Chimps for sale

Bambi the chimp

The most interesting part of JMA was the afternoon market and exposition. Vendors filled the market stalls with the region's agricultural products. There were funny-shaped squashes and snowy piles of dried manioc, displayed like at a state fair. And there were piles of machetes and hoe blades printed with “made in Cameroon” that the seller assured me were actually made in China.

But alongside these more mundane items most was the proud display of leopard skins, two chimps and a monkey, and carved ivory, all for sale and all illegal by the letter of the law. Daniel, a friend in Obo who is also something of a fixer (he translates for the Ugandan soldiers when they have gas or uniforms or cookies to sell; he also translated for me) explained that normally one must obtain a 70,000 CFA (almost $200) permit from the Ministry of Water and Forests officials in Zemio (a good six hours away by road) if one wants to sell these products. Failure to do so gives the gendarmes sufficient pretext to seize your goods. Either way, though, strictly speaking the law forbids the sale of protected animals, whether alive or dead.

But somehow the state laws didn't apply on this, the day of greatest state power and presence. It is well-known to all that the dignitaries are the major purchasers of the wares. Daniel said the laws had been specially “relaxed” for JMA to enable locals to benefit from the dignitaries' visit. Even Daniel was in on it: a gendarme from Bangui had asked him to procure a chimp. Bambi, one of the chimps at the market, lolled on a young man's back, just like a human baby. The young man named his price as 70,000, but Daniel said this was the dignitary price – usually, you can get a baby chimp for 10,000 (about $23). Only chimp babies are docile enough to be pets; they are caught by shooting the mother and seizing the infant carried.

The illicit-goods-fest continued at the president's banquet, where an ivory salesman set up a whole table of carved tusks. (The elephants would have been relatively small, I noted sadly.)

All this fascinates me. It reminds me of the Central African leaders of the ECOFAC (EU-funded anti-poaching program) who use their jobs as privileged positions from which to consume and traffic in game meat (also, strictly speaking, illegal). Whatever else, being a state official does not seem to mean abiding by and enforcing laws. The laws do serve at least one function: they provide a pretext for seizure, should the official choose to invoke it. But it seems to get at something important that the day of the state is also the day of illegality. (This gets into the debate between Bayart et al and Chabal and Daloz about whether it makes sense to talk of criminalization/illegality if the state actors involved do not themselves view the activities as criminal or illegal. For now I'm sticking with the descriptor “illegal,” using the definition of contravention of written laws, without taking the next step of judging it “criminal.”)

World Food Day

Each year, the president chooses a benighted corner of his country to inspire by visiting for World Food Day – la Journée mondiale de l'alimentation et la femme rurale. In December of this year Obo, a town in the far Southeast (several days' drive from the capital, even once the road was fixed up for JMA) plagued by the Lord's Resistance Army for nearly two years, received the (dubious) honor. JMA (pronounced “jema”) is supposed to be a spectacle of state power and beneficence. Will the president distribute food? I asked. No... JMA is about encouraging people to grow more, came the response.

It is fitting that in a country so thoroughly propped up by international donors, the only time when the state makes its presence felt in the hinterlands is on a holiday invented by the United Nations. Before leaving for fieldwork, one of my dissertation committee members posed the following provocation, “Would the CAR exist as a state if the international donors weren't there?” I stumbled in responding then. Now, I think it is indeed the international system's insistence on treating the rent-fee-spoils structure that is CAR politics as a state that makes it appear so. It's kind of amazing how the state category never loses its legitimacy in the international realm, regardless of wholly contradictory on-the-ground realities. Even “collapsed” Somalia is still generally assumed to hew to its post-independence borders, all evidence to the contrary. No wonder it seems like a magical entity.

JMA in Obo dawned hotter and sunnier than usual. By 8am the main road was baking and bustling. Many people were wearing t-shirts and baseball caps printed with “JMA Obo, 15-16 octobre 2009”, which were made before JMA was repeatedly postponed. A group of cowboy hat-clad pom pom girls waited at the front of the parade line. Clowns, their faces painted white and their shirts and pants stuffed to give the impression of potbellies and cushioned bottoms, butted into different crowds and pleaded for alcohol from the people selling and imbibing (mostly gendarmes and dress soldiers) along the periphery. A man played a giant marimba with beautifully clear sound, and a group of dancers (accompanied by a sign carrier: “Groupe des danseurs,” just to clarify) shook to the beat. The notables began taking their seats under awnings set up for them.

And then we waited. The pom pom girls eventually sat down on their puffs; the military brass band found the shade of the beer pavilions. I bought an orange and asked the price: 25 Francs. But it was three for 25 yesterday, I protested. “Today everything has changed,” the saleswoman shrugged. Happy World Food Day.

Two young men approached and introduced themselves as Liberian soccer players. They were en route to Sudan because they had heard of some Liberians who had gotten jobs playing there. But the military roadblocks along the road in CAR had been too expensive, so they got stuck, penniless, in Obo. (I tried to find them in subsequent days, but no luck. I hope they are scoring for Juba as we speak.)

Finally, some hours later, we heard the president's plane overhead, and fifteen minutes after that his motorcade blasted through, kicking up plumes of dust. He retreated to the residence prepared for him so he could rest before the festivities. So we all waited some more, in the beating sun.

Eventually the president arrived, clad in a banana-yellow shirt that made him easy to pick out. His late arrival meant the parade was truncated – only the military bands and a few others got to take their turn in front of the president's awning. An announcer then listed the name and title of every single dignitary who had come for the occasion. “So-and-so, Chauffeur, Office Nationale de Materiel,” he called out in a slow, ponderous voice. There were at least six ONM Chauffeurs. This roll call took an hour or more.

President Bozize gave two speeches, one in French and one in Sango. In the French speech, he read through every security/development tenet you would find in the most anodyne UN document: First, we must have security, then we will work on development; but we must have gender equality...and climate change... In the Sango version, the crowd got a bit more into it, applauding when he told them to “pika maboko” and calling out in response to his promises. Functionaries assigned here will no longer stay in Bangui – they will come to their post, he said. (Whoo-hoo, I thought.) And what about food, the ostensible reason for the holiday? “First, I am working on bringing security,” he said (in fact, his government's role in security is nil – any security in the area is due entirely to its saturation with Ugandan soldiers on the prowl for LRA), “and then I will negotiate with the World Food Programme about food distributions.” What? This is the best vision you can offer up? Distributions from WFP?

That night, a crew of waitstaff brought from Bangui set up not one but two giant banquets for the visiting dignitaries. I started bantering with the waiters in Sango and they insisted I attend. “With your white skin, you're an invité!” they encouraged, without a trace of rancor. (CAR has got to be the most racist place on earth; the mere whiff of foreignness brings vast privileges.) The second banquet, spread on tables arrayed around a well-lit concrete stage, was the more lavish. French red wine, sodas and beers from Bangui, and Cameroonian bottled water filled the tables to the point of clutter. At the buffet, waiters dished out chunks from a capitaine (CAR's prized river fish) the size of a five-year-old. (Once the dignitaries had served themselves, and taken seconds, the waiters served the assembled crowds of onlookers as well.)

Bozize and his wife (incidentally, they're technically no longer married – she had remarried and lived in France when he came to power; their kids urged her to go back and reap the rewards of the good years, such as a staff of five hairstylists) sat at the center table. Bozize wore a shirt covered with pictures of himself and slogans from KNK (Kua na kua – work, nothing but work), his political party. To the crowd's delight, the first couple danced repeatedly and even stuffed money on the forehead of the dancers they particularly liked, such as a young man who “ate” and regurgitated his cigarette while shaking his legs with an incredible elasticity, and a midget.

The next day, nary a trace remained of the previous day's festivities. The president stayed until early afternoon, and then blasted back to Bangui, sparking an exodus of dignitaries. I had the misfortune to be walking in the road then and quickly became caked with the dust of tens of speeding trucks. Even the mattresses brought from Bangui – ostensibly for the hospital in Obo – were packed up and returned to the capital, now likely gracing various functionaries' homes. Within a couple of days, the generator brought by ENERCA to provide night-time electricity had ceased functioning. Some problem with the battery. Potholes are already growing on the road to Bangui, which had been fixed up specially for JMA.

And food? The markets are sparse and food prices sky-high because people are scared to go to their fields for fear of being taken by LRA. But at least oranges are again three for 25 CFA.

Crocodile Men

Some years ago in Bangui, I met a man from Obo. He had been working for an ill-fated American anti-poaching militia and was involved in untold drama: he'd accused his colleague, a South African mercenary, of embezzlement (diamonds, LandCruisers), who then accused him of murder, and he spent half a year in prison. Near the end of our conversation, he pulled out some photos of a corpse in the shallows on the banks of a river. The body was bloated, pummeled, and dismembered. “You Europeans don't believe it, but it is a very real problem for us – crocodile men. They are men who transform themselves into crocodiles and kill people in the water.”

I didn't have time to ask more then, but the image of the corpse and my interlocutor's grave mien – even graver than when he described his rivalry with the South African – as he talked of the crocodile men stayed with me.

Evans-Pritchard, meanwhile, in his extensive work on Azande notions of witchcraft and magic, makes no mention of the “pili” (crocodile men). So I was curious to find out more while out in Obo. The problem of crocodile men dates to the early 1980s, when many Yakoma functionaries were assigned to posts here. The president at the time, Andre Kolingba, was a Yakoma, an ethnic group concentrated in riverine areas near the capital, and his loading of the civil service with his kin marked the beginning of the ethnicization of CAR politics.

Many Yakoma are fishermen, and pili developed as a strategy to increase catches. A man who takes the pili medicine, imbibed under guidance of a magician, gains the strength to stay underwater all day and finds all the biggest fish. Only, it can be used for ill as well; pili can also employ these superhuman skills to slay a foe, provided the foe is in the water. As Yakoma moved into Obo, they mingled with the Azande living there and the pili skills passed between friends. Very often, crocodile murders involve rivalries over women.

The pili problem reached its height in 87 – 96. It felt like an epidemic to residents, who sought out and sanctioned any suspected pili in their midst. The usual practice was burning accused crocodile men at the stake. As the flames began to lick at their bodies, they would denounce others. For a while, the Catholic mission stopped giving communion out of exasperation with its members' excitement for the crocodile-men-burning.

Few Yakoma remain in Obo, as indeed few functionaries at all remain. The crocodile men problem has abated too. (Now, ill will is enacted upon others through inflicting sickness, a sickness that resembles AIDS but is not AIDS because it kills people so much more quickly than the doctors say AIDS usually kills, explained one interlocutor. Incidentally, there is no functioning hospital in Obo, so any opportunistic infections would go pretty much untreated.)

But there was one big crocodile man case last year. A boy from the nearby village of Gugbere came to Obo for a soccer tournament. In the afternoon, he and his friends headed home, but found themselves blocked by the ferry, which was at the far side of the river. Undeterred, the young man jumped in and began swimming to pull back the barge that would bring them home. Halfway across, he began yelling, “They've gotten me! The crocodile men have me! You will never see me again!” His head and torso emerged from the water, as if propelled, once, twice, three times, and then he disappeared.

People searched for his body for four days before they found it. The internal organs and the penis had been cut out. People understood them to have been eaten. Investigations ensued, and three men were accused of the killing: the boy's cousin, a man from Sudan, and a boy from the neighborhood. They confessed to being pili and killing the boy. The man from Sudan was the ringleader, in a way. He had been paid by a patron in Sudan. The patron had lived in Obo until the UN decided to repatriate Sudanese refugees a few years ago. He had his eye on a girl in Obo, but the girl thought him too old and preferred the soccer playing boy. So the patron dispatched his associate to deal with the rival. The associate paid the boy's cousin and another young man to help him.

The three accused sat in detention at the gendarmerie. But an angry mob yelling passages from the Bible (an eye for an eye) led by the murdered boy's mother broke down the door and killed all three. Their bodies now repose in a cemetery established by a Colonel who ruled as prefet of Obo a few years ago. This colonel is remembered as a particularly effective leader, because he could see through people to tell who was bad and who was good, a skill enhanced by his drinking, according to local lore, and he quickly dispatched the bad to his cemetery.

While in Obo, I read a novella by Mark Twain called The Mysterious Stranger. The story takes place in modern-day Austria sometime around the 1600s, a period marked by witch scares. The narrator, a young boy, enjoys a privileged view of the world thanks to repeated visits from the titular stranger, who describes himself as Satan. Satan enables his young friend to see the future and shows him how little humans understand about good and bad – early death might in fact obviate years of suffering; madness may bring greater happiness than sanity. What emerges clearly, through the witch burnings and unexpected changes in people's lives, is the ridiculousness of human efforts to make order out of the evil forces they see in the world. By the end of the story, Satan reveals to the boy that none of it exists. Not the boy, not himself; all is but a ripple, a sigh, a joke of the universe. A kind postmodern tale, a product of its brilliantly irreverent author. And yet, immersed in my own tales of crocodile men scares (not to mention LRA depravities), which have a social truth as well as a physical truth and yet are founded in what are, to a logical-rational mind, untruths, somehow it struck me as hopeful.

Attack on Ndele

I arrived back in Bangui last Tuesday night after a fourteen-hour drive down the rutted dirt roads from Ndele. Thursday morning my cell phone's chirpy T-Mobile ring woke me: had I heard that Ndele was under siege? I immediately starting ringing up friends there to see if they were OK and find out more about what was happening. The Sisters sounded tired to the point of being unable to even talk – due, I surmised, not just to the attack itself but also to the fatigue of living twelve years in a place, hoping to see it progress, and being so often let down. The NGO workers were tensely waiting in their compounds and rightly jealous of their dwindling cell phone batteries. And Al-Habib, my fruit buyer/hustling-merchant/friend, was curious and headed out to see things up close.

The attack was over by the end of the day. The rebels – for it was members of the rebel group that controls the road north from Ndele who had attacked – left, carrying their 26 wounded and two prisoner gendarmes with them. Reinforcements from the Central African armed forces (FACA) arrived the following day. They abused a few people (and killed two wounded rebels) but avoided the large-scale exactions for which they have become notorious. Entry and exit to the town remains closely guarded, and the market stopped functioning for quite a few days as much of the population had fled into the bush.

Can I admit to a strange mix of feelings about hearing of all this from the safety of Bangui? My first reaction was relief that I had made it out before all this came to pass. My second approached guilt – I should be there experiencing it all, too, rather than ensconced in the comparative luxury of the capital, with its (occasional) hot water and cafes. After all, the danger was likely minimal for people who stayed in their homes, more or less out of harm's way. As an anthropologist, I'm supposed to live close to the population and and not erect a protective bubble between myself and the hardships they face. But studying an area home to violent conflict makes that more difficult because, quite frankly, when it comes down to it, I value my life more highly than my research. Unlike in the calculations of altruists like Zell Kravinsky, who argued that the risk of complications in his donation of a healthy kidney (which his wife opposed) was far outweighed by the benefit to the recipient, there would likely be little direct benefit to people in Ndele as a result of me “being there” alongside them as the bullets flew.

Tomorrow I head out again: to the far southeast, site of LRA attacks for the past couple of years, if all goes as planned (still awaiting final confirmation of our departure). We will go to Obo, the last town before the Sudanese border, where the president will alight on Thursday for the Journée Mondiale de l'Alimentation et de la Femme Rurale (World Food and Rural Women Day). Each year, the president picks some far-off, neglected corner of his realm to visit for World Food Day. The road is repaired for the occasion (the road to Ndele benefited from this treatment two years ago), and the president gives a speech reminding people of the state in which they live. I imagine that food is distributed as well. (Time and again here, people have illustrated avowals of the virtue of a leader through reference to the food he hands out. The World Food Programme, however, is generally seen as stingy – haven't quite figured that out yet.)

On the way, we will pass through Bangassou, Zemio, and Rafai, all formerly sites of sultanates who were employed by concessionary companies in the early 20th century. The majority of the population is Azande – I'm hoping I'll be able to thumb through my E.E. Evans-Pritchard as we bump along the roads.