Cameroon with Egbert

by Dervla Murphy

  ‘But at least,’ I said, ‘it’s been more successful than the neighbouring “inventions” – Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea. Why? Are Cameroon’s tribes in some way different?’

  Mrs Jackson thought hard, running her fingers through tight grey curls. Then she asked, ‘Have you noticed how little is known about the history of our area?’

  I had noticed; London’s libraries and bookshops had yielded no History of Cameroon, only histories of West Africa containing brief references to Cameroon. As a Cameroon Airways booklet states: ‘In the 5th century B.C. Hanno, a Carthaginian, explored the Gulf of Guinea and discovered an active volcano which he christened the “Chariot of the Gods”. From that period onwards and for twenty centuries, events related to this country remain hazy.’

  ‘No history makes Europeans uneasy,’ my companion went on. ‘They feel they can’t understand people today if they can’t study their past. But maybe it’s easier to keep a new state peaceful without history shadows lying over it? I often read about your country in the newspapers and watch television programmes – and maybe you have too much history? Our population is about one-third Muslim, one-third Christian of many different denominations, one-third pagan. If we were as history-conscious as you we could have a lot of tension. My Muslim ancestors invaded a few centuries ago, enslaved thousands, took over tribal lands and ruled many pagans until the Europeans came. But most Cameroonians don’t know this. They’ve no written native languages and no interest in their own past, apart from keeping in touch with family ancestors. Of course there’s some suspicion and jealousy and animosity between the religions, especially Christians and Muslims. The pagans are quite primitive and keep in the background. But we never have serious trouble about the awful things we did to one another centuries ago and there are advantages in having no big swollen sense of being a nation. Around Maroua we’re now sheltering and feeding a quarter of a million refugees from Chad that the world has never heard of! It’s not a rich area but my neighbours accept those refugees without resentment. They don’t think of them as foreigners, just as frightened hungry people who had to run away. International boundaries don’t mean much to our villagers – even now they can’t really understand them. Maybe it’s a mistake to try to make a Cameroonian identity … But you asked if our tribes are in some way different. I don’t know about that, I only know our leaders have been very different – how would we be now if we’d had at the top mad devils like Idi Amin and Nguema and Sekou Toure and Bokassa? To name but a few! You must have heard we’ve been lucky in our two Presidents. And this is all-important in Africa, where the people are helpless. That’s the first lesson of our experiences since Independence. In Cameroon less than a thousand men form our ruling class and no one else has any real power – or any hope of ever achieving it.’

  Clearly Mrs Jackson did not devote all her time to housework. When challenged, she admitted to being a lecturer in political sociology and we discussed some of the obstacles she has to overcome at a British university.

  ‘My students don’t like to hear the truth about Africa. They don’t want to know that in most African countries the villagers are materially worse off now, after a generation of “Independence”, than they ever were in colonial times. This is partly because of neo-colonialism, but that only works so well because there are so many corrupt Black rulers. Our first President, Ahmadou Ahidjo, didn’t encourage multinationals to exploit the country more than they were doing already. He was a wise man, a Muslim from the north who managed our resources well for twenty-two years. And he was quite honest. People say he only embezzled a few million French francs, which most Cameroonians think is a fair reward for a lot of hard work. He wasted no time pretending to run a democracy. But even though he was an absolute dictator, in practice, he couldn’t control corruption. And it got worse during his last decade in power. When he suddenly retired in ‘82 he appointed our second President, Paul Biya, a Christian from the south, who’d been working with him for years. He’s said to be very honest. Certainly he’s been running a major anti-corruption campaign – but is it doing any good? He’s also encouraging more foreign investment, from the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, China. And because Cameroon is so stable big corporations are keen to invest. But there’s a trap there. Maybe our stability is tied in with a lack of foreign investment, so far. Big corporations bring big opportunities for massive corruption, which could lead to new political factions with conflicting interests. Some think Biya isn’t as far-seeing as Ahidjo. There’s less corruption in Cameroon than in most Black countries, but still it thrives. When most people don’t think it’s wrong, how can anyone clean it up? The best you can do is what Ahidjo did: limit the opportunities.’

  By the time our flight was called, at 2.30 a.m., Mrs Jackson had taught me more than any ‘Factsheet’ could.

  There was a certain piquancy about our stopping at Tripoli on the way to Cameroon. In the fifth century BC Hanno, the Carthaginian navigator and would-be coloniser, sailed from Tripoli with sixty ships and thousands of men and women to begin his voyage to the Bight of Benin. Extraordinary courage was required to sail through unknown waters around an unknown coast. But, according to the Greek translation of Hanno’s Periplus, West Africa’s humans and animals so unnerved the brave Carthaginians that they soon abandoned their colonial ambitions and for the next 2,000 years no one else dared follow in their wake.

  Yet West Africa was not, as many imagine, completely cut off from the rest of the world before the arrival of the fifteenth-century Portuguese. Herodotus reports that a regular Tripoli-Kawar-Chad trade route had been established by the fifth century BC. And this trans-Saharan so-called ‘salt trade’ flourished until the turn of the nineteenth century, forming a link between the Mediterranean world and what is now northern Cameroon. In Roman times gold, ivory, carbuncles and ostrich feathers were exported from the areas around Lake Chad in exchange for salt. But the most important export, then and for another 2,000 years, was slaves – about 10,000 a year when the trade was at its most flourishing. Young men had to walk in leg-irons, chained together by the neck; girls and women walked free. Not all survived the three-month desert crossing and the route was littered with skeletons. At Fezzan the survivors were held for a time in a prison compound while being fattened for the Tripoli market. People still argue passionately, though rather pointlessly, about which was the crueller: the trans-Saharan or trans-Atlantic slave-trade. Probably the former, in terms of suffering en route, but at least those who made it to Tripoli were not condemned to a lifetime’s misery on plantations. As ‘luxury goods’, they could be reasonably sure of considerate owners in Albania, Cyprus, Turkey or Tunisia.

  When the Portuguese first entered the Wouri estuary – the Cameroons River – they found the water swarming with prawns and named it Rio dos Camaroes: River of Prawns. In due course this became the Spanish Camerones, the English Cameroons, the German Kamerun, and finally the French Cameroun.

  Douala’s past is as murky as the waters of its estuary, from which unreckoned thousands were transported to the New World on British ships. From the fifteenth century Europeans favoured the estuary as a trading-post; it not only provided a cosy harbour but offered valuable direct water-links with the interior. European traders preferred to remain on the coast, buying slaves from local middlemen like the Douala merchants. These Cameroonian Chiefs were cannier than their neighbours up and down the Slave Coast. They refused to allow Europeans to build forts, arguing that their own control of trade – and even of their followers – would be endangered by the presence of organised European communities. Dealing therefore took place aboard vessels permanently anchored in the estuary. At first, and for a long time, barter was used: beads, cloth, alcohol, guns and gunpowder in exchange for slaves, ivory, palm oil and palm kernels. Thus armed, the slave-raiders of the interior became much more efficient. Trade prospered and for centuries the coastal Cameroonians remained firmly in control. Europea
ns were allowed to operate only as individuals who, being dependent on local goodwill, had no choice but to provide lavish credit while also paying duty on their human merchandise. In exchange, the Chiefs built sturdy prison compounds where slaves were stored while awaiting shipment.

  By the mid-nineteenth century Douala was made up of the affluent towns of trading Chiefs: Hickory Town, Bell Town, George Town, Akwa Town. MacGregor Laird described the last in his diary:

  In the morning we went ashore to visit King Akwa. After viewing his house, which was of two stories with a gallery surrounding it outside, we walked through the town, which in order and beauty far exceeded anything I had yet seen in Africa … The principal street is about a quarter of a mile in length, about forty yards wide, perfectly straight, and the houses being of the same plan give a regular and handsome appearance.

  As competition between European traders increased, following the abolition of the slave-trade and the development of European industry, the Africans demanded and received more and more credit. This out-of-control situation contributed significantly to the German take-over. By 1884 the powerful commercial house of Woermann had allowed the Douala Chiefs so much credit that the Germans would have been hard hit by a French or British annexation.

  Europe’s colonisation of West Africa was inspired less by imperialistic territorial lust than by nervous jealousy about ‘spheres of influence’; the present-day echo is Soviet and American interference in (or provocation of) Third World conflicts. Britain was notably reluctant to get involved in the administration of any part of the White Man’s Grave. British soldiers were being sent from India to ‘pacify’ and ‘relocate’ East African tribes – and to slaughter them if they refused to be displaced from their salubrious highlands to make way for White settlers. But West Africa was so uninviting that in 1881 the Douala Chiefs felt it necessary to dictate letters to Queen Victoria and Gladstone, probably at the instigation of British traders and missionaries, begging for annexation. The best known of these does sound suspiciously like a trader-inspired concoction:

  Dear Madam,

  We your servants have join together and thoughts it better to write you a nice loving letter which will tell you all about our wishes. We wish to have your laws in our towns. We want to have every fashion altered, also we will do according to your Consul’s word. Plenty wars here in our country. Plenty murder and idol worshippers, perhaps these lines of our writing will look to you as an idle tale. We have spoken to the English Consul plenty times about an English government here. We never have answer from you so we wish to write you ourselves. When we heard about Calabar River that they have all English laws in their towns, and how they put away all their superstitions, oh, we shall be very glad to be like Calabar, now.

  Had the French not been moving towards Douala from several points – annexing territory, setting up factories and imposing tariffs to protect French goods – the British might have ignored the pleas of Kings Bell and Akwa. As it was, Edward Hewett, newly appointed Consul of Calabar, was dispatched in April 1884 to sign treaties with the Douala Chiefs. But he was too late. Sailing into the estuary, he saw the German flag flying over Douala. While the Brits had been fretting about those devious Froggies, yet hesitating to take action, the unconsidered Krauts had moved in. Dr Nachtigal, the personal representative of two German commercial houses – Woermann and Jantzen und Thormahlen – had been instructed to ‘treat with the natives’ and explain Germany’s wish to annex their territories. He had also been authorised by Bismarck to sign treaties and ordered to claim for the Emperor of Germany all the land his employers had already acquired, or planned to acquire, in what was soon to become Kamerun.

  By then the meddling and squabbling of European traders and missionaries had reduced coastal Cameroon to chaos. So the Douala Chiefs, despairing of a British take-over, reluctantly put their marks to a treaty with Dr Nachtigal. A Nigerian historian, Onwuka Dike, has pointed out that ‘the petty kings of the Cameroons were perhaps unable to distinguish between informal control and outright annexation’. They soon learned the difference, when the Germans cynically broke the 1884 treaty by seizing the Douala Chiefs’ cultivated land, which they held, by tradition, on behalf of their followers. Mini-rebellions then became frequent and Douala’s English missionaries, who loathed the German occupation, were suspected of inciting their flocks to violence.

  By 1885 Kamerun had been created – its borders agreed on by Britain, France and Germany – as one of Germany’s African colonies. (The others were Togoland, South-west Africa – now Namibia – and Tanganyika.) Sir Clavel MacDonald has described the invention of the ‘border’ between two hypothetical ‘nations’, Nigeria and Cameroon: ‘In those days we just took a pencil and a ruler and we put it down at Old Calabar and drew that line up to Yola …’

  The German Zintgraff became the first White to explore inland from Douala. He found a society which accepted occasional human sacrifices, frequent poison-ordeals and regular slave-raids as part of normal village life. Yet no attempt was made to bring South-west Cameroon under German control until 1901; there are still people alive who remember how that area was compelled to adjust to European mores.

  When the Germans set about establishing their administration they were assisted in Adamawa, and points north, by those Fulani rulers who a few generations previously had reduced the indigenous population to semi-serfdom. The Germans had no time for the anarchy, as it seemed to them, of the multitudinous village ‘governments’ of the south. But they admired the Fulanis’ efficiency and interfered as little as possible with the sixty or so Muslim Lamidats, an ‘indirect rule’ policy later adopted by the British in West Africa.

  Although Fulanis began to move into Northern Cameroon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, few settled in the South-west until the turn of the twentieth century. Their origins are disputed but for at least seven hundred years they and their herds have been gradually wandering further west across that vast area – some 3,000 miles wide – between Dakar and the Gabon. Despite their more or less Caucasoid appearance they speak a purely West African language, belonging to the Niger-Congo group – which much mystifies the experts. The majority remained pagan until the eighteenth century, though many of their Bantu neighbours were converted to Islam long before. By 1800 most had been converted, after a fashion, and were ready to take part in Uthman don Fodio’s Jihad, declared in 1804. Before this they had co-existed peacefully with the settled Bantu farmers; during those uncrowded centuries pastoral and agricultural communities were often symbiotic.

  In 1902 the Germans built a military station, durable but dour-looking, on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the Bamenda Plateau. This area interested them only as a source of manpower for their coastal plantations, the linchpin of their whole Cameroonian enterprise. High poll-taxes forced men to leave their villages to earn cash, a favourite ploy of all colonial governments. Prisoners were taken from the gaols and made to do plantation jobs; anyone caught resisting the German take-over of the interior was punished by exile to the plantations; peace treaties with defeated Chiefs insisted on their regularly providing hundreds of workers. Many did not survive the long journey from the cool malaria-free plateau. And resistance to unfamiliar coastal diseases was lowered by fear of the unknown and by loneliness for home, family and friends. The plantation death-rate soon became an ugly scandal. Herded into filthy, overcrowded, humid living-quarters, the half-starved labourers died at the rate of 30 to 50 per cent per annum.

  In many parts of Cameroon colonialism irreparably shattered traditional social structures. For centuries, elaborate long-distance trading missions had been organised by numerous Chiefdoms, large and small. But the colonial demands on the labour-force, not only as cultivators and carriers but also as construction workers, were of another order. The forced migration of thousands of men, and the recruitment of women and children to load-carry, caused the disintegration of scores of local cultures. At one time, on the 150 miles of track from the port
of Kribi to Yaounde, 85,000 men, women and children were employed in the transport of goods – a figure not including Hausa merchants’ slaves. Often the starving carriers had to raid villages for food and huge areas were reduced to chronic civil disorder. Other demoralising factors were the spread of hard liquor and venereal diseases, epidemics of smallpox and measles, the bribing of Chiefs with guns and gunpowder, the unavoidable neglect of farming and the loss of local handicraft skills.

  In October 1915 a British force drove the Germans out of Bamenda. On 1 January 1916 the first British Senior Divisional Officer, Mr G. S. Podevin, arrived from Calabar and at once summoned the region’s Chiefs to a palaver. When those who had been allies of the Germans refused to come a military patrol was ordered to burn their villages. Yet Podevin was less inhumane than his German predecessors; before his death in the 1918 influenza epidemic he had reorganised the native courts and eliminated the worst excesses associated with plantation recruitment.

  Under the League of Nations the Cameroons became Mandated Territories, five-sixths going to France and one-sixth to Britain. The French ignored the rules and behaved like colonists, allowing French settlers to buy land and exploit resources. The British allowed the Germans to buy back cheaply, in 1924, all their pre-war plantations – confiscated in 1916. By 1936, 300,000 British Cameroonian acres were owned by Germans and less than 20,000 by the British. Three times as many Germans as British were resident in the country, most of the plantation produce was shipped to Germany and half the territory’s imports came from there. Because the British administration ensured that working conditions were tolerable, the plantations attracted many migrants from French Cameroon – men eager to avoid forced labour on construction projects.