Free The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Forest by David Quammen Page B

thousand people. Léopoldville became Kinshasa, a twentieth-century African metropolis, where life was very different from what passed in a Cameroonian village. The tenfold population increase, along with the concomitant changes in social relations, might go a long way to explain why HIV “suddenly” took off. By 1959, the ZR59 carrier was infected, and a year later in the same city the carrier of DRC60 too. By that time the virus had proliferated to such a degree, mutating and diversifying, that DRC60 and ZR59 represented quite different strains. The basic reproduction rate now must have well exceeded 1.0, and the new disease spread—through the two cities and eventually beyond. “You know,” Hahn said, “a virus was at the right place at the right time.”
    When I read Keele’s presentation of the chimp data and the analysis, in early 2007, my jaw dropped like a pound of ham. These folks had located Ground Zero, if not Patient Zero. And when I looked at the map—Figure 1 in Keele’s paper, showing the Cameroonian wedge and its surroundings—I saw places I knew. A village where I had slept, on my way to a Congo assignment for National Geographic . A river I had ascended in a motor pirogue. It turned out that, seven years earlier, during an arduous footslog expedition through the forests of the Republic of the Congo and Gabon, with an American ecologist named J. Michael Fay, heand I and his forest crew had passed very near the cradle of AIDS.
    After talking with Beatrice Hahn, I thought it might be illuminating to go back.

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    D ouala is a city on Cameroon’s western coast, with a seaport and an international airport. I escaped it, with my own crew, as quickly as possible. We rode east in a beat-up but sturdy Toyota truck, leaving at dawn, getting ahead of the crush, our gear stashed under tarps in the pickup’s bed. Moïse Tchuialeu was my driver, Neville Mbah my Cameroonian fixer, and Max Mviri, from the Republic of the Congo, was along to handle things when we reentered his country in the course of the crazy loop I had planned. Max and I had flown up from Brazzaville the night before. We were a genial foursome, eager to move after the hassles of preparation, rolling past the closed shops and the billboards to the city’s eastern fringe, where traffic thickened in a haze of blue diesel exhaust and the outlier markets were already open for business, selling everything from pineapples to phone minutes. Highway N3 would take us straight to Yaoundé, Cameroon’s inland capital, and then another big two-lane onward from there.
    During a stop in Yaoundé, around midday, I met with a man named Ofir Drori, head of an unusual group called LAGA (the Last Great Ape Organization) that helps government agencies in Central Africa enforce their wildlife-protection laws. Iwanted to see Drori because I knew that LAGA was especially engaged on the problem of apes’ being killed for bushmeat. I found him to be a lean Israeli expat with dark, alert eyes and a patchy goatee. Wearing a black shirt, black jeans, a black ponytail, and an earring, he looked like a rock musician or, at least, a hip New York waiter. But he seemed to be a serious fellow. He had come to Africa as an adventure-seeking eighteen-year-old, Drori told me, and gotten involved with human-rights work in Nigeria, then moved to Cameroon, did a little gorilla journalism (or was it guerrilla journalism?), and became a passionate antipoaching organizer. He founded LAGA, he said, because enforcement of Cameroon’s antipoaching laws had been terrible, nonexistent, for years. The group now provided technical support to investigations, raids, and arrests. Subsistence hunting for duikers and other abundant, unprotected kinds of animal is legal in Cameroon, but apes, elephants, lions, and a few other species were protected by law—and increasingly by actual enforcement. Perpetrators were finally getting busted, even doing time, for dealing in ape flesh and other