BEFORE LEAVING WUM we called on the Catholic Mission and passed its neat camp for 250 of the 4,000 (or so) villagers displaced by the Lake Nyos tragedy and awaiting official decisions about their future. Many of those ‘aid’ tents were as big as a small hut. Some of the children were playing with the mangled remains of expensive Western toys. Not surprisingly, the camp seemed very quiet. There were none of the frabjous sounds – songs, laughter, cheerful teasing arguments – that normally emanate from groups of Cameroonians. We hesitated on the edge, longing to talk to these victims of one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious natural disasters. But we couldn’t bring ourselves to intrude on them. During the previous eight months, Wum had had more than its share of eagerly beavering journalists from every continent.
As we landed in Douala, on 18 March, almost one hundred scientists were mid-way through a six-day Yaounde conference to try to determine why Lake Nyos exploded, on the evening of Thursday, 21 August 1986, releasing within an hour an estimated 1.3 billion cubic yards of toxic gases – mainly carbon dioxide. This gas instantly killed almost everyone in the village of Nyos and the surrounding compounds. About five hundred people were also killed in the neighbouring villages of Cha, Subum and Fang, as the heavy gas filled fifteen miles of river valley. More than 3,000 cattle died on the mountains around the lake – as did birds, snakes, insects. No creature was left alive.
The conferring scientists included vulcanologists, geophysicians, physicians, ethnologists and sociologists from Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia, North and South America. They debated the nature of the disaster and tried to decide whether or not it was likely to be repeated – either in Lake Nyos or one of the Grassfields’ other three dozen volcanic lakes – and also if any warning system could be devised. Subsequently we met a few experts who had stayed on to pursue their investigations from Bamenda’s tourist hotel, while they sought to rent a Bamenda house in which to install equipment which would tell them what was happening, at any given moment, on the distant floor of the 680-foot-deep lake. They entertained us with lively accounts of the usual experts’ in-fighting at Yaounde.
A minority faction, mainly Swiss, French and Italian, believed that a volcanic vent cap below the bed of the lake was blown off by the pressure of heavy gases which then, erupting through the water, followed the river course to the valley. They argued that similar disasters could happen elsewhere without warning, including in the dormant volcanic lakes of France, Italy and the United States. The American vulcanologists maintained that the gas had not been violently discharged from the lake floor but had gradually escaped and saturated the water. Felix Tahoun, a Cameroonian scientist, agreed in principle with the Americans, but believed the release had been triggered by a massive rock-fall or some other external agent such as a particularly fierce storm. (August is the real rainy season, during which daily storms make those we experienced seem like April showers.) Oddly, no one seems to have asked why the experts, instead of dissenting about the possible role of a rock-fall, had not expended some of their energy, during the previous months, on looking for evidence of such – which would surely be visible to the naked scientific eye, or indeed to any observant eye.
Professor Tchaou of Yaounde University also supported the American theory and argued that it should be possible to monitor and siphon off accumulated gases from all Cameroon’s potentially lethal lakes. He and his Cameroonian colleagues urged the founding of a National Centre for the Study of Natural Risks, which would monitor crater lakes as its first duty. Alas! this is the sort of ‘prestige project’ which over-excites too many Third World academics and governments – though on such matters the Cameroonian government is more levelheaded than most. It would be monstrously expensive to establish and fund. It would offer fat salaries to an elite corps of scientists. Its monitoring, if done efficiently, might possibly, at some future date, save another village from extinction; but the resources thus squandered would be out of all proportion to the good achieved, given the fact that most Cameroonian towns and all villages lack adequate (or any) health care. And in Cameroon’s hospitals patients have to provide not only their own food, fuel and bedding, but their own medicines, dressings, hypodermic needles, plaster of paris – you name it, they must buy it. Natural Risks would therefore seem to be a less pressing danger than humdrum diseases.
After the Yaounde conference (sponsored by UNESCO and other money-wasting international organisations) various newsagencies naively reported ‘lengthy on-the-spot investigations by experts from all over the world’. In fact not many scientists spent much time around Lake Nyos, though during the months after the tragedy they enthusiastically attended Nyos conferences in Hawaii and elsewhere. One American team, neglected by its helicopter, was stranded on the shore for days – of course without camping equipment, as they had expected to be back in Bamenda for sundowners. Apparently it occurred to none of them to go to Bafmeng, scarcely six hours walk away. I’d like to have been a fly on the cliff-face during those days.
The media also announced that 1,746 people had been killed by Lake Nyos, the figure decided upon by the government for global consumption. Local estimates varied from one to two thousand. Given the Cameroonian vagueness about figures, and the circumstances of the burials – most very hurried, under quicklime – there could be no question of anyone compiling accurate statistics. Especially as the military and police gravediggers, and collectors of decomposing bodies, were themselves distressed, unnerved and often terrorised by their task. Several deserted, escaping over the mountains, and have not been heard of since.
The Yaounde conference was unanimous on only one point: the locals should not be allowed to return to the evacuated area (some forty square miles) until many more scientific observations had been made. Nobody in authority took account of the fact that some of the villagers and Fulani compound dwellers would have preferred to risk another explosion rather than to sit around indefinitely in the demoralising atmosphere of the ‘refugee’-camps – in Wum, Nkambe and other points. In the camps rumours were constantly circulating and no one could find out what was likely to happen to them in the future – could they return to their land or would they be resettled elsewhere?
So far as is known, comparable disasters have taken place on only three other occasions this century: in Indonesia in 1979 (seventeen killed), near the Columbian volcano of Turace in 1949 (sixteen killed), and on the Indian Ocean island of Karthala in 1903 (deaths not recorded). It would be interesting to know if any of those areas has similar religious beliefs centred on local lakes. In Cameroon the spirits of Fons and other important religious and military figures dwell in lakes, which also have their own powerful tutelary spirits – how powerful, Lake Nyos proved.
Oddly enough, those puzzled by the sparse population of the Aghem highland, quite close to Lake Nyos, seem never to have speculated about the strong local tradition of (in Bantu terms) cosmic catastrophe. Yet there are vivid ancient legends of exploding lakes and ‘walking’ fish – live fish thrown in their thousands onto lake shores. The recently arrived Fulani, who settled happily in Aghem, are not so culturally and emotionally enmeshed with lakes – though already they have been, to some extent, influenced by Bantu feeling.
In hot Benikuma we had eagerly asked the way to the local crater lake, hoping for a swim. But we were advised, begged, persuaded and almost ordered to avoid it. Therefore we did so. Given the post-Nyos twitchiness, we might have greatly upset the locals by breaking some taboo and thus angering the lake’s spirits. (Or we might have felt, as at Lake Ocu, that we didn’t after all feel like swimming …)
When we left Wum, to find our bush-path way to Bafmeng, Nkambe and the Mbembe Forest Reserve, we knew little about the details of the Nyos disaster – the human details, as distinct from the scientific debate. The unspoken taboo had restricted in-depth conversations to the Bamenda scientists. Otherwise our information was sketchy, picked up at the time of the explosion from vague media reports.
Somehow we mislaid Bafmeng; none of the paths that we had been told about in Wum was marked on our map. After two days’ exhilarating trekking – through narrow valleys, some rugged, some lush, and over high Fulani territory – we found ourselves at sunset on the wide summit of a long grassy ridge. (The final stage of that climb had been the steepest yet, an Ndung descent in reverse.) There we spent a psychologically uncomfortable night in a large Bantu compound of tall square dwellings. The many men, women and children seemed unaccountably scared of us and never relaxed, though their hospitality was lavish. No one spoke a syllable of any recognisable language, which was particularly unfortunate because at that stage we were, even by the standards of the Murphys in Cameroon, very lost.
We left at dawn – the sky a quiet glory of dove grey and shell pink –and soon reached a puzzling turn of the broad path. It was visible for miles ahead, decisively going away from Nkambe. Yet there was no obvious alternative. Near a rich hamlet-sized Fulani compound we sat beside a handsome herd (chocolate or white-and-grey-speckled) and waited for milkers to appear. From this western edge of the ridge we were overlooking a beautiful but baffling world of many other crisscrossing ridges, stretching away to the horizon. Directly below – some 1,500 feet below – was a mile-wide irregular chasm, its jungly sides almost sheer, its floor a confusion of twisting streams, neglected cassava fields and thick scrub. Beyond rose a solitary rock peak – square and grey, a parody of an English Norman church tower based on a steep grassy mountain. Apart from the unsuitable path we had abandoned, none other was visible, anywhere; but we presumed pathlets existed.
Soon two elegantly gowned young Fulanis appeared, accompanied by tiny herd-boys wielding sticks twice as long as themselves. We asked, ‘Nkambe?’ They spoke some English and by then Rachel spoke scraps of Foulfoulde. It became clear that to get to Nkambe we must first get to Ise, a village not marked on our map. And to get to Ise we must descend into the chasm, cross a river, climb around the base of the churchy peak, turn left along a bouldery saddle and continue up and up to the crest of a high forested ridge where we would find a big track going direct to Ise. Then, before entering the village, we must turn right onto a small path which, after a few days, would join the ring-road near Nkambe.
Four strenuous hours later (the details of negotiating that chasm could themselves fill a chapter) we were on the Nkambe path with Ise about a mile away on our left. Near where we left the track, many military tents on a hillside puzzled us – the only army camp we saw in Cameroon.
Gradually we descended, passing from mountain to mountain, then following cultivated slopes to a one-hut compound where a startled little boy stood alone. Here Rachel was the first to glimpse, through tall eucalyptus and pines, an expanse of blue water far below. She pointed to it and asked, ‘What is that?’
For a long moment the little fellow stared up at her in timid silence. Then he gathered his courage and said, ‘Lake Nyos.’
Just below the compound we sat in the aromatic shade of a eucalyptus grove, beside two fat tethered goats, and looked at one another. A Bamenda-met scientist had mentioned the bliss of swimming in Lake Nyos; it was now, he said, 99.9 per cent safe. We unfolded the map. Lake Nyos itself, we already knew, was not marked (though several smaller local lakes were) and we later had reason to be grateful for this omission. But there were two villages of that name, Nyos and Nyos-Acha (Lower Nyos) and we reckoned that by following the eastern shore we could avoid both and, with luck, soon rejoin our Nkambe path – though the map, for once being accurate, described it as ‘not clearly defined’. Before continuing we ate ten bananas each, tossing the skins to the goats.
The lake had looked quite near when first glimpsed, yet to reach it took another hour and a half. In a few isolated compounds bare-breasted women stared at us fearfully; one, on being asked for the path to Lake Nyos, said, ‘Me no hear.’ By then the lake was invisible; and it remained so while we climbed steeply on a moist skiddy path through dense pines and eucalyptus. That ridge supported a long, rich village with maize fields flourishing between tall trees and fine compounds built back from the track. Here we were assumed to be scientists; four youngsters, already corrupted by vulcanologists’ dash, firmly attached themselves to us insisting that we needed guidance. Two were smallish boys, two adolescent girls – one blind in her left eye. The last thing we wanted was an aggressively predatory escort who would prevent our swimming together. But these adhesive youngsters were extraordinarily difficult to detach; on this one occasion I had to be harshly unpleasant to Cameroonians.
Where we emerged from the trees a very long and sometimes difficult descent began, on a scrubby rocky slope. Now the sky had partially clouded over and Lake Nyos was jade-green. Its extent only gradually became apparent: more and more and more water appeared from behind a promontory of red-brown rock. The flat southern shore, which we were approaching, is thin jungle, or naked devastation, near the water. Uneven grass mountains, unusually green, form the eastern and some of the northern shore. The western shore is of sheer rock cliffs, sloping down to the north. Nyos is among the loveliest lakes I have ever seen – at first the shock of its beauty seems to obliterate its lethal past.
On level ground our path petered out and to find the water (invisible again) we had to force our way through a dense belt of unfamiliar grey-green bush, seven feet high and in places almost impenetrable. Where we reached the shore it still looked battered – strewn for some eighty yards inland with dead vegetation, including palms, that had been uprooted by the violent wave accompanying the explosion. On the nearby promontory cliff a vivid straight line marked the water’s lowering; its level sank more than three feet after the expulsion of the gas. Here the ‘beach’ was of soft, black, volcanic muddy sand – slightly stained with reddish iron compound deposits, spewed from the floor of the lake. What looked like solid black rocks by the water’s edge crumbled disconcertingly when one touched them. The experts say Lake Nyos is new-born, not more than a few centuries old.
I was faintly apprehensive lest our swimming might be observed from afar and considered disrespectful to the bereaved or provocative of spirits. But apart from this, and a twinge of guilt about enjoying ourselves in a lake that had behaved so badly, no ‘feeling’ made us hesitate before plunging in. To us Lake Nyos seemed entirely free of Lake Ocu’s negative vibes. Although some water-lilies grew near the shore there was no shallow ledge. I fancied the water tasted faintly of sulphur and that taint seemed to remain on my skin afterwards; but Rachel said I was imagining this. (I don’t think I was; and later we heard that scientists’ samples drawn from 600 feet down showed the depths then still fizzing.) Otherwise the only ‘strangeness’ – the ease of swimming in immensely deep water – was not strange to us who all our lives have been bathing in a mini-crater lake, reputed to be ‘bottomless’, near our Irish home.
And yet, when it came to the crunch we were not really relaxed – only pretending to be so. By mutual wordless consent we stayed within a hundred yards of the shore, instead of swimming far out as in Lake Wum. And when my eye caught a barn-sized boulder, jutting over the water from a grass cliff, I began to think about the 0.1 per cent … We emerged after about fifteen minutes though the temperature was conducive to an hour-long splash. Afterwards, I wondered why. One would be equally vulnerable to another explosion in the water or on the shore. But human beings are not always logical.
Finding a route along that southern shore was difficult, especially for Rachel carrying the heavy rucksack. The explosion wave had ravaged the friable ground and we had to climb in and out of five creeks – wet, black, treacherous gullies where the mud was semi-quicksand. If one paused one began to sink. Twice gully sides collapsed and came with us as we slithered down – a nasty feeling. Then at last we were on a firm grassy slope where we soon fell over a large box labelled ‘Edinburgh University’. From it, wires ran to the floor of the lake and we presumed it was sending messages to our friends in Bamenda’s Skyline Hotel. ‘D’you suppose,’ said Rachel, ‘our kickings in the water have been registered as seismic activity by Edinburgh University?’ A won-der-ful thought!
As we traversed that long mountain, high above the placid, innocent-looking water, I gazed west and thought of the invisible deserted village on the far shore, over the cliff-top. Now we could see the low dip in the northern shore through which the gas spilled out. A major concern of the scientists was that that flimsy natural dam might collapse, as a result of some mild earth tremor, releasing the lake itself to engulf the valley below.
Progress was easy along that grassy slope – until an impassable, jungle-filled ravine blocked our way.
‘We can’t get through that!’ said I decisively. ‘We’ll have to climb high and see if we can bypass it.’
‘You’re always so defeatist!’ complained Rachel. ‘At least we can try!’
She then tried, with dire results that became apparent only days later. The jungle she challenged was peculiarly nasty. I half-heartedly advanced a few yards – then retreated. When she, too, saw sense we struggled upwards and eventually found a pathlet, around the top of the ravine, which led us out of sight of the lake. We wondered if it would soon meet our Nkambe path – as it should, according to the map. Then an inexplicable man-made barrier of tree-trunks and branches blocked the way. Laboriously we surmounted it, but no one could have driven cattle past.
Soon another crater lake, shallow and partially weed-overgrown, appeared far below on our right. This was Lake Njupi: also very beautiful, surrounded on three sides by steep grass mountains. On first seeing it I suggested camping by its shore. Then, as we walked on, gazing down at it, we both simultaneously began to find it ‘spookier’ than Lake Nyos.
So much lush grassland but no herds – not even on the most distant slopes – felt eerie. Far away, high on a mountain, we could see a solitary compound; if there weren’t too many intervening ravines, we might get there by fufu-time. ‘Let’s hurry!’ said Rachel – not having found Bafmeng, we had very little food left.
Then we began to descend and came upon the first cattle carcasses. They were still dreadfully decomposing; everything that would have cleaned the bones had also been killed. After that, around every corner, there were more bovine skeletons or bones or skulls – at our feet or in the distance. Some groups of carcasses were half-burned. And, incredibly, eight months later, there were nauseating whiffs of putrefaction. Suddenly I began to react personally, emotionally, to what had previously been – as faraway tragedies always are – an objectively observed event. This was the remains of some Fulani’s beloved herd …
When we came to the first stricken compound – the one nearest the northern shore – a high washing-up trestle told us it had been Fulani. It was a one-hut compound. For us it should have been a milk-bar, where we sat gratefully sinking pints of milk or curds. Rusting basins, pots and enamelware were scattered outside the hut – and a few plastic shoes. Inside, a Bournvita tin and three mugs lay on the ground by the fireplace, where a blackened dented saucepan stood askew on its stones, above three half-burnt sticks. (Fire-extinguishers use carbon dioxide.) A dog-eared little book lay just inside the door: in Arabic, no doubt an Islamic tract. I thought, ‘How strange, to find a book here!’ I felt an impulse to rescue it but somehow couldn’t bring myself to touch anything in that hut.
We hurried away; what had started as a light-hearted detour, to have a swim in Lake Nyos, was becoming an ordeal. No path was visible. Blundering through a terrible desolation of weed-strangled cassava, we came to another compound half a mile farther down the hillside. Only charred roof-poles remained; three huts had been deliberately burned to exorcise evil spirits. Crossing a fast deep stream, we found a distinct but overgrown path which passed two large compounds – their mango, avocado and banana groves laden with unpicked fruit, the jungle already creeping towards the dwellings and covering the graves.
When the path began to climb a scrubby mountain I exclaimed, ‘Thank God! This will take us away from the area!’
Now we could hear a roaring river on our left, a semi-waterfall hidden amidst trees rushing down the steep slope from Lake Nyos – the river that carried the gas. ‘If it sounds like that now,’ said Rachel, ‘what must it be like in the rainy season!’
Around the high shoulder of that mountain we could no longer hear the river and were overlooking a narrow valley and a by now familiar sight – many tin roofs, glinting through dense foliage. But there were no people to be seen. And there was no sound – absolutely no sound, of any sort.
‘It’s Nyos village,’ muttered Rachel.
‘It can’t be!’ I said. ‘Nyos was on the lakeshore, it’s way behind us, up by the water – somewhere over that rocky cliff.’ (Thus do the media mislead.)
We walked on – unwillingly, but by that stage like automatons and anyway without much choice. Whichever way we turned, it seemed our only companions that evening would be the dead. As we descended the path widened and was carpeted with rotting fruits. Then we were amongst the houses: many fine substantial dwellings set in fertile gardens with handsome carved doors and shutters. Some were closed, some open – but every compound was a burial plot.
‘You must be right,’ I whispered. ‘This must be Nyos.’
Suddenly the vegetation seemed menacing in its exuberance – almost mocking. Crops growing on – maize, yams, cane, cassava – not knowing they weren’t wanted and for eight months being fought by a jungle unopposed. The silence was profound, the only movement our own. And it was 5.30 p.m. Smoke should have been starting to rise, people should have been coming home from the fields, scrubbing themselves in bathroom corners, fetching water, pounding maize, shredding jammu-jammu greens, whisking curds, drinking ‘33’. We became mourners then – not people reading the newspaper and exclaiming ‘How awful!’ but people grieving in their hearts for Nyos.
Soon, astonishingly, we were on a rough muddy motor track – the ring-road again, though we were too bemused to realise that.
Nyos was an important village, the hub of an exceptionally prosperous district. Its weekly market drew people from a wide area, hence the deaths of so many visiting outsiders that Thursday evening. Its merchants’ stalls served many Fulani compounds on the surrounding mountains and many Bantu compounds up and down the intensively cultivated valley of the fatal river. It had recently been expanding; long rows of newish solid stalls and neat dwellings lined the track. And right beside us, as we stood staring up and down that soundless, motionless ‘main street’, was an off-licence with its bright frieze of those little beer advertisements which had so often cheered us from afar. The door was open, a ‘Papal Visit’ poster hung behind the bar, dusty bottles lay overturned on the floor. For us, irrationally yet understandably, that was the ultimate poignancy; there we would first have got to know the people of Nyos. But we said nothing – we had long since ceased to talk, or even to look at one another. There was nothing to say: and each of us had enough to do, keeping a grip on herself.
When I turned to look up the valley a robed figure was standing still in the middle of the road, fifty yards away. My heart lurched with primitive fear – real fear, so real that to recall it can frighten me now. For an instant I truly thought this was a ghost. And, in a sense, he was – a bereft young Fulani from the first compound we passed. He had lost all his family and all his cattle and then had lost his mind and couldn’t be persuaded by anyone (we learned later) to leave the area. Slowly we walked towards him and I called out (a measure of my own demoralisation), ‘Where is this?’
He replied in clear English, very calmly, ‘This was the village of Nyos. But everyone is dead. All my people are dead.’ He didn’t look mad, just inexpressibly sad. ‘Where do you go?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Where does this road go?’
‘There is nowhere to go,’ he said. ‘Everyone is dead. No people are here – nowhere anyone.’ He pointed down the ring-road. ‘That way is Wum, you go Wum, in Wum are people.’
Suddenly our collective nerve broke; we only wanted to get out of Nyos. I groped in my pocket and pressed a CFA note into the young man’s hand – it might have been for one thousand or ten thousand, I never knew. Then I hurried after Rachel who, despite the rucksack, was walking so fast away from Wum, towards Nkambe, that for the next half-hour I couldn’t keep pace with her.
The first report of the disaster was written by Father Peter, an elderly Dutch Mill Hill priest, from Bafmeng, in whose parish Nyos and the other affected villages lay. He was the first White person on the scene, arriving in Nyos at noon on the Saturday, the tragedy having occurred on the Thursday evening between nine and ten o’clock. On the Sunday he wrote to his Bishop:
Your Grace, Last night, Saturday night, I came back from Nyos. On Friday rumours reached us that the lake had killed some Fulani and his cows. Then again that the quarterhead of Cha was lying dead in his compound with his two women. On Saturday morning I was so worried that I went with my two catechists, Sylvester and Hortensia, to Ise, which is high on the top, overlooking the Nyos valley. We thought to get information there but all the men had gone down and nobody had yet returned.
The first compound we entered in Nyos we found only 8 dead people. A child and the mammy lying very peacefully outside with the dog and the goat. In one house a big fat pa had tried to crawl to the door; two other young men were lying on the floor. So, too, the next door we opened. We rushed on to Mr Vincent Zong’s big compound. He is the government teacher. His wife, Mary, is head of our school in Nyos. Vincent was lying dead with his eldest son, Mary with her baby in the next room. And in the children’s room, four girls. Little Jacqueline who attends the school at Ise, was also at home for the holidays. All dead. We rushed on past all the houses in the Nyos market square which were all still locked. We knew that everybody was dead behind these locked doors. We rushed on to the mission. When we opened the door we found Nazarius, our catechist, as if he was saying his prayers with his head on the bed I usually sleep on when I am on trek. Four of his brothers had come from the coast to salute him. All dead. The one had a beautiful watch on, which had stopped at one o’clock in the night. Sylvester stayed behind with Hortensia to bury our catechist. I went as far as the Subum mission, which is about 7 km farther on the ring-road. When I opened the door, I found Lawrence our catechist, lying on the bed, cold as ice. I shouted: Anthony! Anthony! Because I had sent Anthony, one of my seminarians schooling at Fundong, to help the catechist in Subum. Anthony answered. He had survived. He was digging the grave for Lawrence and some other Christians. He and Lawrence were sitting in the half kitchen outside, at ten o’clock on Thursday night. Then something held his breathing. He struggled to get into the house, where he collapsed on the bed. At about 1 in the night, he managed to wake up and look for Lawrence. He had died on the spot. Then, my Anthony, who is perhaps 16 years of age, Form 4, had carried him inside and covered him and gone out to find what had happened. His chest was hurting and he felt very weak, but he started to do the only reasonable thing. He began to dig graves for all the Christians who had died … The number who had died in Subum was more than one hundred. In Nyos simply all people had died, except one Pa and one boy who had slept a little higher up the mountain. There may have been 500 people sleeping in Nyos that night, because Thursday had been market and people from all sides attend the market. Some went back, others stayed and died. I do not know how many of our Christians of Ise have died because they slept at Nyos, but no one Christian of Nyos itself came to salute me or cry for me. The Church of Nyos has died, with Mattias, the head-Christian, and Nazarius the catechist and Mary the choirmistress …
This is what I surmise has happened:
Gas under the lake, probably sulphur from the smell of it, had accumulated until it shot out down the slope into the village. The plantains and the high grass were flattened by the blast. It must have penetrated right through every house in Nyos. There was no difference between people outside or inside. Then spreading, it still had power to kill people at Subum, about 7 km away and even at Cha, about 11 km to the other side.
The gas may be building up again. I have heard that the governor wants all people to leave that area.
On Tuesday I shall go with all my parish to make a cry-die Mass at Subum (it is about 5 hours trekking) then in the night we shall proceed to Nyos about 7 km farther and sing for the last time in their church and pray for them. Then in the morning we shall climb back to Ise. We shall carry all the holy books along.
Father James, sixty hours after the event, and before meeting any other White with whom to discuss the situation, wrote a report to his bishop which said almost as much about the causes and consequences of the explosion as any of the scientists’ reports after their series of expensive international conferences.
As I panted after my laden but speeding daughter – she must have been attaining five miles per hour – it occurred to me that her speed was futile. Darkness was coming early, under a low, leaden, sullen sky, and we were still passing stricken compounds. According to the map, all Rachel’s hurry could achieve would be our arrival at another ghost village before nightfall. (Subum, where Father James found his cherished Anthony burying friends – though we were then unaware of those details.) Beside the track raced the fatal river, narrow and mud-brown and swift even on the valley floor. Rocky mountains rose close by on either side; between them and us were fields of tall coarse olive-green grass mixed with overgrown dying cane. Soon we would have to camp on the muddy track, unless we chose to share a compound with the dead.
Here the ring-road (we had sufficiently recovered our wits to identify it) was in ruins; no heavy vehicle could possibly have used it. If the little rains can cause such havoc, what must it be like in August? No wonder news of Nyos was slow to get out and help for survivors slow to get in. Twice we came to vegetation barriers, bushes heaped on the track with shreds of cloth tied to them. I mistook the first for a ju-ju, then realised these must be to warn vehicles that the ground beneath had subsided and was flooded, requiring extraordinary action. But what vehicles?
As the light faded I trotted to catch up with Rachel and propose settling down on the track before another compound/burial plot came into view. Then we turned a corner and were astounded to see a bush-taxi jerkily heaving itself towards us through the mud. It stopped. We stopped. For an odd little moment nobody moved. We stood staring, the passengers were evidently doing likewise. Then we advanced – and a gendarme in a strange uniform emerged.
We asked, ‘Where is the next village?’ – meaning inhabited village.
That gendarme may have been as unnerved by our appearing out of the empty dusk as we had been by the tragic young Fulani’s materialisation. He was extremely angry, as some people tend to be in reaction to such scares. Banging his fist on the vehicle’s bonnet he said we had broken the law – we were in a Restricted Zone – no vehicle was allowed to pass through without a Special Security Police escort, no pedestrian was allowed without a permit from Yaounde! Did we have a permit from Yaounde? No? Then where did we think we were going? The way we were heading there was no village for forty-four kilometres. There were no compounds, no human beings, everyone was dead or evacuated. We were arrested, he must take us to Wum where we would be punished.
Was ever anyone so happy to be arrested? Not a night in the rain on the track among the dead but Wum – Gussie, Papa, Chief Barnabas, the Happy Days Hotel, the Peace, Unity and Hygienic Restaurant and above all our dear Basil who would surely somehow stand between us and punishment …
The gendarme said we must ride on the roof; there was no space inside. The roof consisted of a few iron struts. My adaptability failed. Criminals we might be; ride on those struts, in the dark, over the chasms of the ring-road, we would not. Those rare moments when one becomes a bully seem shameful in retrospect yet feel like common sense at the time. Among the passengers some two youths must be better equipped than we were – physiologically and psychologically – to ride those struts to Wum. It embarrasses me to recall that fracas. Briefly I became autocratic and declared that we would not allow ourselves to be arrested unless we could ride inside, in the back of the vehicle – we weren’t demanding extra-special treatment, like front seats. The gendarme then batoned two youths as he ordered them onto the struts; neither had protested, seemingly he struck them as a precautionary measure to ensure that they wouldn’t. Everybody was edgy, there in the twilight, with restless spirits – their burials unceremonial and therefore unsoothing – roaming the canefields and the mountainsides.
Later I guiltily asked Rachel, ‘Was that “racism”, throwing my weight about to get us inside?’
After a moment’s thought she replied, ‘No, it was what’s now known as “classism”!’
‘Inside’ was no big deal. I don’t know what happened to Rachel but I was sitting on a knobbly sack of unripe mangoes behind the driver’s seat with a heavy tin trunk on my feet and a sharp object, in the pocket of the fat man beside me, sticking into my left hip. Wedged somewhere above me was an incontinent kid. Spurts of warm urine trickled down my back at frequent intervals. When the dramas of the road surface partly dislodged the creature it was able to establish an even closer relationship and began frantically to suckle my left ear.
‘You are not comfortable,’ understated the youth on my right, attempting to thwart the kid.
‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured him, ‘I like goats.’ (Oddly enough, this was still true.) ‘But,’ I added, ‘if you could ask the gentleman on my left to adjust the sharp object in his pocket I’d be much obliged.’
‘He can’t move,’ the youth pointed out. ‘There is little room. In this bush-taxi are too many people.’ But when we stopped at the next subsidence, where everyone had to disembark and pull on ropes to get the vehicle across, the fat man politely adjusted his sharp object. I had not been neurotically imagining sharpness; it was a new spearhead.
On re-embarking, a replacement hazard appeared before my eyes. One of the youths condemned to ride the struts was now directly above me and his huge bare feet, with rock-hard heels, swung in front of my face, banging my cheeks and forehead as the taxi bucked and slithered. ‘Lean forward!’ urged the solicitous youth on my right. ‘Then you will be more safe.’ ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘Someone’s cauldron is on my lap.’
This Nyos youth, Martin, had lost all but one of his family. Only he and his sister, both then at school in Wum, had survived. She was sitting in front – with a ludicrous number of other comparatively privileged people – being chatted up by the gendarme. As we passed through Cha, seven miles from Nyos but also stricken, Martin pointed towards a mountain bulking black on our left. Its lower slopes had belonged to his uncle – now, with all his immediate family, dead. Many, many acres of bananas grew on those slopes and Martin thought it cruel of the government not to allow survivors to return briefly to the area, if only on police-escorted day-trips, to harvest all the good food being wasted. ‘This would be better for people than sitting idle in camps.’
Our taxi was an ex-limousine, converted to a pick-up. ‘Nothing bigger can go on this road,’ said Martin. ‘It is not a good road.’
Near Cha another subsidence required more extraordinary action. As the vehicle was being hauled across this chasm, we were startled by demented abusive screams. Momentarily the headlights showed an old man, almost naked and with wild hair, running by the edge of the track pointing a stick at us. ‘He has gone crazy,’ Martin explained. ‘He came back from Nkambe to his compound and all were dead and taken and buried – no one knew where. Now he looks and looks, he does not believe they are dead. He lives like a monkey on fruit. If anyone tries to catch him he fights. But he was a very quiet old man.’
Martin and his sister were returning to relatives in Wum (‘They are trying to give us a new family’) after a visit to friends in the biggest camp, near Nkambe. All our fellow-passengers, he said, had been directly involved in the Nyos tragedy. ‘Only such people now have permission to travel through this Restricted Zone, with the Special Security Police to guard them and watch them and not let them go running back to their fields. With time passing more people want to go home, when at first they were too afraid. But I would not like to return – it would make me cry again.’
Soon after, the storm broke; we stopped again and a tarpaulin was spread over the struts. It would in any case have been inadequate: with two passengers up there it was a bad joke. However, those unwittingly brutal feet had now disappeared; the youths were lying full length under the tarpaulin. I began to fret about them as we descended, swerving and skidding on that narrow track above sheer drops too well illuminated by sky-wide sheets of blue lightning. It would be our fault, only, if they were pitched into the abyss … The fat man beside me, squashed against the side-struts, bore the full force of the gale-driven rain and occasionally whimpered softly, like a distressed puppy – a surprising sound from his vast bulk. Martin and I, in the middle, were less exposed but far from protected. It was suddenly very cold and I began to look forward to those warm dribbles from above where the kid was now bleating feebly in sodden misery. Somewhere towards the rear Rachel – also against the struts – was using very bad language sotto voce.
Certain interludes, if one hadn’t kept a diary and written it all down at the time, would afterwards seem like mere hallucinations – not credible to oneself, never mind anyone else. The few hours after our arrival in Wum come into that category.
As the true rainy season approaches Cameroon’s storms lengthen, sometimes continuing all night, and it was still down-pouring when we stopped outside the Happy Days Hotel. (After the Nyos silence, those dire disco decibels sounded almost agreeable.) Moving off the mango sack, I fell into Martin’s arms – my feet had been numbed by the tin trunk. Our captor then ordered us to stay put and we assumed everyone else would disembark. Six did, including an enraged young woman who owned the mangoes. She claimed that my weight had rendered them unsaleable and demanded 6,000 CFA (about £13) compensation. The SSP officer shouted to her to get lost but for her the SSP held no terrors. Resolutely she stood outside the vehicle, her sack at her feet, haranguing through the storm and gesticulating like a windmill. I yelled that her mangoes were so hard they couldn’t possibly have been damaged. Surprisingly, I seemed to have popular opinion on my side. Then the taxi leaped forward, causing me to fall again – this time onto another kid, hitherto unnoticed, lying on the floor. It shrieked in agony and I felt sick and began wildly to apologise to its unidentifiable owner.
A cheerful voice said, ‘No problem, sir! Tomorrow we eat it!’
Our driver proceeded erratically but rapidly, trying to avoid the deeper rain-lakes. Water sprayed up in sheets on either side, as though we were in some sort of aquatic Dodgem Park, and by now ‘inside’ was awash. I supposed we were going to deliver the remaining eight passengers to their destinations, before we were delivered to our place of punishment. But no. They had become the innocent victims of Murphy criminality and were doomed to spend hours at the mercy of the storm while our captor tried to get rid of us.
Apparently we posed an unprecedented problem. At two official buildings, miles apart, guidance was sought but was not available. Finally the taxi – now coughing and shuddering – forced its way up and up, through a raging torrent, to a ridge top. There stood a sprawling conglomeration of newish buildings. At the entrance the headlights picked out a large notice: DIVISIONAL HEADQUARTERS OF SPECIAL SECURITY POLICE. A much smaller notice had an arrow pointing our way and said, simply, PRISON. We began to feel slightly uneasy. Did the SSP operate quite independently of Basil and his merry men? Already we had tried dropping his name, to no effect. Yet our unease was very slight; one cannot feel seriously threatened among the genial Cameroonians.
The taxi could have been driven into Headquarters and parked under cover; instead, it was left out in the deluge while we and the driver (as witness) raced after our captor across a wide yard to ‘Reception’. When we had been handed over to a junior duty-officer, behind a long high counter, the other two vanished. Only one notice was displayed in that cavernous hallway, a list of names headed ‘Football Duty for 17/5/87’.
We were drenched and shivering and exhausted; since dawn we had walked some twenty-seven miles on a hand of bananas. Rachel collapsed on a narrow concrete bench, opposite the counter, and fell asleep with her head on the saturated rucksack. I presented passports to the duty-officer, who was polite and amiable but looked like an unkind caricature of a Third World bureaucrat. Slowly he opened an enormous ledger, designed for commercial uses, and picked up a biro which only reluctantly yielded its ink. While ‘entering particulars’ he frowned, narrowed his eyes and breathed loudly as though carrying a heavy load uphill. Thumbing conscientiously through our health certificates, which have a fatal fascination for semi-literates, he asked if we had ever had leprosy? I controlled an hysterical urge to giggle and gravely assured him that we were not, and had never been, lepers. Finding our visas, he stared silently at them for long moments, then pronounced that their validity depended on their date of issue rather than on our date of arrival in Cameroon.
‘That is not so,’ I said, quietly but firmly. ‘Will you just take my word for it?’
Disarmingly he beamed, ‘Yes, sir! I must believe you! You are educated gentleman!’
I let that pass; he was already sufficiently addled; a gender debate might have unseated his reason. Inexplicably, Rachel’s passport was now causing him mental torture and our problem became bilingual.
‘Your wife is born in city of EIRE in country of England – yes?’
‘My daughter was born in London, in England. “Eire” is the name of our country, Ireland, in the Irish language.’
‘Hah! And Sassenach is your place of residence?’
‘“Sassenach” is “England” in the Irish language.’
‘So why this book say you live in Sassenach when you come from this country of Eire?’
‘It doesn’t say so, it says my daughter was born in England.’
‘But she is only eleven years! So big for eleven years! You marry too young – in Cameroon we do not marry before twelve years, smallest.’
‘My daughter is eighteen – you can see the date there – born December 1968.’
‘But now we have the year 1987 – this time I think you make mistake!’ He drew a scrap of paper from beneath the ledger and began to do sums, holding the tip of a carmine tongue between advertisement-perfect teeth. ‘See!’ He pushed the scrap of paper triumphantly towards me. ‘If she is eighteen she must be born 1948 – it is written there!’
I felt that my own reason was about to be unseated. Abandoning all hope of keeping our encounter on rational lines, I seized his pen and did my own sum while he watched enthralled. ‘Hah! You have another way of making figures! Is this way right? Is it good in Europe now?’
Mercifully our mathematical tete-a-tete was interrupted at this point.‘Here is Big Man!’ exclaimed the duty-officer, saluting a figure wearing what might have been a Fon’s cloak and cap. He was loquaciously drunk and said that I reminded him of his grandfather who always wore khaki bush-shirts. And Rachel reminded him of a Peace Corps girl he wanted to marry and she liked going to bed with him but went back to America and never wrote to him though she promised she would. Then, placing an arm around my shoulder – as much to steady himself as to express affection – he continued affably, ‘Let me show you the cells.’ As one’s host might say, ‘Let me show you your room.’
The cells were bare and clean and unoccupied. They recalled Mr Ndango’s store-room in Acu – minus the noisy generator – and we felt that we could, if necessary, sleep well in them.
‘These are nice cells,’ said the senior officer. ‘But we have not many to put in them. Wum is too quiet. You are spies from Nyos? Do you have bedding?’
As though on cue our captor reappeared, looking distraught. He was quite likeable despite his proclivity to baton youths for no good reason and leave passengers sitting around in the rain. He had, after all, only been doing his duty when he arrested us. And now, clearly, he did not wish us to be imprisoned. The drunken officer seemed to have no strong views on the subject. Given Wum’s limitations as a centre of international espionage, he would have liked to see one of his nice cells occupied by bona fide spies. Yet he too seemed personally well disposed towards us – indeed towards everyone, by that hour of the evening. It was agreed that our passports should be confiscated (‘Not again!’ groaned Rachel) and we promised to present ourselves to the Chief of Security Police at 8 a.m. for further deliberations about appropriate punishment. Spies, we reckoned, would have an easy ride in Wum.
Back at the taxi we found our fellow-passengers all huddled together using the tarpaulin – inside – as a tent. When they had disentangled themselves we grovelled abjectly but they chuckled cheerfully. There was no problem, it wasn’t our fault: ‘Life’s like that!’ said one. Yet they were soaked through; I could hear several sets of teeth chattering.
Our captor offered to drop us off at the innocently named Gay Lodge Hotel: ‘This is finest hotel in Wum, only 1,500 CFA for a clean bed.’ But it was away on the other side of the town so we booked into Happy Days. Rachel’s hunger-pangs were hard to cater for as most chop-houses had closed. I was past hunger. I felt like a football hooligan; I only wanted a bottle of beer in each hand.
At 8 a.m. no one could find the Chief of Security Police. He was, it then transpired, our drunken friend, and 8 a.m. was never his finest hour. It wasn’t mine, either, that morning. I had over-drowned my Nyos trauma.
‘At some stage,’ said Rachel, ‘we’ll have to contact Basil. We’ll never get anywhere with this lot.’
The pyjama’d SSPS who had greeted us seemed to have gone back to bed and there was no one behind the reception desk – no one anywhere in sight. I toyed with the notion of trying surreptitiously to unconfiscate our passports …
Then Basil walked in; his junior officer escort looked astonished to see me hugging and kissing him like a long-lost son. Our kind captor had told him the Murphies were in trouble again.
‘At first,’ said Basil, ‘I didn’t believe him. I thought, these women cannot be like paratroopers, reaching Nyos through the mountains! And now you have a big problem here. This is not my business, but give me your details and I will try to help!’
We unfolded our map, sans Lake Nyos. We explained that no one had told us about the Restricted Zone and that garbled media reports had falsely located Nyos village, describing it as ‘on the lakeshore’ and ‘remote and inaccessible’ – which it is not, being on the ring-road.
‘But,’ said Basil dryly, ‘the ring-road is almost impassable during the rains. And if you were a journalist, straight in from Paris or New York, inspecting the area by helicopter, you might imagine it was remote and inaccessible! But why were you not stopped at Ise? Did you not see the army camp? Many troops are posted there to stop people going near the lake. And did you not come to a big barrier of trees on your path? Did you not think then perhaps you should stop and turn back?’
We admitted that we had noticed the camp but had seen no soldiers. And the barrier on the path had seemed a relatively minor obstacle which we soon got over.
‘You get over too many obstacles!’ said Basil. ‘That is why you have so many problems! Now you wait here for the Chief, tell him your story, then come to my home and we shall see how things develop.’
By then Headquarters was coming to life. We sat in the sun outside reception, overlooking a flooded parade ground. Three friendly SSPS in mufti (but with revolvers stuck in their belts) were listening to two elderly villagers being passionately disputatious about goats. One billy (old) had killed another (young). The old billy was free, his victim tethered. As it is illegal to leave goats untethered the victim’s owner was claiming the old billy as compensation. But he, being fat, was worth 20,000 CFA (about £45) – whereas his victim, being thin, was worth only 10,000 CFA (about £22.50). Nothing had been decided when another pair of litigants arrived – younger, but also goat-centred. One man’s billy had been tethered so close to another’s nanny that he killed her by strangulation – a far knottier problem than the first and one to which the elders now applied themselves with as much enthusiasm as though it were their own.
Even in my hung-over state, I perceived an incongruity here. Why were these goat controversies taking place at the Headquarters of the Special Security Police? What did internecine conflict among goats have to do with National Security? A charming SSP with only half a face (the other half had been blown off when his gun went wrong) elucidated. All these litigants were followers of SSP officers and so deemed it expedient to seek justice here rather than at the Gendarmerie. By then we were so Cameroon-attuned that this seemed a perfectly logical explanation.
At 10.20 a.m. the Chief appeared, now grandly uniformed but looking frail. He seemed not to recall that I was his grandfather’s double. Realising that for him this was our first meeting, we played it that way.
‘Why you were arrested?’ he asked.
I told my story, ending with profuse apologies for having unintentionally broken the law.
‘You should have permit from highest sources of Yaounde,’ said the Chief. He had, we suspected, taken in little or nothing of what I said. He held out a hand: ‘Please, give me your passports, to send to Yaounde. You wait in Wum – is good?’
‘But you have our passports!’ I protested. ‘Your duty-officer kept them last night!’
The Chief wrinkled his brow and looked as if that hurt. ‘Here are no passports – I do not have – give me!’
‘Someone here has them,’ I insisted, beginning for the first time to feel genuine alarm. It seemed hideously possible – even probable – that that duty-officer had allowed our passports to be eaten by goats or termites.
‘Come back tomorrow,’ ordered the Chief. ‘Your passports may be found – maybe not …’
‘At what time tomorrow?’ I asked, being obstinately White.
‘At any time,’ said the Chief. ‘I am always here, at your service. I am a public servant. It is my duty to help people.’
Thus began another Wum passport saga.
From Wum, the town nearest Lake Nyos, the mass-burials were organised and to Wum came many survivors for medical care and ‘rehabilitation’. Now, emboldened by our new feeling of personal involvement, we initiated discussions of the tragedy and discovered an unravellable accretion of rumours, allegations, contradictory statements of ‘fact’ and fresh Nyos-myths. Perhaps this turmoil of gossip, accusation and fantasy was being used as an anaesthetic to dull the local awareness of what actually had happened. In Wum even the most dogged investigative journalists had been forced to abandon their quest for hard facts – details of who had done wrong, and why and how and where. And I had no stomach, after walking through the village of Nyos, for probing scandals. No one could be blamed for the explosion. It was a natural disaster, or an act of God, if one chooses to believe in a God given to such actions. In my then mood it didn’t matter who was making away with emergency relief supplies, or if the government said more or less people died than was the case. Everyone in Nyos village died. And statistics become supremely unimportant when everyone is dead. (In fact everyone didn’t die, as we were soon – and shatteringly – to discover.)
We were told of a European scientist – some said English, others German – who in the mid-1970s warned the locals that Lake Nyos was likely to give trouble. We were also told of a quarterchief from the area who in 1982, after Mount Cameroon’s latest eruption, foretold a disaster and urged everyone to move away. His prophesy was based not on traditional magic but on personal observations of ‘strange things floating in the water and bad smells around the shore’. But his advice was misinterpreted as a ploy to clear good land for occupation by friends of his from ‘outside’.
In a shebeen a youngish Bantu man was bitterly eloquent. He had lost fifteen of his family and denounced the mass burials as ‘shameful and not necessary’. He and his friends had buried their dead in their compound, where people should be buried, because they could afford to bribe police jeeps to take them to Nyos. Almost every family, he said, had survivors who should have been helped by the authorities to hurry to Nyos to bury their dead ‘with respect’. ‘For us this is more important than you people realise. We stay close to our dead, they are not gone – forgotten – finish! They stay with us still, in the compound. They have a part to play in the family, helping the living. Even if scientists say the lake is safe again, government has made it hard’ for many people to go back to Nyos. Too many dead have been treated badly and will be unhappy and angry. For the Fulani it will be easier – they have different feelings.’
Basil, who organised the mass burials, told us later that given the delay in discovering the tragedy, the state of the ring-road and the need for quick burial in a tropical climate, it would have been impossible to organise family burial parties – and dangerous to try, because of the risk of epidemic disease.
A Fulani evacuee was also embittered. The government had promised financial compensation to surviving Fulanis who could show vets’ certificates proving cattle losses, yet after eight months no one had received a franc. Like everyone else, he derided the ‘1,746’ official death toll. Many had been buried before the security forces arrived with their shovels and quicklime – many others, in isolated compounds, after they left. ‘But the government wanted to seem in control, that way more aid would be sent from other countries. They are trying to get big money from Israel to build a new modern town for all people now in camps! But this is dishonest. We don’t want to live in a modern town – we are village and cattle people …’ (When news of the Nyos disaster reached Yaounde, the then Prime Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, was on an official visit to Cameroon and Israel at once provided most of the medical aid needed – and much of the equipment for the camps.)
Basil’s exertions on our behalf won-der-fully abbreviated that second passport saga. After a stern interrogation by the Biggest Man around – far transcending in importance any Chief of Police – our passports were returned and we left Wum next morning with changed plans. The Mbembe Forest Reserve was out: all of the Restricted Zone lay between us and it. So our new goal was the Bambouto Mountains, to be reached via the hitherto elusive Bafmeng. Basil had seemed understandably anxious that this time we should get out of his jurisdiction in – metaphorically – a straight line, without further unscheduled wanderings. Therefore we attached ourselves, on the outskirts of Wum, to four wood-collecting children who guaranteed to put us on the correct bush-path.
Just beyond the town, as I was bringing up the rear, a handsome, well-built, sad-faced young man emerged from a side path and quietly returned my greeting. He was carrying an axe and was oddly dressed, in a shirt and shorts of grey and black striped material. When I asked if he was going to Bafmeng – hoping we might have a guide all the way – he replied in excellent English. He wished he could go to Bafmeng, but he was a good-conduct prisoner who, having served seven years of his sentence, was now allowed out once a week to collect firewood for the prison kitchen.
This frankness encouraged me to ask ‘Why were you imprisoned?’ and his reply shook me because one couldn’t not believe him; he was that sort of young man. His father, a prosperous We farmer, had set him up as a butcher in Wum market at the age of eighteen. A few months later he bought twenty cattle from a Fulani who had rustled them. In court he claimed not to have known they were stolen and proved that he had paid the full market price. Yet he was sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment. And the Fulani was executed by firing-squad.
Despite the brevity of that encounter it remains one of my most indelible – and saddest – Cameroonian memories. There was something extraordinarily moving about the dignity with which this young man accepted a gross injustice. We shook hands where he turned off to climb a jungly hillside and I stood for a moment watching him walk away alone through the bush. I felt our short conversation had helped him; that meeting had a curious flavour – almost as though it were designed.
Six energetic hours later our approach to Bafmeng coincided with the sort of storm that goes down in history. At first we imagined it to be a normal manifestation of the real rainy season (now close) but even by Cameroonian standards it was freakish: ripping off roofs, felling mighty trees, destroying several square miles of crops and demolishing five substantial buildings including a Catholic church. When it began without warning we were some four miles from Bafmeng but already under shelter, in an isolated off-licence-cum-huxters. Luckily this little shack stood in a slight hollow; had it been on a ridge-top it might well have been blown away and would certainly have lost its roof. The parents and three children seemed disturbingly ill-nourished and apathetic, reminding us how rare poverty is in rural Cameroon. When we arrived a skinny little fellow, aged about six, was amusing himself by rearranging the very few goods displayed on dusty shelves behind the bar: washing soap, torch batteries, small boxes of loaf-sugar. His younger sister lay restlessly asleep on a wooden bench; she looked feverish. Then, as we raised our bottles to our parched lips, the sky was suddenly black – and Father slammed the door as an uncanny howl, not immediately identifiable as wind, seemed to fill the world.
The thunder and lightning were not – could not be – any more dramatic than what we had already witnessed. But never have I experienced such darkness at midday. And the rain seemed not rain but falling water – as in a waterfall. Then it was mixed with thick hail, the size of ping-pong balls, that bounced three feet off the ground and might have concussed us had we been exposed to it. Opposite the shack a mature eucalyptus wood became frighteningly beautiful as trees flung themselves this way and that, like mad tormented dancers staging a frantic arboreal ballet. At first the gale had been blowing from behind us, where the ground rose slightly. When it veered abruptly Father rushed to shutter the wide window but was too late to prevent a flooded floor.
Two hours later the hurricane had dwindled to a storm, the torrential rain was hail-free and we continued – though in such a wind neither umbrella nor capes could protect us. We were now on a hilly ‘fair weather’ motor track which in foul weather becomes a swirling dark brown river. Schoolchildren, wading through the flood, looked scared: what might they find when they got home? Many tin roofs and unrooted eucalyptus lay strewn about; items of colourful enamelware were perched high in mango trees; plantain groves, coffee bushes and almost-ripe maize had been smashed into the ground. This was a heartbreaking scene of industry defeated, the innocent punished, the hard-working deprived.
We splashed into Bafmeng’s first off-licence through a wide red-brown lake below the track. A dozen men and a few women were bewailing the hurricane damage, none quite sober at 4.45 p.m. An elderly Big Man sitting in a corner (Commander Emmanuel) commiserated with our sodden shivering and ordered beers for ‘these sad people’. His ‘son’ Barnabas, a follower inherited from his father, was unpleasantly drunk with bloodshot eyes and refused to shake my hand.
‘First I salute Madame! I know how to behave with ladies – I know Germany!’ He turned to embrace Rachel, at some length, and leeringly informed her, ‘I have spent time in Germany, there I was very nicely looked after by girls like you – yes? You love me?’ He swung around, seized my bottle of beer and drank deeply before returning it.
I said, loudly and distinctly, ‘I am Madame. This is my daughter. Her name is Rachel and I am her mother.’
Here gender confusion reached its bizarre apogee. Barnabas came towards me and turned nasty. ‘You are lying!’ he sneered, thrusting his face into mine. ‘You are man – why you want to pretend you are woman?’
Wearily I unbuttoned for the breast-baring routine, but with Barnabas it didn’t work.
‘Artificial things are not good!’ said he. ‘We don’t want that kind of trouble in Cameroon! We don’t like this here, we don’t have such problem in this country, we don’t like it brought from outside … We have no saints here but we are better than Europe which has many saints. We in this country can’t be fooled by you people – you are man!’ By now he was staring at me quite wildly and swaying as though about to topple forward onto my suspect bosom.
Commander Emmanuel, who had been trying to intervene, at last made himself heard. He shouted something in whatever Bafmeng folk speak and his follower was temporarily silent. The Commander then turned to me, apologetically. ‘Madame, this is bad! You come here wet and he talks of Germany – for what? What help for you to talk of all countries he’s seen? He is my son but only because I have to take him when my father dies – I do not like him. But we are all God’s children, whichever church – or no church – you attend. For us all God had love enough to die – you are Catholic?’
Before I could reply, Barnabas borrowed Rachel’s Beaufort, took a swig, then began a loud confused account of his time in Germany, his two-day visit to East Germany and his views on Communism. When it emerged that he had worked as a docker in Hamburg his reaction to my bosom became less baffling.
An hour later the rain stopped and the evening sun slanted across a waterlogged Bafmeng. Opposite the off-licence was the European-orderly Catholic Mission, an unusually large complex of buildings set amidst neat almost-lawns shaded by rows of spreading trees. The Commander (we never discovered why he was generally known as ‘Commander’) said that we could spend the night either at the Mission or in his younger brother’s nearby empty house. Brother was ‘a very big army officer’, living in Yaounde, and his new house was unoccupied. At the Mission they had a visiting medical team of three, caring for Nyos refugees, so perhaps we should stay in Brother’s villa? Gratefully we agreed and a very small boy led us through knee-deep (for him) water, head-carrying our rucksack apparently effortlessly. In a huge bedroom two posh Dunlopillo double-beds were made up with fresh sheets and warm soft blankets. Each (urbanisation running wild!) had a bedside locker and the glazed window was securely grilled.
We dined in the Commander’s own villa, a hundred yards away. In a spacious living-room, sparsely furnished, he invited us to admire a collection of firearms, dating from various eras, on the whitewashed walls. The party consisted of our host, another follower (a local teacher) and Sister-in-law, who divided her time between Yaounde and Bafmeng because someone had to supervise the cultivation of Brother’s many rich acres. This was the only time a woman shared a meal with us – and with men – in rural Cameroon; but of course Sister-in-law was used to Yaounde ways. By then both Commander Emmanuel and his follower were truculent-drunk. They shouted angry abuse at each other throughout the meal while Sister-in-law looked disapproving but resigned. Perfectly cooked rice and herby mutton stew were served from giant food-thermoses and cutlery was provided for all, though not used by the men. It seemed tactful to retire the moment we had finished, leaving Sister-in-law to pour palm oil on increasingly troubled verbal waters.
We chose the bed by the window and were almost asleep when our host came lurching in, a lantern in one hand and a gun in the other. This was no home-made brass-studded job, nor had it been left behind circa 1640 by the Portuguese. It was a gleaming new army rifle and when the Commander had put down his lantern he pointed it at us and said he wanted Rachel on the other bed. A fate worse than death seemed improbable; our host’s competence on that score was unlikely to have survived his beer intake. But death itself seemed quite probable, if the rifle were loaded and its owner continued to wave it about while fiddling with the safety-catch. I spoke soothingly, as one does to a toddler who has got hold of something so dangerous he mustn’t be startled. Rachel was pretending to be asleep and I protested that she was exhausted – it would be very cruel to wake her – but in the morning she would certainly join him in his bed.
The Commander persisted; he wanted my daughter now. Suddenly he sat heavily on the edge of the other bed and again targeted me and hiccupped. By this stage my heart was hammering with fear and my palms sweating. Then he changed his demand: if I would join him now he could wait until morning for my daughter. Another flourish of the rifle accompanied this proposal. I tried to sound as though it fired me on all cylinders, then explained that I, too, was exhausted. However, after a few hours sleep it would be my privilege and pleasure to enter his bed.
Still he persisted, his speech becoming increasingly slurred. He wanted me now– and again he began to fiddle with something on the rifle that went clickety-click. I decided to join him; even should he prove unexpectedly virile, there is no fate worse than death. Then abruptly he threw himself back on the bed, clasping the rifle to his chest. A moment later he stretched out a hand and turned off the lantern – a very un-Cameroonian thing to do, yet he seemed far too drunk to be planning anything cunning. I was beginning slightly to relax when he again mumbled ‘Madame! Come under me now!’ Further clickety-clicks followed and seemed even more alarming now that I couldn’t see which way the rifle was pointing. Fleetingly I considered snuggling down with our host, then grabbing the gun. But if it were loaded that could be suicidal. Then I heard – sweetest of sounds! – a long snore; and it was followed, rhythmically, by others. Yet that was an unrestful night. Whenever the Commander muttered and tossed, as he frequently did, I became not only alert but hypertense.
From 5 a.m. I was wide awake and twenty minutes later our host sat up, slid off the bed and said in a small meek voice that he was going to his compound where we must join him for breakfast at 7.30. Then he slung his rifle over his shoulder and slunk away into the grey dawn.
I felt a bit sheepish as we dressed; very likely the rifle had been unloaded.
‘You really were scared,’ recalled Rachel, amused by this maternal over-reaction. ‘I’m sure that thing wasn’t loaded – where would he get ammo, in Bafmeng?’
‘From his very big officer brother,’ I retorted. ‘But you’re probably right, I was just being jittery.’
‘You look haggard!’ said Rachel. ‘Did you not sleep well? You are silly!’
At 6 a.m. the church bell was ringing as we crossed the almost-lawn to salute Father Peter before leaving for Fundong. In Wum we had been told, ‘He’s been in Cameroon twenty-eight years, he knows us better than we know ourselves! He’s doing more than anyone else for Nyos people, he’s a perfect Christian!’
A tallish figure in a white surplice was strolling beneath the trees, reading his breviary. When he saw us his smile melted our hearts. He had thick snowy hair, pink cheeks, big bright blue eyes – and disconcertingly I found myself thinking that pink and blue people look odd… His voice was gentle yet he radiated power – spiritual power. After a few moments’ conversation he urged us to spend another day in Bafmeng, at the Mission. ‘Be with us today and meet my poor people from the Nyos villages – it will help them.’
The English language seems to lack words for describing this sort of person without sounding mawkish. Rachel wrote in her diary: ‘Angelic! – or at least saintly.’ I wrote in mine: ‘Being a perfect Christian has nothing to do with it. The last person I met who at once gave this impression of sheer, pure goodness was an agnostic – our beloved Martin Ryle.’
The Bafmeng Mission was injudiciously founded as a convent; European nuns should never have been expected to flourish in the heart of the Grassfields. When that enterprise collapsed Father Peter laboured alone from his little bungalow and for twenty years the rows of cramped cells lay empty. Then the Nyos evacuees moved in: some men and youths, but mostly women and children from Subum, Cha and Fang, whose menfolk had all died.
An Argentinian lay-missionary woman doctor, based in Fontem but seconded to Bafmeng for a fortnight to deal with evacuee health problems, mentioned a theory that more men than women died, and more adults than children, because alcohol leaves the body extra-vulnerable to carbon dioxide. Yet in some compounds more children died. And in the huts where children only survived it may have been because at that time of evening they were asleep under thick blankets. (Cameroonians usually sleep with covered heads.)
Here I felt no inhibitions about talking with and questioning Nyos victims. Perhaps absurdly, yet in a way that felt very real, our own reactions to Nyos seemed to have given us the right to sit with them and share their grief. But Rachel soon sensibly retreated to the living-room to write her diary. At eighteen there is a limit to what one can handle and it is a wise youngster who recognises this.
Most harrowing of all were the Nyos village children who survived. A boy, aged four at the time, spoke no word for eight months – never, under any circumstances, to anyone. Then a few days before our arrival he saw an older boy digging a hole to plant a tree and suddenly screamed, ‘No, stop! No dig hole!’ Having spent thirty-six hours locked in a hut with the dead, he had watched Ise men digging and digging and then burying all his family in the compound.
One little girl, aged twenty-two months at the time, was put on my knee in an ex-cell. Her aunt, a survivor from Cha, told me that she had been tied so tightly to her dead mother’s back that she couldn’t free herself. She was not found for two days – two days in a room with seven corpses – so ‘She have Mama’s neck for chop.’ This victim, now aged two and a half, sat listlessly on my knee, the very antithesis of a Cameroonian toddler – usually by that age singing and dancing and bubbling and twinkling with joie de vivre.
Even more disturbing was the little girl, aged just three at the time, who was found on the Monday morning, three and a half days after the explosion, in a hut with nine fast-decomposing bodies – her parents and all her older siblings. When the gendarmes entered she came crawling out from under a bed; Basil had mentioned her, saying the men who found her were utterly shattered and cannot rid themselves of the memory of her face at that moment. She had reacted to nothing since, though everyone focused extra love and attention on her, attempting to arouse some emotion – fear, anger, hate, anything … Every evening after supper Father Peter holds an informal and very moving prayer service in the living-room for the older evacuees, followed by a sing-song and dancing. This little girl is always brought in, to provide her with as much stimulation as possible. She courteously accepts caresses, sweets, biscuits – but passively, expressionlessly, with dead eyes. I shall never forget that child’s eyes.
Afterwards we wondered if, in the cases of the most profoundly shocked small children, adoption by Whites and removal to a totally different Western environment might be a good idea, though normally such well meant interventions are inadvisable. I couldn’t help feeling, in the unjustifiable way one does, that it would have been better for those children had they not survived.
One Nyos man, whose wife and five children had died, told me he was found unconscious and flown by helicopter to Wum hospital where he came to after another thirty-six hours. He said, ‘When you walked from the lake you passed my fine compound – it is by that path – you have seen it. I don’t like to see it again. Why they make me live? For why? Why they not leave me to die with my woman and my pickins? Five pickins, all good, loving God, then God destroy them – why?’ He was obsessed by the fact that there had been no warning sound, just suddenly an inability to breathe. He seemed to resent this as unfair sneaky – and to believe that had there been a warning he could somehow have protected his family. (Which of course is not true.) He denied that it was ‘a quick easy death’, the consolation those attempting ‘rehabilitation’ had been offering to the survivors. ‘Not quick! Much, much suffering for some, dying ten minutes, tearing their clothes off and all fear – try to breathe but no air – and so frightened, so frightened!’
That victim was aged about thirty-five and restored to full physical health. Yet I had a strong feeling that soon he would die. Throughout that spacious convent-compound, for all Father Peter’s sensitive care, the lack of the will to live was apparent. The Mission had provided the evacuees with ample good land to cultivate for their own use (work therapy) but they had no heart for it – those once-vigorous young women who had been so proud of their skill as cultivators, so tireless in their to-ings and fro-ings to all the local markets to sell surplus crops to pay school-fees or buy new clothes for the children …
After lunch, on Father Peter’s advice (he may have noticed me looking over-harrowed), we went to pay our respects to the Fon – as we should have done on arrival, but the hurricane was our excuse. Bafmeng, like We, is a traditionally important trading centre, not the creation of a motor-road. In extent a town, it has a village feeling. Long stretches of cultivation separate its various quarters and the Fon’s palace is about three miles from the Mission.
On the way we met Norbert, a Douala airport gendarme who insisted on escorting us to the palace. ‘The Chief is my good friend and I like to talk English. It helps me in my job if I sound like English person.’ Norbert had lost seventeen in Nyos village: ‘My parents, two grandparents, the rest brothers and sisters.’ Significantly, he seemed not to have been traumatised in the way most Bafmeng evacuees were. One of his wives and most of his children lived in Bafmeng but his world, now, was Douala. For him life went on, post-Nyos, as it could never do again for those whose world was their compound or village. He told us that Nyos and Bafmeng people are ‘same tribe with same language’ and the Fon is chief of the whole area. Then he led us on a detour, up a steep forest path, to meet his Bafmeng (senior) wife. We found an attractive twenty-two-year-old sitting on a low stool outside .a big thatched hut in a coffee-surrounded compound. She was suckling her hefty fourth son. ‘Is good woman!’ said Norbert. ‘She have only boy babies!’ Eleven of her immediate family died in Nyos and her welcoming smile did not light up her eyes.
Bafmeng’s palace is as big — if not quite as grand — as Bafut’s. The Fon, an ex-secondary school teacher, was a fubsy character who suddenly became formidable when discussing Nyos. In 1977 and 1978, and again after Lake Manoun’s explosion, he wrote to both local and central government departments expressing concern about Lake Nyos’s ‘moods’ and reporting the unprecedented subsidence of huts in nearby compounds. Inevitably, those letters were ignored. But he told us he kept copies which are now of some interest to scientists — and of some embarrassment to the government.
When Rachel sought permission to smoke she was told that nicotine is taboo in the palace. But alcohol is not and an ancient retainer, wearing a long loose gown, soon appeared with a raffia bag that clinked promisingly. Taking four glasses from a corner shelf he polished them on the end of his gown — which, being itself dust-laden, left them markedly less sparkling than before. This large, long, shadowy reception hall was decorated with an eighteen-foot python skin, a selection of ancient firearms, and faded photographs of the Fon’s father and grandfather, surrounded by their respective councils.
By the Fon’s reckoning, Lake Nyos killed more than 2,000 people. I asked if he approved of the Restricted Zone policy being indefinitely maintained. Yes, he did: Lake Nyos should never again be trusted. He told us about a Peace Corps teacher who had been stationed in Fundong, a few hours’ walk away, for the past two years. Steve Tabor (in whose back garden we were soon to camp for two nights) had been one of the first Whites to arrive in Nyos and he helped with the mass-burials. A scientist by training, and considerably older and shrewder than the average PC volunteer, he had been closely studying Lake Nyos since the explosion (more closely than most of the international experts then busily writing papers about it). Four months and nine days after the explosion he observed a long red gash on the jade-green water, the shape and size of a giant submarine. He photographed it from the cliffs on the west shore and later showed us his pictures. At the Yaounde conference most scientists agreed that this was not evidence of another comparatively minor eruption but had probably been caused by a rock-fall. To this statement my previous comments on rock-falls may be applied with even more force; Steve’s photographs show exactly where to look for signs of such an event.
’If a rock-fall can again turn some of the water red,’ said the Fon, ‘why should my people go back? Cameroon is not over-populated, they can be settled on the high ground beyond We. There they would be within reach of Bafmeng and relatives and the markets they know.’
I aired my theory that the Aghem highland is under-populated because of a previous crater lake disaster lingering on in the folk-memory.
‘That is likely,’ replied the Fon. ‘But now we know the gas can’t move up. Heaviness is its characteristic. So there is no reason for my people to avoid that area.’
But, as Norbert observed afterwards, the Fon of We might not agree …
On our way back to the Mission Norbert told us that the Fon had been deserted by his wife (his only wife) who was also a teacher and had refused to leave Bamenda and her good job when he was selected. He longed for her to join him in Bafmeng though she was — according to local gossip — tight-fisted, spiteful and ill-tempered. No one could understand why he didn’t just forget her and have lots more wives, as was in any case a Fon’s duty. Unless — could it be that what she said about him was true?
That night, lying on the concrete floor of a new Mission schoolroom, I slept much more soundly than on Brother’s Dunlopillo mattress.