Signs of the Germans’ fifty-year stay were visible throughout the town, but especially in the form of the occasional two- and even three-story terraced stone buildings with red metal roofs that seemed so out of place in the lush green natural scenery.
Another volunteer, Jim Wilson, and I arrived there on the first day of September, having survived an eight-hour trip in a Peace Corps Land Rover. The roads in Cameroon would be familiar to anyone who has been to West Africa: a laterite clay, hard almost to the point of feeling like cement in the dry season, but soft like tomato soup during the rainy season. Four-wheel-drive vehicles used in rural Cameroon in the mid-1970s bore no relation to those parked in front of hotels today in Vail or Aspen, Colorado. The shock absorbers seem to have been left out of the undercarriage and a ride of longer than an hour made one feel like a jackhammer operator. Our driver seemed to be in constant road races with the “bush taxis,” Peugeot 404 station wagons that seated nine passengers—two in the front, four in the second seat, and three people stuffed in the rear—and would carry them between towns. Luggage on those taxis (which included live goats and chickens) was stored on roof racks made locally of crude metal and covered with garish signage to encourage repeat customers. The names of the taxis painted on the front of the roof racks were quite varied, often a line from the Bible, or a movie character (“007”), or sometimes just a philosophical expression that the proud driver may have been inspired to make up himself, such as (my favorite) “Man Must Die.”
Getting out of our Peace Corps vehicle was a welcome moment indeed. The driver helped pull our bags out of the back of the vehicle, wished us good luck and told us not to drink the water, and sped off. Jim and I looked at each other and then at our house and our waiting motorcycles sitting against the side of the house. A neighbor who had been watching over the property since the last volunteers had left a few months before emerged from a nearby house with our keys. Our house was made of cinder block and cement and sat incongruously in the midst of a patch of five-foot-high grass off a dirt road. With occasional running water, it was the lap of luxury for a Peace Corps volunteer, a cheerful thought I conveyed to Jim as we surveyed the mauve interior walls and the ubiquitous spiderwebs and, a first for me, a two-inch-wide ant column that had effortlessly marched its way under the front door to what presumably had been a feast of insects inside. Groups of small children started emerging from the tall grass to stare at us, a sight they never lost interest in during the two years we were there. There wasn’t any furniture, but Jim and I used our Peace Corps allowance to build wooden bed frames for our foam rubber mattresses (which we both decided we didn’t want to place directly on the floor) and to buy a few chairs and straw mats.
The best part of the house was its roof. Made of corrugated tin, it stubbornly, albeit loudly, withstood the pounding monsoon rain. Buea had 265 inches of annual rainfall, most of which fell during the summer months through the end of September. That first night in September, with the dry season still a few weeks away, the rain came down on the tin roof in a deafening torrent that I thought would punch holes through it. In the morning, however, a bright sun was up in a cloudless sky, the grassland slopes of Mount Cameroon had become an emerald green, and every insect in the world, it seemed, along with a few newly formed columns of ants, seemed hard at work on the cement stoop or nearby in the thick, green tall grass.
I was assigned to the Department of Cooperatives, under the Ministry of Agriculture, with duties to serve as a credit union field-worker. Catholic priests from the Netherlands had introduced credit unions about a decade before. They had studied the local “Njangi” savings societies, a system of monthly savings against an eventual payout of everyone’s savings. Thus if each person saved a dollar a month and there were twenty persons in the group, that person would, every twentieth month, receive twenty dollars, which, less the funding for food and drink for the monthly party, was a substantial payout, almost like winning the lottery. The priests, carefully building on the Njangi system, created a rudimentary but effective standardized bookkeeping system that allowed people to take loans against their savings or those of a cosigner. The Cameroonian government supported the program and had asked the Peace Corps to send volunteers to help supervise the credit unions.
Credit unions were often the only access to credit that anyone had. And even though the word microcredit had not yet become the subject of Nobel Peace Prizes, loans from tiny credit unions in places were instrumental in helping people create small businesses (foot-pump sewing machines were a popular loan request), buy schoolbooks for their children, and replace thatched roofs (the smells and sight of which bore no relation to thatch roofs in the English countryside) with shiny corrugated metal.
My job was to get to each credit union over the course of the month to check the loan balances, tie up the individual accounts with the general accounts, meet the board of directors, and otherwise make sure that nothing unusual had taken place. The Peace Corps gave me a Suzuki 125cc dirt bike. It was large by local standards, and with its four gears and another four lower gears, activated with the click of one’s heel, it could climb the steepest trails even with Mr. Timti, my Cameroonian credit union trainee, holding on to the rear seat for dear life.
In some villages, especially those up on the mountain, my arrival on a motorcycle was not so much an important event as it was the only event happening in the village that day or even that week. While most adults had at some point been down the mountain to the market towns of Tiko and Muyuka, most of the children had not. Thus dismounting the motorcycle also involved clearing a path to escape the circle of kids that would form around the bike, some interested in the machine, others simply fascinated by my white skin and determined, for a start, to cure me by rubbing it off my hands.
After a meeting with the village elders, with the help of the local schoolteacher, who translated local dialect into something between English and West African Pidgin English, I would make my way to where the credit union was housed, usually a tiny one-room hut with a table and two chairs, and not much more room than that. The bookkeeper, who was also the schoolteacher, would hand me the stacks of individual ledgers, probably about 150 of them, a cash book, and the “files” of monthly statements, with pretty much the last sign of any work traced to the last time I was there. I would get to work under the watchful eyes of the small children, who by this time seemed to include every child in the village, except for those still taking turns sitting on my motorcycle. The task was to update the transactions so that the sum of the individual loans would, together with money in the bank in Muyuka and the cash on hand, actually equal the total assets of the credit union. I would also add people’s savings ledgers to make sure that together with some other issues they would prove out the actual liabilities amount showing in the credit union’s statement.
In the early afternoon, farmers in from their coffee farms would drift over to the credit union to see what was going on. Some would bring their own paperwork, consisting of tiny scraps of mildewed receipts, received from the coffee cooperative and subsequently stashed in their homes, to see whether in having savings and loan repayments garnished from their coffee payments they were actually credited with them.
I looked at each of them, disrupting as it was to the task of adding long lists of numbers (in my second year I received a hand-crank adding machine with a roll of paper that I strapped on to the back of the motorcycle). I was pleased to see that the numbers added up, and most important that there were no signs of fraud. Fraud was rare. I can only imagine the bookkeeper’s prospects in that village if the rest of the village saw him as cheating them out of their life savings. At around 4 P.M., I would wrap things up and once again tell the bookkeeper to try to stay up-to-date with postings so that I didn’t have to do them all on my next visit a month later. He, of course, promised it wouldn’t happen again, that his child had been sick, etc. I smiled and thought about where I was a year before: writing an independent study for Professor Vail,
my economics professor, and coming up with all kinds of excuses why I hadn’t finished it on time.
I walked back to the village elders, the number of accompanying children having diminished since earlier in the day (though I could see the motorcycle was still attracting a crowd, while a slightly older kid was now organizing the turn taking and how long each was allowed to sit on the seat).
People came up and thanked me in ways I had never been thanked for anything like that in my life before, and I thought what that had meant to me. I sat in the village chief’s home, his several wives scurrying around to offer food and drink, the latter consisting of palm wine, a milky fermented liquid tapped from a palm tree. He asked how I thought the credit union was doing and told me how much he supported it because it was helping people in his village. He said it was more important than any single person because it would stay to help different people in the future. He never used the word institution, but I understood what he meant by something not made of any physical materials but made by people who were very real and might help others in the future. He suggested I come more often, not just to work or worry (he could see I was a little grouchy at having to do a month’s worth of bookkeeping during that day), or even to address problems, but just to be there with his people. He then ranged further—a lot further—and asked about the moon landings, and how it was my country had decided to accomplish that. I told him about President Kennedy’s vision, and he was very moved by that. He asked whether I thought a Cameroonian might go to the moon someday. I said I surely hoped so. We’ll go together, I told him optimistically. He liked that idea. I felt a little troubled that I had come up with such an insincere thought so effortlessly, but its effect seemed to be to draw us closer and I was pleased with that. Besides, I don’t really think he believed it, either.
But mostly he thanked me for my work that day. And then he thanked America for sending me there, and thanked President Kennedy, whose picture sat in the corner of the room, for thinking of the idea in the first place.
He accompanied me to my motorcycle (whose seat by then needed a certain amount of cleaning off, having been sat on by every kid in the village with or without trousers). I headed down the mountain track, riding slow in the gathering twilight. I felt that in that far-off village I had been representing my country, and that people felt better about my country as a result of my visit that day. Heady stuff.
I signed up for the Foreign Service exam soon afterward and resolved to pass it, because I knew that was what I wanted to do with my life.
• • •
Some credit unions took more time than others, and Tole Tea Estate’s credit union was one of those. There were about six hundred members, not unusual for a credit union whose membership was drawn from a plantation workforce. Unlike village credit unions, the plantation-based credit unions seldom had any loan delinquency problems because the corporate employer garnished the wages.
Tole had a “board of directors” that consisted of about twelve people. When I looked at the loan ledgers, I discovered that some 50 percent of all of the credit union’s loans had been taken by those twelve people. The loans appeared to be cosigned, that is, covered by savings accounts, and I hadn’t spotted any arrearage, or indication that they were not going to be paid back. Still, the concentration of loans with such a small group of people highlighted the fact that these leaders had abused their positions and needed to be replaced.
I raised the overall governance issue with Alex Lantum, Southwest Province director for the government agency that had broad oversight for cooperatives, including the Cameroon cooperative credit union league to which I was assigned. He looked at my report and agreed that something had to be done before there was lost or stolen money and other more dangerous threats to people’s savings.
With the annual general meeting coming up, I worked fast to prepare my report to the general membership, and, most important, my recommendations for a fresh start with a new board of directors. Fortunately, Tole was located only thirty minutes from my home in Buea, which I could get to through a back road, a narrow dirt track that descended rapidly down the side of Mount Cameroon, a dense forest shading it on both sides. Approaching the estates, the forest would give way to tea fields, and refreshingly, as I looked back over my shoulder, to a view of the thirteen-thousand-foot mountain that often disappeared into thick rainy season clouds.
Tole Estates was a division of the Cameroon Development Corporation plantations system in the province, a German, then British, and now Cameroonian-owned corporation that produced rubber, palm oil, bananas, and, only at Tole, tea. Unlike in the other plantations, the bulk of the workforce was composed of women. All day, they worked along the rows of tea bushes, carrying on their backs enormous wicker baskets the size of a laundry basket, attached by a string that would loop around the women’s foreheads, which were in turn covered with thick headbands.
At the annual meeting, held on a warm Sunday afternoon in March, the board and I sat in plastic white chairs set up on a green sloping hill, the view of Mount Cameroon behind us, and a thick forest below. When the time came for my report, I stood and delivered a cautiously optimistic version of events, but made very clear to the membership that the board of directors had entirely too many of the loans. Person after person rose in support of what I had uncovered. And while the board appeared sullen and upset, one of them saying to me, “You are destroying the credit union,” I stood there in my khaki pants and excessively colorful Cameroonian loose cotton shirt, explaining that these loans exceeded our rules, should not have been approved, and needed to be reduced.
The reaction overall was positive and, more important, not panicky. I was calm in my appearance and presentation, though clear about the need for change, and the reaction could not have been more approving and supportive. I decided it was time to move on to the next phase of my plan. I had identified a group of people who were not associated with the previous board but had enough education and integrity to take over the union and run it properly. I proposed this new board be elected to replace the old one.
The reaction to the announcement of a vote was mainly positive. There were applause and smiles, although most of the members seemed to be more attentive to what each other were saying than to credit union speeches. Elections were accomplished by gathering the old board on one side of the grassy field, the new board on the other side. The logistics took a few moments to develop, but soon I had on my left the old board (not very happy with me) standing around and facing the large audience, and some fifty feet away from me on my right, the reform board, also not looking very happy, and standing around facing the crowd. At that moment the hundreds of members were asked to stand and file in behind whichever board they wanted to support.
There was no need for a count. The membership, men and women still talking to each other quite cheerfully and the latter still nursing their babies, pretty much (about 90 percent) all lined up in front of the old board. My reform board attracted a few votes, relatives perhaps, but the results were in. The board chair shook my hands, let bygones be bygones, and invited me to the annual general meeting party, an occasion that consisted of tons of beef, covered by tons of flies, lots of fruits (covered with still more flies), and lots of beer, soft drinks, and, for the hearty ones, palm wine.
Person after person came up to me to shake my hand to thank me for caring about the credit union. Small kids stared as they always did, with a few of them first gently holding my hands then doing what they really had in mind, which was to rub my skin to see if the white pigment would come off. I peeled the kids off me, said good-bye to the board members, pulled the half dozen kids off my parked motorcycle, and headed home to Buea. I acted nonplussed, deciding that the best way to behave through this humiliation was to pretend it never happened.
That night, sitting on the cement step on the back of my house, starring up at the giant grass slopes of Mount Cameroon illuminated by a brilliant night sky, I reflected that I had no idea what was
really going on in Tole Tea Estate’s Credit Union. I asked myself what I had missed, what I could have done better to understand the dynamics, the relationships, of the place. Had I talked to enough sources or did I just talk to people who already agreed with me? How could I have been so misled to believe that people genuinely annoyed with their leaders would have illogically, at least in my view, voted to put those same leaders back into office? Was it that I had chosen the wrong ones to replace them? Could there have been another group I could have identified?
None of the above, I concluded. I just needed to accept the fact that I didn’t understand the place, that I had really overstepped my authority in thinking I could unseat an elected leadership and impose another. I had completely misread the support people gave to me during the meeting. They were thanking me for my sincerity and hard work, not for my solution. I resolved that even though I had twenty-seven other credit unions to deal with, I was not going to presume that I could make personnel decisions for them again, or ignore their own reasons, presumably based in cultural idiosyncrasies, most likely in the relationships that trumped my preferences for better credit union management. The first question I had asked myself when I saw the problem at Tole was how to get rid of the board. The question I should have asked myself first was how that board got there in the first place.
Years later, in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in Asia, I would see time and again systematized efforts on the part of the United States to pick winners in situations we understood little about. Like my efforts at the Tole Tea Estate’s credit union, they never worked.
On a Saturday morning in December 1975 I got up at 4 A.M. and with another volunteer, Ed Diem, rode a motorcycle to the U.S. Consulate in Douala to take the three-hour, three-part Foreign Service exam. We arrived at 7:30 A.M., cutting it close because along the way a truck carrying sap from the nearby rubber tree plantations had run Ed off the road into a water ditch.
Outpost: Life on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy: A Memoir Page 3