THE ‘SWEET BLACK Sister’ had, I was relieved to hear, used a new disposable needle. In most parts of Africa basic medical equipment, taken for granted in the West, is so hard to come by that ‘disposable’ needles are used again and again – and are regarded, by some doctors, as an even greater AIDS hazard than promiscuity.
Rachel’s ‘shot in the bum’ was supplemented by massive doses of chloroquin pills at six-hourly intervals and after a semi-delirious night she was up, though still very weak, on the following afternoon. However, the experts pronounced that she needed at least three days’ rest and would be well advised to ride Egbert for another few days. Relapses, they said, are brought about by too much exertion too soon. Mayo Darle (population approximately 5,000) has no doctor but through personal experience most of its inhabitants have become malaria experts.
From Egbert’s point of view this was a lucky break; he had perceptibly lost condition on the hot plain. After the storm Yaya Moctar, a young Fulani malloum (religious teacher) and noted local horseman, put him to graze with his own herd beyond the river. Often I turned my binoculars on that grassy hillside, almost opposite the Mission, to enjoy watching him stuffing himself.
Yaya was a friend of the Foxes, a young lay-missionary couple who, after four years in Cameroon, spoke a marvellous multiplicity of languages including Foulfoulde. They lived in a bungalow in the Mission compound and, with Franz, formed Mayo Darle’s White colony. John Fox (from Ireland) was a teacher and photographer; Jacqueline (from Holland) was a Primary Health Care worker, away in the bush when we arrived. At sunset John dragged himself over to the big Mission bungalow and Franz introduced us. The Irishman was then a shocking sight: tall, gaunt, haggard, with sunken eyes and a ghastly pallor. He could eat nothing and drink only water. Frequent and severe attacks of malaria wreck the digestive system, even when the patient is a strong, well-nourished White. Hence it is a main killer-disease in areas where many are ill-nourished.
Franz was a comparative newcomer and after two years in Kenya, working deep in the bush with one large nomadic tribe, he found Cameroon’s patchwork of languages and clans somewhat daunting. ‘Where do you start?’ he wondered plaintively.
My unspoken reaction was, ‘Why bother to start?’ It is hard to see any possible spiritual benefit accruing to Africans in the 1980s from the presence among them of White missionaries, however sensitive and sympathetic. The dispatching of those men and women ‘to save souls’ in Black Africa is unrealistic, if only because of the missionaries’ past symbiotic relationship with colonialism. Inevitably we contrasted the roles of Franz, the ‘formal’ though flexible mission priest, and of the Foxes, new-style lay-workers whose practical activities gave shape and meaning to their lives in Cameroon. The demands made on Franz by his flock were minimal: an annual average of ten confessions heard and ten baptisms administered. (Of course he also provided daily Mass: but that was not a demand.) Across the compound, the demands made on the Foxes’ skills were endless.
On meeting Jacqueline, I at once got the sort of charge that comes from recognising a kindred spirit. The morning after the storm, as Mayo Darle sweltered on its lowish riverbank under a cloudless sky, she invited me to accompany her to the Health Centre at the local open-cast tin-mine, which we had noticed on the way from Somie. Mayo Darle’s Mission was founded to minister to the mining settlement, when the French forcibly imported hundreds of workers from the Central African Republic in 1935. (Most inconveniently, the terms of their League of Nations Mandate forbade them to subject Cameroonians to the conditions then prevailing at the mine.) In 1974 the Mission moved to its present site because the tin – and miners – were dwindling. A new church was built in 1985, its design incomprehensibly based on a Fulani compound although in Africa, as elsewhere, the Muslim-to-Christian conversion rate is, and always has been, negligible.
By 1987 the miners’ community was down to about 250 and many company dwellings – grimly resembling prison-compound huts – lay empty. A recent attempt to revive the mine had failed and closure seemed imminent. In a small shed, shaded by mighty mango trees, the sad, gentle manager showed us minute quantities of tin being processed with the aid of primitive but adequate (he said) technology. Apart from the rows of dwellings, now half-obscured by vegetation, this ecologically benign enterprise has left the beauty of the surrounding mountains unspoiled.
A decrepit primary school, devoid of what we consider basic teaching aids, catered for two score happy children who seemed to have an excellent relationship with their kindly if ineffectual teacher – and with Jacqueline. But what does the future hold for those grandchildren of forcibly displaced persons? Probably many will migrate to a city and compete desperately for the most menial jobs. The wiser ones will remain around Mayo Darle and clear enough bush to provide meagre sustenance for a family – very meagre, as the local soil is ungenerous to those without cattle.
Jacqueline had won the rare distinction of being accepted as a friend by the area’s notoriously aloof Fulani semi-nomads. These clans refused to accept Islam and take part in don Fodio’s Jihad and so reaped none of the conqueror’s rewards, which didn’t in any case appeal to them. Some have now settled with their cattle in otherwise uninhabited and uncultivated bush. But none think of themselves as belonging to any nation-state and the majority remain seasonal nomads, migrating twice annually with their enormous herds and few possessions. Unlike Muslim Fulanis, they never marry out; a girl who became pregnant by a Bantu would probably be killed and her baby certainly would. (Many Fulani warriors took Bantu women into their harems to consolidate alliances, hence the high percentage of dark-skinned upper-class Fulanis in modern Cameroon.)
I was touched when Jacqueline suggested a day-trip to the compound of her closest nomad friends; she is not the sort of person to display friends as ‘tourist attractions’. From Mayo Darle we drove south-east for half an hour, the jeep weaving like a hunted hare to avoid this international highway’s numerous fissures. On our right, far below, the Somie plain was a heat-hazed blur. On our left, hilly grey-green scrub and thin jungle, apparently unpeopled, stretched away to the horizon. Parking the jeep under a wayside mango tree, we walked through those steep hills for forty-five minutes on a surprisingly well-defined path. Many of the low trees were unfamiliar and, Jacqueline said, a valuable nomad food-source. They gather an abundance of wild fruits, berries, roots and medicinal leaves and herbs. We glimpsed a few groups of turkey-sized black birds strutting through the bush; I have never seen others like them. This high, silent hill country was yet another of Cameroon’s many contrasting ‘worlds’ – harsh yet tranquil.
Jacqueline talked, with affection, of the nomads. Naturally they keep no record of ages; youngsters marry when physically mature. Babies are named a week after birth and cattle killed to celebrate the event. There are no family names and personal names change at different stages of development – and sometimes for other reasons, to do with unusual events in an individual’s life. All of which, added to a lack of fixed addresses, makes Fulani nomads peculiarly difficult to catch in bureaucratic nets; and the Cameroonian government sensibly leaves them to their own devices.
Those very few nomad children who have sampled schooling find it uncongenial. Their academic concentration span is short, like that of their White contemporaries from Tv-dominated homes. Yet out in the forest, when hunting, herding or honey-gathering, they can concentrate on detail for hours at a stretch, showing exceptional patience and persistence.
We passed only one compound, at some little distance; the few low huts merged into their surrounding bush and but for Jacqueline I might have missed them. Her friends’ compound was altogether grander, occupying a large, dusty, unfenced clearing amidst spindly trees. Their new main hut was, on the local scale of things, a Yuppie residence, made of imported (from beyond Tignere) bamboos, with circular walls of pre-woven straw matting bought at a market. A small boy and slightly larger girl fled at our approach, despite my being escorted by their beloved Jacqueline.
Jacqueline’s special friend, Dijja, was sitting in the sun on a frayed raffia mat, bare to the waist, and for a moment her appearance frightened me. No Famine Appeal poster could have been more harrowing. She was, literally, skin and bone; never before had I met anyone at such an advanced stage of emaciation. Obtusely, I assumed her to be very, very old. In fact, according to Jacqueline’s calculations, she was scarcely fifty – but had been suffering from untreated tuberculosis for seventeen years. A lesser being would long since have died but these nomads are hardy folk. When she rose to greet us her breasts flapped like strips of dried leather yet she stood erect and moved with agility. Her greeting was gracious and warm and after the initial shock one forgot her appearance. An extraordinary vitality burned within that skeletal frame. Dijja was among the most impressive people I met in Cameroon: brave, witty, vivacious, with strong views and a formidable air of authority – a grande dame of the bush.
We had to bend very low to enter the main hut. Inside, close enough to the doorless entrance for smoke to escape easily, a few sticks smouldered between three stones. Dijja at once added twigs and began to blow on them as two daughters and a daughter-in-law hurried in to welcome Jacqueline and her guest. We sat on one of three homemade beds and gratefully received pint mugs brimming with fresh milk. A teenage girl lay close beside us on another bed, completely invisible beneath a goathair blanket and moaning softly at frequent intervals. She had ‘stomach ache’, whatever that might signify, and throughout our four-hour visit remained immobile but for an occasional convulsive movement when stabbed by pain. Nobody, except Jacqueline, took any notice of her.
The children soon joined us, after a cautious preliminary peeping session. The handsome three-year-old boy was stark naked; the frail girl (Dijja’s youngest) looked about eight but must have been twelve, Jacqueline reckoned. All the men were away, tending their many cattle and fewer sheep. The latter are cash-livestock, to be sold whenever money is needed – which isn’t very often. Cattle are rarely sold for cash but are in themselves a form of currency, being used to pay debts or clan-imposed fines, and for such ceremonial obligations as brideprices.
The hut was some thirty feet in diameter and the roof rose to quite a high point. Wood in convenient lengths had been stacked near the fire. A stand made of uneven branches held several calabashes and a few of their modern equivalents, bright dishes imported from Nigeria. Previously a woman’s calabash collection was her pride and joy; now enamel-ware is ‘in’. Flies swarmed and as my eyes became adjusted I observed that the floor was unswept, the food dishes unprotected from flies and the general level of cleanliness (except bodily cleanliness) way below normal. This is one reason why other Cameroonians, including Fulanis, despise the nomads as ‘backward’. But, Jacqueline explained, they are also feared and grudgingly respected for the efficacy of their magic. Never having ‘gone over’ to Islam or Christianity, they are believed to be more closely in touch than most with the spirit-world and their magic is proportionately powerful.
All the young women were good looking, graceful, high spirited. But one was a problem. Fatah, aged twenty-five, refused to marry – or at least to marry any man suggested by her family. She should have been a wife for nine or ten years, yet she had remained steadfastly anti-marriage in a way that would have been impossible for a Muslim – and hard to imagine for any other Cameroonian outside the Westernised elite. Jacqueline suspected that the family blamed her for indirectly encouraging, through her own example as a career-woman, Fatah’s claims to independence – though the rebel had been twenty-one, and set in her apparently celibate ways, when Jacqueline came on the local scene. Fatah didn’t strike me as a natural celibate: rather the reverse. Was she perhaps a nomad drop-out who felt an inexplicable longing for the wider world and hoped somehow to reach it through a self-made marriage? Or was she simply an unconscious pioneer of feminism in the bush, freakishly individualistic and determined not to become any man’s property? Did she, I wondered, have a lover in Mayo Darle? I didn’t care to ask Jacqueline who, had she received any such confidence, would not have wished to break it.
The hours passed agreeably. Dijja herself prepared our ‘treat’ – aromatic fried butter, onion-flavoured and spiced. This was placed on the floor between us in a little bowl, together with a large communal bowl of cold rice left over from breakfast. Chunks of rice dipped in the hot butter sauce tasted surprisingly good and I stuffed myself while a relaxed triangular conversation flowed between Jacqueline, her friends and myself. Meanwhile the little boy – already an apprentice herd, when the cattle are nearer home – was romping desultorily with a half-grown dog of infinite tolerance who lay close beside Dijja when not being required to romp.
This family belonged to a group known as the Aku who speak their own dialect and have their own hair-styles and dances. They still migrate to and fro across the border mountains; Dijja was born in Nigeria. They have no conception of the world beyond their own territories. Douala means no more to them than Dublin. But the local markets are important, socially rather than economically. Twice or even thrice a week someone walks to a market – this may involve a thirty-mile trek – and returns full of entertaining gossip.
The latest gossip concerned an unusual domestic tragedy. Nomad marriages are arranged very early, sometimes during babyhood, though the ceremony never takes place until both partners are fully mature. However, husbands are free to choose their second and subsequent wives, which occasionally provokes friction – or worse. In this case an unprepossessing first wife became so jealous of a comely second wife that she bit off two of her rival’s fingers at the top joints and thrust her face into a kitchen fire, wedging it between the stones. The young woman was dreadfully scarred and her sight permanently damaged. Having recovered enough to walk, she took refuge in her parents’ compound – and stayed there. Which was the object of the exercise. The neighbours’ reaction to this drama proved how unusual it was. A self-contained society, operating beyond the laws of the land, also has to be self-regulatory. Therefore strong taboos ensure that such violent urges are usually repressed.
An hour or so after our rice course a huge bowl of delicious creamy curds was placed at our feet – and soon emptied. Some time later we were handed two filthy tin spoons and encouraged to help ourselves from a dish of thick, dark honey, newly gathered in the forest. It was faintly smoke-flavoured; a fire is lit below the hive – hanging from a tree – to disperse the owners. At this stage we restrained ourselves; honey is hard-won and an important nutrient.
Dijja also suffered from asthma and when an attack began Fatah rushed to fetch a large bottle of spray-on scent which she applied lavishly to her mother’s back as a ‘cure’. Those grotesquely incongruous ‘ First World’ fumes seemed to aggravate the attack but everyone inhaled them appreciatively and the little boy begged for scent on his hands; this was evidently a regular routine.
The maverick Fatah had her own tiny hut which it was de rigueur for me to visit before we left. A frame of rough branches supported a tousled grass thatch and there was just room for the three of us to stand beside the hide-covered pallet. On a little shelf above it stood an improbable array of shampoos, deodorants, insecticides, toilet soaps, scents and cosmetics. Plainly Fatah’s imagination had been seduced by the Big Bad World where not only cattle are important. She now impulsively decided to accompany us to Mayo Darle and spend the night in the Foxes’ bungalow, as she quite often did when the opportunity arose. But first a hen had to be caught; no honoured guest may leave a compound without a gift of a hen – or a cock, should he prove easier to capture. I carried the unfortunate bird back to the jeep.
Later I asked Jacqueline if, in her view, the Cameroonian villagers’ connubial sleeping arrangements mean that most couples’ sexual relationships are strictly functional, for the physical relief of males and the fertilisation of females.
‘Just so,’ replied Jacqueline. ‘Village women get their emotional satisfaction from mothering. They couldn’t even imagine what we mean by love-making – maybe that’s why they seem content without sex while suckling. It’s fantasy that Africans enjoy gloriously uninhibited, passionate, voluptuous sex-lives!’
Near Mayo Darle we met a young nomad woman carrying a large basin of milk to the market; having sold it she would buy the supplementary food needed during this in-between season. She sat behind with Fatah, on the spare tyre, and as we jolted down the track it distressed me to see much of her precious liquid sloshing onto the floor. She often drove with Jacqueline: this was not the first time she had lost a significant percentage of her load. Yet the basin was adequately lidded, had the lid been held firmly in place. I felt utterly baffled; she didn’t seem stupid and Jacqueline confirmed that in her own world she was shrewd and resourceful. But she couldn’t grasp the simple laws of science that prevent liquid from spilling in a jolting jeep.
This must be the sort of incident that prompted generations of White colonialists to scorn ‘thick Blacks’. It reminded me of our Bamenda conversation with an anguished and mildly intoxicated English architect who asserted – after working for fifteen years in Africa – that one cannot train a team of Black construction workers and then leave them to get on with the job.
‘Unless you’re supervising,’ he had said, ‘something will go radically wrong. Most Blacks are fine builders in their own styles but anything else defeats them. I don’t exactly mean intellectually – some of them learn very fast. But then they won’t concentrate. And all the basic principles we’ve taken for granted for centuries are new to them – so they won’t take them seriously if you’re not watching. I’m not talking only about modern technology – looking after machinery and so on. It’s more complicated. Seven hundred years ago we were building the great cathedrals of Europe. Seventy years ago, they were building mud so-called palaces – that was the apogee of their architectural ambition and still would be if we hadn’t come along. Is it racist to say this? Should we only think it? Or should we pretend it’s not true or doesn’t matter? But if you’re living and working here it does matter, one helluva lot! For your own peace of mind you’ve got to try to understand why Africa has such problems – otherwise you’d become professionally embittered and intolerant and really racist. And probably an alcoholic …’
Like all the (fortunately few) towns on our route, Mayo Darle seemed to signify a strong African disinclination to come to terms with having been dragged into the Modern Age. These places look like wounds inflicted on the country by some alien force. The contrast with bush villages, away from ‘motorable’ tracks, could not be more striking; many villages still retain that simple, orderly beauty so much admired by early travellers in West Africa. Nor is this comparison just one more symptom of silly White romanticism. The towns do not provide a more comfortable or convenient way of life than the villages – rather the reverse. If they have an electricity generator (usually they don’t) its unreliability means that it is not a mod. con. but a source of dismay and confusion. A post office may occasionally exist but it can take letters a month or two to travel a hundred miles. A health centre may also exist in theory (the French maps are peppered with them), but it will be so under-staffed and ill-equipped that it is better to stick with the medicine-men, as most people do. A water source may be closer to each compound, but it will almost certainly be more polluted than rural supplies. And health is further endangered by a hazard (now a deadly hazard) unknown in the villages – prostitution.
Often prostitution is someone’s problem exported from a village to a town, as on every continent. Mayo Darle has a colony of more than two hundred prostitutes to serve passing truckers and while bar-crawling I met dozens (many bars are also brothels). Once I was invited to the two-roomed hut of an articulate Anglophone quartet; all were barren and had been rejected by their husbands, leaving prostitution as the only alternative to starvation.
This was the dark side to the Ntem Chief’s moving love for – reverence for – children. According to traditional beliefs, a barren woman is a non-person. Her husband will not necessarily reject her, demanding a refund of the bridewealth, because she may still be useful as a field worker. But the extended family and the local community will make her feel so inadequate – almost wicked – that it is often easier to run away. She sees herself as excluded from the tribe/family/clan. When she dies there will be no one to remember her, to maintain contact with her spirit, so she cannot join the living-dead. It will be as though she had never lived. Barrenness has removed her from the river that flows from birth through life to afterlife; it flows on without her. And even while she lives she is non-existent because unfruitful.
All four women in that sad little hut were believing Christians – two Baptists, one Roman Catholic, one Presbyterian – yet none took comfort from their faith. If anything, having been brought up on the ideal of Christian marriage sharpened their grief. Not only had they failed as women, in their traditional role, but they had also failed as Christian partners in a monogamous life-long union. Belonging to ‘Mission Christian’, as distinct from ‘Black Church’, families can make rejection even more humiliating; often the barren wife is blamed for leaving her husband with no choice but to sin. These women’s reliance on children – especially sons – to confer immortality had remained undiminished by their exposure to the Christian doctrine of individual posthumous rewards or punishments. None could sufficiently comprehend ‘the Beatific Vision’ to regard it as an adequate consolation prize for childless women. Not myself believing in the Christian afterlife, I shared their gut-reaction to ‘Heaven’ and became aware of an ironic closing of a circle. We five women were agreed that immortality has more to do with child-bearing than with ‘Heaven’ but we had travelled to that meeting-point by different – and opposite – roads.
On another level our conversation was one more reminder of the gulf between individualistic Westerners and most of the rest of mankind. In their own estimation these women had no value as individuals; they saw themselves only as part of a community to which, being female, they should contribute young. Instinctively they were concerned with the survival of the species, to an extent and with an intensity that is no longer necessary. The fulfilment of the individual was not on their agenda.
When I asked what they knew about AIDS the women giggled. There was no problem in Cameroon, only in other places … It would have been pointless to remind them that most of their clients came from the ‘other places’ in question. There was nothing they could do to protect themselves, even had it been possible to convince them that protection was necessary. Cameroon is not in the main danger zone (yet) but the virus has of course arrived and we heard of several deaths in the Kumbo region.
As we talked in that shadowy little room – becoming increasingly uninhibited on ‘33’ and Guinness (they preferred Guinness) – I wondered what would happen to my unfortunate friends, and their many colleagues, when their bodies are no longer saleable. Like most African countries, Cameroon has no social security system; family members are supposed to care for one another and usually do, at least in rural areas. All four women were in their mid-forties and their prices had dropped to 100 CFA (about 20p): the price of a hand of bananas. Many teenagers, they said, could charge 500 CFA and even up to 1,000 CFA (just over £2) if they were very fat. I asked why teenagers chose this job and was startled to learn that some are earning their brothers’ school fees. Prostitution does not of course carry the same stigma in Africa as in Europe. If times are hard – a crop failure, an expensive illness, storm damage to a compound – it may make economic sense to send a daughter out to earn for a few years, before marriage, even if this leads to her husband paying somewhat reduced bridewealth. Being by then on my third ‘33’ I got lost in the maze of clans and groups now mentioned. Some are openly tolerant of pre-marital sex and see prostitution as nothing more; others condone it, but furtively; others condemn it and would consider a daughter on the streets the ultimate family disgrace. Yet even from among that last group many modern girls now defy their families and come to the bright (lamp) lights of Mayo Darle because they want to find ‘educated’ husbands and graduate to the brilliant (electric) lights of Douala or Yaounde.
Thirty-six miles of hilly motor-road link Mayo Darle to Banyo, a bigger town, with a post office, a hospital and two Missions (Catholic and Protestant). There are no cut-shorts; the French (or was it German?) road-builders took the shortest cut. However, we decided to look for bush-paths, even if they added miles. By Cameroonian standards the traffic is considerable on this comically circuitous but only transcontinental route from Yaounde to the Central African Republic and Mombasa. Every hour or so a menacing giant container or oil-tanker goes rattling and roaring and hooting over the calamitous surface, creating clouds of blinding, stifling dust.
While drifting around Mayo Darle I repeatedly enquired about bush-paths going north. Most people said there was no such thing but at last I met Jackson, a worried-looking Anglophone, who showed me the start of a path which would take us through high hills to Yoli, on the motor-road, where we could ask again. This path began near an unused hospital, completed a few years ago but as yet unopened for lack of trained staff willing to work in ‘primitive’ Mayo Darle.
Jackson looked worried because his brown and white in-kid nanny had broken her tether and strayed. She and her young represented all his savings: he had been seeking her since dawn. I joined in the search and roamed the sides of a deep wooded glen. Then a distant figure appeared on the skyline – a woman gesticulating and shouting. We hastened to the road; the nanny had been found in someone’s depleted maize-field and could be redeemed on payment of compensation. Jackson looked at me expectantly; he had after all gone out of his way to show me that path to Yoli. We set out to retrieve the goat, inspect the not very extensive damage and palaver with an eloquently angry Francophone woman who seemed to detest all Anglophones. After half an hour damages were settled at 1,000 CFA and muggins paid up.
Mayo Darlé had more than its share of predatory folk, no doubt a result of the permanent White presence. Several of my bar companions – eminently respectable men and women, highly regarded in their local community – were delighted to hear that in the middle of June we would again be stopping off at the Mission. Urgently they begged me to bring them gifts from N’gaoundere: a sack of rice, a pair of ‘smart shoes’, a length of ‘cloth with many colours’ for a new frock, and so on and on and on. When I protested, ‘We’re not rich!’ they took that to be my little joke. All Whites are rich and as I seemed an amiable drinking partner, willing to dispense beer within reason, was it not natural that our reunion should be celebrated with gifts?
Malaria prophylactics may not work too well nowadays, as preventatives, but they do mean milder attacks when the virus strikes. On 5 April Rachel felt fit enough to accompany Yaya and me to the Sunday market where we hoped to buy two strong holdalls to replace the bulky sacks, thereby leaving room on the saddle for a convalescent.
This weekly market was disappointing, though it draws villagers from near and far. The only foods available were maize-flour, jammu-jammu greenery, manioc, bananas, avocados, mangoes and a tall pyramid of expensive tins of Ovaltine newly smuggled from Nigeria. In the butchers’ corner hunks of beef swarmed with flies and were already smelly. The two zebu heads concerned stood on a trestle-table like noisome hairy sculptures and behind them little boys were doing arcane things with piles of offal. (One day we would discover to our cost exactly what they were doing …) Dogs lurked profitably and a strangely mottled mother cat defied them to make off with an intestine prize longer than herself.
All the little stalls – mostly Fulani and Hausa – are open on Sundays, lining rough narrow laneways, but the local cash scarcity limits their range and quality of goods. Many tall, bearded, commanding figures were striding around in flowing pastel robes and embroidered caps, looking as though they owned the place – which once they did, before the White man came. Yaya knew everyone and because of his malloum status was obviously much respected, despite his youth. He saw to it that fair prices were mentioned and after much deliberation – nothing on offer looked very substantial – we paid 5,000 CFA for two large ‘airline’ holdalls of tawdry plastic and cardboard, with zipped outer pockets. Yaya suggested reinforcing them on his uncle’s sewing-machine and for twenty minutes we sat in a minute tailor’s cubby-hole watching him deftly at work; he is a man of many parts. When I made a shocking – insulting – mistake by trying to dash him, he forgave me with one of his most charming smiles.
Next day Rachel seemed stronger still and we went for a ‘test-run’ stroll on the hills above the tin-mine. Although she claimed to feel ‘95 per cent’ – quite fit enough to walk to Banyo – I insisted on her riding and quoted Mungo Park: ‘My recovery was very slow; but I embraced every short interval of convalescence to walk out, and make myself acquainted with the products of the country. In one of those excursions, having rambled further than usual in a hot day, I brought on a return of my fever, and on the 10th of September I was again confined to my bed.’
The bush-path to Yoni crossed steep wooded mountains, separated by spectacular ravines from which baboons abused us. Our compact holdalls left ample room for a rider but Egbert at once made it plain that he abhorred his new role. Nor could we blame him. The load was light: your average Cameroonian donkey would think nothing of carrying twice that weight for twenty miles non-stop. Rachel however is not light and, within moments of her mounting, Egbert reminded us that carrying a hefty rider was not part of his contract. He conveyed this message by walking at a steady one m.p.h. and looking reproachfully aggrieved when two m.p.h. were suggested.
Rachel had to dismount for the hazardous descent from those mountains. Soon after, we came upon our first milk-bar: two very small Fulanis milking three very large cows in the middle of nowhere. They were bewildered when I paid them for an enormous gourd brimming with warm frothing milk. Near Yoni we joined the hot, stony, dusty motor-road and at 11.15 a.m. took refuge under a generously shady tree surrounded by lush grass. The convalescent slept deeply while I conversed with two Bamenda truck-drivers whose vehicle had broken down nearby; they expected to have to spend two or three nights in their cab while awaiting ‘a piece’ from Douala.
A frisky breeze tempered the afternoon heat and Egbert consented to speed up as we turned off the ‘international highway’ onto another bush-path. But soon Rachel announced that she would have to walk; folded sacks on a wooden saddle don’t do much for the bum. (My suggestion that we should camp immediately was derided.) Our path crossed a series of forested hills – unpeopled and bird-rich – before dropping into a broad, serene, cultivated valley. This was Fulani territory and several prosperous compounds glowed golden amidst acres of young maize. By a cool sandy stream we performed our river ritual: water Egbert, fill and pill bottles, wash selves, brush teeth.
At sunset fortune favoured us with a tranquil tree-encircled campsite on a flat high hilltop where Egbert was turned loose to make the most of scant grazing. Then darkness revealed an awesome bush-fire to the north; sheets of crimson flame steadily widening on a hillside, below swirling clouds of orange-tinted smoke. Our inexperienced eyes couldn’t judge how far away it might be and momentarily it seemed threatening. We had seen evidence enough that some bush-fires spread and spread, devouring many miles. Would we be safe all night in our tent? This instant of animal fear was absurd yet powerful: one of those atavistic reactions that remind Western (wo)man how very recently s/he became ‘civilised’.
As we struck camp at dawn Rachel mutinied. ‘Today I’m 100 per cent fit, so there’s no need to ride.’ By noon she had proved her point, having effortlessly walked twelve miles. We were then in a newish, partly Anglophone village where the friendliness level seemed markedly lower than usual. While Egbert grazed outside the unwelcoming bar – some way from the road, behind empty market-stalls – both sacks were stolen off the saddle. This was our only Cameroonian experience of pilfering.
Back on the shadeless dusty motor-road we prayed for clouds that never came. Then a cattle-track appeared, accompanying the road but some little distance from it, winding through comparatively cool bush – much of it so dense that often we had to hold back saplings to make way for Egbert.
Near a group of Fulani compounds the track and road amalgamated where a still-solid colonial bridge spanned a wide brown river. I had just finished washing when a herd of migrating cattle came pouring over the crest of a high ridge beyond the river. There is something mysteriously exciting about such a sight; the last time we witnessed it was in Madagascar. I moved slightly to get a better view. Some four hundred glossy, lean, wide-horned beasts – including dozens of small calves, to the rear – came swiftly down the slope, eager for water. They were flanked by slim, nimble donkeys carrying household goods: rolled-up hides for sleeping on, gourds of every size, battered and blackened kettles and pots (just like our own), bags of manioc or maize-flour, a storm-lantern, a rusty tin of kerosene – and, topping one load, a pair of yellow and pink plastic sandals. Only four men were herding: lithe, muscular nomads wearing dusty rags, brandishing long sticks and chanting weirdly. This method of giving directions is perfectly understood by cattle but not, it seems, by sheep. Those inferior animals – about fifty of them, including lambs – came far behind in the charge of two small boys. Men and boys alike glanced at us with indifference (or was it contempt?) before returning all their attention to their animals. Fulani nomads on the move – we were to meet many others – have a strong aura of exclusiveness and independence. One senses a people completely absorbed in their own demanding yet fulfilling way of life, as they have been for millennia but may not be for much longer.
We followed the cattle-track up that ridge and into a deep, densely forested valley. When brilliant feathers flashed through the foliage I made to lift my binoculars – but they weren’t there. Only their empty case hung around my neck.
Stricken, I turned to Rachel. ‘My binocs! I’ve left them by the river!’
We stared at one another in silence. Then, ‘Shall I go back?’ I asked. ‘You could wait here.’
‘What’s the point? All those cattle have been across the bank.’
We continued through the cool evening shadows beneath the trees, then crossed the muddy bed of a dried-up stream and climbed a steep, tunnel-like path bizarrely eroded out of a shiny dark red cliff. Our campsite was far from compounds and cultivation so again we turned Egbert loose. Below this high crest another bush-fire leaped and quivered, sending wavelets of flame to lap at the feet of mighty trees; it was so close that we caught occasional whiffs of incense-like smoke. Having developed a local weather sense, we rightly judged it unnecessary to put up the tent and Rachel spread our flea-bags on the saddle-blanket on an open patch of ground. Soon she was asleep, but I lay grieving over my loss and miserably reviewing, as one does, every detail of ‘how it happened’. Objectively I recognised this misfortune as just punishment for having broken a basic Travellers’ Rule: CHECK EVERYTHING BEFORE MOVING ON. Subjectively, however, I found my punishment hard to take because bird-watching had been contributing so much, every day, to my enjoyment of Cameroon.
A brilliant moon had quenched all but the brightest stars and the deep stillness of the bush was emphasised at intervals by companionable Egbert-noises. Although it had been an exceptionally strenuous day sleep continued to elude me and, when no Egbert-noises had been heard for some time, I pulled on my boots and went to investigate. In fact he was nearby, merely snoozing between courses, but finding myself soothed by the austere black and silver beauty of the moonlit bush I mooched further along the ridge. Would it, I wondered, be worth while returning to the bridge at dawn? If I didn’t, would I always feel that I should have?
Suddenly there was a precipice ahead and soon after turning back I began to feel doubtful about our camp’s position. However, this was only a mini-crisis; at dawn Rachel could rescue me by whistle. The only snag, apart from missing a night’s sleep, was that other people might then be around. That, I suppose, is how folk-legends start – when a white female wearing only boots is glimpsed in the bush at sunrise.
Half an hour later I accidentally wandered onto the path, which eventually took me back to where Rachel lay asleep beneath the moon. By then I had made my decision: I would return to the bridge.
That dawn journey was, in a limited sense, worthwhile. During the whole river-ritual/nomad episode we had been watched by several men in a nearby ailing truck. One had found the binoculars and taken them to the nearest compound on the assumption that we would be back to search for them. But the Fulanis refused, literally, to touch them. Possibly they feared this weirdly shaped White man’s fetish, possibly they imagined we might accuse them of theft. So the binoculars were taken to Bamenda where, their finder told the Fulanis, they would be deposited at the Catholic Mission. All this I discovered through an odd coincidence: as I reached the bridge two Anglophone soldiers, returning to Bamenda on leave, stopped to wash in the river and volunteered to be my interpreters.
Banyo lies in a sun-trap saucer half-encircled by rugged blue hills. Although bigger than Mayo Darle, and an administrative centre, it is not very big. We arrived at ten o’clock and sat outside a friendly bar while Egbert grazed nearby amidst the rusting corpses of jeeps. When two passing gendarmes paused to investigate us my assertion of femininity paid off; once my womanhood had been accepted, slight suspicion became astonished cordiality.
On Banyo’s colonial-flavoured northern outskirts, we met a young Anglophone woman doctor riding a mo-ped and wearing a leather jacket over a pretty frock. Being a scientist she didn’t misgender me but noted, ‘The daughter is very like the mother!’ – causing the daughter, naturally enough, to scowl. As we went on our way towards Sambolabbo she turned to follow us, looking slightly anxious.
‘Where can you sleep tonight?’ she asked. ‘Do you know you are walking into the bush? There are no towns this way, you will find no hotel – maybe no house, no compound!’
We explained that we had a tent and could sleep out.
‘You are not afraid?’ marvelled the doctor.
‘Afraid of what?’ I asked.
Her laugh was rich, musical, expressive. ‘Wah! You White people! This is why you people conquered all the world! No fear, all confidence! I will not sleep in the bush and I am educated, they say “Westernised”. But no, something would make me too much afraid … Not dangerous spirits – I don’t believe in them. Not dangerous animals – we have none here, only snakes. But the loneliness I would fear – you are brave, brave people!’ She shook hands again and zoomed off, shouting a last ‘ Wonder-full’ over her shoulder.
Fifteen minutes later the brave people collapsed under a crop-guard’s shelter of two loose tin sheets laid across four uneven poles. By then a strong wind was blowing – hot, dusty, gusty – and I remember that as our noisiest siesta. From here the Tchabal Mbabo, twenty-five miles ahead, was a faint but massive blur blocking the northern horizon. The Banyo-Sambolabbo motor-track ends at the base of the range and is virtually traffic free, even in the dry season.
Four long, hot hours, climbing gradually through arid, silent, uninhabited bush, brought us to a campsite where the grazing was so poor that Egbert had to be tethered. And the rock-hard ground left no alternative to tree-tethering, which meant my having to move him every hour or so during the night.
Before sunrise we were striding through the blessedly cool blue-grey dawn, breakfasting as we went. By nine o’clock the heat was brutal and all morning the broken scrubby terrain remained desolate, dessicated and, in Rachel’s view, dreary. I, being of another temperament, enjoyed it despite the heat. Baboons abounded and our track was littered with their left-overs – deleaved branches and gigantic empty pods. Also, in one of the few remaining patches of forest, we saw five colobus monkeys – compensation enough for any amount of desolate dessication.
Towards noon a turn of the track revealed an improbable green hill surmounted by a wide-spreading tree. When we had unloaded in that merciful shade Egbert sniffed disdainfully at the lush clover-type greenery, then perversely headed off into the bleached scrub far below. We struggled to write our diaries but the unparalleled blood-lust of the local flies made concentration impossible. We tried to Scrabble but our minds were too heat-clogged. We drank a lot of water and ate a lot of salt and took off all our clothes which made it much easier to combat the ants. As we were reloading, at two o’clock, the day’s only vehicle passed. It was, cheeringly, a small beer-truck with some thirty passengers perched on the swaying load of crates.
Within an hour we were in Mba, a friendly Muslim village, neat and clean. It has no overt bar but a kindly old man wearing a frilly yellow nightgown (bequeathed by a female missionary?) led us far off the track to an isolated thatched hut where full crates of ‘33’ and Top witnessed to the truck’s passing. The ex-nomad sisters who entertained us had heavily tattooed faces – elaborate blue patterns on foreheads, noses, cheekbones – and wore many malloum’s amulets. All protective devices are appreciated by the eclectic Cameroonians and it is not uncommon to see one person wearing a malloum’s amulet, a medicine-man’s charm and a Catholic priest’s ‘Miraculous Medal’.
The grazing was so good and the bar-hut so seductively cool that we lingered until four o’clock. One young woman was trying to remove a large thorn deeply embedded in her muscular forearm. She dug into the flesh first with a broken matchstick, then with the point of a rusty knife taken from a cavity in the wall, finally and successfully with a needle brought by her sister. She seemed indifferent to her self-inflicted agony though merely watching made us feel sore.
Outside, three naked pickins sat on tattered goat-skins in the shade, playing intently with identical-sized stones. Mba has no school and many older children wandered to and fro, pausing to gaze in wonder at Egbert’s load. They were clad in rags but looked cheerful, healthy and undeprived. Their futures may be all the more satisfying because they have escaped that personality-fracturing process which passes for education in most Cameroonian rural schools.
North of Mba aridity again prevailed. From a deep forested chasm on our left came bursts of fractious monkey noises and the rugged scrubland on our right was implacably hostile to campers. The sun had almost set when at last we came to smoothness: an expanse of hard red earth amidst scattered, gnarled bushes. Happily an Egbert-delicacy grew here in abundance, a low dark green plant with tiny white flowers. Knowing this to be his asparagus-equivalent, we turned him loose with an easy mind. Then, going to pee, I startled a two-foot-long black and green snake which slid swiftly under a rock.
There had been no food for sale in Mba and our own supper was meagre: a soup cube and stale Banyo bread for Rachel, mint-cake for me, nuts for both. We Scrabbled by moonlight, then unrolled our bags. The snake had prompted me to consider ‘sleeping in’ but Rachel protested that in such heat our cramped tent would be intolerable. As I lay scratching my fly-bites a few high wispy clouds drifted gently past the moon, seeming not like clouds but elegant silver ghosts.
Asparagus is more palatable than sustaining so Egbert was to have a day off in Sambolabbo, before our ascent to 7,000 feet. A non-stop three-and-a-half hour march got us there before brutal heat time.
Sambolabbo, a large Fulani village, stands above the wide Mayo Mbamti and directly below the Tchabal Mbabo. We came first to a terraced row of newish houses and shops, with wide verandahs, where we consulted a youth about lodgings and grazing. He was an excellent sign-linguist who at once led us to his father’s nearby house. There we were graciously welcomed and shown straight into a disconcertingly affluent guest room. Our disgusting boots had been removed on the verandah; then, seeing a brand-new wall-to-wall nylon carpet, we hastily removed our no less disgusting socks. A double bed, with ironed cotton pillow-cases and an intricately woven counterpane, took up half the floor space. A low, plastic-topped table stood between two easy-chairs. The mud walls were white-washed and the wooden shutters of the unglazed window fitted perfectly. Our elderly host, Ibrahim Ali, was obviously a man of substance. Yet he spoke not a word of French, which puzzled us, given his man-of-the-world air. Later we heard that he speaks five African languages, apart from his native Foulfoulde, and it was hinted that his not learning French had been an anti-colonial gesture.
Ibrahim Ali was tall, slim, dignified, quiet-spoken. When our smelly dusty gear had been stacked in a corner of his guest room (where it looked very lower class) he handed me the door key. Impulsively I handed it back and to my relief he accepted the compliment. One never quite knows how to react on such occasions; he might have preferred not to be responsible for our possessions. But usually acting on impulse seems to work. And his never bothering to lock the door during our absence suggested that theft from a guest is unthinkable in Sambolabbo.
By ten o’clock Egbert was enjoying the riverside grass and we were thirsty. A small boy led us to the only bar, along a narrow path between compounds of various sizes, comprising two to six huts – mostly thatched, some tin-roofed. All were neat and clean, many had decorative shrubs or saplings. Some were enclosed by mud walls, others by high fences of woven grass or bamboo. Each had its prayer-space – raised circles of pebbles, six to eight feet across. In the more prosperous compounds these were edged with upturned bottles embedded in the ground, or with empty tomato puree tins, or whitened stones. Everywhere cocks strutted and crowed and hens and chicks scratched and clucked and cheeped. Outsize ducks waddled and quacked and we worried about their water supply. Invisible lambs bleated. Several elaborately caparisoned horses stood in the shade of mango or avocado trees while their riders did business in the market. ‘Not tethered,’ noted Rachel. Most Fulani horses, though whole, are extraordinarily docile and dependable. It was already very hot and few adults were about. Numerous small children stared at us, mesmerised, before rushing into their huts. Here, for the first time, we noticed significant numbers of unhealthy-looking youngsters: malnourished, with trachoma, jungle-sores and severely worm-distended bellies.
Sambolabbo’s only sink of iniquity was run by Andrew, a fat exuberant Bamenda man who had many other irons in the Banyo-Sambolabbo fire – and needed them, for the local bar trade is sluggish. He greeted us rapturously, rejoicing to meet two Irish topers with whom he – an urbane Bamenda Christian – could deplore the savagery of bush life in general and Fulani society in particular. (Most of the village’s few White visitors are teetotal missionaries.) He repeatedly emphasised his Christianity, and also his wealth of wives: a senior wife in Bamenda, a middle wife in Banyo, a junior wife in Sambolabbo. When he took Rachel to be my junior wife I explained, ‘Pickin for me’ and to short-circuit the gender argument unbuttoned my shirt.
‘Won-der full’ exclaimed Andrew, crashing his fist on the counter. ‘Hah! You White people! The women as strong as men!’ He glanced at Rachel, sitting in a corner pointedly dissociating herself from this scene of indecent exposure. ‘Pickin for you? But she is bigger than you! Won-der-ful! Where is your husband?’ He looked expectantly towards the door.
‘We’re travelling on our own,’ I explained. ‘I have no husband.’
Andrew wrinkled his face sympathetically. ‘Gone to God?’ he whispered.
‘I’ve never been married,’ I said.
‘Why?’ shouted Andrew, again crashing his fist on the counter. ‘Why no husband? Now you are old, worn out, grey and finished. But when you are young you must be like this fine pickin – you must have husband paying so much brideprice!’ He paused and narrowed his eyes. ‘Your family ask too much brideprice?’
‘It’s not like that,’ I said, ‘in Europe. Lots of women don’t marry. And a few who have no husband do have pickin.’
‘How many pickins you have?’ asked Andrew.
‘Only one,’ I admitted.
‘One?’ yelled Andrew, ‘Only one? Why only one? You have no son? Why no son?’
I began to wilt. Another short-circuit was indicated. ‘After this pickin,’ I said, ‘I am barren.’
‘Barren?’ Andrew whispered hoarsely. ‘Wah!’ As he covered his face with his hands I seized my beer and retreated.
Andrew stocked no Top so Rachel decided that the teetotal phase of her convalescence was over, which caused a sharp rise in our cost-of-living. Given a calculator and the inclination, it would be easy to outdo the USAF and produce a reliable map of Cameroon based on the price of beer. In Bamenda 100 CFA (about 22p) per half-litre, in Sambolabbo 275 CFA (about 60p) – and all along our route gradations that precisely indicated ‘distance from nearest city’ and ‘state of local roads’. When I exclaimed at the Sambolabbo price Andrew retorted huffily, ‘You have walked on this terrible way from Banyo, you should understand!’ Then we did; considering the wear and tear on the beer-truck, Sambolabbo’s ‘33’ was cheap at the price.
Andrew, having business elsewhere, soon left us alone but took the precaution of locking the counter opening. We wondered why; a thief could easily have surmounted that four-foot barrier. Perhaps because Sambolabbo is almost entirely Muslim, all beer crates lay under the counter and no bottles were displayed. The bar consisted of a semidetached mud shack enlivened by a catholic selection of technicoloured posters, printed in Nigeria. From left to right as one entered these were:
We had already seen most of these posters singly in other bars but the cumulative effect was particularly memorable – and, somehow, sad.
Andrew was now hammering tin sheets onto the roof beams of a new hut opposite the bar. When I proposed calling him to serve a second round Rachel said, ‘Isn’t it lunch-time? D’you realise we haven’t had a square meal since leaving Mayo Darlé?’
‘What,’ I speculated, ‘do round meals taste like?’
‘Soup cubes and nuts!’ replied Rachel.
Sambolabbo’s shopping-precinct – a rough-surfaced open space, overlooked by short rows of merchants’ stalls – has the atmosphere though not the shape of a town square. By far the biggest mud hut is a whitewashed mosque with an embryonic dome – a slight swelling on the roof. Opposite the mosque, appetising things were happening on a raised platform, under a tin roof. Charcoal glowed beneath half a tar-barrel, on top was a grid and on the grid were bits of what might loosely be termed ‘meat’. Sniffing like Bisto kids (an advertising allusion that dates me) we advanced on this gastronomically promising scene, ordered in sign-language and were invited to sit on greasy logs of wood. We realised then that we had queue-jumped; several hungry men were standing around nearby and very properly we had to await our turn. The log-stools were a concession to the visitors, but White queue-jumping isn’t on in Cameroon.
Fraternisation would have prospered had we been able to speak Foulfouldé. There were no women in sight but most men looked friendly, curious, amused – though a few closed, hard faces among the older generation suggested some anti-White (or anti-Christian?) bias. We did of course achieve a certain amount of communication: ‘From Bamenda – with horse – to N’gaoundere.’
No merchants operate in the Mbabo mountains and as we peered into a succession of shadowy shops, seeking supplies, the gender issue surfaced yet again. Sign-language was then taken to its (bio)logical conclusion. After much unproductive argument I stood in the middle of the shopping-precinct and bared my bosom to the sceptical crowd, causing a hurricane of hilarity. This ploy would be worse than tasteless among Asian Muslims, but by then I had got the very different flavour of Cameroonian Islam.
Little food is sold in small towns or villages, where most families are self-sufficient. At last our increasing desperation was noticed by a kind young man – small, wiry, vivacious, with a few phrases of French. He led us to a tiny shop where three rock-hard loaves of bread, transported in times past from Banyo, lay on the counter under a strip of sacking. Gleefully we bought them. Elsewhere we collected two rusty tins of sardines, one expensive onion (25 CFA, about 5p) and five small bananas for the exorbitant sum of 50 CFA – bananas don’t thrive around Sambolabbo. Without our Somie supply of nuts the nutritional outlook would have been alarming.
While Rachel slept off her injudicious intake of beer, I relocated Egbert in his riverside field. Annoyingly, he seemed less interested in grazing than in a nearby herd of donkeys, including a pretty mare with a gladsome eye. We had already noticed that a donkey mare excited him like nothing else.
Several teenage boys, on their way home from school, greeted me, ‘Good mor-en-ing Sir!’
I was beginning to feel the strain of being habitually misgendered, an error only funny when occasional. Having talked to somebody (male or female) for half an hour, it is confusing suddenly to realise that the conversation might have developed entirely differently had the other party known the gender score. Given the low status of village women, this error may sometimes have been to my advantage, yet I always felt an impulse to correct it. Most White women of the late twentieth century don’t ‘think sexist’. One is simply an individual who happens to be female; not until one’s femininity is repeatedly questioned, and frequently disbelieved, does it become important. By the time we reached Sambolabbo I had decided that human relationships, everywhere, are quite complex enough without the Orlando factor.
Outside the school, its headmaster stopped me with a peremptory gesture – ‘You are missionary?’ I tried to explain. He looked baffled. For ten minutes we failed to communicate; I gathered only that he was also the English teacher, though incapable of expressing himself in that language. (The calibre of most of the many teachers we met was scandalous.) There are scarcely 250 pupils at Sambolabbo’s government school; Muslims tend to opt for Koranic schools, despite their curriculla being less conducive to success in the modern world. Most Fulanis remain impervious to urban magnets; they do very nicely as cattle-breeders and/or merchants.
This area is goatless, but many shabby sheep were tethered on arid wasteland opposite our lodgings. I was watching lambs gambolling in the dust when an extrovert young Nigerian introduced himself: ‘I am Garvey, an illegal immigrant.’ He came from a village four hours walk away and was working locally as a carpenter to earn money to finish his BA course at Ibadan University. ‘The CFA is so strong at home, my wages mean a lot. In Nigeria money has become very scarce, if you are not a Big Man. We’re supposed to be rich but Cameroon is better off. It always has good sensible rulers, we have not. And we have too many people – nearly one hundred million! Here are not even ten million, so it’s easier to rule well.’
Garvey’s English was excellent; in rural Cameroon, the most fluent English speakers are usually Nigerian migrant workers. Whatever that country’s problems, its educational standards are evidently higher than Cameroon’s. Yet the Cameroonian government has always proclaimed that a well-schooled population is the surest guarantee of future prosperity and teachers are among the best-paid officials in the country. Sadly, however, this policy isn’t working: one can guess why.
When Rachel woke we drifted back to Andrew, stopping on the way for a kebab each. In the bar a Bamileke woman with baby at breast and beer bottle in hand was (with the other hand) vaguely de-lousing a toddler. ‘My young wife!’ beamed Andrew, nodding in her direction.
Suddenly it rained torrentially. ‘Wah!’ yelled Andrew. ‘Won-der-ful! Won-der ful!’ He slapped himself on the buttocks and jumped up and down. ‘Forever we have no rain, now plenty, plenty!’
Two non-Fulanis who had been working on the new hut rushed in and demanded beer. One asked how much money our government paid us to walk in the bush, a not unusual question. Andrew however was familiar with the quaint White habit of trekking for fun. ‘These people from Europe,’ he informed the brick-layers, ‘very much like to see places! They like to move around and camp the way nomads do. They are never afraid of the bush.’
To most Cameroonians we were inexplicable in a way White travellers would not have been during colonial times. Then they were comparatively numerous and everyone had to ride or walk; our arrival would have surprised villagers only because we lacked servants – we might have been traders, missionaries, soldiers, government officials. Sometimes, if persistently questioned about our purpose, I explained that my job is writing books about countries far from Europe. (A statement which always rings false in my own ears; it seems hypocritical to describe what one most enjoys doing as ‘a job’, even if by great good fortune that happens to be how one earns a living.) But this attempt to clarify merely thickened the mystery of our presence. ‘Writing a book’ is an activity as incomprehensible to most Cameroonians as ‘programming a computer’ is to me; neither reading nor writing is part of their culture. Mungo Park had the same problem in a much more acute form. When granted an interview with Tiggity Sego, Chief of Teesee, ‘The old man viewed me with great earnestness … I related to him, in answer to his inquiries, the motives that induced me to explore the country. But he seemed to doubt the truth of what I asserted, thinking, I believe, that I secretly meditated some project which I was afraid to avow.’
At sunset, as we again relocated Egbert, the humidity, after that brief downpour, felt like a threat to life. An hour later supper was brought to our room: fufu and jammu-jammu plus two big hunks of delicious mutton.
‘Those shabby sheep are OK stewed,’ Rachel commented appreciatively.
Four raw eggs were also provided but alas! Rachel has not yet learned to relish this form of protein. I ate the lot and she had extra mutton.
Settled on our comfortable bed, we observed the insect night-life swinging into action. I have seen slightly bigger cockroaches, in Ecuador and Madagascar, but nowhere have I seen more lively cockroaches. Their frenzied activities on the white walls were like some entomological Olympiad.
‘And to think they’re only limbering up,’ said Rachel, ‘for when the light goes off!’