Road kill in Cameroon

When we met Behrend in Yaounde,,he had struck me as a character straight out of a Joseph Conrad novel. He was wearing a food-stained shirt, trousers with ragged cuffs, and a three-day stubble. But he was warm and articulate--and as passionate an advocate for the rain forest as Ammann was for apes. The three of us rolled out of the Yaounde train depot at 5:00 P.M. in a first-class club car so thick with cigarette smoke that you could almost carve your initials in the air.

It was after midnight when we arrived in the town of Belabo, which was pitch black except for the lights of the police station. We went straight there to report being robbed. A washed-out bridge halfway to Belabo had forced us to disembark from the train and walk a mile to the opposite side of the break, where a second train awaited us. It was on this trek--swept along by a tide of jostling, shoving, yelling passengers--that light-fingered thieves had lifted a Nikon F4 from Ammann's camera case and our train tickets from my shoulder bag. It looked as though our trip was going to be a rough one, which was just Ammann's style.

The duty officer at the station was brusque and irritated. His pistol and a scattering of bullets lay conspicuously atop his desk. As Ammann explained about needing a copy of the robbery report for an insurance claim, you could hear the wheels turning in the policeman's head. Rather than taking a statement, he announced that he was fining us 5,000 francs, or about $10, for traveling without tickets.

"Are you crazy?" yelled Ammann in French. The constable jumped to his feet. "Who are you calling crazy?" he barked back menacingly. My gaze drifted from the bullets on the constable's desk to the door of the jail behind him. An aphorism on the rust-streaked portal read La souffrance est un conseil (Take counsel from your suffering). Behind that door, I imagined, was a dingy cell crowded with prisoners--the ones who hadn't paid the 5,000-franc "fine."

Ammann was not about to submit. Sometime around 1:00 A.M., the constable saw that it was hopeless. He suddenly remembered some urgent business and swept out of the station, directing his assistant to take a statement.

On the sixty-mile bush taxi ride to Bertoua, I was filled with relief but also foreboding. Nothing ever seemed easy for Ammann. He was supremely well organized and as efficient as a Swiss trainmaster, but he seemed to chafe against the inertia of Africa. Butting heads with petty bureaucrats or haggling over a hotel bill, he could grow suddenly harsh and imperious, and he absolutely refused to be cowed or pushed around. Stooping to bribery, the lubricant of everyday transactions in Cameroon, was tantamount to defeat.

This gutsy, aggressive style has served Ammann well, but it has also resulted in tense moments. In Cameroon last year, with two television crews in tow (from the BBC and Britain's Channel 4), he asked the Ministry of Environment and Forests to seize an orphaned chimpanzee pet and deliver it to the Limbe Zoo and Wildlife Reserve Center on Cameroon's coast. Ammann and armed rangers from the ministry descended on an amusement park near Yaounde to confiscate the chimp. But the influential park owner alerted a highly placed--and armed--friend that a foreigner had stolen his chimp and was trying to smuggle it out of the country.