A Decree, a Road and a Daily Count
Since 1997 somebody has walked the bushmeat stalls in Malabo market every day and written down what is lying on them. The record is now long enough to show what a presidential decree did to the trade in monkeys, and what a road did to it afterwards.
The bushmeat section of the market in Malabo is at the back, past the vegetables, and it is not hidden. Carcasses are laid out on tables or hung from a rail: blue duiker mostly, brush-tailed porcupine, cane rat, the occasional pangolin, and — depending on the year, and on which year you ask about — monkeys. Prices are chalked up. It is a normal retail transaction in a normal covered market, and it has been photographed and written about so often that the traders are bored of it.
What is unusual is the man with the clipboard. Since 1997 someone has come to these stalls every single day and recorded what is on them: species, number, condition, whether it was shot or snared, and what it sold for. The count has not stopped for a change of government policy, an oil boom, a pandemic or a change of researcher. It is one of the longest continuous records of a wildlife trade anywhere in Africa, and it exists because Bioko is an island, which means the market is a bottleneck. Almost everything killed in the forest here passes across one of those tables. Count the tables and you have counted the island.
An island cut at the right moment
Bioko sits about thirty kilometres off the Cameroonian coast in water shallow enough that during the Pleistocene lows it was not an island at all — it was the end of a peninsula, and the animals walked on. When the sea came up, roughly ten thousand years ago, they were shut in. That is why the island holds seven species of diurnal monkey on a landmass of some two thousand square kilometres, several of them now distinct from their mainland relatives, and why one of them, Pennant's red colobus, lives here and nowhere else on earth. The drill, a short-tailed forest relative of the mandrill, has its own Bioko form. None of them has anywhere to go.
The decree of 2007
In 2007 a presidential decree banned the hunting, sale and consumption of primates outright. The effect on the market was immediate and easy to see in the daily record: the monkeys came off the tables within days. It was not a slow decline, it was a switch. Anyone standing in the market that month would have concluded the problem was solved by a signature. Within months the carcasses were back, in smaller numbers at first and then not smaller, and the count is the only reason anybody can say that with confidence rather than as an impression. A ban with no budget behind it moves a trade indoors and then lets it walk back out again, and the ledger recorded both halves of that.
A decree can empty a market in a week. Keeping it empty is a different problem, and it is not a legal one — it is a question of who is standing at the far end of a road at four in the morning.
The road did what the decree could not, in reverse
The southern third of Bioko is the Gran Caldera de Luba, an enormous collapsed crater running down to the sea, written into the national protected area network by the law of 2000 and protected for most of its history by the simple fact that reaching it meant walking for two days. Hunters did go in. They could not carry much out. Then, in the 2010s, a track was cut south from the highlands towards Ureca on the coast, and the arithmetic changed: what had been a two-day walk each way became a drive, and carcasses from the south stopped being a curiosity on the market tables and became routine. The road was not built to enable hunting. It was built because several hundred people live at Ureca and had no vehicle access to a hospital, a school or a market, which is an entirely reasonable thing for a government to want to fix. Both of those statements are true and the daily count is what makes it possible to argue about them with numbers instead of opinions.
Who shoots it, and who eats it
The other thing the record shows is who this trade is actually for, and it is not what the phrase bushmeat suggests to most people who read it in Europe. Very little of what reaches Malabo is subsistence food. It is a premium urban product, priced above imported frozen chicken, bought in a capital city whose incomes were transformed after the Zafiro field came onstream in 1996 and the oil money arrived. Demand went up because Malabo got richer, not because anyone got hungrier. That inverts the usual assumption completely: the pressure on the forest is coming from the top of the economy rather than the bottom, and it means the levers that work on rural poverty do not touch it. The hunters are the visible end of a chain whose paying customer is a salaried household in the city.
What a long record is worth
The counting is run out of Moka, a village at fourteen hundred metres in the southern highlands, by a partnership formed in 1998 between Drexel University in Philadelphia and the Universidad Nacional de Guinea Ecuatorial. It is a joint operation rather than a foreign one, and the useful measure of that is who does the walking — Equatoguinean students and staff, on the market floor in Malabo and on the nesting beaches at Ureca, year after year. The turtle work at the southern beaches runs on the same principle: four species come ashore there, and the numbers only mean something because somebody has been on the sand for enough seasons to know what a normal one looks like.
That is the whole argument for the clipboard. A single visit to the market produces a photograph and an opinion. Twenty-nine years of visits produce a line on a graph that can be laid against a decree, a road and an oil price, and tested. Equatorial Guinea has the shortest possible list of things it is written about abroad, and a wildlife dataset that most far richer countries cannot match is not on it. It should be. The tables at the back of the market are the same tables they always were; what has changed is that somebody now knows exactly what has crossed them, and can say so.