Next morning Jane drove us down to the market to buy equipment. She had presented us with a plastic bucket, a kettle and a saucepan; so we needed only two mugs, two bowls, twenty yards of leading/tethering rope and two sacks (old-fashioned gunny-bags, not fragile nylon jobs) to act as pannier-bags. Cameroon’s First World cost of living had caused me to scrap a grandiose plan to buy real saddle-bags, or have them made.
The market was crowded, vociferous, colourful, friendly. A maze of rough alleyways, muddy after the rain, ran between ramshackle stalls selling everything from French toothpaste and Taiwan T-shirts to Nigerian plastic floor mats, red-brown palm oil in dirty five-gallon tins, bananas, avocados, groundnuts, plastic shoes, strange spices, bundles of tree bark, miniscule tins of Italian tomato purée, piles of rice and maize flour, bloody mounds of freshly slaughtered beef, pungent dried fish, boxes of lump sugar, brilliant bales of cotton, ox-tails in buckets of slimy water, giant Chinese thermos flasks, local and American cigarettes, bunches of a green vegetable (or weed) with which we were to become very familiar, and sardines from Peru, which we bought for sentimental rather than gastronomic reasons.
A personable young Nigerian merchant sold us blue nylon rope, measuring the metres fingertip-to-elbow. Cameroon, he said, is a much happier country than Nigeria. ‘It is safer, too. Here we have very, very little crime. In Nigeria’s towns life has become too dangerous – so I left!’
Jute sacks were harder to find; but at last I noticed a few neatly folded by the entrance to a cramped, windowless hut. An ancient Fulani squatted in one corner, rocking to and fro and mumbling prayers. He had a hawk nose and trembling hands and tried to persuade me that I didn’t need two empty sacks, that I couldn’t possibly need them. Then he sold both for 1,100 CFA (about £2.50).
That afternoon’s multiracial meet of Bamenda’s Hash Harriers was a memorable occasion. David, who imported this bizarre offshoot of the Raj to Cameroon, was retiring as ‘Grand Hash Master’ and after a strenuous two-hour cross-country race his boozy farewell party began at sunset on a high mountainside. Midway through these revels Doi arrived with the good news that a sound horse would be available for our inspection early on Monday morning.
Next day, after Sunday lunch, I explored the hills behind the Hughes’s bungalow. The sun appeared only occasionally, between low banks of dove-grey cloud, and along the highest ridges small wisps of vapour drifted one after another in single file like ghostly presences. A narrow red track looped up and down between new hoed fields, well tended banana-groves, stands of palm-trees, stretches of scrubland (not useless, but lying fallow) and patches of forest. In every direction billowing smoke marked fields being ‘fire-weeded’ in preparation for sowing. Such fires often run wild and on a slope near the Hughes’s a young eucalyptus plantation was wastefully aflame.
All the traffic was pedestrian. Everyone smiled and made welcoming noises; most adults shook hands. Those schooled in colonial times usually speak better English than their juniors – many of whom speak none, only Pidgin, and a tribal language.
At one hairpin bend I paused to listen. From several large compounds, set well back from the track, came sounds of merriment: laughter, song, playful teasing, teenage tittering. When the juvenile population noticed me they swarmed forwards, clad in little or nothing, delirious with excitement – shouting greetings, waving, running away in mock alarm when I approached, turning somersaults in the dust to entertain me, dancing and singing on the roadside ditches. The traveller in Cameroon doesn’t need to be told that 60 per cent of the population is under sixteen.
Viewed ecologically, the Africans’ procreative recklessness chills the blood – how long before there is a Cameroonian Famine Appeal? Viewed otherwise, these happy, loved and loving children seem a moving affirmation of the Black appreciation of life, as a gift to be enjoyed. A positive sense of enjoyment often emanates from a Black crowd – a group of fieldworkers, a market throng, a family gathering – even if the individuals concerned are not engaged in any obviously enjoyable activity.
Those positive energies are invigorating, though they have inspired no great technological or artistic achievements. But in our society only a few are involved in ‘great achievements’ – from some of which millions benefit without understanding them, while the individual feels increasingly insignificant in an impersonal world controlled by a greedy oligarchy. In contrast, most rural Africans have significant personal duties and how these are performed can be observed – and praised or blamed – by all.
These reflections were interrupted by Aziki, an English Literature student home for the Easter holidays from Yaoundé University. As we walked together he explained sadly, ‘For us from this side Yaounde is difficult. Too many Francophones think studying English is time-wasting. And they have too much control of our university, like we’re only second-class citizens. Jane Austen is my favourite English writer – you know about her? Her books are not complicated. They are about village people, so if you come from a village you understand them – though English villages are rich and ours are poor.’
Aziki already knew that I was staying with the Hughes; in Bamenda White visitors are uncommon enough to arouse curiosity. He pleaded, ‘Could you not make your friend change his mind? You know how it will be when Mr Hughes leaves? MIDENO will fall to bits! It will be inefficient, corrupt, with jobs only for followers of Big Men. Then in a few years the government must call for another Englishman to put it right. I know how it is because my brother works there and now is sad because the policy is “Cameroonians should run everything!” But MIDENO is not African. It’s a European idea so it needs a European to keep it organised, to make decisions. We know how a thing like MIDENO should be run, we’re not stupid. But we’re too much afraid of responsibility. We push problems from office to office until all files are lost and nothing is done. You can’t lose your job if you make no decision, only if you make the wrong decision!’
Aziki’s outburst (the first of many such) recalled the standard colonialists’ blanket condemnation: ‘Africa has no tradition of service or integrity’. He had however used a key phrase: ‘It’s a European idea’. For centuries, throughout Western Cameroon, a stable farming-and-trading society depended for its prosperity on a complex and highly developed tradition of ‘service and integrity’. But it was too inflexible to withstand the impact of Fulani invaders, never mind the imposition of Western ideas.
At sunset we called on close friends of the Hughes, Joy and John Parkinson, to whom the Murphy Expedition, with all its hypothetical future woes/problems/diseases/crises, was being bequeathed. Little did they – or we – then realise what that introduction augured.
Later we spread our enormous USAF charts on the Hughes’s dining-table and sought guidance.
‘Those sheets would be just fine,’ said David, ‘if you were touring by light aircraft. But I can’t see too many footpaths marked. And half the place-names are figments of the Pentagon’s imagination. The locals won’t know where you’re talking about – they use utterly different names.’
On the Hughes’s map we plotted a bush-path route from Bamenda to N’gaoundere, via the remote and wondrously beautiful Mbabo mountains. Our first week or so would be spent crossing the highlands of Western Cameroon – ‘the Grassfields’ – which made global news in August 1986 when Lake Nyos, a crater lake, exploded one evening killing hundreds of people and thousands of cattle. The shadow cast over many Cameroonians by this natural yet mysterious disaster was perceptible from the day of our arrival, though most seemed not to want to discuss it. No one said anything about the subjects being in any way taboo, yet it did have a strong taboo feel. The trauma had been particularly severe for the Grassfields folk, whose small territory is studded with some three dozen volcanic lakes. In August 1984 a gas release from Lake Manoun, sixty miles south of Lake Nyos, had killed thirty-seven people as they walked home from their fields at sunset. That tragedy, almost certainly provoked by a landslide, received little publicity at the time bu
t was uneasily noted around Nyos, where odd happenings had been observed within the previous decade or so. Most experts believe that only five or six of the Grassfields crater lakes are potential killers. However, few locals are aware of this and the Nyos catastrophe, following on Manoun, has inevitably caused them to fear that their nearest lake will be the next to explode.
The Hughes guaranteed that our bush-path route would keep us at an agreeably high altitude, apart from one unavoidable hot plain, at 1,500 feet, between Ntem and Somie. Beyond the sparsely inhabited Tchabal Mbabo, we planned to explore the virtually uninhabited Tchabal Gangdaba before turning east towards N’gaoundere. This important Muslim town lies as far north as the climate would permit us to trek; beyond its escarpment Cameroon slopes steeply towards the hot lands south of Lake Chad. And, as Jane remarked, a Fulani Lamidat would be a good sales-point for our horse.
2
Enter Egbert
HIS NAME, DOI said, was Mbodeyoo.
‘We’ll call him Egbert,’ decided Rachel.
‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘Why Egbert?’
‘Because he is an Egbert,’ replied Rachel enigmatically.
Looking at him more closely, I saw what she meant. ‘But,’ I reminded her, ‘we haven’t bought him yet.’
Mbodeyoo was politely co-operative as we examined his feet and teeth.
‘Five years old,’ said Doi.
‘Surely at least eight!’ said I, pretending to be more knowledgeable than I am.
‘He was born here!’ said Doi, a trifle huffily. ‘He was born here in 1982.’
As Rachel led Mbodeyoo around the compound I stood watching with Doi and his two full brothers; most of the younger males in the background were half-brothers by various stepmothers. Jane was absent, dealing with removal men. David’s driver had dropped us off at the compound and we would return to Bamenda with Doi.
Mbodeyoo moved nicely and was quick to respond to directions. A glossy bay with four white socks and a slightly Roman nose, he stood about fourteen hands and to our eyes was oddly shaped. From the rear Fulani horses look more like tall bony cows than anything equine; from the front they seem pathetically narrow chested. But Jane had told us not to be put off by their eccentric contours or lean and hungry looks. They are notable for speed and stamina – and indeed Mbodeyoo was a compact mass of muscle. We didn’t, that morning, think him particularly handsome; but when we had compared him with many other Fulani horses we realised that he was, by local standards, an Adonis. His golf-ball-sized congenital hernia didn’t in fact worry me though I judged it expedient to feign alarm. When I prodded this protuberance Mbodeyoo looked around wearing a faintly surprised expression. ‘Not good!’ I exclaimed, frowning.
‘His father had it too,’ said Doi. ‘Other horses in this area have it. It makes no trouble.’ He nodded then towards an adolescent brother who flowed onto Mbodeyoo in one beautiful sinuous movement and went galloping away across the grassland beyond the compound. When he returned I nodded to Rachel who mounted less sinuously and cantered off into the distance, looking comfortable.
‘He’s my best horse,’ said Doi, as we watched them.
By this stage I was having trouble concealing the fact that I had fallen madly in love with Mbodeyoo/Egbert. ‘He seems quite steady,’ I conceded.
‘He is good to ride and good to carry,’ observed Doi. ‘He is strong and gentle.’
That sounded like a professional horse-coper’s speil; but it proved to be true.
When Doi and I withdrew to the palaver-room, followed by the full brothers, Rachel remained on the verandah with the half-brothers.
‘I think 200,000 is a nice price,’ said Doi. ‘It is a special price only for you, because you are Jane’s good friend – and she is my good friend!’
I looked amused at this little joke and suggested that 100,000 (about £220) would be a much nicer price. Doi laughed at my little joke and protested that even for Jane’s good friend he couldn’t give away his best horse.
Five minutes later we had settled on 130,000, for which Doi would also provide a brand new saddle-blanket and an extremely decrepit dual-purpose saddle.
‘But,’ I stipulated, ‘you must have the saddle repaired today.’ When Doi had agreed I counted out 130 one-thousand CFA notes and shouted to Rachel, ‘He’s Egbert now!’
Doi tucked the money away in a pouch beneath his gown. Then he said, ‘In the market you must buy very strong antibiotics for your horse. If you don’t know how, I can give injections today and tomorrow.’
This startled me. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked sharply. ‘Why does he need antibiotics?’
Doi smiled reassuringly. ‘Nothing is wrong – yet. But if the road cuts him, or thorns poison him, or ticks give him fever, then it’s better he has big doses of antibiotics now, to be ready. You are taking him to hot places he doesn’t know, then if he’s ill there’s no town, no vet, no medicine – and he dies!’
It was impossible to make Doi understand that antibiotics are not a prophylactic but a cure, that to give them unnecessarily is not only useless but counter-productive. Involuntarily I glanced at the parasite poster from Paris and felt mingled exasperation and despair. Doi was no ignorant villager but a literate young man fluent in English, French, Pidgin and several African languages – a cattle-breeder interested enough in animal husbandry to fly to a Paris show. Yet to him, as to millions all over the Third World, antibiotics are, quite simply, White Man’s Magic. Everyone has heard about their swift, mysterious power and many have experienced it. So if you can afford to give your horse this magic protection why not do so before exposing him to various hazards? Plainly Doi regarded my adamant refusal to have Egbert injected as just one more symptom of White parsimony.
We had been advised not to bring our gear to the compound as that might have suggested a willingness to buy any horse. Now it was arranged that when Doi had completed his day’s Bamenda business he would collect us, plus gear, and we would sleep in his guest-hut.
On the way down I asked what ‘extras’ Egbert liked when working hard.
‘Nothing!’ said Doi. ‘You give him only grass – for a horse grass is the natural food. He has never eaten anything but grass.’
This was a too-familiar misapprehension. I explained how experience has taught us that horses, mules and ponies do need ‘extras’ when carrying a load twenty or twenty-five miles a day in hilly country for months on end.
Doi refused to be persuaded. ‘You give him salt to lick, then he needs only grass.’ His mind was on more important matters, like our Deed of Sale. ‘Now at once,’ he went on, ‘you get this form in triplicate. Three copies, you understand? And a 300 CFA fiscal stamp.’
‘Which form?’ I asked apprehensively, recalling our bureaucratic travail when mule-buying in Peru.
‘A simple form,’ said Doi, ‘a Deed of Sale. David knows, he’ll type for you three copies. It proves you own this horse when people steal him – I mean if they do! I keep one copy, the police keep one. When you sell the horse you must show your copy to the buyer – otherwise he says you have stolen this horse. And remember you get only one fiscal stamp, not three for 100 CFA each – that is important.’
‘I’ll remember,’ I promised meekly. Mine not to reason why …
Not far from Bamenda we swung off the main track and jolted into a village centre. The arrival of Whites provoked shouts of glee from dozens of pickins who raced after the car.
‘Here we may find a policeman,’ said Doi.
‘But,’ I objected, ‘don’t we need the forms and the stamp first?’
Doi smiled. ‘You don’t understand! Here the policeman may be able to open the post office to find a stamp.’
‘But,’ I persisted obtusely, ‘wouldn’t it be easier to find in the main post office?’
Doi laughed aloud. ‘You still don’t understand! To find this stamp can take a long, long time. It is scarce. Many people use it. Most post offices don’t have it when you need it.’
I registered a big logic gap somewhere in all this but remained silent.
We stopped under an avocado tree outside a mud hut with ‘PO’ scrawled in white chalk on its padlocked but flimsy door. When Doi yelled imperiously a very young policeman came loping out of a nearby off-licence and greeted him deferentially. The post-master had gone to his fields but the policeman knew for certain it wasn’t worth his entering the post office through the window. He knew there were no fiscal stamps inside because the day before his uncle had sold twenty-two goats as he was not feeling well and was moving to live with his eldest daughter in Yaounde where it would be troublesome to keep goats and anyway too expensive to transport them there … But had we tried the post office at Bafut?
‘We’re not going anywhere near Bafut,’ I said. ‘We’re going to Bamenda.’
The policeman sighed and passed a hand across his eyes and declaimed, ‘It is too hard to live!’
Twenty minutes later we were in David’s office. He briskly typed out the Deed of Sale in triplicate, then again put his driver at our disposal: ‘Roger will know where to get those damn stamps.’ He also provided an elaborate To Whom It May Concern ‘Attestation’, sealed and stamped like a medieval treaty, for use in emergencies. We read it and were bemused. ‘What does it mean?’ I asked.
‘You’re not supposed to know,’ replied David. ‘No one is supposed to know. And because no one will admit they don’t know, you’ll go on your way unmolested. That’s putting gobbledegook to a constructive use.’
We gazed at him respectfully; four decades of hard labour in the underdeveloped vineyard endow a man with much practical wisdom. He then gave us a chit for the Chief Immigration Officer, whom he had already telephoned with a request that our visas should be extended to those ninety days for which we had already paid. Roger took us to the Immigration Office circuitously, via three post offices from the last of which he emerged triumphantly waving The Stamp.
Cameroon with Egbert Page 5