Free In the Danger Zone by Stefan Gates Page A

Britain, and this unity is to be celebrated. No one has ever done anything like this for me before and I am deeply touched. Ruhi is called Anyadawe (Beautiful and Moon-faced). We are both glowing with pride.
    Before we clear up to leave, Majo asks if she can keep the big saucepan we brought. Of course she can. She says she will call it Stefan to remind her of the day she came back to her village.
    As we leave, I ask Bitek if he really wants to come back to live in this wasteland. He's a modern, urban journalist now with a decent standard of urban living. But he says that he'd definitely like to move back to his home village.
    'I was born here. I very much long to return.'
    • • • • •
    I'm heading for Cameroon now – away from war and brutality, I hope. But it seems that fear and pain are never far away in central Africa, and I have a sneaking suspicion that in Cameroon it might just take another form.
    A few months after my visit, the LRA and the Ugandan government announced a ceasefire, hut despite my hopes, there's been much talk and, little change, and up to 2 million refugees are still in the camps. And, to he honest, most people in Uganda don't expect to see change happening any time soon.

CAMEROON
The Bushmeat
Paradox
    POPULATION: 19 million
    PERCENTAGE LIVING ON LESS THAN $2 A DAY: 50%
    UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX: 144/177
    CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION: 138/163
    GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA: $1,002 (126/179)
    FOOD AID RECIPIENTS: 190,000 to 2007
    MALNUTRITION: 25% of the population
    I open the door to a horrible room in the Meumi Palace Hotel in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon in central West Africa. There's a thick stench of sweat mixed with something I can't quite put my finger on – possibly blood – and a table covered in empty beer bottles and fag butts. A TV hangs from the wall fizzing static and I can't get rid of the thought that someone has recently been brutalized in here. The smell of mould is overpowering, the shower's bust and there's an entire Natural History Museum of insects scuttling across the floor, including several species as yet unidentified.
    Outside my grimy window the rain is coming down like a ballistic power shower. I've just found out that it's the rainy season in Cameroon, and I'm trying to look on the bright side but there doesn't seem to be one. This place is poor, unhappy, sweaty and corrupt.
    I've come here to find out about the bushmeat trade, and it looks like being a tricky story. I'm probably going to have to eat all manner of unusual insects and mammals, but it's not that that's worrying me – I believe that we should eat pretty much anything on the planet – the trouble is that in Cameroon it's exactly this belief that's causing an ecological and environmental catastrophe. Cameroonians consume a vast amount of bushmeat, accounting for an estimated 60-80 per cent of all protein eaten (up to 90 per cent in rural areas), and cut swathes through the forest fauna. The meat comes from rodents, forest-dwelling animals and even primates such as highly endangered mandrills, gorillas and chimpanzees. Some scientists warn that the next generation of children will grow up in a world without any great apes at all. If you think you've heard all this before, stick with me because it gets messier. HIV and other diseases originated here in Cameroonian primates, and eating bushmeat is one of the ways animal diseases are transmitted to humans. Many people say that we're so closely related to primates that we shouldn't eat them anyway – it's practically cannibalism.
    And here lies my big problem: if I'm presented with a primate and asked if I could eat it, my complex carnivorous rationale is going to be severely tested. I've always based my carnivorousness on the simple idea that we can kill animals for food, but not humans, and I can't start differentiating between species now or my whole carnivorous justification might come tumbling down. And if two sticky weeks of moral and