Cameroon with Egbert

by Dervla Murphy

  Within fifteen minutes the road had become a foaming torrent. The icy wind carried sharp hailstones mixed with blinding sheets of rain. On the road’s highest point, below a dark escarpment of jagged rock, the gale almost blew us over. Egbert decisively turned tail and this time he meant it. I didn’t even attempt more coaxing.

  Now the scene far below on our left had a weird violent beauty. All the hills and ridges were hidden beneath miles of racing ragged black cloud, seen as though from an aeroplane; never had I imagined that clouds could move so fast. And above all this speeding vapour were stationary cloud banks through which brilliant explosions of blue and white lightning danced and flared erratically. The thunder’s vibrations tingled from the ground up my legs and throughout my whole body – a truly extraordinary sensation. Its roaring and crackling were continuous, the echoes of each shattering crash merging into the next.

  Retreating from the crest, we stood shivering in the middle of the road. There was nothing to be said, nothing to be done. Our situation seemed unreal: two humans and a horse become the helpless victims of this elemental mania – scourged by hail, buffeted by the gale, deafened by thunder, dazzled by lightning, unable to proceed and with nowhere to shelter. Egbert was trembling and breathing fast, his ears laid back. I put an arm over his neck, for mutual comfort, and reflected that this must surely be the storm’s crescendo: very soon the drama would have moved on. Then my eye was caught by the raffia bags over the pommel and I used bad language. In one lay Egbert’s salt and our camera, the latter in a dustproof but not waterproof wrapping. There was no possibility that a camera infiltrated by wet salt would ever work again.

  When the wind suddenly dropped I looked at my watch and realised that we had been immobilised for only seventeen minutes. It felt like an hour. Slowly we continued, our teeth chattering. We needed a quick warming march but Egbert was clearly feeling the effects of exposure plus malnutrition. The rain had lightened to what would seem a downpour at home but then seemed a mere drizzle. Half a mile below the crest stood a solitary shack and desperately I knocked on the tin door. A young woman cautiously opened it, uttered a piercing scream, slammed it shut and drew a bolt.

  We plodded on. It was 6.20 p.m. and would soon be dark. The rain however had almost stopped and we were considering unloading, and sleeping in space-blankets on the road, when we saw a distant tree and deduced more ‘normal’ terrain. Around that tree was a patch of level ground, supporting a few clumps of coarse grass. Marvelling at our good luck, we hurried to get the tent up while the rain was minimal, a routine that took much longer than usual by torchlight. Leaving our dripping clothes outside, we snuggled into damp flea-bags and had mint-cake for supper. Large immovable stones lay under the tent in all the wrong places, below ribs and hips. And it had been impossible to push the pegs more than half-way down.

  ‘If it rains again,’ said Rachel gloomily, ‘we’ve had it!’

  ‘Think positive!’ I urged. ‘There can’t be any rain left around here!’

  But there was – lots. The next (windless) downpour started at 11.45 p.m. and continued all night. Because the pegs were insecure the fly-sheet touched the inner tent and by 1 a.m. our bags were sodden.

  ‘This is worse than Peru!’ pronounced Rachel, through teeth again chattering.

  ‘Don’t be daft!’ I snapped. ‘You’ve just gone soft after six years at boarding-school!’

  At dawn it was still raining, lightly. Emerging naked from the tent I was startled to see three women standing two yards away, staring. They too were startled.

  ‘At least,’ said Rachel ‘they realise you’re not my husband.’

  All our possessions, except our books, were saturated. As we helped each other to pull on wet clothes many other hoe-bearing women appeared on little field-paths – vivid daubs of colour in a drab world of low grey cloud and bare brown hills.

  By 6.10 a.m. we were on our way: chilled through, unrested, hungry. Egbert had also had a wretched night and was moving accordingly. And then, further to lower morale, we came upon the inexorable sequel to deforestation.

  Above the road on our right a steep mountain had recently been cleared, though not so recently as the previous day’s arboreal graveyard. Already the new season’s maize had been planted, but the rain-storm had ravaged that entire mountainside. Tons and tons and tons of soil covered the road – statistics come horribly to life. Under forest, such a slope loses almost no soil through erosion. Under crops it can lose from 200 to 400 tons per hectare (90 to 170 tons per acre) each year. Thus in one year a century’s soil formation may be washed away. Rain falling at more than 25 mm (one inch) an hour is erosive. Only 5 per cent of a temperate region’s rainfall reaches that figure but Africa often experiences 100-150 mm (4-7 inches) an hour, such as the deluge we had just endured.

  Reading about erosion tragedies, the mind is numbed by an anaesthetic of hectares and years and millimetres and tons and centuries. It is another matter to see and smell and struggle through the event as it is happening. Miserably we squelched and skidded across those tons of squandered soil – made still more poignant by the frail maize seedlings, killed in infancy, that occasionally showed through. That storm had brought disaster to a family as well as to a mountain, a family who had worked themselves to exhaustion to clear the land. They had not meant to commit an ecological crime; they only wanted to feed and clothe and educate their children. In Cameroon one cannot feel the rage provoked by the activities of American beef-ranchers in Amazonia or Japanese logging-companies in Borneo. One can only feel despair.

  Those two scenes – the newly burnt miles around Lake Ocu and the denuded mountain – could be used in a strip-cartoon for children to illustrate the fragility of our planet: and especially of Africa, where geological old age is a problem. The soil is geriatric, African rocks and mountains being some 4,000 million years old. They therefore weather into coarse, large-grained soils, as is apparent even to non-scientific travellers. These are easily eroded, poor at retaining nutrients and water, low in phosphorus and nitrogen and so by far the least fertile in the world. That visually attractive red soil so common in Africa is in fact a menace. Being full of iron oxides it tends to crystallise, forming rock-hard uncultivable wasteland. Stripped of vegetation, Africa will die – both the land and the people.

  Newcomers are often puzzled by Africa’s lack of irrigation, but Paul Harrison explains it in The Greening of Africa:

  Africa’s transition (from extensive to intensive farming) is more problematical than in any other area. The Asian option of irrigation is much more difficult. The African landscape, outside East Africa, is generally flat, and her rivers are highly variable in their flow. Surface waters are less common, and shallow ground-water is harder to find. The opportunities for cheap and simple irrigation are limited.

  Writing of Africa in general, Mr Harrison makes a point that applies to Cameroon with particular force:

  There is still enough land for it to be cheaper and easier, in the short term, for farmers to move their plots every two or three years. Population density has not yet reached the level where intensive farming is unavoidable. But it has reached the level where massive ecological damage can occur if traditional methods go on being used.

  Another of Africa’s natural handicaps is the infamous tsetse fly, which carries trypanosomiasis, a disease fatal to cattle, horses, camels and humans. (Donkeys and goats have some resistance to it but are not entirely immune.) The human version is known as sleeping-sickness, the animal as nagana, a Zulu word. There is a theory – I imagine difficult to prove – that the tsetse fly caused the extinction of the dinosaur and all that lot. It has certainly been around since those days and is now, like the mosquito, proving that it can beat modern science. Between 1925 and 1960 some advances were made against it but when the Whites went home, and the tsetse fly improved its adaptability, things deteriorated. By 1960 Nigeria’s sleeping-sickness victims had been reduced from 11 per cent to 0.15 per cent of the population and in
Zaire, too, the disease had been almost wiped out. Yet in both those countries – as in Zimbabwe, Angola and Zambia – the incidence is now almost back to pre-colonial levels.

  In 1849 Dr David Livingstone saw the tsetse fly as ‘a barrier to the progress of Africa’. The history and development of no other race can have been so influenced by one insect. All of Black Africa would probably have been converted to Islam, and thus acquired a written language, had the invading Arabs not backed off when their camels and horses died by the hundred. For millennia trade was severely restricted by a lack of pack-animals; there are limits to what even an African can head-carry. The hand-ploughing which looks so backward to anyone accustomed to Asia’s oxen-teams is the inevitable consequence of nagana. And now it is threatening the very survival of Africa.

  Nagana excludes mixed farming, with a steady supply of free manure, from about four million square miles of Middle Africa. This area would otherwise be capable of sustaining more than 100 million cattle, and a similar number of sheep and goats, and so producing meat and milk worth $50 billion a year. In Cameroon about 8,000 square miles had been freed from the fly but are now re-infested. Therefore there are cattle only on high pastures, far from the cultivated fields, which, being unfertilised (or at best insufficiently fertilised), give good yields for only two or three years. Hence extensive rather than intensive farming is practised, with the removal of the only possible protection against the death of the land.

  Despite all the local environmental disasters, we were, that morning, in one of the most agriculturally privileged corners of Africa. There was nothing ‘representative’ about this thickly populated region of healthy, hard-working peasants – so hard-working that they hadn’t anywhere left a patch of grass for poor Egbert.

  Our cut-shorts to Kumbo may have lengthened rather than shortened the distance. But there was heavy traffic on the motor-road (a vehicle every half-hour or so) and those quiet paths took us through an agreeable mix of well-wooded hills, fertile valleys, expansive coffee plantations and shady kolanut stands. From one compound an elderly Fulani hurried out to admire Egbert and presented me with a fistful of kolanuts. These are an acquired taste and a mild stimulant. We hadn’t yet acquired the taste but we prudently tucked them away against another rainy evening. The indigenous kolanut has been used for millennia in this region and was the main export crop before the introduction of coffee.

  We first saw Kumbo from the crest of a high ridge: many roofs gleaming through dense foliage in a long valley. It looked close but was still two hours’ walk away. According to oral tradition, Kumbo was founded in about 1820 as the political capital of the powerful Nso chiefs who, by 1900, had brought many scattered clans under their control, including the Do, Ndzendzef, Tang, Sob, Ya, Ki, Mbiim Mbinggiy, Nggamanse, Jem, Mbise, Langkuiy, Nkim, Kgang, Tankum, Menjei, Ka and Faa. All were encouraged to settle near Kumbo during the nineteenth century, hence the present density of population – and the need for Pidgin as a lingua franca.

  At the foot of that ridge tender grass grew by the path and poor Egbert strained towards it eagerly. But alas! this Cameroonian long acre was being grazed by many goats, the majority tethered, though a few were running loose, wreaking havoc among the young crops. It is illegal to leave livestock untethered and this is one of the few laws taken seriously by villagers, perhaps because it long antedates colonial rule. Previously, some villages chose to let their goats, pigs and sheep roam free, using salt to lure them back to their compounds at night, and all cultivation was done five or six miles away. This made life even more gruelling for the womenfolk but increased the villages’ wealth, livestock forming an important part of bridewealth payments and Secret Society entrance fees. But the general rule was to tether them and a chiefdom’s law-enforcing council took a serious view of infringements.

  Cameroon’s dwarf goats are so enchanting that I often loitered to watch them. The adults are no taller than a week-old Irish kid but broad and plump, with short glossy coats. Some are all black; most have white and/or bright ginger markings and ginger scuts. When near kidding the nannies look quite square, their bellies and distended udders almost touching the ground; twins are common. Very young kids are rarely tethered, and bound around as though on springs; they may sometimes be seen standing on inches-long hind-legs illegally reaching for the most succulent shoots on baby banana plants.

  Increased goat and sheep breeding is important in the calculations of those planning to avert future African famines. Dr B. T. Kang, an Indonesian soil scientist who has been working since the mid-1970s at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan, Nigeria, leads a team which has devised a brilliant system of cultivation known as ‘alley cropping’. This increases crop yields by at least 35 per cent and meat yields by 55 per cent – goat and sheep meat, that is. Alley cropping is not one more ‘Experts’ Fantasy’, unable to survive transplanting from its institutional nursery. It makes allowances for Africa’s social and economic realities and has been proved to work when implemented by villagers. If taken seriously by national Agriculture Departments (which so far it hasn’t been) it could solve many production and ecological problems in humid and sub-humid zones.

  On the outskirts of Kumbo, in a dreary suburb of semi-derelict ex-colonial houses and newish jerry-built offices, we tethered Egbert to a wobbly electricity pole on a small patch of grass. Then we sat outside an off-licence, worrying about our malnourished friend. To make matters worse, he was refusing his rock-minerals, recommended by Jane and dissolved daily, as per instructions, in a bucket of water – which was then spurned by our hero, however thirsty he might be.

  Kumbo (population 10,000) is almost a city by Cameroonian standards and so it harbours policemen. One now appeared, dandering down the middle of the wide street. He was overweight, thuggish-looking and, judging by his grand uniform, quite a senior officer. At a distance of about thirty yards he paused, stared at us, then imperiously beckoned me.

  ‘What a ghastly type!’ said Rachel. ‘Don’t go! If he wants to talk to you let him come here.’

  That however is not the way to win friends and influence people among the world’s police forces. Beaming delightedly, I hastened to his side with outstretched hand. Ignoring my hand he asked sharply where we were going to and coming from – and why? He was a Francophone, which helped. Gesturing lavishly and talking rapidly, I made a comic scene about not understanding any French. When I thrust our passports into his hands he stared uncertainly at them, then suddenly began to chuckle and look quite amiable. Returning them unopened he shook my hand warmly, wished us ‘Bon voyage!’, saluted smartly and turned away.

  Rachel by then was deep in conversation with a young man called Patrick who found our Irishness exciting. He was a smartly dressed,, beautifully mannered and ebullient ex-pupil of St Augustine’s College,, a boarding-school where six hundred hopeful youngsters, from all over Anglophone Cameroon, study more or less diligently for British O and A Levels. Three of the nuns, he said, were Irish. Sister Eileen was his special friend and would rejoice to meet compatriots. We must spend the night there – two nights, a week!

  ‘Is there any grass around St Augustine’s?’ I asked.

  ‘Grass,’ exclaimed Patrick, ‘so much grass! Hectares and hectares of grass!’

  In Bamenda I had dismissed the suggestion that we might stay at St Augustine’s; in recent years missionaries have been plagued by ‘over-landers’ and I doubted if there would be a welcome for two vagrants and a horse. But Egbert’s parlous state overcame my inhibitions: we could after all make a donation to the school. I hastened to untether Egbert from the electricity pole that had almost keeled over.

  Patrick guided us down to a crowded town centre where garbage was piled in the gutters. Numerous trucks, mostly carrying full or empty beer bottles, severely tested Egbert’s sang-froid with their squealing brakes and blaring horns. But for his desperate hunger I would have lingered long enough to find the Chief’s house where, in 1905, Captain Glauning coun
ted 900 heads of Barmum and Nsungli warriors decorating the facade. These were souvenirs of the famous 1880s war between the major chiefdoms of Nso and Bamum; some 3,000 warriors took part and 1,500 or so Bamums lost their heads.

  We said goodbye to Patrick at the beginning of a precipitous three-mile cut-short to St Augustine’s. As we climbed, through maize-fields and woodland, I pondered on the Evolutionary Stages of Man. To us the notion of, say, Argentinian heads decorating the facade of No. 10 Downing Street seems primitive/barbarous/savage/uncivilised. To those Nso warriors the notion of accumulating weapons designed to kill women and children indiscriminately would seem shocking beyond comprehension. Are modern White governments, who unequivocally condone the slaughtering of innocent non-combatants, more civilised – in the sense of humane – than the Nso warriors who fancied their opponents’ heads as trophies and fetishes? Even ritual human sacrifices, from which White colonialists recoiled with such horror, seem less morally depraved than those mass-killings of civilians which have taken place in recent White wars and are now being planned, on a far greater scale, for future White wars. What sort of ‘civilisation’ is it that quotes its own ‘defence’ as justification for plotting crimes against humanity on a scale unprecedented in any previous age?

  Patrick had not exaggerated. Sister Eileen and her colleagues did seem pleased to meet compatriots and by 3 p.m. Egbert was loose amidst several hectares of fenced grass. It had been overcast and humid all day but the sun then came out for long enough to dry our gear, which disposed of worry No. 2. We slept long and soundly that night, in an austere but comfortable little guest room.

  Modern missionaries are motorised and our nun friends knew nothing about bush-paths. But next morning they provided an ancient retainer who showed us what he believed to be the cut-short to Ntem. For several miles this undulated gently through an area of few compounds, some scrub and many eucalyptus plantations with saplings planted close together. Crowded trees produce the highest yields; the roots go deeper and the trunks grow straighter and so are more saleable as poles or stakes. Hereabouts eucalyptus form a most valuable crop, growing up to thirty feet a year, and they may be coppiced every other year. But ecologists worry about their side-effects as they are hostile to all local forest species.