WE TOUCHED DOWN at noon, precisely, and dragged our stiff, over-fed bodies through what felt like a substance – Douala’s humid midday heat. In the small uncrowded Arrivals Area Rachel muttered, ‘There’s a bureaucrat to every passenger!’ Anxiously we waited by the conveyor-belt: was our irreplaceable gear in Douala or Ulan Bator? Beside us stood Rosa, a young Italian linguist specialising in Pidgin and embarking on three months’ research in Anglophone Cameroon. She was being met by a compatriot, a road-building engineer, and had generously offered us a lift into Douala. When her suit-cases appeared she promised to wait for us at the entrance.
Dreadful things can happen to rucksacks on aeroplanes and at Heathrow we had packed ours in a tough orange survival-bag, together with bit and bridle, riding-hat and picket. The picket had been specially designed and made for this trek by a young welder friend who knows a lot about horses – but not enough, as we were to discover, about Africa. It was a formidable object: two feet long, heavy and thick, with a wide loop on top, a four-inch half-bar and foot-long swivel-chain two-thirds of the way down and a very sharp point. To anyone unfamiliar with pickets (99 per cent of most modern populations) it must have looked like a weapon bought in some kinky Martial Arts shop.
Our sack was the last item to be disgorged. As we marched out to the Customs area – Murphy Junior wearing a hard hat and a bridle round her neck, Murphy Senior grasping the picket – a frisson of alarm went through the assembled bureaucrats and jostling porters. We might have been arrested then and there – instead of much later – but for Rosa’s friend. Bernard had taken the precaution of bringing with him a senior police officer who quickly surmounted, on our behalf, the numerous hurdles of a Third World airport. Yet even a police escort did not deter one customs officer – while our protector was coping with ‘health’ – from attempting to appropriate a tin of mini-cigars.
‘For me!’ he exclaimed gleefully, delving into my hand-luggage and grabbing a tin.
‘Not for you!’ I contradicted with a wave of the picket.
‘I am joking!’ he gasped, dropping the tin and backing away. I began to see that this picket might have secondary uses.
Some four-letter words are peculiarly graphic. When a city has been described as a ‘dump’ the speaker need say no more. At once we can visualise the place, on whichever continent it may be, and so I had vivid preconceptions about Douala. Those few who know it speak ill of it. I cannot recall a single person, Cameroonian or otherwise, who did not denigrate its climate, architecture, insects, morals, entertainments, prices and unrelieved dullness. Clearly no one would choose to live at sea-level on the Bight of Benin, yet for me there was an intense excitement about this arrival in Douala, my first point of contact with Black Africa. (I don’t count a 1967 trek through northern Ethiopia, with its distinctive history and Coptic culture, or a 1983 journey through Madagascar, which is not purely African.)
All was rampantly green by the road from the airport: trees, shrubs, vines, grasses and crops seemed aglow despite an overcast sky – an eager greenery that invades and softens the city streets. The traffic seemed sparse, the few pedestrians sluggish – it was siesta time – and both roads and pavements were scarred with the standard man-trap holes. Behind expensive bars, restaurants and shops, catering for Douala’s large expatriate colony, we glimpsed pullulating street-markets, rowdy shebeens and collapsing or collapsed lean-tos. Just as some ugly people can be attractive, so is Cameroon’s biggest city – which has a population of less than half a million. Tales of murders, muggings, pickpocketings and car-thefts are common, yet one’s antennae pick up no threats. Most of the inhabitants are recent arrivals from all over Cameroon, optimists who imagine that fortunes can be made where industry burgeons, and the atmosphere is more rural than urban.
Rosa had booked into the Catholic Mission city-centre guest house. Otherwise the choice was between (tower-block) Tourist Hotels, where bed-minus-breakfast costs £40 to £60 a night, and Unclassified Hotels – otherwise known as ‘Africa hotels’ – at £4 a night. In the latter, asserted Bernard, our property, our virtue and even our lives would be gravely endangered. So we left our gear in his flat and accompanied Rosa to the Mission, five minutes’ walk away.
Missionaries have been busy in Douala for more than a century and we found a substantial but characterless three-storey colonial building half-surrounding a bare dusty compound. Beside a broken-down truck, full of medical supplies, a young Dutch priest was being semi-hysterical. Someone at the docks, where the vehicle was held up for five weeks, had removed a vital part. What to do? The priest was a newcomer to Africa and had moral scruples about giving bribes …
In a tiled hallway languid goldfish drifted through the clear water of an ornamental pond fed from a coolly-splashing mini-fountain. A row of wall-cabinets, facing the door, contained specimens (happily deceased) of Cameroon’s more spectacular creepy-crawlies. I averted my eyes from the palm-spider – very common, the size of a tea-plate and the only living creature for which Gerald Durrell can feel no affection.
A surly German priest in ‘Reception’ could find no record of Rosa’s booking. Sister Veronica might know something about it but wasn’t around. When would she be around? No one knew. But all bookings must be confirmed before 5 p.m. We tried to confirm them with Father Surly but only Sister Veronica could handle bookings.
Back in the hallway Rosa wondered, ‘Do Europeans become mentally African after they’ve been here for years?’ As she had an appointment with a potential landlady we volunteered to wait for Sister Veronica and sat on a wide verandah overlooking a swimming-pool fringed with hibiscus, dwarf palms and poinsettia.
This was the Mission bar; a tall money-in-the-slot refrigerator dispensed beer and soft drinks (same price) to those who struck it with sufficient violence on both sides simultaneously. Here we had our first bottle of excellent Cameroonian beer – the first of how many hundreds?
During the next two hours a cross-section of expatriates wandered in, sat around for a while and wandered out. There were pairs of nuns coming from or returning to the bush, and emaciated young lay-missionaries who looked as though their guts and blood were permanently parasite-infested, and elderly priests with weather-withered skins, yellowish eyes and nicotine-stained fingers. Dermatologically, even the youngest looked as though they had already spent too long in West Africa. Then there was a French colonial antique – part of the establishment – very short-bodied and long-armed, with a tangled white beard, spindly bow legs and a gross belly hanging over knee-length khaki shorts. Otherwise he wore only pink plastic flip-flops and a limp straw sombrero. His lips were set in a demi-snarl, revealing jaggedly broken teeth, and he was forever busy: refilling the refrigerator, testing the water in the pool, hurrying in and out of storerooms, fiddling with air-conditioning machines.
Father Surly came to the refrigerator for a beer but ignored us; he had a bushy blond beard and hard pale eyes. On that verandah no one ever smiled and conversation was restricted to occasional murmured comments. Even the few servants who drifted to and fro were – most unusually for Cameroonians – dour and silent.
We received quite a few openly hostile glances. ‘I suppose they think we’re spongers’ remarked Rachel, ‘and you can’t blame them.’ She told me then about a scandalous guidebook, available in English and German, which advises ‘over-landers’ on how to travel through West Africa without spending any money. Such travellers were beginning to infest Cameroon when political chaos in the surrounding countries put a stop to their predatory gallop.
At 4.30 I went map-hunting, leaving Rachel to cope with the evanescent Sister Veronica. In London, where we had been able to get only United States Air Force aeronautical charts – hardly ideal for trekkers though better than nothing – a young man, then writing a guidebook to West Africa, had misinformed us that detailed maps were available only in Yaounde. In fact we could have bought them from the Topographical Institute at 36 rue Joffre, ten minutes walk from the Mission; it was consistent with our whole Cameroonian experience that we made this discovery only on our return to Douala, when we were about to fly home. However, it wasn’t for lack of assistance that I failed to find even an oil-company road-map; two men and a woman went out of their way to lead me to stationery-cum-bookshops.
I then began to notice a difference between the évolué and the ‘normal’ Cameroonian – a difference not apparent in Anglo-Cameroon where the colonial power had no grand design for the mass-production of Black Englishmen. Douala’s affluent ‘Black Frenchmen’ (and women) were perceptibly less friendly than the majority. They also looked less happy, as though they saw being sophisticated and Frenchified as incompatible with spontaneous bonhomie. A superficial French influence is apparent in all Franco-Cameroon’s small towns – themselves French or German creations – but only during our brief visits to Douala and the capital, Yaounde, did we encounter this disconcertingly haughty middle class.
The late afternoon heat was just tolerable; I sweated steadily, but not to saturation point, as I walked down the crowded Avenue Poincare. Long limousines were parked on the pavements, forcing pedestrians to disrupt the traffic and risk their lives by walking on the streets. Watching for tourists, I saw only expatriates: one can’t confuse the two. France is notorious for retaining an economic grip on ex-colonies (unless, as in Madagascar, neo-colonialism is actively combatted) and independent Cameroon has many more French residents than colonial Cameroon ever had.
At street junctions cheerful men stood by tiny cigarette stalls selling American brands at negotiable prices. Outside smart European-type delicatessens cheerful women stood by tiny vegetable stalls hoping to sell a few avocados, or misshapen blotchy tomatoes, or minute purple onions. The larger wayside greengrocery stalls, some twenty yards long, were piled with local and European fruits and vegetables including, absurdly, imported Golden Delicious apples. Douala’s big stores stock everything, at a price. Given the money (as expatriates are, or they wouldn’t be in Cameroon) one could live as well here as in Paris. Yet the rich-poor contrast is much less distressing than in Bombay or Lima.
One’s first day in a new country is largely a sensory experience: body-contact between the stranger and a myriad unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells. These have an acute – oddly animal – importance while the traveller’s mind is uncluttered by personal knowledge or acquired opinions. There is nothing to puzzle over, analyse, dissect; one is merely a passive, though excited, receiver of impressions. Also one’s psychic pores are open wide, absorbing messages – their significance not yet understood – from a whole new cultural-spiritual environment. That first day rarely deceives. And having escaped from Douala’s rather tiresome West End, I felt certain that I was going to enjoy Cameroon and the Cameroonians.
In a large side-street bar beer cost 120 CFA (about 25p – 100 Cameroonian francs is equivalent to about 22p) a half-litre, as compared to 1,200 CFA (about £2.50) in the Akwa Palace. I had to shout my order above three different tunes simultaneously emanating from battered juke-boxes. The place was so crowded – mainly with young men and women – that I took my drink outside; a row of blue plastic beer crates had been placed on the pavement for the overflow. A young man from Bamenda, now working for the Port Authority, at once joined me, shook hands and asked, ‘You are missionary?’ (This, I thought, spoke well for the present generation of missionaries; I doubt if many of their predecessors were found in bars.)
When I explained myself – not an easy task – the young man looked worried. ‘This journey is too difficult! You must not walk, you will be tired! In Cameroon we have plenty bush-taxis – you must use them!’
‘But,’ I said, ‘we like to get away from motor-roads, into the bush.’
The young man leant forward, almost toppling off his crate, and grasped my elbow. ‘In the bush people are savages! You will not like them. They have no toilets, no beds, no water, no bread, no shops, no light from electricity … They eat only fufu – you know fufu? It is not nice!’ (Fufu is a tasteless but sustaining maize-flour dumpling.)
I assured him that almost any food is nice at the end of a day’s trekking and stood up to go.
‘Where is your daughter?’ asked the young man. ‘I would like to meet her, please bring her here now. She is married?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘she’s only eighteen.’
‘Eighteen!’ exclaimed the young man. ‘Why are you waiting? Does she like Cameroonian husband? Can we meet now?’
‘Not now,’ I said, ‘because early tomorrow we go to Bamenda. But perhaps – who knows? – another time …’
Returning to the Mission, I relished not being one of a dominant, and too often domineering, White majority. Recently I had been living in a British city where many Afro-Caribbeans were tortured by a sense of inferiority or embittered by White refusals to accept them as equals. Now it felt good to be among Blacks who could unselfconsciously regard me as a potential mother-in-law.
Sister Veronica was still missing so Bernard invited us all to spend the night at his construction company’s flat, where three bedrooms lay empty. But we hesitated to impose on him until Sister Veronica, materialising out of the dusk, revealed that a three-bed room would cost us 4,500 CFA (L10) each.
At 5 a.m. Douala’s wide colonial streets were dark, silent and very hot. After walking a mile or so, we were sweat-soaked. According to Bernard’s houseboy, Bamenda bush-taxis left at dawn from the railway station. He was however mistaken and someone advised us to take a shared taxi to another ‘motopark’ four miles away. We shared with two thin men, three fat women and five squirming children.
As the sun rose we stood bewildered among scores of buses and bush-taxis. Hearing us ask for the Bamenda rank, a kind young man in a dark lounge suit explained that one could get to Bamenda only from outside the Cameroon Hotel, several miles away.
We shared the next taxi with an adolescent soldier, stationed in Bamenda, who was pertinaciously curious. ‘Why must you walk in the bush? This is strange! What is your reason? Does your government pay for this work? Have you walked in other places?’
I explained that I walk in many places and then write books about them.
‘Aha!’ said the soldier. ‘So it has become a habit!’
The Cameroon Hotel looked very ‘Unclassified’. Beside it a strip of wasteland – the motopark – was crowded and cheerfully chaotic. A smart white minibus, labelled ‘Bamenda’ on the windscreen, would leave when full and already half the seats were booked. Its ticket-seller-cum-driver (tall, obese, grey-haired) treated all women with hectoring contempt. When I had handed over our fares – 4,000 CFA (almost L9) each – he demanded our passports, then disappeared with them. At once a little knot of tension tied itself inside me: every traveller’s gut-reaction to being even momentarily out of sight of vital documents. Nobody had warned us that all bush-taxi passengers must hand over identity cards or passports when buying tickets; the details are entered on a list which drivers have to show at frequent police check-points. Evidently my anxiety was obvious; a slim young man, with tribal incisions on his cheek-bones, stepped forward to shake my hand. ‘You have no problem,’ he soothed, ‘because this is the custom. Your passports will safely come back with your tickets.’ Which they did – fifty minutes later.
Cameroon’s public transport is well organised. Notices stating the official fare (so many CFA per kilometre) are displayed in every vehicle and even foreigners are not overcharged. But undercharging can happen when passengers know the driver and all uniformed servants of the State travel free in the best (front) seats. Baggage charges vary. On that minibus we paid 1,000 CFA (L2.25) for both rucksacks. Had they travelled free we would have been given no receipt.
Rachel returned disgruntled from a breakfast-hunt. ‘No chai-khanas here,’ she complained. But moments later a mobile chai-khana (teahouse) appeared – a ragged, barefooted man carrying two buckets. One contained opaque water, the other a huge kettle and several mugs.
‘You can’t get hepatitis twice,’ Rachel reminded me. (That was our viral souvenir from Madagascar.) We chose to ignore the other possibilities in the bucket and when two mugs had been rinsed out and vigorously shaken they were filled with aromatic clove tea, scalding hot and heavily sugared.
Then a baker’s barrow arrived, wheeled by a stocky youth shouting his wares in Pidgin. To us his prices seemed alarmingly high but soon every tiny fist in sight was clutching a sticky bun or doughnut. We splurged on two baguettes and I produced out of a sock six triangles of hoarded Aeroflot soft cream cheese.
‘Why,’ demanded Rachel, ‘is our breakfast in a sock?’
‘Because,’ I explained, ‘I’ve been carrying it carefully all morning as hand-luggage. It might have been squashed in a rucksack.’
‘You get madder by the minute,’ said Rachel.
Our water-bottles had not been filled, since between us we were shouldering a horse’s load of gear, and already we felt dehydrated. Opposite the motopark stretched a line of ramshackle lock-up stalls but, unusually, there was no bar in sight. Shelves of expensive bottled drinking water promised relief until I noticed something suspicious; the labels looked soiled, as did the liquid. Turning away, I noticed a small boy lifting off his head a crate of full bottles which he shelved before disappearing with a crate of empties. I followed him. Around a nearby corner he was filling the empties from a wayside tank of murky water, then skilfully replacing the metal caps.
Even in that smallish motostop crowd the variety of types made our crude European image of Black Africans – ‘primitives’ about whom one may loftily generalise – seem at once laughable and offensive. Observing the different features, skin-shades, body-structures, hairstyles, languages, garments, gestures, jewellery, miens and tribal markings, I felt almost intimidated by this diversity. Technologically Black Africa may be primitive, but already I was sensing more complexities and subtleties than ever an outsider could cope with. Clearly nobody could even begin to understand Cameroon in three months – or, perhaps, three decades. Before travelling in Asia it is possible to establish some rapport with the countries to be visited through translations of their literature – a preparation one can’t make for Africa. Perhaps this is why Cameroon seemed to me immeasurably more mysterious than the ‘Mysterious East’.
At last loading began. An agile young man leaped onto the minibus roof and received from his muscular colleague six sacks of maize, two enormous woven baskets of rice, ten jerry-cans of palm oil, three rolls of raffia matting, four gigantic aluminium cauldrons serving as suitcases, eight crates of empty bottles, countless plastic hold-alls, several amorphous bundles – and two rucksacks.
Those passengers who had been sitting on a low wall, coping with innumerable offspring, now stood up expectantly – detaching infants from nipples and toddlers from severely mauled sticky buns. But our hour had not yet come. We were, it transpired, waiting for two wealthy Fulani merchants, dignified and handsome in freshly-ironed pale blue robes, who arrived by taxi at 7.45 a.m. and at once occupied the roomy seats beside the driver. No hanging about with the proles for them!
When we were given the signal to pack in I found myself in the centre seat of the middle row, ill-placed to observe the landscape. On my right, a puny, heavily-pregnant girl alternately slept and crocheted baby-clothes. On my left, a tall, svelte young woman was being witty in French about the problem of what to do with her very long legs. As we were about to start two elderly steatopygous women, with bosoms to match, slid back the door and squeezed aboard, breathing heavily. Extra seats materialised in the narrow aisle and we all politely tried to make our persons and hand-luggage more compact.
Compared to Malagasy motor journeys this six-hour drive seemed sybaritic; the new velvet-smooth road was of an excellence rarely found in Britain and never in Ireland. For two hours we remained in the low humid zone, where occasional rubber plantations interrupted miles of dense jungle. Near the villages women and girls hacked rhythmically at the soft red earth – bent low, using short-handled, broad-bladed hoes. Some grannies (probably no older than myself) had grievously curved spines and moved stiffly. Many men sat around talking and drinking and laughing.
In this comparatively Westernised region most dwellings were breeze-block-built, tin-roofed, shoddy and surrounded by a squalid abundance of ‘consumerist’ litter. It seemed that no one took any pride in their homes or gardens, that here were people suffering from incurable culture-shock Although modern building materials are chosen for convenience or swank, the Cameroonians remain uninterested in using them creatively, or even sensibly.
The road began to climb near the base of Mount Koupe, which seemed higher than its 6,000 feet after so much flatness. Beyond and above many forested foothills we entered Cameroon’s most densely populated province, an area so fertile that it can support more than one hundred inhabitants per square kilometre – as compared to one per kilometre in the Tchabal Mbabo. Now the air felt blessedly cool and in the near distance, heaving along the horizon, were the sort of chunky mountains that over-stimulate my adrenalin.
Abruptly Bamenda appeared, sprawling across a red-dust plain 1,000 feet below the edge of an unexpected escarpment. It is a fast-growing town of some 70,000 inhabitants, its buildings mainly one-storeyed, its streets mainly rough, its people – we soon discovered – mainly warmhearted and welcoming.
From the motopark a taxi took us to a grotty ex-colonial office block where we hoped to find David Hughes in the MIDENO headquarters. Already we looked like vagrants and MIDENO’S well-groomed receptionist viewed us with distaste verging on horror. David was not expecting us on any particular day, owing to the vagaries of Cameroon’s postal service, so I sent up a chit: ‘Rachel and Dervla have arrived’. The receptionist looked affronted when we were immediately summoned to her Big Man’s office.
The Hughes introduced us not only to a reliable horse-dealer but also to Western Cameroon’s history and customs. Unlike many expatriates, they lived not merely in Cameroon but with it: concerned about its problems, affectionately studying its traditions, camping all over the Grassfields (see map on p. viii), while making friends and influencing people, agriculturally, as best they could. They were too experienced to be starry-eyed, too sympathetic to be impatient. Without our four days as their pampered guests and eager pupils, the social nuances of Cameroonian rural life would have greatly perplexed us.
Jane’s letters had mentioned Doi, a rich young Fulani from whom the Hughes had bought their own horses four years ago, and to whom they had sadly sold them back a few days previously, their departure from Cameroon being imminent. At 7 a.m. on a cool clear morning (all golden light and blue shadows) we set off for Doi’s compound in Jane’s jeep, climbing steeply on a rough red track below a rugged ridge with ‘bite marks’ along its crest – volcanic craters containing sacred lakes. Everyone, recognising the jeep, greeted Jane. And at one point a messenger bearing a letter for David came leaping down a precipice from the local Fon’s invisible hilltop palace.
This Fon had served twenty-five years in the Cameroonian army and recently retired, on a meagre sergeant-major’s pension, having been selected as ruler after his father’s death. When we met him next day at a Bamenda Hash Harriers’ meet (he was a keen cross-country runner), I observed him overcoming two awkwardnesses with aristocratic aplomb. Fons may not shake hands with anyone, ever – a confusing rule for strangers, who will at once have learned that vigorous handshaking is among Cameroon’s most important courtesies, neglected only by boors. At the meet were two newly-arrived expatriates’ relatives, a frail elderly French lady and a rather solemn little German boy. When the French woman offered her hand the Fon bowed graciously, gently grasped her forearm with both hands and greeted her so charmingly that she could not possibly have resented (or even noticed) her hand being ignored. Again, when the little boy shyly extended his hand he found himself, to his evident delight, being hugged and kissed instead of formally greeted.
Doi’s isolated compound occupied one of the province’s highest points, an 8,500-foot flat ridge-top overlooking some hundred miles of Grassfields. We were startled to see a shiny red saloon parked amidst the thatched huts and even more startled by the news that Doi was still abed, having just returned from a four-day visit to an international agricultural show in Paris. He was, Jane explained, an atypical Fulani. One of his stepmothers was an Englishwoman who had retired to England on being widowed and with whom he still kept fondly in touch – even visiting her, occasionally, in Surrey.
Yet in most respects this was a classic Fulani family. Doi’s senior wife (the senior of two: doubtless two more will follow) was tall, lissom, poised – but shy of strangers, for she rarely left the compound. We shook hands, then saw little more of her. She was busy around the kitchen-hut, cooking breakfast for Doi, his adult brothers, an aged uncle and sundry ‘followers’.
In the men’s living-room we watched them eating mountains of rice, with fried plantain and giant omelettes, while we drank Bournvita imported from Nigeria. The small, dark room was furnished with grubby easy chairs, an unstable sofa and a low table. Several garments and a kerosene lantern hung from nails in the mud wall and an Islamic calendar depicted Mecca. The only other decoration was an enormous wall-chart, new from Paris, illustrating the various parasites – many times enlarged – that infest farm animals all over the world.
It is a Fulani characteristic to live simply, eating and dressing well but never squandering money on unnecessary possessions. Most other Cameroonians, if they could afford to fly to Paris for a long weekend, would live in an ostentatious villa, garishly furnished and equipped with a plethora of electrical gadgets – mainly ornamental, because of power shortages. And of course their womenfolk would lead easier lives, not cooking on charcoal between three stones and washing-up in the nearest stream.
While Jane gossiped with Doi, no one else spoke. The purpose of our visit was generally known but not mentioned until a small boy had cleared away the dishes and a slightly larger boy had handed around ewer, basin and towel.
Then Doi stood up, adjusted his robe with a few fluent flicks and assured me, ‘I will have news in a day or two. It’s hard to find the horse you need but I will search and search – though I am a very busy man. Because you are Jane’s friend I’ll find you a good horse – the best! Don’t have any worry.’
No one, at that stage, was sordid enough to mention money. Doi said he could also provide a saddle, saddle-blanket and bridle; he looked faintly disappointed on hearing that we had brought our own head-collar and bridle.
On the way home Jane told us that horses are comparative newcomers to the Grassfields. They were first seen during the 1820s when a band of Ba’ni from the north raided the Bamenda Plateau. The mounted invaders – wearing pantaloons and flowing gowns, making martial music on flutes and armpit drums, attacking with bows and arrows – terrorised the peaceable Grassfields tribes who fled into the roughest mountains where no horse could follow. Ironically, while the Ba’ni were wreaking havoc in the Grassfields the Fulani were doing likewise in the Ba’ni homelands.
At Jane’s bank she introduced me to one of the staff, then wisely abandoned us; many British-orderly queues stretched away into the middle distance. Because I was twice directed to join an irrelevant queue it took two and a quarter hours to change our French franc travellers’ cheques.
One thousand pounds in Cameroonian francs is dauntingly bulky. The temptation was to assume the bank clerk had got it right and make way for the next customer. But I told myself to have sense and stood firmly at his glass-enclosed cubby-hole where he could watch my every move as I counted and counted and counted pile after pile after pile of ragged, smelly notes. Out of the corner of my eye I observed his increasing tension. He was prepared for my challenge and without argument handed over what could so easily have been his ‘commission’ – the equivalent of £50.
Carefully, I packed the notes into two deep double-zipped side pockets of my trekking-slacks. ‘You are a strange shape!’ commented Rachel, surveying my hips. I wasn’t worried about my silhouette but being so well worth robbing did make me feel a trifle uneasy.
In an earth-floored off-licence (as bars are oddly known in Anglophone Cameroon) we were welcomed by half-a-dozen men of varying ages and types. As we drank our beer – the only alcohol sold in most off-licences – a group of giggling small girls with babies on backs crowded excitedly around the unglazed window just behind us. This surprised me, since Bamenda has a few score expatriate residents; but perhaps not many expatriates drink in off-licences.
Most of the passers-by looked clean, well fed and well dressed. Only a few were barefooted. The majority carried head-loads: anything from a lone tin of Ovaltine to a colossal bale of cloth. Many women, even young women, were grossly overweight, though one never sees fat pre-puberty girls. Obesity is a sign of beauty – something to be worked (eaten) for – and also of prosperity.
The locals think of Bamenda not as a town but as a series of villages, known as ‘quarters’. These straggle along the base of the escarpment, extending up the lower slopes where the gradient permits, and each has its quarterchief – a title I at first found slightly disconcerting. The mud-brick, tin-roofed dwellings vary in size but most are surrounded by flowering shrubs, banana plants and mango trees. Short-haired dwarf goats are tethered on patches of scrub. (The rich eat goat-meat; beef is for the hoi polloi and mutton is rare.) Plump dogs lie on shady verandahs beneath laden washing-lines and don’t bark at White strangers. Men lounge around listening to compound-blasters. Women carry loads to and from the market, pound maize for fufu, sit in doorways making children’s clothes on antique sewing machines, dig or weed in little gardens, fetch water from distant standpipes and firewood from the rapidly dwindling forest far away over the top of the escarpment.
In pre-colonial days the men of this region warred and slave-raided occasionally, hunted regularly and spent much time repairing or building thatched huts and maintaining local tracks and footbridges. They also smelted a massive amount of iron and made a variety of tools which they traded over long distances, bartering them for goods unavailable in their own area. These occupations have long since been eliminated, while the women’s daily chores remain no less demanding – if not more so, since many men can now afford only one wife.
Yet the poorest men still work hard. In Bamenda one sees them descending from the blue mountains high above the escarpment, balancing formidable loads of firewood on their heads. Children, too, carry huge loads, their little neck muscles bulging under the strain. One morning I met a barefooted, sweat-soaked father and son hurrying down the rough path. On the steepest stretch the little fellow, aged perhaps seven or eight, slipped and fell, scattering his load over the inaccessible cliff. At once he burst into tears, his chubby face piteously puckered, his eyes fixed despairingly on those precious branches which had cost so much labour to collect and bring thus far. Carefully then his father laid down his long load – not an easy manoeuvre on a narrow path – and knelt to take his son in his arms and cuddle him and stroke his hair.
That Friday evening everyone rejoiced because there was a violent thunderstorm with torrential rain – the first rain for months. Cameroon’s ‘little rains’ are supposed to start on 15 March and people begin to worry if they are even a few days late. The electricity promptly went off for several hours and we dined by lamplight.
Next morning Jane drove us down to the market to buy equipment. She had presented us with a plastic bucket, a kettle and a saucepan; so we needed only two mugs, two bowls, twenty yards of leading/tethering rope and two sacks (old-fashioned gunny-bags, not fragile nylon jobs) to act as pannier-bags. Cameroon’s First World cost of living had caused me to scrap a grandiose plan to buy real saddle-bags, or have them made.
The market was crowded, vociferous, colourful, friendly. A maze of rough alleyways, muddy after the rain, ran between ramshackle stalls selling everything from French toothpaste and Taiwan T-shirts to Nigerian plastic floor mats, red-brown palm oil in dirty five-gallon tins, bananas, avocados, groundnuts, plastic shoes, strange spices, bundles of tree bark, miniscule tins of Italian tomato purée, piles of rice and maize flour, bloody mounds of freshly slaughtered beef, pungent dried fish, boxes of lump sugar, brilliant bales of cotton, ox-tails in buckets of slimy water, giant Chinese thermos flasks, local and American cigarettes, bunches of a green vegetable (or weed) with which we were to become very familiar, and sardines from Peru, which we bought for sentimental rather than gastronomic reasons.
A personable young Nigerian merchant sold us blue nylon rope, measuring the metres fingertip-to-elbow. Cameroon, he said, is a much happier country than Nigeria. ‘It is safer, too. Here we have very, very little crime. In Nigeria’s towns life has become too dangerous – so I left!’
Jute sacks were harder to find; but at last I noticed a few neatly folded by the entrance to a cramped, windowless hut. An ancient Fulani squatted in one corner, rocking to and fro and mumbling prayers. He had a hawk nose and trembling hands and tried to persuade me that I didn’t need two empty sacks, that I couldn’t possibly need them. Then he sold both for 1,100 CFA (about £2.50).
That afternoon’s multiracial meet of Bamenda’s Hash Harriers was a memorable occasion. David, who imported this bizarre offshoot of the Raj to Cameroon, was retiring as ‘Grand Hash Master’ and after a strenuous two-hour cross-country race his boozy farewell party began at sunset on a high mountainside. Midway through these revels Doi arrived with the good news that a sound horse would be available for our inspection early on Monday morning.
Next day, after Sunday lunch, I explored the hills behind the Hughes’s bungalow. The sun appeared only occasionally, between low banks of dove-grey cloud, and along the highest ridges small wisps of vapour drifted one after another in single file like ghostly presences. A narrow red track looped up and down between new hoed fields, well tended banana-groves, stands of palm-trees, stretches of scrubland (not useless, but lying fallow) and patches of forest. In every direction billowing smoke marked fields being ‘fire-weeded’ in preparation for sowing. Such fires often run wild and on a slope near the Hughes’s a young eucalyptus plantation was wastefully aflame.
All the traffic was pedestrian. Everyone smiled and made welcoming noises; most adults shook hands. Those schooled in colonial times usually speak better English than their juniors – many of whom speak none, only Pidgin, and a tribal language.
At one hairpin bend I paused to listen. From several large compounds, set well back from the track, came sounds of merriment: laughter, song, playful teasing, teenage tittering. When the juvenile population noticed me they swarmed forwards, clad in little or nothing, delirious with excitement – shouting greetings, waving, running away in mock alarm when I approached, turning somersaults in the dust to entertain me, dancing and singing on the roadside ditches. The traveller in Cameroon doesn’t need to be told that 60 per cent of the population is under sixteen.
Viewed ecologically, the Africans’ procreative recklessness chills the blood – how long before there is a Cameroonian Famine Appeal? Viewed otherwise, these happy, loved and loving children seem a moving affirmation of the Black appreciation of life, as a gift to be enjoyed. A positive sense of enjoyment often emanates from a Black crowd – a group of fieldworkers, a market throng, a family gathering – even if the individuals concerned are not engaged in any obviously enjoyable activity.
Those positive energies are invigorating, though they have inspired no great technological or artistic achievements. But in our society only a few are involved in ‘great achievements’ – from some of which millions benefit without understanding them, while the individual feels increasingly insignificant in an impersonal world controlled by a greedy oligarchy. In contrast, most rural Africans have significant personal duties and how these are performed can be observed – and praised or blamed – by all.
These reflections were interrupted by Aziki, an English Literature student home for the Easter holidays from Yaoundé University. As we walked together he explained sadly, ‘For us from this side Yaounde is difficult. Too many Francophones think studying English is time-wasting. And they have too much control of our university, like we’re only second-class citizens. Jane Austen is my favourite English writer – you know about her? Her books are not complicated. They are about village people, so if you come from a village you understand them – though English villages are rich and ours are poor.’
Aziki already knew that I was staying with the Hughes; in Bamenda White visitors are uncommon enough to arouse curiosity. He pleaded, ‘Could you not make your friend change his mind? You know how it will be when Mr Hughes leaves? MIDENO will fall to bits! It will be inefficient, corrupt, with jobs only for followers of Big Men. Then in a few years the government must call for another Englishman to put it right. I know how it is because my brother works there and now is sad because the policy is “Cameroonians should run everything!” But MIDENO is not African. It’s a European idea so it needs a European to keep it organised, to make decisions. We know how a thing like MIDENO should be run, we’re not stupid. But we’re too much afraid of responsibility. We push problems from office to office until all files are lost and nothing is done. You can’t lose your job if you make no decision, only if you make the wrong decision!’
Aziki’s outburst (the first of many such) recalled the standard colonialists’ blanket condemnation: ‘Africa has no tradition of service or integrity’. He had however used a key phrase: ‘It’s a European idea’. For centuries, throughout Western Cameroon, a stable farming-and-trading society depended for its prosperity on a complex and highly developed tradition of ‘service and integrity’. But it was too inflexible to withstand the impact of Fulani invaders, never mind the imposition of Western ideas.
At sunset we called on close friends of the Hughes, Joy and John Parkinson, to whom the Murphy Expedition, with all its hypothetical future woes/problems/diseases/crises, was being bequeathed. Little did they – or we – then realise what that introduction augured.
Later we spread our enormous USAF charts on the Hughes’s dining-table and sought guidance.
‘Those sheets would be just fine,’ said David, ‘if you were touring by light aircraft. But I can’t see too many footpaths marked. And half the place-names are figments of the Pentagon’s imagination. The locals won’t know where you’re talking about – they use utterly different names.’
On the Hughes’s map we plotted a bush-path route from Bamenda to N’gaoundere, via the remote and wondrously beautiful Mbabo mountains. Our first week or so would be spent crossing the highlands of Western Cameroon – ‘the Grassfields’ – which made global news in August 1986 when Lake Nyos, a crater lake, exploded one evening killing hundreds of people and thousands of cattle. The shadow cast over many Cameroonians by this natural yet mysterious disaster was perceptible from the day of our arrival, though most seemed not to want to discuss it. No one said anything about the subjects being in any way taboo, yet it did have a strong taboo feel. The trauma had been particularly severe for the Grassfields folk, whose small territory is studded with some three dozen volcanic lakes. In August 1984 a gas release from Lake Manoun, sixty miles south of Lake Nyos, had killed thirty-seven people as they walked home from their fields at sunset. That tragedy, almost certainly provoked by a landslide, received little publicity at the time but was uneasily noted around Nyos, where odd happenings had been observed within the previous decade or so. Most experts believe that only five or six of the Grassfields crater lakes are potential killers. However, few locals are aware of this and the Nyos catastrophe, following on Manoun, has inevitably caused them to fear that their nearest lake will be the next to explode.
The Hughes guaranteed that our bush-path route would keep us at an agreeably high altitude, apart from one unavoidable hot plain, at 1,500 feet, between Ntem and Somie. Beyond the sparsely inhabited Tchabal Mbabo, we planned to explore the virtually uninhabited Tchabal Gangdaba before turning east towards N’gaoundere. This important Muslim town lies as far north as the climate would permit us to trek; beyond its escarpment Cameroon slopes steeply towards the hot lands south of Lake Chad. And, as Jane remarked, a Fulani Lamidat would be a good sales-point for our horse.