IN BAMENDA JOY and John Parkinson lavishly provided support of every sort: moral, sartorial, alcoholic and cartographic. They advised on our new route and John lent us detailed though rather elderly French maps – Second Impression 1972, the most up-to-date available. He warned that within fifteen years some villages change their names and/or locations. Some mountain paths also change, as the rains sweep them away and replacements are devised. But despite these limitations the Parkinson sheets, at 1:200 000, were a huge improvement on our USAF charts.
From Bafut, fifteen miles east of Bamenda, we planned to go up the Metchum valley, wander through the Aghem highland to Wum, cross a few mountains to Bafmeng (also called Mme), turn north-east and cross many more mountains to the Mbembe Forest Reserve. Five days after leaving Sambolabbo we were driven to Bafut by Ralph, a warmhearted and keen-witted friend of the Parkinsons who is a native of that town and filled us in on the local Fon scene.
The last Fon had 250 wives (a suspicious number of Big Men are said to have ‘250’ wives) and children beyond reckoning. The present Fon, born in 1955, has been ruling since he was sixteen and is a man of many talents, both traditional and Western. Being ‘modern’ he has only three wives, one of whom is a senior government official. When in residence he occupies not his inherited palace but a colonial Rest House that might have strayed from Simla and overlooks the palace compound. He is ‘very, very rich, owning many miles of fertile land and receiving tribute from dozens of villages’. As Bafut’s Fons are chosen from among the only sons of mothers, it is every wife’s unusual ambition to have no more than one son and, in the past, it was not unknown for surplus male infants to disappear and be reared elsewhere.
Only in Bafut did our path cross Cameroon’s tourist trail – not that there were any tourists around. But those few who do the 240-mile Ring-Road Tour (‘Leaving Bamenda’s Skyline Hotel at 9 a.m.’) are shown around the Fon’s palace at 1,000 CFA per head and already the place feels like a ‘tourist attraction’, or at least like a place that has lost its meaning. As Ralph sadly observed, ‘The Fon and all Bafut’s Big Men are now in the Western economic system and have not much time left over for the traditional life.’ This was by far the most imposing palace we had seen and gloriously surrounded by tall forest trees laden with dark pink blossoms. There were surprisingly few children in evidence but many elderly unsmiling women, presumably the residue of the last Fon’s collection. When our arrival was observed a few brightly dyed raffia bags, woven by the womenfolk for sale to tourists, were hastily displayed outside one hut. Each large square hut had four rooms with separate doors and not so long ago each room was occupied by a wife. In the inner compound we were shown a few rooms once reserved for the incarceration of junior wives who had misbehaved. The most important and interesting looking buildings were of course taboo to us, as they are to all but the chiefdom’s elite. Ralph pointed out an ancient boulder on which the Fon still regularly grinds camwood to make an oily paste with which to anoint supplicants. However involved he may be in the modern economic life of Bamenda, he remains religiously important to his followers.
Ralph – a teacher at Bamenda’s Catholic boarding-school for boys – escorted us to the beginning of our cut-short while being informative on the wing. In the 1890s Bafut had a population of about 5,000, the nearby Mankon Confederation the same, the Bali chiefdom about 4,000 and most other Grassfields chiefdoms between a few hundred and a thousand. By African standards the area’s population density was then extraordinarily high – about ninety per square mile – and probably had been so for centuries because of the local yam/ palm oil agricultural base. This, the oldest and most efficient crop-mix in Africa, led to high population densities wherever it was found. Also, the Grassfields enjoyed a healthy altitude, fertile soil, remoteness from slave-trading harbours and a strong matrilineal tradition among many of the local chiefdoms.
Among the Bantu clans – the majority – in this region women and children rather than cattle have always been the measure of a man’s wealth. Much fertile land requires many women and children; in times past, the more they produced for the market, to feed local craftsmen and traders, the richer a chiefdom became. During the second half of the nineteenth century the Metchum valley was drastically depopulated by raids from Bafut; only those who fled into the most rugged mountains escaped capture. Before that the valley people had been otherwise exploited, not only by Bafut and the chiefdom of Kom but, most systematically, by the rich and well-organised federation of Wum or Aghem, in the mountains north of the valley.
The eight independent Metchum clans spoke mutually unintelligible languages (with two exceptions) and did not have chiefs. Each village was run by consensus politics, decisions taken at public moots. This lack of a formal hierarchy and disciplined warriors left these clans particularly vulnerable to the Aghem raiders who often kidnapped young men and women, releasing them only when the Aghem oil-drums had been filled. Nor were the young women always released. Some were sold in Isu market where for some reason (probably an epidemic) there was an acute woman-shortage during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Others were married off to Aghem men – an excellent source of revenue for their kidnappers, who pocketed the brideprice having had no production costs.
By noon we had regretfully said goodbye to Ralph and were climbing cultivated hillsides on a narrow, muddy path. This region was having an adequate though below normal rainfall and after the drought-threatened Adamawa weeks we felt an atavistic relief at the sight of its generous fertility. Intercropping is popular here; acres of maize, groundnuts, beans, yams, cocayams, cassava and coffee are skilfully mingled on rich slopes of dark red earth from which pointed grey rocks protrude like the battlements of buried castles. And far below, in a deep cleft, we saw oil-palms, raffia-palms, bananas and plantains flourishing by a hidden, singing stream.
Here most huts are square, thatched, bigger on average than the round variety and all of red mud; they seem to glow amidst their surrounding groves of glossy greenery. Our track followed the shaded crest of a high ridge, overlooking miles of jungly hills. This is a strongly Presbyterian area and where the descent began a large mud church bore witness to that community’s prosperity, as did an even larger school, with three shiny motor-bicycles parked outside.
In a palm-wine shebeen at the junction with the motor-road a surprising typewritten notice on the wall stated the controlled price of mimbu: 175 CFA (about 40p) per litre. An elderly couple – the proprietors – were drinking from a plastic Johnson’s Baby Powder container, with the top cut off, and a baby’s feeding bottle similarly modified.
Two silent women with shaven heads – one middle-aged, the other youngish – were introduced by a young man as ‘my mothers’. His father had recently died, hence their shaven heads (a mark of mourning) and their need for mimbu which ‘makes them feel happy again’. A teacher arrived then, parking his machine in the doorway. He was disillusioned to find that we had no views on the comparative virtues of various breeds of motor-bicycle.
Everybody looked at us strangely when we asked about the cut-short to Ndung.
‘It is better you people stay on this road,’ said the young man. ‘Sometimes there is bush-taxi and you can buy seats – you have money for seats?’ When we explained that we prefer walking he insisted, ‘It is too difficult!’ Then, under pressure, he indicated the relevant path.
Soon our new acquisition was tested. In Bamenda we had been presented with an umbrella by the headmaster (Brother John from Scotland) of Ralph’s school. It was one of those gaily striped jobs now common all over the world but used with special zeal in Cameroon where, during the rains, nobody will cross their compound without a brolly – if they can afford one. Setting out from Bafut I had felt a bit foolish; umbrellas and rucksacks don’t somehow go together. But when we came through that afternoon’s downpour unsodden we blessed Brother John.
A long easy climb took us to a recently settled area of tin-roofed mud-brick dwellings and thriving eucalyptus plantations. Here Mr Joseph Ndango invited us to be his guests: ‘You will reach my place by sunset.’ He was returning on his motor-bicycle from the school twenty miles away where he taught – an impractical arrangement, he admitted, given the price and scarcity of petrol in Cameroon. We wondered why he didn’t teach in the local school, a long low building complete with level playing-field. Although playing-fields are officially regarded as essential, terrain permitting, we never saw anyone using them. This may be partly owing to teachers’ laziness and partly to the many domestic demands made on rural pupils’ physical energy.
On the outskirts of Acu, a hamlet between fertile hills, Mr Ndango’s bungalow looked displaced. A large suburban construction, Western-furnished, it had wrought-iron grills protecting glazed windows and a garage which housed not only the motor-bicycle but an electricity generator. Supper (rice and stewed chicken) came in thermos food-flasks, accompanied by knives, forks and spoons. When I absent-mindedly picked up a handful of rice Mr Ndango looked scandalised. Several lively children roved around but none spoke recognisable English, despite having a teacher father.
The generator’s gratings, rumblings and whinings woke us often as we lay on the concrete floor of an empty storeroom. Our host had offered us a bed, but somewhat half-heartedly. Although only thirty-three, he had nine children, several resident followers and a second wife. (The first died in childbirth.)
By 6 a.m. Mr Ndango was breakfasting. ‘Every morning I must be gone at 6.30. On this bad road it takes me one hour for twenty miles and my school must open at 7. Otherwise pupils won’t come – at this season they must get home early to work in the fields.’
We were urged to make our own Ovaltine and Mr Ndango apologised for the lack of bread. ‘Here we are too far from shops and at this season no flour is left because Acu’s new settlers are bad farmers. They know nothing about storage, they leave animals to eat the grain.’ He was enjoying more rice and chicken; a shy small daughter brought the guests a dish of fried yam.
On the previous evening, a young MIDENO woman worker had invited us to her home and given us a giant pineapple, a fruit best carried interiorly. Not far from Acu we paused to eat it and soon juice was running down our forearms. After a night of heavy rain the morning colours were wondrous – royal blue mountains filling the middle distance, with dark green hills nearby and the red line of our track climbing a slope all pale green under young crops.
We startled many barefooted pupils, clad in Cameroon’s compulsory blue school uniform: skirts and blouses for the girls, shorts and shirts for the boys. Unless loaded with plantains, they carried writing-boards on their heads. Many were in their mid- or late teens. The older children of a family often start primary school at eleven or twelve, having previously been busy caring for younger siblings.
An hour later we were between two high grass mountains on which only horizontal cattle-grooves were visible. We had met no one since leaving Acu but now a very pregnant young woman, carrying wet laundry, emerged from the bushes lining a nearby stream and beckoned us to follow her. Climbing steeply from groove to groove, we speculated about her load’s weight; it plus pregnancy did not slow her ascent as much as the rucksack was slowing mine. In a little compound, half-hidden by mango trees and banana plants, she dumped her basket and we asked, ‘Ndung?’
She stared at us as though we were mad. ‘Ndung?‘ she repeated.
We nodded. She frowned – then laughed, beckoned again and led us upwards for half an hour.
On a wide level ledge stood a new bungalow – an extension to an old Fulani compound – where we were invited to rest in a posh two-windowed living-room with cushioned easy-chairs and Nigerian nylon mats on the white-washed walls. Scores of vividly patterned enamel dishes, of every size and shape, were displayed on three tables; among with-it Fulani women the collecting of enamelware is the thin edge of the consumerist wedge.
Our hostess looked pure Fulani, her husband pure Bantu. Both spoke basic English and their easy personal relationship seemed as modern as their home; our pints of boiled milk were served in sparkling glasses imported from France. Husband was aged twenty-two, wife twenty; they had three sons, all in appearance like their mother, and 115 cattle. They hoped to send all their sons to Brother John’s college, ‘the best in Western Cameroon’. It would not be necessary to send daughters to school. In their view the path to Ndung was ‘too difficult’, but then most Cameroonians considered whatever we might be about to do ‘too difficult’.
Soon we were above 7,000 feet (the USAF said) amidst a bright vastness of grassland. From an isolated compound a young woman led us to a clarifying – in her estimation – vantage point. She too, though speaking only Foulfoulde, conveyed some unease about the Ndung path. We were beginning to suspect that when people said ‘too difficult’ they meant ‘too elusive’. Despite all our guide’s elaborate gesturing, we remained unclear about where the descent to Ndung began.
We lunched under noble trees, by a swift shallow stream, watching scores of dark chestnut cattle being watered – their midday routine. One sociable bull wandered curiously towards us, sniffed at my boots, nuzzled my hair and then began enthusiastically to lick my sweat-salty arm. The sensation was akin to being sandpapered.
A tough climb took us to the highest point of the range where we followed a tenuous path along the edge of the mountain wall, overlooking the Metchum valley 4,000 feet below. Tin roofs glinted among trees near the river: Ndung, we presumed. Another range of bulky blue mountains, as high as our own, filled the western sky – tomorrow’s goal.
Soon the path descended slightly to a long forested spur, then expired in leaf mould.
‘We’re lost again,’ I observed. ‘There’s no way down these mountains for miles in either direction – they’re sheer walls.’
Rachel however insisted on continuing, through a shadowy tangle of undergrowth, and we came out on level grassland-cum-jungle. Here the spur was perhaps half a mile wide and a mile long, with 3,000-foot drops on either side. Even in bright sunshine those ravines looked dark and three species of monkey were already protesting at our intrusion.
‘That path must go on,’ said Rachel, with what seemed to me a tiresome lack of logic. ‘It was clear enough till we got to the forest.’
‘Only because Fulanis collect firewood here,’ said I in my let’s-be-reasonable voice.
Foolishly we split up, to look for that hypothetical continuation, and soon had lost each other. Time passed and I found myself becoming slightly agitated: there were lots of edges to be fallen over … Our whistle-system had broken down because of the sound-distorting topography. But half an hour later it reunited us – and Rachel announced that she had found the path.
We were then standing on the edge of a precipice. ‘Where is it?’ I asked, bewildered.
Rachel pointed over the edge of the precipice.
‘Don’t be so bloody silly!’ I snapped. ‘That’s not a people path, it’s a baboon path!’
‘It’s the path to Ndung,’ said Rachel doggedly. ‘There isn’t any other.’
I peered over the precipice and felt queasy; it was a precipice – I am not using the word loosely. But, surveying the surrounding peaks, ridges, ravines and spurs, I had reluctantly to agree with Rachel. This wasn’t, in my view, a path. Yet there couldn’t be any other route down. Our advisers had been right. The path to Ndung was much too difficult.
‘Looks like we’ll have to go back to the motor-track at Acu,’ I said. ‘That path’s more than difficult – it’s impossible. Especially with an unbalancing rucksack.’
‘I’ll take the rucksack,’ offered Rachel.
‘Oh no you won’t!’ I said. ‘It’s better to die at fifty-five than at eighteen.’
‘You mean we’re not going back?’ deduced Rachel.
‘Evidently not,’ I said. ‘Onward non-Christian soldiers!’
It was a three-hour descent, inducing indescribable hypertension; as an ascent it would have been harder on the body but much easier on the nerves. It was even worse than it looked. The rains had made it slippy. Small rocks, hidden by the vegetation, lurked to be stumbled over. Thin, taut vines were stretched like trip-wires within the vegetation. This was only my second day as a porter and I had not yet fully adjusted to the rucksack. (Later, it seemed to become part of my body.) I fell five times, Rachel twice. And that first precipice was not the end of the matter. We then had to climb another ridge, the descent from which was if possible even more gruelling because much wetter and impeded by hostile vegetation. But I learned something that afternoon; when the chips are down vertigo is a controllable condition because not controlling it would be fatal. Afterwards we remarked on the irony that ‘tame’ Cameroon had presented one challenge more formidable than anything encountered in the Himalayas or the Andes. We became instant-folk-heroines in Ndung when it was realised how we had arrived. Cameroonian villagers are not sissy but very, very few of them use that route.
Our ‘brake’ thigh muscles were throbbing as we sat gulping ‘33’s in Ndung’s one small huxters-cum-off-licence. And our hands were shaking, as Mr Bernard Ngu astutely observed.
‘You are too tired,’ he said, ‘you are shivering. From Bamenda you can get bush-taxi to Ndung. That would be better.’ He told us then about his fourteen-year-old daughter who, having had malaria for two weeks, had just developed a very high fever.
At once we provided a chloroquin course and Rachel wrote out, in capital letters, how many should be taken and when. We expected Mr Ngu to hurry off to administer the first dose. Instead, he pocketed the pills, ordered himself another beer and settled down to expatiate on St Patrick about whom he knew an inordinate amount. He was the only teacher at the local Catholic Mission school. The local Presbyterian Mission school had two teachers: ‘Always in this province there is too much Presbyterians.’ We were invited to spend the night in his sister’s compound; he had come recently to Ndung and while building his own house was renting two rooms from her.
It was dark as we slithered down a steep muddy slope, beside the off-licence, to a large palm- and banana-surrounded compound. The L-shaped house had eight rooms leading off the verandah and another row of rooms behind. Yet for all its prosperity this was not a happy compound; eddies of ill-feeling swirled and the numerous children looked unusually cowed. Sister’s husband worked in Bamenda; the whereabouts of Mr Ngu’s wife was not disclosed but she seemed to be elsewhere. He could have only one wife: ‘As teacher in a Catholic school it is too much difficult! I lose my job if I take more wives and to get teaching jobs is not easy.’
In the outer of Mr Ngu’s two rooms his fevered daughter lay on an iron bed; despite Bamenda’s nearness, she seemed pathetically frightened of us. The only other furniture was a long wooden bench where we sat hoping for fufu, having assured Mr Ngu that we had our own bedding and could sleep on the floor. When I reminded him of the chloroquin in his pocket he administered the first dose, gently and kindly. Then he fetched supper from the kitchen-hut on the far side of the compound; Africans deplore our nasty habit of cooking and sleeping under the same roof. Again it was rice and chicken; in this area rice is now popular, especially at the end of the dry season when maize stocks are running low. Sister’s rice tended towards sogginess and the stewed chicken had not been a chicken for a very long time. Mr Ngu placed the lantern on the floor by the two dishes; it would have illuminated them more effectively had he left it on the bench.
During the meal our host donned another mantle when an old woman arrived and grovelled on the ground beseeching a cure; Mr Ngu was, it seemed, a medicine-man in his spare time. After much palaver the patient gladly paid 600 CFA and a plump cock for an ounce of ground dried bark enfolded in a page of my notebook. Then she took her leave with respectful – almost worshipful – gestures and murmurings of gratitude.
‘My brother’ then joined us – an all-purpose kinship term meaning in this case sister’s husband’s brother. He hopefully asked if we would like some mimbu and was soon back with a gallon of the most powerful palm-wine I have drunk anywhere. It was more than twice the legal controlled price, but worth it. A few other men drifted in and we all became agreeably tiddly and discussed taking snuff instead of smoking (Mr Ngu had switched ten years ago ‘for health and money reasons’), and comparative cuisines and African politics.
‘South Africa needs Whites to run it,’ pronounced Mr Ngu, little guessing what effect his words would have on an anti-apartheid demo in Trafalgar Square. ‘It is a big rich modern state, too complicated for Black men to run alone. My father tells how more convenient Cameroon was under White men. Schools better, hospitals better, roads better. And seventy years ago there was fast telegrams where now we have not even slow mail!’
Poor Mr Ngu had a broken night. Twice his daughter needed to be escorted across the dark compound to the latrine and thrice she awoke screaming – expecting us, sleeping at the end of her bed, to kill her before dawn. No doubt the mimbu helped me to sleep well in between those interruptions, despite a moderate number of mosquitoes and a very bumpy floor – which was also, as we saw in the morning, very dirty. For all its many rooms and luxuriant garden, that was a slummy compound.
Achu is the Cameroonian dish most dreaded by expatriates. Joy Parkinson had told me of what and how it is made; the details were so horrendous I deliberately forgot them lest one day we might encounter it. And now it appeared for breakfast, a delicacy triumphantly borne from the kitchen by our host in honour of his White guests. It looks exactly like the sludge workmen dump on the road when clearing blocked sewers and its looks do not belie it. Mr Ngu kindly taught me how to cope with this ultimate gastronomic abomination, which comes on a vast communal dish, forming a semi-solid lake in a crater of whitish slimy dough. One takes a portion of dough in one’s fingers, working inwards from the edge of the dish, and having thoroughly mixed it with achu the consequent nauseating ball must be swiftly transferred to the mouth before it slithers through the fingers. On the previous evening, as we discussed international eating habits, I had by a cruel coincidence mentioned that breakfast is my main meal of the day.
‘This is sustaining food for your main meal,’ beamed Mr Ngu. ‘When we have finished all you can have more. In the kitchen is much more—don’t be shy!’
I stretched my face in a ghastly grin and mixed and slurped and gulped and felt myself going pale beneath my tan.
Rachel had gone pale as the Achu was unlidded. ‘I never eat breakfast!’ she asserted traitorously.
On our arrival Mr Ngu had assured us that it was not necessary to find the latrine: ‘In an African compound you can make water anywhere, the latrine is only necessary for different matters.’
This is untrue of Fulani – and many other Cameroonian – compounds, but it accounted for the ammoniacal pong around Sister’s homestead. After breakfast, when different matters took me to the stinking latrine behind the kitchen hut, an adolescent girl was shovelling its contents onto the roots of nearby banana plants. I decided not to share this observation with my more fastidious daughter; bananas were likely to be our staple food during the weeks ahead.
Mr Ngu begged us to visit his school: ‘It is good for me if I bring White friends to look at my scholars.’ We climbed steeply on slippy red mud paths, between fields of high maize, to a broad ridge-top. The large State school had not yet opened but Mr Ngu’s smaller academy, a two-roomed hut, was already full of large industrious pupils, sharing dog-eared text-books at crudely made desks. He coped alone with six classes, three in each room – a total of eighty-four scholars. Simple sums had been chalked on the blackboards and fly-blown alphabet pictures hung crookedly on the walls, interspersed with children’s poems – one of them touchingly good, about the rains coming. Mr Ngu’s intelligence had underwhelmed us, yet here one sensed more effort being made than in the average State school.
As we said goodbye a ragged young man came panting up the hill and insisted on our seeing the Catholic church. We followed him down to the ring-road and were nonplussed when confronted by an apparently abandoned mud but with a pile of stones at one end (‘The altar,’ our guide assured us) and a few tree-trunk pews lying on the floor. A gourd money-box lay by the pile of stones. ‘You dash Christ,’ urged the young man. I pretended not to hear; my CFA-padded hips were slimming faster than expected.
It was already too hot when we left Ndung at 8.30 a.m. For hours the terrain restricted us to the ring-road but this Metchum valley is so lovely – winding between high grassy or forested mountains, or through placid widths of cultivation – that we were not impatient to leave it. And all morning only three vehicles passed: the omnipresent beer-truck, an expatriate Aid Land Rover and a bush-taxi which paused to invite us on board.
Our bread-and-bananas elevenses were enjoyed by the Metchumm Falls, sitting on a cliff-edge beneath a cool canopy of trees with white water crashing and seething very far below our feet. These Falls are among Cameroon’s most boasted-of tourist attractions but as yet mercifully ‘undeveloped’. Mr Ngu had apologised for this: ‘You will pass the Metchum Falls but I’m sorry our government has made nothing nice there for tourists.’
‘It’s dramatic enough now,’ said Rachel, ‘so what must it be like after the rains?’
‘Let’s hope,’ said I predictably, ‘they never do make anything nice for tourists.’
‘You forget,’ retorted Rachel, ‘that tourists don’t want to sit on damp red soil in their nice new tropical outfits, being tortured by flies with ants dropping out of the trees into their hair. They need shiny little prefab cafes with red and blue plastic chairs.’
I shuddered, too easily able to visualise just that, when Cameroon’s ‘tourist potential’ has been realised.
The Metchum River is only occasionally visible from the road but at noon the heat drove us to seek it; we had been told swimming was safe if one picked one’s spot with care. While attempting to follow a dried-up stream-bed, deep in a ravine, we were thwarted by dense jungle. Then we had to climb an exhausting cliff covered with golden grass – tough, dusty, four feet high – and ‘fortified’ with piles of menacingly sharp pineapple leaves dumped from a nearby field.
Back on the road, I used the umbrella as a sun-shade and we collected ten unripe but delicious mangoes, lying under trees, and bought a papaya from a fruit-stall at a compound entrance. The uninspiring cross-roads village of Befang coincided with a torrential downpour during which we fruit-ate and diary-wrote in a would-be-smart (concrete and plastic) off-licence. Unusually, we were the only drinkers. A few youths begged for cigarettes, a few women sidled past the door to inspect us, a few small boys settled in a corner to watch us writing – and seemed mesmerised by the speed and unhesitancy of our pens. But that place felt rather unwelcoming, until an idiot girl laughingly presented us with kolanuts and softly stroked our arms.
The humidity was extreme when we continued under a cloudy sky. Now we had left the ring-road and our muddy path soon dropped to river level via a spectacular stairway of slippy boulders. In the depths of a tree-darkened gorge an old colonial suspension foot-bridge crossed the Metchum – eighty feet below, loudly surging between sheer rock cliffs. A faded but still legible notice reminded the natives that NOT MORE THAN TEN PEOPLE MAY CROSS THIS BRIDGE AT ONE TIME. Even in the colonial era, did anyone heed that well meant flourish of British paternalism?
Half-way across, I paused above the foaming brown torrent. That solid plank bridge, with firm handrails, was still sound. Time’s ravages, though perceptible, were not yet alarming; even such modest constructions have a way of outlasting empires. I gazed up at a mountain with a difference, cloaked in subtropical semi-rain forest. The mighty palms, taller than any seen elsewhere, were mingled with a variety of other, unidentifiable, giants. And the bridge ended as it had begun, with a boulder-stairway that took us straight into a moist, green-tinged twilight.
The next few hours had a magical, almost eerie quality: we seemed to be in a fantasy world. Nothing was familiar – fruits, berries, nuts, ferns, fungi, vines, mosses – even the leaves were strangely shaped and hued. The sounds and smells were also new; muted bird calls, though we saw no birds, and an amorphous rustle peculiar to this place as thousands of palm-fronds imperceptibly swayed all around and far above us.
This area gets more than its fair share of rain. The air was pungent with the odours of permanent damp, piquant fungi and who knows what mysterious, powerful herbs – the raw material of medicine-men. Sometimes the path was an almost sheer slope of skiddy mud and we had to help each other up. Sometimes streams racing to the Metchum formed miniature waterfalls, leaping from ledge to ledge. Occasionally the path wound level around outcrops of rock, from which massive webs of roots and vines hung like man-traps; on those stretches the black liquid mud was inches deep. Once this path must have been a main route, hence the bridge. Now it seems little used; on the southern side of the range a circuitous motor-track links Mukuru with the ring-road. We met only one man – not in a sociable mood – carrying a spear and followed by four hunting dogs wearing belled collars. These hounds– resembling black whippets but lower and with broader heads–had crossed our path several times before, always with hunters. This was the only distinct breed we saw in Cameroon.
Suddenly we came out on a ledge where the forest was no less dense but consisted of fewer palms and many more unidentifiable giants. Then we were surprised by a hamlet in a semi-clearing, a dozen small huts embedded in riotous greenery. This was the most forlorn settlement we came upon in Cameroon. How, why and when had these people been squeezed onto their hidden ledge? Not many were about; both men and women looked dispirited, debilitated and, when we appeared, apprehensive. Only one very old man, with a bad limp, seemed unafraid. Struggling to remember his few words of English, he gave me a military salute. From here a selection of pathlets led into the forest and, having shown us the right one, this veteran persistently demanded dash – the only Cameroonian who sought a reward for guiding us.
A gradual climb took us onto rugged grassland where cattle grazed. Their small herd deserted at speed as we emerged from the trees and watching him vanish over a hilltop I wondered, ‘How many Olympic Gold Medallists are blushing unseen in Cameroon’s mountains?’
‘Poor little chap!’ said Rachel. ‘Now he’ll be beaten …’
The sky had cleared and at this altitude the sun felt pleasantly hot. As we ate more bananas, the USAF told us that from the bridge we had climbed almost 3,500 feet. Yet all day our pace had been slower than usual; leg muscles take time to recover from an Ndung descent. Some two miles ahead, beyond gullies and spurs, we could see a long, low forested ridge, which didn’t feel low when the time came to climb it. On this severe gradient the forty pounds in our rucksack seemed like eighty. Here a square mile or so had recently been burnt; maize and groundnuts grew between prone tree carcasses. But over the top the forest was untouched and Mukuru remained invisible until we were there – on the outskirts of a widespread village, its neat substantial square huts glowing orange-red in the slanting light. When we asked a puzzled but smiling young woman the way to the Fon’s palace she called her little son and told him to guide us.
The compound of Chief Foto, Fon of Mukuru, lacks Bafut’s grandeur but retains all that Bafut has lost. It is a village in itself, complex, crowded and purposeful. Long irregular rows of mud-brick rooms occupy three sides of the sloping square. (Everything in Mukuru slopes.) A newish bungalow-type but stands on the highest ground, overlooking all. There the Fon has his Reception Hall-cum-office, an austere little room furnished only with the chiefly bamboo stool (actually a chair) opposite the doorway, and a small desk-table and chair by the unglazed window. He was busy with paperwork when we arrived, being among those Fons who have been incorporated into the Republic’s bureaucracy.
Chairs were at once unfolded on the narrow verandah. Before greeting the Fon we had removed our noisome boots and socks – exuding a deadly miasma of sweat and black mud – and discreetly left them around a corner. Now motor-tyre flip-flops were provided by a young woman too shy to do more than giggle when addressed. Then a thirteen-year-old son, who spoke fluent English, brought a dish of juicy mangoes – whereupon a plump nanny-goat, tethered nearby and clearly a spoiled pet, demanded the skins by placing her forefeet in my lap and thrusting her nose into my face. Consternation! – followed by relief when my predilection for goats was revealed by the simple expedient of hugging this cheeky creature and scratching her between the horns. As she hoovered mango skins from the verandah, less favoured relatives looked on enviously from beneath the eaves of thatched huts.
Soon our page was back: ‘Do you need hot water?’ He looked relieved when we said no and led us to a pile of large, round stones, reeking of urine and semi-encircled by a scrap of old tin roof. This high ground at the edge of the compound allowed an unimpeded view of our most memorable Cameroonian sunset. Above a corrugation of dark forested crests, masses of many-layered clouds became a celebration of bronze, green, gold, rose, saffron, plum. And against that pandemonium of shifting colours were silhouetted a lone giant palm and the pointed golden roofs of many huts.
Back on the Fon’s verandah, Rachel counted twenty-eight small children simultaneously in view, the seniors wearing school uniform. Many women were returning from the fields with hoes on heads. Others squatted outside huts, preparing stacks of greenery for jammu-jammu; like spinach, it reduces radically in the pot. On one long verandah a young woman was grinding maize in a hand-mill – a rusty, cumbersome machine, yet a liberation. Pounding corn is among the African woman’s most strenuous tasks. This was the first family hand-mill we had seen, though communal machines are quite usual in large villages and towns. As children scuttled to and fro, fetching water and firewood, the smoke of a dozen fires began to rise from various corners. Just below our verandah, one woman was endeavouring to split a long knotted branch against the grain. With baby on back, she hacked and hacked – her axe identical to those used 1,200 years ago by the people of the Grassfields. I was being tempted to intervene when the Fon, having cleared his desk, invited us inside.
At first Chief Foto had seemed a little distant – even brusque – probably because of gender confusion. But now (a woman having observed me stripped to the waist while washing) he was graciously attentive. A well-built man in his mid-fifties, authoritative yet not domineering, he had served for ‘many years’ in the Nigerian army before being selected as Fon in 1975. He emphasised that he had only nine children all from the same mother despite 250 (again!) wives. We took this to mean that though many females were dependent on him he was a one-woman man. Later his brother confirmed this: ‘Our Fon loves only one wife.’
We sat at the table while Chief Foto, now formally enstooled, received a succession of supplicants with worries. The Aku (people of Mukuru) clap their hands three times to greet their Fon and address him when seated on the floor near the entrance. They don’t speak through cupped hands with bowed heads, though I noticed none actually meeting his gaze. He was assisted by a young man, introduced only as ‘my sub-chief’, who afterwards explained, ‘In daylight our Fon solves “official” problems, after sunset he listens to “traditional” problems.’ When I asked how often the two categories overlap the sub-chief looked so perplexed that it seemed kind to change the subject.
During these palavers our page reappeared with the drinks tray: three brands of beer, two versions of Top. He came first to us: ‘What is your choice?’ Then, having served the others, he noticed us absentmindedly drinking from our bottles, off-licence style, and hurried forward to fill our glasses.
When the last of the supplicants had departed backwards, bowing gratefully, it was fufu and jammu-jammu time; this fufu’s lightness suggested that grinding produces a finer flour than pounding. We ate at the table, by the light of the only lamp, while our host dined on his throne in the shadows. Only when he had finished did the sub-chief begin.
After the hand-washing ritual a young woman showed us to our hot windowless room, one of a tin-roofed row. The door was ill fitting and the mosquitoes were energetic though not numerous. Garments hanging around the walls indicated that we had displaced a female – or more likely two, though the bed was single with a lumpy mattress of grass stuffed into nylon sacking. We slept soundly until the crowing of a cock – roosting in the rafters but hitherto unobserved – woke us at 4.20 a.m.
The Fon wished us to breakfast before departing but that would have involved at least an hour’s delay. At sunrise women were only beginning to beat batter for puff-puffs (crisp buns made of maize-flour and deep-fried). And the USAF had warned that Benikuma, unavoidable en route to the Aghem highland, is at a hellish 1,000 feet, our lowest point since leaving Douala. When the situation had been explained Chief Foto understood and we left him waving and smiling benignly, standing outside his office in his nightgown.
For a few hours we were gradually descending through a brilliant rain-washed world of greens and reds. Near the scattered tree-rich village of Modele (also known as Ide) an ancient woman, shaven-headed and naked to the waist, was quite overcome when she met us. Falling to her knees in the mud, she beamed toothlessly but joyously and, saying nothing, clapped her hands three times as though we were Fons. It seemed she had happy memories of the colonial era.
Scores of pupils, each bearing a hoe and a bouquet of wild flowers, were converging on a school that looked older and better built than most. They greeted us unshyly – indeed, everyone in Modele radiated friendliness. But remembering the ordeal ahead, we prudently declined a 7.45 a.m. invitation to ‘Drink with us some native liquor!’
Beyond Modele, amidst densely forested hills, we were agitated by evidence that some ruthless, bulldozing logging company had recently been at work. These are the forests which once inspired good relations between the Ide (Modele’s people) and the clans of the Aghem Federation (centred on Wum), whose men were generously entertained when they came down to hunt. This was soon after the Aku and Ide clans settled here (circa 1840), to become rival exploiters of the Metchum valley’s resources. Then, as the Ide became stronger, through killing or absorbing earlier settlers, Aghem grew envious and uneasy – especially about the Ide establishment of complex trading links with the Benue lands. When it began to look as though they might take control of the Metchum valley trade Aghem declared war, towards the end of the nineteenth century, and reduced Modele to tributary status.
Relations were never good between Modele and Essimbi (also known as Age). Their frequent forest ambushes and slaughterings of each other must have done a lot to control population growth throughout the area. Yet the Ide traded with the Age, in the intervals between killing them. The former were unusually dependent on fish and the latter were the most skilled net-weavers around. So the Ide captured Ndo women and exchanged them for Age nets.
The forenoon’s two vehicles were pick-up trucks, delivering for rival breweries and doubling (like Andrew’s) as bush-taxis. At brutal heat time we reached hell – a flat unshaded stony track, running for miles between cultivated fields. Soon I was showing symptoms that reminded Rachel of our hen, en route from Sambolabbo. Ingeniously she attached the umbrella to the rucksack, enabling me to walk in the shade of my own mobile verandah with both hands free to collect mango windfalls.
An hour later we were in Benikuma, where the sword of Damocles fell at last. In this cul-de-sac village the motor-track ends, some twelve miles from the Nigerian border. Yet it boasts another of those Customs and Immigration posts that dotted our route, this one presumably for the control of smuggling pedestrians and illegally bush-bashing vehicles. As we had to pass the little building, and planned to spend the hot midday hours in the village, it would have been foolish to pretend not to notice it.
Boldly I marched into the Immigration Office with passports extended. Then, seeing the officer in charge, I knew our bluff would be called. This was no semi-literate, semi-inebriated buffoon but a very together and articulate gentleman who didn’t imagine we came from Germany because we had Irish passports and who wasted no time cogitating over our 1973 vaccination certificates. Within seconds he had found our visa pages and within a few seconds more he was saying, ‘I’m sorry, sir, very sorry … But you must know your visas are no longer valid. They have not been valid for some time. Why is this?’
I beamed unconcernedly and corrected him. ‘Not “sir” – “madam”!’
Mr Itoe stared at me incredulously, then leant back, chuckling. ‘ Wonder-ful! You women who go walking in the bush, carrying big weights, quickly get to look like men!’ But he soon stopped chuckling and lent forward again, picking up my passport. ‘So, your visas?’
I came clean, grateful for an immigration officer who spoke English as well as I do. Starting in the Holland Park Embassy, I ended in the Bamenda Immigration Office.
Mr Itoe listened attentively, then nodded sympathetically. ‘This fellow in Bamenda, I know him – a good man but new to his job. So, for me you are now a problem! You should return to Bamenda for extensions, but this you have tried … It is very irregular, but I must let you continue. You have done your best. I hope you meet no others who take advantage of your difficulty. And your daughter? She is well?’
I nodded towards the window and Mr Itoe peered through the mosquito-screen at Rachel, sitting on the verandah devouring unripe mangoes. ‘But she is beautiful! Why do you drag her through the bush? And I think she is too hungry – green mangoes will give her colic! You must take her quickly to the market and feed her!’
Benikuma’s weekly market was a busy yet unexciting affair smelling strongly of rotten fish. Despite being surrounded by rampantly fertile land, this dusty, sun-tormented village seemed one of the poorer places on our route.
Rachel unsuccessfully quested about for baguettes and chocolate spread. I sat outside a crowded, noisy off-licence drinking tepid beer in the grudging shade of tin eaves. The only available alternative was Top. And after the fate suffered by our water-bottle (and myself) in Galim, I had taken a vow of lifelong abstinence from Top.
An overweight Presbyterian minister, exhaling achu fumes and gnawing at a kid’s skull, settled beside me. I was, he said, ‘plenty lucky to belong to government that pays for travelling to study other religions’. (I wondered by what bizarre deformation of logic he had identified me as a student of religions.) His less enlightened government would not pay for him to study American Presbyterianism. Mopping my face with my shirt-tail I let him burble on and he proudly informed me that there are one million children in the local school: ‘Many are good Christians who fight for Christ every day in their hearts.’
I cheered up when Mr Itoe appeared, probably to check that all was well with the dotty Irishwoman. He wouldn’t accept a beer because ‘I have much work in my office and I must be a good example to these people who drink from breakfast time!’ But he got himself a Top and then said, ‘It makes me happy that you two can travel so securely in my country. This area is now easy to administer, though too hot for comfortable living. I cannot ask my family to live here so I see them only at weekends. But in times past, before the Germans and the British, there was serious trouble up and down the Metchum. These tribes quarrelled and killed about land, hunting, fishing, trading, women. Life was dangerous then. Now we have peace and prosperity, everyone can move around safely, there is little crime. Some old people say good traditions died in colonial days – and they are right. Now young people can be very confused, going from bush to city. What is good? What is bad? For them nothing is certain – they seem to need our lost traditions. But when the bathwater goes it is not always possible to keep the baby!’
When Mr Itoe had shown us the start of our cut-short to the Aghem highland we said goodbye. Then I looked at the hilly track ahead and groaned and lay under a mango tree and went into a heat coma. Soon after I heard a woman telling Rachel that she, Rachel, was the double of the woman’s daughter, Jacqueline, now studying in Mexico. This all seemed so outrageously improbable that I decided I must be asleep and dreaming. But hearing the soulful comparison being made for the third time, I opened one eye. A buxom, very black woman was staring fixedly at Rachel with transferred affection. Had it been less hot I would have pursued the matter of Jacqueline in Mexico. As it was, I quickly shut my eye.
During the next half-hour I listened but didn’t look, not wishing to be conversationally embroiled. A kind youth presented Rachel with three ripe mangoes. A gang of rowdy youths verbally molested her – which unpleasantness was unique in our experience of Cameroon. An amiable gendarme conversed with her in French. A less amiable gendarme interrogated her rather aggressively and implied that her husband was in a drunken stupor. Whereupon I opened both eyes, claimed to be a sober Mamma and, by way of proving sobriety, heaved on the rucksack and strode off purposefully. It was only two o’clock, but mitigating clouds had gathered.
By 5.50 p.m. we were in impossible camping terrain – precipitous, heavily forested mountains – and beginning to wonder if we would in fact come to a village by sunset, as Mr Itoe had guaranteed. Then, on a steep descent, we overtook three women carrying colossal loads home from the market. In sign language they urged us to follow them and stay with their Fon. Moments later we met him: a handsome young man carrying a fine antique firearm, a type of weapon still much used in this area. He was accompanied by an older man and, having no idea that this was our host-to-be, we offered our hands. Only when these were ignored by the hunter did we realise who he was. Neither man spoke any but local languages, yet it was somehow agreed that we should continue with the women and await the Fon’s return outside his palace.
An exhausting half-hour later – the upward path was another of those boulder-stairways so popular hereabouts – we panted onto a small cleared ledge. There our guides smiled goodbye before disappearing into lush greenery. A tiny, tin-roofed, one-window hut, with weather-warped door and shutters, was made to look even tinier by the height of the surrounding palms, mango trees and plantains. Even by local standards it didn’t seem palatial.
On the climb up we had been joined by an unusually tall brother of the Fon, returning from school and looking rather absurd in his blue shirt and shorts. At first he viewed us with extreme unease but as he spoke a sort of English we assiduously curried favour. Relaxing slightly, he brought from behind the but two eighteen-inch-high bamboo stools–the most uncomfortable form of seating ever devised. Then he too vanished into the greenery but was soon back, wearing threadbare jeans and a woman’s blouse and accompanied by three elders. One was the Fon’s present ‘father’. His biological father had died two, three, maybe four years ago – no one could remember exactly when. (Or, more likely, they would not risk misfortune by revealing the date to us.) One of the elders seemed deeply suspicious, almost hostile. But Father was tentatively welcoming, though naturally bemused. He produced a few phrases of German, which at the time bewildered us. Meanwhile the word was spreading and soon thirty-two small, silent, round-eyed children were sitting in a row on a fallen tree-trunk at the far side of the ledge. When I stood up to fetch our malaria pills from the rucksack some of the toddlers shrieked with terror and clung to their minders.
Not until the Fon arrived did we accept that that but was the palace all of it. We were ushered into a tiny room furnished only with his stool, in this case an ancient, high-backed, elaborately carved chair set on a wooden platform with two steps. The uneven mud floor was filthy. Inside the door stood two iron cauldrons of water with tin jugs and mugs on their lids. On the wall above the stool hung a wooden drinking vessel in the shape of a zebu horn, with a cock’s head most realistically carved at its base. This, Brother explained, was used only when the Fon made sacrifices for the protection of his people. Below it, somewhat disconcertingly, hung a large framed photograph of the Fon’s elder son (now aged seven) as a baby. This was the Fon’s everyday living-room; it had not been opened up specially for us.
As we dumped our rucksack by the cauldrons a storm broke: one of the Big Uns. For twenty minutes the lightning was brighter than the lamp and the thunder – and rain on the roof – made conversation impossible. During this drama, a basin of warm washing-water was provided behind the palace. However unswept floors may be, bodies – always and everywhere – must be scoured at the end of the day. No latrine was indicated; presumably the jungle serves.
Back in the palace beer was flowing, to our delighted astonishment. Getting it to this ledge must tax even Cameroonian muscles and I insisted on paying treble the Benikuma rate. When the storm had passed over the night was very still; this fortunate village seemed to be trannie-free. Then someone in the next but began softly to play an ndengi. Noticing our interest, the Fon summoned the musician, a gentle young man who stood by the door drawing a poignantly sweet melody from his clumsy-looking instrument. Brother translated ndengi as ‘guitar’ but it more closely resembled a zither, made of special wood, velvety to the touch, with the addition of a few bent twigs and strings of fine wire.
This was our most enigmatic stopping place. We never discovered the name of the village, or of our charming host. Next morning, seeing its full extent, we realised that the palace was the meanest dwelling; most other huts were of the biggish square sort, with pointed thatched roofs. According to the Fon, the population was fifty-six. ‘That means,’ explained Brother, ‘fifty-six tax-payers. We don’t count women and children.’ From this we calculated a population of about five hundred, assuming nine or so dependents to each male.
The clan language is so peculiar that it was studied ‘about ten years ago’ by a German who lived in the village for ‘about five months’. (Hence Father’s German phrases.) Elsewhere we discovered that of the eight main Metchum valley clans, only the Aku and Ide are mutually comprehensible though all eight languages have a common origin. But our nameless village is, linguistically, a place apart. Possibly, hidden in dense forest on a hard-to-reach ledge, its people survived the depredations of the Bafut (and other) raiders and have been in situ for longer than the majority now living along the Metchum.
A multiplicity of wives, desired or not, is obligatory for Fons. Yet our rebel host had only one and wanted no more. She was a beautiful young woman, shabbily dressed in a ‘Western’ frock but slender and poised, with a quietly forceful personality. This marriage reminded us of Mr and Mrs Kami; the Fon and his wife even slept together, with their two daughters, in a double-bed which almost filled the little room that formed the other half of the palace. As we talked before supper, Mrs Fon arrived with a restive baby girl, handed her to Pappa and told him to get her to sleep and put her to bed. One didn’t have to understand the unique local language to know exactly what was being said; the scene was startling in its modern-Western familiarity. And the Fon accomplished his task with the skill of one much-practised. Fifteen minutes later a peacefully sleeping infant was being tenderly tucked up. Then Pappa collected the five-year-old daughter, who screamed with terror when she saw us. At once Pappa took her into the bedroom and sang her to sleep. Oddly, we didn’t see either of the sons, aged seven and three.
Meanwhile there was the usual to-ing and fro-ing of supplicants; and here, despite the Fon’s unorthodoxy and the unpalatial nature of his palace, cupped hands, hoarse whispers and downcast eyes were the order of the evening. One wrong-doer, come to seek forgiveness, crawled on hands and knees from the door to lay his head on the steps of the stool. As this wretched creature was being pardoned and reassured, a drunk stumbled in, like the Fool in Lear, and stood unsteadily before his Fon, loudly mouthing what sounded like abuse. Then he turned to face us, fell over his feet, picked himself up and began to speak English.
‘I fought – that’s past tense – in World War Two. But you don’t know English – that’s present tense – so you can’t – present tense – understand me. Somebody told me – past tense – that all Europeans know English but that is not – present tense – true.’
This character caused much amusement, not least to the Fon, before the elders removed him; our host was agreeably laid back. Yet we had realised, by the end of an eventful evening, that this young Fon (aged thirty at most) retained more real power than any other chief we had met – even the apparently potent Lamido of Tignere.
Supper consisted of rice and fresh fish, netted a few hours earlier in the stream at the foot of the mountain. A jolly young man with a torch escorted the meal, bearing his own bamboo stool on which he sat close to the Fon; their relationship seemed ‘special’. Whenever we obeyed orders to help ourselves – yet again – the torch-bearer kindly illuminated the dishes on the floor. (‘Greed highlighted!’, Rachel noted in her diary.)
At 9.30 p.m. four supplicants arrived to palaver about the use of land; soon they were followed by two more ‘special buddies’. Normally in Cameroon our own sleeping habits and our hosts’ coincided; here it seemed things were only hotting up at Murphy bedtime. We unrolled our bags and slid into them without causing comment. The esoteric clan language proved an effective lullaby and we don’t know when palavering ended.
Hours later Nature called me and I discovered that the ‘lock’ on the door consisted of two adjustable nails a few inches long. A lantern had been left alight in our room, turned low; another was alight in the bedroom. Darkness is dreaded.
The Fon and his wife deplored our dawn start. ‘You go plenty hungry,’ warned Mrs Fon, presenting me with a gigantic hand of bananas. (Everything growing on that ledge seemed gigantic.) Only then did we realise that she spoke some English.
From the palace a narrow path wound through well grown maize ‘ no drought had afflicted this area – to the village proper. We saw then that the Fon’s ‘ledge’ was part of a long valley enclosed on three sides by forested slopes. Many smiles greeted us as we passed between huts where men were standing outside their doors vigorously brushing their teeth with twigs. All those enviable African teeth don’t happen by accident.
The path crossed a mile or so of flat land where we were saturated while pushing through coarse, golden-brown, rain-laden grass as tall as ourselves. On the edge of a river-noisy ravine we were about to go astray when a quick-witted young hunter came towards us out of the grass. ‘ Aghem?’ we checked. He pointed away from the path, into the ravine – then up to a series of high forested ridges. He was the only person we met all morning; it was uncanny how often, in unpopulated regions, a guide materialised when most needed.
That climb was long but not unduly severe; usually the path zigzagged sensibly. This was a main route when Aghem men hunted the Metchum valley and rich traders organised long human caravans to carry the valley’s abundant palm oil to Wum, returning with hoes, machetes, spear-heads, tobacco, salt, tree-bark oil-drums, and sometimes goats, sheep and poultry, none of which do well at river level. Now sections of the path are in a mildly perilous state of disrepair and it is much overgrown. But most of the undergrowth is benign, though a barbed thorn on a dead palm frond deeply embedded itself in Rachel’s right ear and was not easy to remove.
This forest was no less exciting than Mukuru’s though quite different in composition. Many palms grew in deep ravines but all the giants were majestic hardwoods. Often their complicated root-systems provided steps; on other difficult gradients the rock beneath the forest cloak offered footholds. Most of the smooth pale grey trunks were superbly fluted to a height of five or six feet. And some were of a girth that Rachel and I, with hands joined, could not encircle. But even here greedy loggers had been tempted – though their over-ambitious scheme had, not surprisingly, gone phut. Several felled giants had been electric-sawn into planks which were then abandoned. One 200-foot-long victim lay across our path, forcing me to remove the rucksack before surmounting its vast bulk.
Fortunately we were almost out of the trees when driver ants struck. I had unwittingly walked on a column (they were locally numerous) and within seconds my ‘attack’ provoked theirs. As they invaded under my slacks I fled – to the extent that one can flee, with a rucksack, up an escarpment. Out on the sunny grassland I stripped; by then the enemy were all over me, causing agony. It took time to remove them from every crevice of shirt, slacks, briefs and socks.
Meanwhile Rachel was working her way through the Fon’s bananas. ‘Let’s hope,’ she said indistinctly, ‘no hunter or herd comes by.’
Clad again, I sat on a boulder and wolfed my share of bananas. Within yards – moments – we had moved from one world to another, from the dim, damp, enclosed forest onto bright, breezy, expansive pasture-cum-jungle. And the Aghem highland stretched ahead for many, many miles.
‘D’you realise,’ said Rachel, ‘that with Egbert we couldn’t have used any of these forest paths?’
I had indeed begun to realise that in Cameroon there were advantages to trekking without a horse, though I could not subdue my post-Egbert heartache. Now we could over-exert ourselves, when necessary, without angst about cruelty to Egbert. Also, being able to use footbridges, and not being constrained by grazing requirements, greatly enhanced both our freedom of movement and our speed. When we did our statistics in Douala, it emerged that post-Egbert our average daily mileage went from eighteen to twenty-four. But of course the price to be paid for this increased mobility was book-starvation.
‘So really,’ said Rachel with irritating logic, ‘we invested £250 in a pack-horse so that we could have plenty to read!’