54 page)

Drori’s newsletter mentioned a raid against a hidden storage room, at a train station, that served at least three different dealers; the room contained six refrigerators and its seized contraband included a chimpanzee hand. Another bust, against a dealer whose car held fifty kilos of marijuana plus a young chimp with a bullet wound, suggested diversified wholesale commerce. And if chimp meat travels toward money, chimp viruses presumably do too. “If you’re thinking about infection,” he said, knowing that I was, “don’t just think of villages.” Any chimpanzee killed in the southeastern corner of the country, including an SIV-positive individual, might easily end up here in Yaoundé, being sold for meat in a back alley or served through a very discreet restaurant.

We left the city in early afternoon, headed eastward again, moving against a stream of log trucks hammering toward us in the opposite lane, each one burdened to capacity with a load of just five or six gigantic stems. Somewhere out there, in that sparsely populated corner of the country, old-growth forests were being sheared. Around sundown we reached a town called Abong Mbang and stopped at the best local hotel, which meant running water and a lightbulb. Early the next day, an hour beyond Abong Mbang, the blacktop ended though the log trucks kept coming, now on a ribbon of rusty red clay. The temperature climbed toward midday equatorial heat and, wherever we encountered a little rain shower, the road steamed in red. Elsewhere the landscape was so dry that powdery red clay dust rose on the gusts from passing vehicles, coating trees along the roadside like bloody frost. We hit a police checkpoint and endured a routine but annoying shakedown, which Neville handled with aplomb, making two phone calls to influential contacts, refusing to pay the expected bribe, and yet somehow recovering our passports after only an hour. This guy is good, I thought. The road narrowed further, to a band of arsenical red barely wider than a log truck, leaving us hugging the shoulder when we encountered one, and the forest thickened on both sides. Around noon we crossed the Kadéï River, greenish brown and slow, meandering southeast, a reminder that we were now at the headwaters of the Congo basin. The villages through which we passed became smaller and looked progressively more spare and poor, with few gardens, little livestock, almost nothing for sale except bananas, mangoes, or a bowl of white manioc chips set out forlornly on an untended stand. Occasionally a goat or a chicken scampered out of our way. In addition to the log trucks, we now met flatbeds loaded with milled lumber, and I remembered hearing how such trucks sometimes carried a concealed stash of bushmeat, rumbling toward the black markets of Yaoundé and Douala. (A photographer and activist named Karl Ammann documented that tactic with a photo, taken at a road junction here in southeastern Cameroon, of a driver unloading chimpanzee arms and legs from the engine compartment of his log truck. The photo appeared in a book by Dale Peterson, titled
Eating Apes,
in which Peterson estimated that the human population of the Congo basin consumes roughly 5 million metric tons of bushmeat each year. Much of that wild meat—though no one knows just how much—travels out of the forest as contraband cargo on log trucks.) Apart from the trucks, today on this stretch of red clay, there was almost no traffic. By late afternoon we reached Yokadouma, a town of several thousand. The name translates as “Fallen Elephant,” presumably marking the site of a memorable kill.

We found a local office of the World Wildlife Fund and, inside, two earnest Cameroonian employees named Zacharie Dongmo and Hanson Njiforti. Zacharie showed me a digital map plotting the distribution of chimpanzee nests in this southeastern corner of the country, which includes three national parks—Boumba Bek, Nki, and Lobeke. A chimpanzee nest is simply a small platform of interwoven branches, often in the fork of a smallish tree, which provides just enough support for the ape to sleep comfortably. Each individual makes one each night, though a mother will share hers with an infant. Tallying such nests, which remain intact for weeks after a one-night use, is how biologists estimate chimpanzee populations. The pattern on Zacharie’s map was clear: a high density of nests (and therefore of chimpanzees) within the parks, a low density outside the parks, and none at all in areas adjacent to the roads leading to Yokadouma. Logging and bushmeat were the reasons. Logging operations bring roads and workers and firearms into the depths of the forest; dead wildlife consequently travels out. Zacharie and Hanson explained it as an informal, ad hoc form of commerce. “Most of the illegal trade is man-to-man,” Hanson said. “A poacher meets you and says, I have meat.” But it’s also woman-to-man, he added: Much of the trading is done by “Buy ’em–Sell ’ems,” women who travel between villages as petty traders, dealing openly in cloth, or spices, or other staples, and covertly in bushmeat. Such a woman buys directly from the hunter, often paying in bullets or shotgun shells, and sells to whomever she can. Commerce is relatively fluid; many of these women have cell phones. And there are all sorts of tricks, Hanson said, for getting the meat out. It could be tucked into a truckload of cocoa pods, for instance, a cash crop from this region. The police and the wildlife wardens get tips, and they can stop a truck and search it, but at some risk to themselves. If you stop a truck and demand it be unloaded, and then there’s no illegal cargo, Hanson said, “the guy can sue you. The information has to be very good.” That’s why Ofir Drori’s network has proved itself useful.

Most of the poachers, Zacharie added, are Kakaos, a tribe from the north with a strong propensity toward bushmeat. Many of them have drifted down here to the southeast, drawn by marital connections or opportunity in the bush. The local Baka tribe, on the other hand, has traditional strictures against eating apes, which are deemed too close to human. In fact, Zacharie reckoned, there was probably less eating of apes down here than in some other sectors of the country—apart from the totemic consumption of ape parts by Bakwele people in connection with a certain initiation ceremony for adolescent boys. And that offhanded comment from Zacharie was the first I’d heard of a Bakwele ritual known as
beka
.

We lingered in Yokadouma for two nights and a day, long enough for me to walk the dirt streets, admire the concrete statue of an elephant gracing the town’s central roundabout, photograph a piteous pangolin about to be butchered for meat, and meet a fellow who told me more about beka. This man, whose name I’ll omit, wrote a small report on the subject, which his organization declined to publish. He gave me a copy. Yes, he said, the Bakwele people here in the southeast use chimp and gorilla meat in their beka ceremony. They especially favor the arms. As a result, he said, “chimps are becoming more and more scarce.” So scarce that gorilla arms are now often used as a substitute.

His report described a typical beka initiation, complete with slaughtered sheep and chickens, the neck of a tortoise (because it resembles a penis), and “virgin lasses” in attendance through a long prelude that culminates at four in the morning. The boy to be initiated is dressed in leaves and given drugs to keep him awake. Drums beat through the night until, before dawn, the boy is led into a special area of forest, where he’s obliged to confront two chimpanzees. Some of what follows seems to be symbolic enactment, some of it blood-real. “A gong is sounded,” according to a Bakwele chief who informed my source, “a voice calls out from the forest, and two chimpanzees respond. The male chimpanzee comes out first and touches the boy’s head. The female chimpanzee emerges minutes after and the boy is expected to kill it.” At dawn the boy bathes, then stays awake until late afternoon, pacing and expectant, at which point the circumciser comes at him with a homemade knife. “I nursed my wound for 45 days after,” one initiate said. But now he was a man, no longer a boy. The unpublished report added:

Until recently, the Bakweles have been using chimps
for this ritual. They claim two chimps could be used for circumcision of as many as 36 people. They amputate the arms of the chimps. This part of the animal is eaten by elders of the village. Of late, however, due to the scarcity of chimps, Bakweles go for gorillas.

Eight gorilla arms had lately been seized when a poacher fled from game rangers, leaving the meat behind in a bag. The arms were intended for an impending beka
.
“We cannot do without these animals,” the Bakwele chief complained, “if we must perform this important traditional rite.”

It’s no condescension against Bakwele culture to note that butchering chimpanzees to eat their arms, as part of an ancient and bloody ritual, could be a very good way to acquire SIV
cpz
. Then again, in a landscape as lean and severe as southeastern Cameroon in 1908, beka
might have been superfluous. Sheer hunger could account for the original spillover just as well.

98

T
hirty miles farther south, at a crossroads known as Mambele Junction, with a central roundabout defined by three truck tires piled up like coins, we dined by kerosene lantern at a small cantina, eating smoked fish (at least, I hoped it was smoked fish) in peanut sauce and drinking warm Muntzig beer. This happened to be the place where Karl Ammann saw chimpanzee arms stashed under the hood of a log truck. It was also one of the locations featured in Brandon Keele’s paper on the chimpanzee origins of HIV-1. Chimp fecal samples from hereabouts had shown high prevalence of the virus in its most fateful form. Somewhere very nearby was Ground Zero of the AIDS pandemic.

After dinner, my compadres and I stepped back outside and admired the sky. Although this was Saturday night, the lights of Mambele Junction didn’t amount to much and despite their dim glow we could see not just the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, and the Southern Cross but even the Milky Way, arcing overhead like a great smear of glitter. You know you’re in the boonies when the galaxy itself is visible downtown.

Two days later, at a modest building nearby that served as headquarters for Lobeke National Park, I met with the park’s
conservateur
, its director, a handsomely bald man named Albert Munga, dressed in a floral shirt and (unmatched) floral pants. He sat aloof at his desk for several minutes, shuffling papers, before deigning to notice me, and then for a while longer he seemed cool to my questions about chimpanzees. The office was heavily air-conditioned; everything about it was cool. But after half an hour Mr. Munga warmed, loosened, and began to share some of his data and his concerns. The park’s population of great apes (chimps and gorillas combined) had fallen abruptly since 2002, he told me: from about sixty-three hundred animals to about twenty-seven hundred. Commercial poachers were the problem, and by his account they came mainly across the eastern boundary of the park, the Sangha River, which happens also to be the southeastern border of Cameroon. Beyond the Sangha lie the Central African Republic and, slightly farther south, the Republic of the Congo, two countries that have known insurgency and war in the last couple decades. Those political conflicts brought military weapons (especially Kalashnikov rifles) into the region, vastly increasing the difficulty of protecting animals. Bands of well-armed poachers come across the river, mow down elephants and anything else they see, whack out the ivory and the elephant meat, lop off the heads and limbs of the apes, take the smaller creatures whole, and escape back across the water. Or else they move their booty downriver by boat. “There is a huge bushmeat traffic on the Sangha,” Munga told me, “and the destination is Ouesso.” The town of Ouesso, a river port of some twenty-eight thousand people, just over the border in Congo, is a major trading nexus on the upper Sangha. By no coincidence, it was my destination too.

Just outside Mr. Munga’s office, I paused in the corridor to look at a wall poster with lurid illustrations and a warning in French:
LA DIARRHEA ROUGE TUE!
The red diarrhea kills. At first glance I thought that referred to Ebola, but no. “
Grands Singes et VIH/SIDA,
” read the finer print. SIDA is the French acronym for AIDS, and7 VIH likewise is HIV. The cartoonish but unfunny drawings depicted a stark parable about the connection between simian bushmeat and
la diarrhea rouge
. I lingered long enough for the oddness to strike me. Throughout the rest of the world you see AIDS-education materials crying out:
Practice safe sex! Wear a condom! Don’t reuse needles!
Here the message was:
Don’t eat apes!

We drove onward, along a dirt track between walls of green, still farther into Cameroon’s southeastern wedge. The country’s southern border out here is formed by the Ngoko River, a tributary flowing east to its junction with the Sangha. The Ngoko, according to local lore, is one of the deepest rivers in Africa, but if so there must be a steep wrinkle of rock underneath, because it’s only about eighty yards wide. We reached it around midday at a town called Moloundou, a scruffy place spread over small hills above the river. From any good point of vantage in Moloundou, the Republic of the Congo was easily visible across the water—close enough that, in the quiet of evening, we could hear the chainsaws of illegal loggers at work in the darkness over there. These log poachers would fell trees directly into the water and tangle them into rafts, I was told, and then float the rafts down to Ouesso, where a mill operator would pay cash, no questions asked. Ouesso again: the outlaw entrepôt. There was no government presence, no law, no timber concessionaires defending their interests, on that side—so said scuttlebutt on this side, anyway. We had reached the frontier zone, which was still a bit wild and woolly.

Early the next morning we walked up to the market and watched sellers setting out their goods in neat piles and rows: local peanuts and pumpkinseeds and red palm nuts, garlic and onions, manioc tubers, plantains, giant snails and smoke-blackened fish, hocks of meat. I hung back discreetly from the meat counters, leaving Neville and Max to investigate what was available. Mostly it was smoked duiker; no sign of ape meat being sold aboveboard; and even pangolin, a seller told Neville, was out of season. I hadn’t expected different. Anything so valuable as a chimpanzee carcass would change hands in private, probably by prior arrangement, and not be slabbed out at a public market.