WE KNEW THE stage beyond Nthambaw would be rough. This was ‘the hot plain’ and our Old Augustinian friends, bred on the cool heights, were appalled at the idea of anybody – never mind two Whites – crossing it on foot. But there was no cooler route to the Mbabo mountains.
On the outskirts of Nthambaw a dramatic waterfall, hundreds of feet high, flashed whitely down the opposite mountain – a vivid illustration of the perversity of Africa’s terrain and climate. The region’s severe water-shortage had caused our friends to take much trouble, at dawn, in order to fill Egbert’s bucket. (He then refused to drink; we were discovering that he liked liquid refreshment only during the midday hours.)
From Nthambaw a neglected colonial ‘motorable track’ – happily devoid of motors – descended through scrub-covered mountains uninhabited because of their steepness and aridity. Yet several migrating herds, lean but healthy, were gaining sustenance (‘grazing’ is not the word) on gradients more suited to goats. During the morning two black and gold snakes, scarcely a foot long, crossed the track; and we marvelled at the variety, brilliant colouring and enormous size of the local butterflies. By 11.30 a.m. we were almost down – and it felt like it. When a cut-short appeared we wandered across a gradual, thinly forested slope in search of lunch for Egbert and turned him loose where tall bunches of stiff, yellowish grass grew between the trees. By then we knew he didn’t want to leave us; he had been untethered all night on the village green.
Our own banana supply had run out but we were too hot to be hungry. I sensibly ate salt with my water and when Rachel refused to follow suit we bickered peevishly on this issue. Then she discovered a jigger in her left big toe and I dug it out with a safety-pin. The usual tickling mega-ants and biting mini-flies tortured us. Meanwhile Egbert was being plagued by handsome birds with yellow beaks who alighted on him in twos and threes, parasite-hunting. But to our huge relief he approved of the apparently unappetising grass; for a few days nothing better was likely to come on his menu.
At 1 p.m. Rachel suggested moving on and I snarled, ‘You must be mad! This bloody sun is lethal!’ In between being very nasty to insects I was reading Mungo Park’s Travels in Africa and I pointed out that he always rested in hot regions ‘till half-past two o’clock’.
Rachel studied her left big toe and decided that I had failed to remove the jigger.
I snapped, ‘Remove it yourself then!’
Rachel wondered, ‘What will your temper be like after three days of this heat?’
All morning the sky had been clear but now clouds assembled with astonishing speed: a phenomenon to which we were becoming accustomed. By 2 p.m. the sky was completely overcast and the heat just bearable. We went on our way, criticising the eerie muted quality of the light and assuming it to be yet another disagreeable feature of this ghastly plain. Days later we heard about that afternoon’s near-total eclipse of the sun.
Below that slope a line of vigorously green bushes marked a stream and while Egbert drank we poured clear cool water over each other’s heads. On the plain, lines of women were turning the thirsty brown soil, hoping for the little rains – here already a fortnight late. They seemed less prosperous and out-going than their sisters on the high land. One woman, digging with a hefty baby on her back – as is usual – straightened up to stare at us and we saw that she was heavily pregnant. This is unusual; perhaps she was caring for somebody else’s baby. A powerful West African taboo forbids intercourse while a woman is suckling, which may be for two or three years; it is widely believed that semen mingles with a mother’s milk and weakens the baby. Generations of missionaries have raged against this taboo, one of the main reasons for the African reluctance to accept monogamy.
Our cut-short passed through a deserted compound. Three round straw huts seemed to have been deliberately demolished and several worn-out trainers were strewn over the dusty earth, scarred by cooking-fires. Had some tragic event blighted this homestead – a suicide or murder or sudden death attributed to ‘bad magic’? Such misfortunes require an elaborate ritual cleansing ceremony which poor families cannot afford. It costs much less to run up three more straw huts on a ‘clean’ site.
Beyond the dessicated hamlet of Nsop our track crossed miles of monochrome scrubland. Thousands of termite-hills, with conical roofs, formed a bizarre city between the low bushes. Rachel aptly compared them to ‘mushroom clouds’; presumably their clever design averts disintegration when the rains come. The only flecks of colour were orchid-like flowers, striped purple and white and some eighteen inches tall, which seemed to eat flies.
Our grazing anxiety-level began to rise at about 5 p.m. and was very high indeed an hour later – when suddenly fertility reappeared, including a green playing-field by a new school. This was Ntem, a small village surrounded by big trees. We tethered Egbert on a grassy patch, while seeking the Chief’s permission to sleep in the school; rain seemed probable and we now knew our tent was not big enough for two on a wet night. Outside the off-licence an amiable youth greeted us – conveniently, one of the Chief’s twenty-nine children, who offered to show me the palace while Rachel remained beer-swigging amidst a jovial welcoming throng.
This was a more imposing palace than Nthambaw’s, with an incongruous modern bungalow in front of the mud fortifications. The Chief, too, was more imposing: a dignified courteous man in his mid-fifties who spoke good English and was warmly and wittily welcoming: ‘Are you pretending to live a hundred years ago, when there were no vehicles in Cameroon?’ Having escorted me back to the off-licence – a mile-long walk – he ordered food, stood us beers and himself had a Top. He too was Muslim.
Their Chief’s unwonted appearance after dark caused some excitement along the village street and much bowing and cupping of hands. One sensed a strong mutual affection; evidently this Chief’s benignly paternalistic attitude was appreciated and he exchanged quips with both sexes and all age groups. Ntem is mainly Christian and its womenfolk were out in force, enjoying the Murphy road-show. They particularly enjoyed our statutory gender-confusion session. I had introduced Rachel to the Chief as my daughter and a few moments later, addressing her, he referred to ‘your father’. When she respectfully but firmly corrected him he leant forward, scrutinised me by lamplight and exclaimed, ‘Impossible! This is a strong man!’
‘It’s not!’ said Rachel. ‘It’s a strong woman!’
Our audience was in paroxysms of mirth, a phrase that applies more exactly to Africans than to any other race I know. They shook and heaved with laughter, seized each other by the shoulders, jumped up and down together and literally fell about in the abandon of their hilarity. Finally the Chief was convinced and made a public announcement, in whatever language Ntem people speak, confirming that this odd bod really was female. Whereupon several young women rushed to shake my hand and/or embrace me.
A small boy arrived then with our supper. He offered the dish first to the Chief, who removed its lid and took one symbolic morsel, to prove it wasn’t poisoned, before signalling that the rest was for us. In darkness we groped through a thick, highly spiced sauce and found little bundles wrapped in bristly hide. These contained bush-meat (beef) which we were hungry enough to relish despite the bristles.
As we ate, the Chief expounded on family life: ‘Some foreigners would like to sell birth-controls in this country but it is wrong to think of economics before children. We love our children, we can’t have too many. Ntem has two-and-a-half thousand people and more than one thousand are schoolchildren. So we have built a second schoolroom where you will sleep. We built it without help from government but now we hope they will give us more teachers – and good teachers! Bad teachers are worse than nothing. But too many good teachers don’t like to live in the bush. I have had difficulties, giving education to twenty-nine children – my daughters also have education. See! There is one speaking good English!’ He indicated a comely young woman talking to Rachel. ‘But these difficulties are not important. I have seventeen sons and twelve daughters and each one is a gift from God. I am grateful.’
Hearing that I have only one child, the Chief was deeply sympathetic. He obviously felt that his question had been a faux pas and hastily changed the subject. This awkward topic of my infertility came up almost daily without its ever occurring to anyone that a personal decision might be involved. For most villagers, choosing to have only one child is literally unthinkable. And the few who can grasp that idea consider it grossly immoral. (Or at least the men do; some women, significantly, are more ambivalent on this matter.) It would have been futile as well as rude to try to explain to the Chief why, in future, women should have no more than two children each. Many Whites look ahead, most Blacks don’t. To us, but not to them, the African birth-rate of 47 per 1,000 is menacing. Nowhere else in the world has ever experienced such a population increase: 3.2 per cent per annum, despite one child in seven dying before its fifth birthday. Even without droughts, food production cannot keep pace with such a breeding-rate; an estimated 99 million Africans were starving before the 1982 famine. Throughout the 1970s Africa’s total food production rose at an annual rate of 2.1 per cent, as compared to the First World’s 1.8 per cent. Yet in 1982 production had fallen, since 1965, by 12 per cent per person. During the same period, throughout other developing regions, it rose steadily per person – by as much as 49 per cent in Asia. Nor should cash crops be blamed, as they often are in the West, for Africa’s starving millions. The overall acreage under cash crops fell by 9 per cent during the 1970s and the per capita cash crop production has also been falling, even more dramatically than food production.
Only one incident marred that happy interlude with the Chief. A small boy, carrying a heavy saucepan of jammu-jammu into the off-licence, tripped over the rough threshold and fell, spilling his precious burden. As he burst into tears the crowd roared with laughter – and continued to laugh while he threw himself face down on the ground and lay weeping inconsolably.
Ntem’s large empty schoolroom had lakes of water on the mud floor, but one corner offered ample dry space for our flea-bags. The heat was still stifling though there were neither doors nor windows – unnecessary trimmings in such a climate. We lay talking on our bags, naked yet dripping sweat, and by torchlight consulted the USAF, trying to work out the distance to Sabongari. But in this area, curiously enough, the USAF had given up; a white blank on their map was marked RELIEF DATA INCOMPLETE. That day we had asked twelve people ‘How far to Sabongari?’ and got twelve different answers ranging from eight to seventy miles. Miles or kilometres mean nothing to rural Cameroonians – who also tend to give wildly inaccurate estimates of distances in walking-hours.
In fact Sabongari is about fourteen miles from Ntem. We arrived there at 12.30 next afternoon, speechless with heat-exhaustion.
The first two hours, through flat, dull farmland, were cloudy and just tolerable. In the hamlet of Ngu we enjoyed an eccentric breakfast of avocados, salt and beer; to my secret relief, neither Top nor coke was available. But beer for breakfast, when it’s 95°F in the shade and there isn’t any shade, must be condemned as irresponsible and probably contributed to our sorry noon state. However, at 8 a.m. Ngu’s off-licence was already quite crowded with jolly male drinkers who didn’t have to exert themselves during the heat of the day.
The usual juvenile swarm gathered to watch us but soon grew bored and resumed their play. As so often, this consisted of impromptu dancing to the music (surprisingly sweet) of instruments ingeniously contrived from old tins, scraps of wood, lengths of string, bits of wire. From the day Cameroonians can toddle, making music and dancing come as naturally as breathing. Why do some British Blacks, and White anti-racists, scream ‘Stereotyping!’ if one refers to the Africans’ inborn sense of rhythm? Pretending that Africans are not exceptionally gifted in this respect is like pretending they have straight hair.
Around Ngu most huts were palm thatched, a less attractive roofing than grass though vastly better than tin. There were many more dogs, of indeterminate breed but well cared, and numerous ungainly short-coated sheep – peculiarly ugly animals, who always look dirty and dishevelled, if not actually mangy.
By ten o’clock the sun was trying to murder us through an odd haze – our first encounter with the harmattan. By eleven o’clock I was opining that we should rest, that we were stupidly inviting heat-stroke. But Rachel argued that Sabongari must now be close and that lying in the bush, being preyed upon by insects, is not restful. Against my better judgement, we proceeded. Later, when feeling the ill-effects of walking under the noon sun, Rachel conceded that we should indeed have chosen insects as the lesser of two evils.
Sabongari is a large village – torpid, gritty, smelly and scarcely fifteen miles from the Nigerian border. Its ‘Africa hotel’ consists of two rows of oven-hot rooms behind one of several off-licences. When we booked in the fat friendly proprietor smiled knowingly. ‘Hah! You go to Nigeria with your horse – there you get plenty, plenty money for him!’ We were too exhausted to put the record straight. It would take time, Mr Ndanga explained, to prepare a room. No rush, we assured him, subsiding in the bar and gulping four ‘lemon’ Tops each. At a certain stage of dehydration, one’s scorn for Top evaporates; it is marginally less unpalatable than chemically purified water.
As we drank, an agitated young man in a ‘CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY’ T-shirt appeared in the doorway, frowning and shouting at us. We had met him thrice during the morning, as he delivered beer at Wannti and Ngu – and also in the middle of the uninhabited bush, where he replaced three cases of empty beer bottles with full ones. (A significant measure, we thought, of local honesty.) At each meeting he had urged us, in limited English, to go to the border police post as soon as we arrived. ‘Go to office quick! In Sabongari you see police very quick!’ His concern in the matter baffled us and now he seemed ridiculously upset by our having paused to drink before ‘going to office’. I said soothingly that soon we would go but five minutes later he was back with a policeman, who seemed only mildly interested in us and readily accepted my assurance that we were en route to the office. After he had gone the young man hung about and insisted on leading us to a mud but with ‘POLICE OFFICE’ chalked on its rickety door. Then he vanished and we never saw him again. Daily life in Cameroon was peppered with such mystifying incidents.
The Police Office, some ten foot square, was furnished only with a small unsteady table and two chairs. One dog-eared ledger occupied the centre of the table. Behind it sat a stout, blank-faced Francophone gendarme who very slowly went through our passports, page by page, saying nothing – and probably understanding nothing. I sat opposite him in a semi-coma. Rachel sat on the mud floor beside me, slumped against the wall, fast asleep. The room had no ceiling and it seemed the sun’s midday rays were being magnified a hundredfold by the low tin roof.
Two other Francophone officers entered. They shrugged when I said, ‘Speak English only!’ and for ten minutes stood on either side of their colleague, watching him studying our vaccination certificates. (I asked myself what would happen, on a similar occasion, when our visas had expired. With luck nobody would notice.) Then, ignoring us, all three gendarmes disappeared with our passports into the only other room in the hut.
Time passed. The village was silent. Rachel snored gently. I wondered why Francophone officers are posted to Cameroon’s border with an English-speaking country. Meanwhile Egbert, tethered to a mango tree, looked increasingly dejected.
Twenty minutes later the stout officer returned, handed back our passports without comment and said, ‘Bon voyage!’ I woke Rachel, who asked if we might pasture Egbert on the indifferent grass across the road. Permission was given and we hastened back to the doss-house to unload.
Our little room was ready. ‘A hell-hole!’ groaned Rachel, falling onto the rectangle of uncovered foam-rubber that served as a double-bed mattress. Soon she was asleep again. A table and two chairs completed the furnishing. I tried to write my diary but soon gave up; leaving the door and two windows open did nothing to counteract the tin roof but gave access to clouds of those tiny biting flies which were rapidly becoming my most hated Cameroonian insect. Then suddenly the sky darkened and a half-hour deluge blissfully lowered the temperature.
When Rachel woke we had acrimony about the local water. As it came from a deep well, between the rows of ‘guest rooms’, I decided ‘Definitely a double dose of pills!’ Rachel protested that double-dosed water nauseated her and the matter was settled only after my visit to the latrine, a sentry-box-sized tin hut less than four yards from the well. I was at once put to rout, for the first time in twenty-five years’ travelling, and went instead to Egbert’s field. On my return I told Rachel, ‘That water is having a treble dose!’
We went shopping and were grotesquely overcharged for Algerian sardines. Here White travellers are taken for granted – and, if possible, taken for a ride – though only a few score use this crossing-point each year. Later, reviewing our trek, we identified Sabongari as the only uncongenial village en route; so much for tourism improving international relations. Even our five Francophone fellow guests, all on their way to or from Nigeria, seemed sullen in a non-Cameroonian way. ‘I daresay we seem sullen, too,’ observed Rachel. ‘Something about this place brings out the worst in one.’
We looked for the cut-short to Sonkalong, so that no cool moments need be wasted next morning, and eventually found it beyond the market-place. Near the stalls someone had recently built a large restaurant with pretensions to being chic. Unsurprisingly, it was closed. But promising aromas came from a busy eating-house next door, to which we resolved to return for supper. We hadn’t had a square meal since leaving St Augustine’s, as Rachel more than once reminded me.
At sundown I settled in the empty bar to drink lots of beer while writing my diary by lantern-light, but a variety of winged insects – mostly large and all noisy – seriously impeded me. At one point I counted seven species simultaneously crawling across the page.
Outside the eating-house we met Peter – tall, handsome, articulate, the eldest son of a local Big Man and a law student at Yaounde. The eating-house was owned by his father and staffed by two of his sisters. The chic restaurant was also Pappa’s, a memorial to over-optimism about Cameroon’s tourist trade. At a very cramped corner table we sat in semi-darkness. ‘Here there is no kerosene,’ explained Peter apologetically, ‘so the lamp must be turned low. Transport is a big problem in Cameroon – you have seen our tracks, not many vehicles like to use them often. Only beer trucks move regularly. Only the brasseries can sell enough goods to make it worth while to wreck vehicles.’
Peter gave us a glimpse of the Anglo/Franco tensions that can exist among middle-class Cameroonians. He was fiercely anti-French, denouncing Yaounde University for discriminating against Anglophone students – a common complaint.
‘Even if we have very good A Levels, Francophones with worse marks get preference. The French side is much more corrupt, even in the bush – you will find this tomorrow when you move in there.’ (We didn’t.) ‘And so many French employers living here encourage corruption. They give jobs only if you pay them 10 per cent of your salary for two years. The British are always honest, they hire on merit alone. But they have not stayed on like the French to make money. Now Cameroon has many, many more French settlers than before Independence. Everywhere in French West Africa is the same. They only pretend to let go. Economically they keep their grip and by corruption make it tighter.’
Our tepid fufu and jammu-jammu cost 500 CFA for both (smallish) portions. ‘Bad value,’ Rachel decided afterwards. ‘Think of all the bananas and avocados you could buy for that!’
Peter warned us to secure our room, as best we could, against mosquitoes. ‘This is the worst malaria time, at the start of the rains. In one week hundreds of people here will be sick and children will die …’ He declined our invitation to have a beer in the hotel bar. ‘I don’t like this man!’ he whispered vehemently, glaring at poor Mr Ndanga who was dozing behind the bar, cradling a transistor radio, and who seemed to us perfectly inoffensive if a trifle dim-witted. But, as we had already noticed, Big Men and their families are not always on good terms with the hoi polloi. By 6 a.m. we were on the cut-short; by 6.05 we were removing our boots to cross the first of the day’s three rivers: a shallow stream, some twenty yards wide. The sky was overcast, the air fragrant after a night of heavy rain and the abundant birdlife unusually visible, where our path ran level through an unpeopled mixture of thin forest and scrubland. Often I fell far behind the others, revelling in the best ornithological opportunity of the entire trek.
Next came miles of recently settled land, rudimentary cultivation interspersed with stretches of untamed bush – an extraordinary contrast to the intensively farmed country around Kumbo. In the few compounds of small thatched huts most women wore only wrap-around skirts though it is now illegal for Cameroonian women to go topless: a dotty law in a country where every village woman of child-bearing age has a breast almost permanently exposed.
Here we were overtaken by a little girl, carrying a big basket of bananas, and two little boys and three dogs – one a bitch, being led on a leash of plaited vine. Having left us behind the children paused to confer, then waited for us and gravely presented a hand of bananas.
‘Dash?’ wondered Rachel in an anxious whisper. But I thought not; only kindliness had inspired that gesture. We continued together, the children clearly baffled by our caravan. They were an enchanting trio, their bodies well developed, their big smiles revealing perfect teeth, their few garments ragged but freshly laundered, their dogs happy, their composure complete. And it was well we met them where we did, for soon the path divided.
‘Sonkalong?’ we asked. The girl pointed to the least likely looking route, semi-obscured by high dense greenery. And there we said goodbye.
The day’s second river was wide, thigh deep, strongly flowing. Both banks supported the remains of a substantial colonial bridge, witness to the decline of empires. In times past (German times?) an important road must have run where now there is only a path – and one so faint that several times we almost lost it. Tropical Nature quickly reasserts herself.
The third river, amidst dense forest, was nasty – less a river than a smelly, slimy, stagnant creek approached through an expanse of deep black mud concealing tree-root snares. A humans-only two-pole bridge spanned the creek and Rachel tripped across; it was my turn to lead Egbert. By then we had learned that he would tackle almost any obstacle, if allowed time to think about it, so I gave him his head and when I became entangled in hidden roots he cleverly pulled me through. The still water was full of horrid little creatures – half-swimming, half-crawling.
Soon we were in more broken country, close to the mountainous border with Nigeria. Sonkalong, where we rejoined the motor-track, straggles over a low hill and was our first Francophone village. In the off-licence (here known as a bar) Rachel conversed with two laid-back gendarmes who assumed us to be friends of a young Englishman living in Somie. They didn’t know why he was living there; he wasn’t a missionary, he just sat around talking to people.
‘An anthropologist,’ diagnosed Rachel.
The gendarmes kindly led us to a nearby hilltop and pointed out the track to Somie via Lingham, a red thread winding through scrub, forest and cane fields. According to them, we would get to Somie by sunset; we knew we wouldn’t. (‘Why,’ puzzled Rachel, ‘can’t they correlate time and distance?’) In fact the sun was near setting as we approached Lingham, having been refreshed en route by a brief heavy shower.
Lingham’s ‘main street’ was soap-slippy and poor Egbert fell heavily, provoking shrieks of laughter from the pullulation of children in our wake. Then the Reverend Mr Eyobo introduced himself: ‘I am Baptist minister, it is my duty as a Christian to give you every help.’ He was lovable at first sight: aged fortyish, slightly myopic, small, slim, energetic, caring. Swiftly he organised our immediate future. We could spend the night at the home of Mr Makia, the quarterchief; Egbert could graze on ‘the fat grass’ by the Baptist church; Mr Eyobo himself would lead us to the palace to pay our respects to the Muslim Chief. As we unloaded, a passing youth was summoned to lead Egbert to his grazing. Mr Makia, our elderly involuntary host, looked somewhat taken aback when we dumped our dusty/muddy gear in his already overcrowded living-room before being swept off to the palace.
On that long walk, past flat hectares of maize and sugar-cane, Mr Eyobo explained that there are two Linghams, the old mainly Muslim village around the palace and the new Christian village – an overflow from the Nso region – where he ministered. ‘In Cameroon when places get too many people there is room to move. So my Christian people came here, cleared the bush, made gardens. It is too hot, but they have food. We are not poor if we work. The Chief is a good man, a Muslim who helps Christians!’
It was dark when we reached the palace. The Chief sat on his ornamental stool in an enormous shadowy reception-hall – thatched, high-ceilinged, dimly lamp-lit and furnished only with a row of tall drums along one wall. Several men were kneeling around him in attitudes of supplication and we sensed that we had interrupted something important. Our audience was brief. Mr Eyobo explained us; the Chief graciously gave us permission to rest in Lingham; we expressed gratitude and withdrew.
It is often alleged that a disproportionate number of chiefs are Muslim because Mr Ahidjo, Cameroon’s first President who ruled for twentyfour years, was himself a Muslim. But Mr Eyobo dismissed these allegations. ‘For thousands of years many villages have Muslim chiefs, from times when Fulanis came for slaves and beat local warriors and took land and power. This is not modern politics!’
In Mr Makia’s neat back-yard water and soap had been provided for our ablutions but around the kitchen-hut there was, alarmingly, no sign of activity. As we settled down to be sociable in the living-room, Mr Eyobo proudly drew our attention to three newish, over-varnished Nigerian wooden wall-plaques depicting violent biblical scenes – to us a source of anthropological speculation rather than aesthetic thrills. But the ancient Yoruba carved wooden chest that served as a sofa was truly a work of art, though not highly regarded by its owner.
When tea and bread were offered, I tentatively suggested beer as a more appropriate refreshment at the end of a long hot day. Moments later no mere bottle but a crate arrived. Lingham’s tolerance was pleasing: a Muslim Chief helping Christian settlers, Baptist teetotallers providing crates of beer … And at bedtime we had to argue strongly before being allowed to pay for the four bottles consumed.
I asked if there were any conversions, either way, between Old and New Lingham. Mr Makia admitted that some Christians become Muslims because they wish to prosper as traders. ‘For so long, only Muslims have traded long-distance – they have all contacts, networks, set up. They have their own kinds of handy arrangements about money and credit. For too many years, all over Africa, men have become Muslim to trade big – and their women do not like this change!’
As his friend spoke Mr Eyobo sighed heavily, shook his head and pulled his fingers through his curls. ‘Mammon!’ he murmured. Then he asked, ‘You are Protestant Christians? What is your denomination?’ Both he and our host seemed genuinely distressed when we confessed to having no religion, or none that has a label; they felt acutely that as unbelievers we were impoverished people.
Later, when we begged leave to retire, Mr Eyobo asked gently, ‘Can you wait for a little prayer?’ And taking a bible from the window-ledge behind him he read aloud, ‘The Lord is my shepherd …’ Then he looked up at us and improvised his own exquisitely appropriate prayer for our safety, as we trekked. We were quite overcome, moved beyond any possibility of expressing the gratitude we felt.
Now I always recall Mr Eyobo, when Whites assert that Christianity is unsuited to Africa. Perhaps what Whites have made of it doesn’t transplant well, but Christianity didn’t start in Europe. We adopted it and fashioned it into a many-branched religion to suit our own cultural/intellectual/national inheritances, shedding much blood in the process. And then, characteristically, we pronounced that ours was the real Christianity. Africans have for a few generations been in the process of refashioning it to suit their inheritance. And what right have we to judge that Black Christianity is less ‘real’ than the White version?
I often wondered about the beliefs of people we passed in the bush. We noticed many charms in the fields: bones and palm fronds hanging over junctions on the pathways, little archways of saplings erected between fields, bundles of feathers and leaves secured to rocks with lengths of vine, plaits of straw tied to bamboo poles. Undoubtedly, despite much mosque- and church-going, many villagers remain close to their ‘traditional religion’, known in my youth as ‘paganism’. Recently, ‘paganism’ and ‘heathenism’ have been excluded from civilised vocabularies not only because they offend Westernised Africans but because their heavy connotations of ‘irreligious’, ‘immoral’ and ‘unenlightened’ are grossly misleading. By instinct Africans are profoundly religious, in the sense of not believing that feeble and fallible mankind can fend for itself. They believe in a Creator, one remote all-powerful God, who may best be worshipped through intermediaries – various spirits (not thought of as gods) and the living-dead. Those last are family members so recently dead that they can be remembered by someone still alive. Their importance in the traditional scheme of things is incalculable and they are thought to be very much amongst those present – helping, or if necessary punishing, their descendants.
Hence Mr Eyobo’s distressed reaction to our ‘irreligious’ state, a reaction that was many times duplicated in conversations with Cameroonians of all faiths. In their terms, by refusing to worship a Creator one is denying human feebleness and fallibility and so committing the cardinal sin of Pride. They may never have heard of Lucifer, but if they did make his acquaintance they would regard him as a very bad boy.
We slept restlessly in a hot cubby-hole behind the living-room, sharing a narrow pallet. From within our gear, piled in a corner, came many rat-scufflings and shrill, aggressive squealings, recalling a night spent in a disused coffee-warehouse in Madagascar. Rats everywhere speak the same language.
As we dressed in the dark a vigorous drummer was walking through the village: Mr Eyobo summoning his flock to matins. And successfully summoning them: his large round church (a tin roof on tall tree-trunks) was more than half-full when I fetched Egbert in the grey dawn-light. Women stood on one side, men on the other; everyone swayed, clapped and fervently sang to the music of ten or twelve drummers. And from the Presbyterian church, hardly fifty yards away, came the sound of no less enthusiastic worshipping. The rival congregations were unmistakably competing in the decibel stakes, an endearing manifestation of sectarianism. As I stood listening to those powerful waves of sound, rolling towards each other across the street, a long bank of cloud to the east was suddenly faintly pink. Soon it would be hot – very hot.
By 6 a.m. we were on our way, musing over the semantics of money. Our host, looking agonised, had protested that he wanted no payment: 'I only want dash!’ On being assured that the 2,000 CFA just pressed into his hand was indeed dash, he beamed and pocketed the notes. Perhaps fortunately, Mr Eyobo wasn’t around. We felt sure he had intended Mammon to play no part in our relationship with Mr Makia.
Our up-and-down cut-short to Somie ran through thickish jungle, parallel to low, round, densely forested hills from which came many monkey-calls, including blood-curdling sounds that we had learned to identify as baboon quarrels. The morning cloud quickly dispersed and by eight o’clock we were sweating hard. An hour later we reached Somie, a small village near the base of a steep escarpment – our escape route from the hot plain. We planned to seek out the anthropologist (always an interesting species) and relax until three o’clock, leaving ourselves time to reach the cool heights by sunset.
Few of Somie’s five hundred inhabitants were visible, both sexes having gone to the fields – even, to our grief, the bar proprietor. (Somewhere along the route we had lost our inhibitions about beer for breakfast: a process known in times past as ‘going native’.) A young Fulani pushing a bicycle – cyclists are not uncommon on the plain – spoke fragmentary French but was nonplussed when Rachel asked the way to the Englishman’s compound. She should have said ‘White man’s’; no one in Somie has ever heard of an Englishman. But at last the franc dropped and the youth volunteered to fetch Dave, who was also in the fields.
I led Egbert to scanty grazing beyond the village and on my way back Dave on his bicycle overtook me – an emaciated young man, too fair skinned to be tanned, wearing a huge conical straw hat and looking dazed. An Englishman who has been living alone in Somie for two years has much to say to fellow-English-speakers and we soon scrapped our plan to leave that day; luckily there was ample grazing close to Dave’s three-roomed hut. The Chief, an ex-teacher and fluent French speaker, was away. But Dave said his wives would be perfectly agreeable to our staying in the palace guest suite, where, he insisted, we must burn one of his mosquito-coils. He seemed sceptical about the value of our prophylactics: ‘Nowadays the mosquitoes are on top, they’ve got the measure of all those pills.’ And he was shocked to hear that we were travelling without our own hypodermics: ‘Who knows what percentage of Cameroonians have AIDS? What happens if you need an injection? Do you really want to die?’
During that forenoon we drank a lot of tea and learned a lot about spider divination, Dave’s particular interest of the moment. He had just achieved a hard-earned breakthrough and been promised that he could attend a local divination ceremony. Modesty forbade him to explain what an honour this was, but I recognised it as the ultimate proof of trust, respect and acceptance. Diviners are as paranoid as the British Government about their Official Secrets.
According to John Mbiti, the Kenyan scholar equally distinguished as philosopher, theologian, linguist, Christian clergyman and pioneer of ecumenism:
Diviners are the agents of unveiling the mysteries of human life. This is done through the use of mediums, oracles, being possessed, divination objects, common sense, intuitive knowledge and insight, hypnotism and other secret knowledge. They also keep their ears and eyes open to what is happening in their communities so that they have a store of working knowledge which they use in their divination … The art of divination presents us with puzzling problems which I make no pretence to solve. A certain amount of communication goes on between diviners and non-human powers (whether living or otherwise or both). It is difficult to know exactly what this is: it might involve the diviner’s extra-sensory ability, it may involve spiritual agents, it might be telepathy, it might be sharpened human perception, or a combination of these possibilities. Whatever it is, divination is another area which adds to the complexity of African concepts and experiences of the universe. Divination links together, in its own way, the physical and the spiritual worlds, making it a religious activity.
In cases of particular importance, requiring sensitive diplomatic solutions, spider divination has long been the most popular form in many areas of West Africa, including Western Cameroon. The earth spider (Heteroscodra crassipes, large, black and hairy) lives in burrows and so is in touch with the sacred underworld where dwell the ancestral – and some other – spirits. Thus he is well placed to serve as interpreter of their will and is among the animal elite, credited with unique wisdom and to be seen in stylised form on door-posts, finger-rings, tobacco pipes, ornamental stools and tattooed around women’s navels. In some areas the earth spider was considered so sacred, less than a century ago, that death was the punishment for deliberately killing one; and those who might know the identity of an accidental killer had to conceal it from the rest of the community.
Diviners keep their spiders in burrows in enclosed shrines, to which leaf-cards are taken when a client seeks advice. These are made from the leaves of an African plum tree (Pachylobus edulis) and each is marked with a separate symbol. (They may not exceed three hundred to a pack.) Early in the morning some edible (to a spider) green leaves, or freshly killed insects, are placed inside the burrow under the leaf-cards. An upturned pot or basket ensures that the spider works in darkness until the diviner and his client return, near sunset, to interpret the cards as they have been ‘arranged’ by the hungry spider. Should the diviner feel that the will of destiny, or the spirits’ guidance, has not been made plain, the whole process may be repeated again and again.
As it is not always possible to find earth spiders, land-crabs may be used instead – and are, around Somie. Even now the evidence provided by spider divination is accepted in courts of law – official government courts, not only traditional village courts. Men who could not possibly be convicted on other grounds have been sentenced to life-imprisonment ostensibly on the strength of the spider’s arrangement of leaves.
Dave’s lunch – fufu and stewed liver – arrived from the palace at noon on a little girl’s head; the Chief’s wives provided all his meals for a fixed weekly sum. We discussed our emergency rations for the thinly-populated Tchabal Mbabo and Dave suggested an afternoon groundnut quest. This was the scarce in-between season, but he knew a man …
That quest took us around a forested mountain and along the edge of a deep narrow valley where many women – bright little dots from our vantage point – were planting and weeding. We passed two earth spider (or land-crab) burrows, darkened by wickerwork funnels about eighteen inches long. One of Dave’s friends accompanied us, a cheerful character wearing a long gown and carrying a long spear with which he hoped to secure a plump bush-rat or monkey for his supper. He paused to bend over the burrows, but didn’t touch them: that would have been taboo.
In a spacious compound, surrounded by lush greenery, two wooden chairs were ceremoniously placed outside the main hut for Dave’s guests. After a lengthy lead-in, groundnuts were mentioned. Some time later, a shy young woman brought a sackful for my inspection; groundnuts are the women’s cash-crop. We bought two large buckets of unshelled nuts for 1,200 CFA (about £2.70), a bulky purchase until we had time to shell them.
This had once been a smithy family, an ancient and honourable profession in Western Cameroon, and we were shown a disused smelting furnace, and the equipment of a primitive forge, in an old hut in the centre of the compound. Archaeologists estimate that iron was first smelted in Africa some 2,000 years ago, by the people of the Grassfields – which was the beginning of the end for the great forests. No one could have cleared them with stone tools; and the development of intensive smelting and smithing industries hastened their clearing by creating a demand for charcoal. During the nineteenth century, in the Banbungo area alone (a small chiefdom near Mount Ocu), approximately one hundred metric tons of pure iron were produced annually. But this ancient industry was killed in the 1920s by imported European iron.
We were back in Somie by sunset, in time to enjoy a booze-up with thirty or so jolly women not long returned from the fields. They formed a circle – some on stools, some squatting on the ground – in one corner of the village square, a sloping dusty expanse below the palace. These vivacious gatherings – regular events during the planting season – are presided over by the Chief’s senior wife and one of his sisters, the latter a strong personality who in the complicated hierarchy of the Somie Chiefdom holds a significant position ‘at court’. Gourds of potent maize-beer were being filled from a cauldron in the centre of the circle and handed around; we each took a swig before passing the gourd to our neighbour. Wife of course had her personal gourd and sat on a flimsy metal and plastic camp-chair with Sister beside her on a stool. I was given a lower stool, on Wife’s left, and twice she toppled over (whether because of her beer intake or wobbly seat was unclear), falling heavily on me to the delight of all present. Meanwhile Rachel had become embroiled in the gender argument with a group of elderly women. To resolve the matter I took Wife’s hand and placed it on my bosom, a direct approach that caused much hilarity.
Now the air felt almost cool. Continuous sheet lightning flickered blue over the Nigerian mountains, fireflies darted brightly and a golden sliver of moon was poised above conical roofs. Despite a long day in the fields, many young women danced exuberantly to their own singing and clapping – a performance that recalled Mungo Park’s prim comment: ‘The dances, however, consisted more in wanton gestures than in muscular exertion or graceful attitudes. The ladies vied with each other in displaying the most voluptuous movements imaginable.’
Later, as we dined with Dave – eating manioc chunks fried in palm oil from a communal bowl – he told us that pre-marital chastity is not de rigueur hereabouts, but fidelity in marriage is. He also advised us that beer would be the dash most appreciated by our Somie hostesses.
Then the three little girls who had delivered our meal led us to the palace through a tangle of rough alleyways. A shy, speechless junior wife ushered us into the State Apartments by lantern-light. One large room boasted a dining-table, four chairs and several five-foot-high drums. Leading off it was the bedroom, containing only a double-bed (more sweat-inducing foam rubber) and floored with disconcerting mock-parquet plastic tiles, most of which had come loose. I was conducted across the wide, high hallway-cum-audience chamber to our basin of hot washing water in a bathroom no bigger than a shower-cabinet. This was also the latrine and a flat stone covered the hole in the floor. I was about to move the stone when I saw Heteroscodra crassipes low on the wall beside me – or if it wasn’t Heteroscodra crassipes it was his first cousin, very large and black and hairy. Trembling with terror, I fled. Moments later Egbert’s bucket was emptied out of our unglazed bedroom window and we both went unwashed that evening.
At daybreak, returning to the palace with Egbert, I saw through an archway our three little friends crossing the compound in single file, each bearing a tray. For a moment they looked like a scene from an opera – Aida, perhaps – their gaily patterned frocks glowing vivid against pale mud walls, their dark slender arms curving upwards, steadying the trays. That was a luxury breakfast: six hot crisp maize-flour buns and three cups of Ovaltine each.
Dave escorted us to the start of what is known locally as ‘the German road’, a sensationally steep track cut through the forest of the escarpment and described on French maps as vestiges d’ ancienne voie. When we said goodbye, on the bank of a swift stream, I would have expressed my admiration were he not an embarrassment-prone Englishman.
Nigel Barley’s hilarious books on anthropologising in Cameroon have entertained millions (though not the Cameroonian government) and are so funny that one tends to underestimate the heroism such work demanded. Living for years in a mud hut in stifling heat on a pitifully inadequate diet miles from any other European requires awesome professional dedication. And when we met Dave he had been doing it for longer than Nigel Barley – for long enough, indeed, to have produced the first dictionary of the local language. Dr Barley has observed: ‘The best one can probably hope for is to be viewed as a harmless idiot who brings certain advantages to the village.’ Yet we sensed that Dave had achieved considerably more than this. Not of course ‘acceptance’, which couldn’t happen without impossible feats of imagination on the part of the Somie folk; but unmistakably he was valued in the village as a person, not merely as a bringer of ‘advantages’.
On a strip of level land, between the stream and the foot of the escarpment, we saw our first column of driver ants hurrying across the path. It was about a foot wide and small ‘squaddies’ formed the bulk of the troops, with a few rows of much bigger ‘guardsmen’ on either side. We paused to watch and at first this seemed an unremarkable phenomenon; these looked no different to the ants that swarmed all over us every siesta-time. Then we became aware of their numbers: thousands, tens of thousands – perhaps millions. Leaving Egbert, I walked to the left, where the column was going, and Rachel walked to the right, from whence it was coming. For more than two hundred yards we followed that marching straight line, across flat fields, without seeing its beginning or its ending. Then we understood how these ants can quickly kill a large animal or human being when they unite in a surprise attack.
The German road has not been repaired since 1915 and, after seventy-two years of erosion, is much harder to walk on than an unpretentious bush-path. Half-way up we had our first clear view of a baboon colony but Rachel, oddly, seemed not very interested. She plodded on, leading Egbert, while I, enthralled, watched eighteen baboons, of all ages, feeding, grooming, playing, scratching, snoozing, flea-hunting and doing rude things with their genitalia. Curiosity is a conspicuous baboon trait; as I stood motionless two hulking males came to within five yards and sat in the grass, their hands on their knees, returning the compliment of my fascination.
I caught up with the others near the top of the escarpment where they were drinking from a cold, clear spring. Here the resin-tinged air felt exhilaratingly cool yet Rachel, most unusually for her, was dripping sweat as we rounded the last hairpin bend and emerged from the forest – to find ourselves looking directly down on Somie, thousands of feet below.
For a mile or so the road followed the ridge-top, winding through pine-woods and a new sort of glossy scrub. High mountains – which were Nigeria – rose some four miles away beyond an immensely deep valley. A few tin-roofed huts were visible on their forested slopes and I reflected that the concepts of ‘Nigeria’ and ‘Cameroon’ can mean little to their inhabitants. Since leaving Kumbo, we had been conscious of the locals feeling much closer to the clans across the border than they do to their compatriots in the distant coastal rain-forests or the deserts of the north.
Near the village of Ribao our ancienne voie joined a motorable (in dry weather) track linking Mayo Darle with Nigeria. Here we were to turn right, instead of continuing into Ribao – but at the junction Rachel suddenly sat down and said, ‘Would you like to lead Egbert?’
‘How do you feel?’ I asked sharply.
‘Sort of lethargic,’ admitted Rachel, ‘and my legs are all achey.’
Maternal concern often manifests itself as irritability. ‘Hah!’ said I. ‘Salt deficiency! I told you this would happen if you didn’t eat your salt!’
‘I’ll be ok in a minute,’ said Rachel pathetically, resting her head on her knees.
My anxiety level soared. Fourteen years of travelling together had taught me that Rachel’s middle name is Stoicism; if she gives in there is something dreadfully wrong.
‘You are stupid!’ I ranted. ‘It’s crazy to trek in this heat and not eat salt!’ I produced some, which Rachel meekly consumed. Then she sucked a few glucose tablets. Egbert meanwhile was grazing happily. I mooched off into the scrub, pretending to bird-watch.
Fifteen minutes later Rachel said, ‘Now I’m OK. Let’s push on.’
I led Egbert and tried to persuade myself that all was well. For miles we followed the crest of that glorious ridge, Rachel sucking glucose at intervals and seeming quite cheerful. A frolicking breeze pushed small white round clouds across the sky and tempered the sun’s heat. Occasional thatched Fulani compounds were surrounded by high wickerwork fences. Many cattle grazed between low trees but we saw nobody until the day’s one vehicle overtook us: a bush-taxi coming from Ribao.
It stopped. Two soldiers emerged – one Francophone, one Anglophone – their uniforms without insignia, their faces without smiles. The fat Anglophone unzipped his fly and pee’d almost onto my boots while asking, ‘Where you come from?’
‘From Bamenda,’ I replied.
‘Not true!’ exclaimed the soldier, shaking his little willy and tucking it away. ‘Bamenda is far, far! You come from Nigeria – give me your passports!’
I gave them. He stared at the green booklets and enquired, ‘You are German people?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘we are Irish people – from Ireland.’
‘Ireland? What is Ireland?’ He glared angrily at me, slapping his left hand with the passports.
‘Our country,’ I explained. ‘Where we live – where we have our compound.’
Meanwhile the Francophone had been surveying Egbert’s load. He said something to his mate who eagerly asked us, ‘What happens you go sick in bush?’
‘We have medicines,’ I foolishly replied.
‘Show us your medicines!’ demanded the Anglophone, adding frankly, ‘These might be useful for us!’
Regretfully I pointed out that we couldn’t show them because they were deep inside the load which was very difficult to undo.
‘Show us everything!’ ordered the Anglophone. ‘That is normal, you must show! We are border guards and many smuggle from Nigeria – it is normal to show!’
Here Rachel craftily intervened. ‘You undo the load,’ she suggested. ‘We are too tired and the knots are very difficult.’
‘Yes,’ I echoed, 'you undo it. But take care! This dangerous horse, he kick plenty!’
We sat down, like people not in a hurry, and repeated that we were too tired to attempt the hazardous task of unloading such an evil-tempered brute. But we had no objection to their unloading and examining all our baggage.
Much argument followed, in an increasingly amiable key. Finally the Anglophone admitted, rather disarmingly, ‘We fear horses – we go!’ And they went.
We found this confrontation less amusing at the time than in retrospect.
Soon a brief downpour refreshed us. Where Mayo Darle first came deceptively into view, hours before we got there, cultivated fields replaced forest and scrub. The cultivators – both men and women – were truly black skinned (few Africans are) and regarded us with nervous suspicion. Later we learned that these people are Kwondjas, a tribe who remained enslaved by the Fulanis until the 1950s. Around one corner we came face to face with a leggy Mbororo girl; she emitted a weird wail and bolted into the bushes.
When Rachel again needed to rest we sat on a grassy bank and I somewhat belatedly expressed sympathy. But my suggestion that we should spend the night at a Fulani compound was rejected and I was accused of ‘fussing’. I warned that Mayo Darle was further than it looked but Rachel – fortunately – remained resolute. As we began the long, gradual descent another brief downpour made the track treacherous and Egbert, perhaps remembering his Lingham fall, slowed down considerably.
Two hours later there came a repeat performance of our evening on a bare mountain, with the difference that this storm lasted much longer and the sound and lighting effects were not quite so spectacular. When the heavenly damn burst without warning we were about a mile from the town, on a steep hill that within moments became a river.
Gale-driven sheets of water almost blinded us and I could hear poor Egbert thinking, ‘Not again!’ For his sake we soon took refuge on the wide verandah of a large roadside shuttered house. But he was unnerved by the torrent’s tattooing on the tin roof and would only put his forequarters under shelter, which meant that the waterfall from the gutterless roof streamed directly onto the load.
We sat shivering on a narrow bench in the macabre twilight created by these tropical storms. I studied Rachel and shouted, ‘How do you feel?’
‘Fine!’ she shouted back untruthfully. Her eyes seemed to have shrunk and her shivering was much more violent than my own. I put a hand on her forehead and guesstimated that her temperature was not less than 103°F. ‘Nonsense!’ she snapped. ‘Mothers always exaggerate!’
A smiling woman came tripping down the hill – the only person in sight – her shoes on her head, her wrap-around gown clinging to her portly form. She waved cheerfully and I reflected that Mayo Darle had probably been praying for rain. Yet such deluges are not what the rainmakers try to attract. We could see the water rushing down the steep field opposite, not being absorbed by the earth but sweeping the topsoil into the Mayo Darle – which was rising rapidly as we watched.
Then our involuntary host – an elderly man – came racing around the corner of his house. On seeing us he stopped as though pole-axed, but quickly recovered himself and beckoned us to follow him inside. Rachel did so. I stayed with Egbert who needed constant soothing, verbal and tactile, as the thunder crackled and boomed – less continuously than on the bare mountain, which for him made it all the more terrifying.
Thirty chilling minutes later the wind dropped and the rain eased, though only very slightly. I found Rachel slumped dopily in an armchair in a big empty half-dark room. Of our host, or anybody else, there was no sign. By then however we were too demoralised to worry about the finer points of politesse.
‘Let’s go!’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get you into a bed somewhere – and fast!’
We waded down towards the Mayo Darle, by now a wildly swirling red-brown torrent. A man was pushing a hand-cart over the bridge and despair engulfed me. This wasn’t a real bridge but a few loose sheets of warped scrap iron laid over a few flexible tree trunks – the hand-cart’s crossing sounded like a heavy metal band gone berserk. No horse that I have ever known would take on such a contraption. Without altering my pace I looked at Egbert, who was wearing his ‘pained resignation’ expression. (His range of expressions was truly remarkable.) Then suddenly I knew that he would, as always, oblige. Which he did, following me across those rattling metal sheets without any trace of nervousness. On the far side three women in a doorway were diverted to see me embracing my horse.
When I yelled an inquiry about ‘Africa hotel?’ the women yelled back, ‘No hotel here!’ This, we subsequently discovered, was untrue. Mayo Darle has numerous doss-houses, being on one of Cameroon’s main motorways and a staging-post for trans-continental truckers. But no doubt the good ladies deemed those establishments unfit for Whites.
We now joined the international motorway – a wider earth track, also converted to a river. At the junction stood a sodden gendarme, wearing no waterproofs; sensibly, the locals don’t even try to defy such storms.
‘From Nigeria?’ asked the gendarme.
‘From Bamenda,’ I corrected, without stopping.
‘Halt!’ cried he. ‘This way not from Bamenda! You cannot walk from Bamenda – nobody walk from Bamenda! You come Customs and Immigration – show passports, show health papers, fill immigration forms, show baggage!’
I paused, glanced over my shoulder and said through clenched teeth, ‘You must be joking! Look at us! And my daughter has fever – we’re going straight to the Mission.’
The gendarme waved his arms in the air. ‘This is not your daughter! You tell me lies! This is your wife!’
‘Get stuffed!’ growled Rachel from the background.
I turned and strode purposefully away up the long main street past a row of colossal parked trucks bringing cargoes (and no doubt AIDS) from the Central African Republic to Douala. A hundred yards on we glanced back. The gendarme was still standing at the junction, peering at us through an opacity of rain.
Reluctant as we were to sorn on the Mission, especially when diseased, there seemed to be no alternative. Two little boys volunteered to guide us through a network of steep laneways – now cataracts. The distance was about two miles but it felt like twenty.
Mayo Darle’s solitary missionary (Franz, a Dutch Mill Hill priest) was unsurprised to see us; he had just returned from a visit to St Augustine’s. Standing on his wide verandah, he nodded and smiled through the curtain of rain, and shouted something inaudible above the tattoo on the roof, and pointed to the guest room – where Rachel at once collapsed onto the single bed.
Unloading took a long time; my fingers were numb and the knots rain-tightened. Tethering Egbert nearby, I changed into garments that were damp rather than wet and joined our host in his simple but comfortable living-room. He poured me a beer before saying anything. Then we shouted at each other about Rachel’s symptoms. Her diary for 2 April records: ‘Felt lousy and was diagnosed as having malaria. A sweet black Sister gave me a chloroquin shot in the bum.’