At 1 p.m. Rachel suggested moving on and I snarled, ‘You must be mad! This bloody sun is lethal!’ In between being very nasty to insects I was reading Mungo Park’s Travels in Africa and I pointed out that he always rested in hot regions ‘till half-past two o’clock’.
Rachel studied her left big toe and decided that I had failed to remove the jigger.
I snapped, ‘Remove it yourself then!’
Rachel wondered, ‘What will your temper be like after three days of this heat?’
All morning the sky had been clear but now clouds assembled with astonishing speed: a phenomenon to which we were becoming accustomed. By 2 p.m. the sky was completely overcast and the heat just bearable. We went on our way, criticising the eerie muted quality of the light and assuming it to be yet another disagreeable feature of this ghastly plain. Days later we heard about that afternoon’s near-total eclipse of the sun.
Below that slope a line of vigorously green bushes marked a stream and while Egbert drank we poured clear cool water over each other’s heads. On the plain, lines of women were turning the thirsty brown soil, hoping for the little rains – here already a fortnight late. They seemed less prosperous and out-going than their sisters on the high land. One woman, digging with a hefty baby on her back – as is usual – straightened up to stare at us and we saw that she was heavily pregnant. This is unusual; perhaps she was caring for somebody else’s baby. A powerful West African taboo forbids intercourse while a woman is suckling, which may be for two or three years; it is widely believed that semen mingles with a mother’s milk and weakens the baby. Generations of missionaries have raged against this taboo, one of the main reasons for the African reluctance to accept monogamy.
Our cut-short passed through a deserted compound. Three round straw huts seemed to have been deliberately demolished and several worn-out trainers were strewn over the dusty earth, scarred by cooking-fires. Had some tragic event blighted this homestead – a suicide or murder or sudden death attributed to ‘bad magic’? Such misfortunes require an elaborate ritual cleansing ceremony which poor families cannot afford. It costs much less to run up three more straw huts on a ‘clean’ site.
Beyond the dessicated hamlet of Nsop our track crossed miles of monochrome scrubland. Thousands of termite-hills, with conical roofs, formed a bizarre city between the low bushes. Rachel aptly compared them to ‘mushroom clouds’; presumably their clever design averts disintegration when the rains come. The only flecks of colour were orchid-like flowers, striped purple and white and some eighteen inches tall, which seemed to eat flies.
Our grazing anxiety-level began to rise at about 5 p.m. and was very high indeed an hour later – when suddenly fertility reappeared, including a green playing-field by a new school. This was Ntem, a small village surrounded by big trees. We tethered Egbert on a grassy patch, while seeking the Chief’s permission to sleep in the school; rain seemed probable and we now knew our tent was not big enough for two on a wet night. Outside the off-licence an amiable youth greeted us – conveniently, one of the Chief’s twenty-nine children, who offered to show me the palace while Rachel remained beer-swigging amidst a jovial welcoming throng.
This was a more imposing palace than Nthambaw’s, with an incongruous modern bungalow in front of the mud fortifications. The Chief, too, was more imposing: a dignified courteous man in his mid-fifties who spoke good English and was warmly and wittily welcoming: ‘Are you pretending to live a hundred years ago, when there were no vehicles in Cameroon?’ Having escorted me back to the off-licence – a mile-long walk – he ordered food, stood us beers and himself had a Top. He too was Muslim.
Their Chief’s unwonted appearance after dark caused some excitement along the village street and much bowing and cupping of hands. One sensed a strong mutual affection; evidently this Chief’s benignly paternalistic attitude was appreciated and he exchanged quips with both sexes and all age groups. Ntem is mainly Christian and its womenfolk were out in force, enjoying the Murphy road-show. They particularly enjoyed our statutory gender-confusion session. I had introduced Rachel to the Chief as my daughter and a few moments later, addressing her, he referred to ‘your father’. When she respectfully but firmly corrected him he leant forward, scrutinised me by lamplight and exclaimed, ‘Impossible! This is a strong man!’
‘It’s not!’ said Rachel. ‘It’s a strong woman!’
Our audience was in paroxysms of mirth, a phrase that applies more exactly to Africans than to any other race I know. They shook and heaved with laughter, seized each other by the shoulders, jumped up and down together and literally fell about in the abandon of their hilarity. Finally the Chief was convinced and made a public announcement, in whatever language Ntem people speak, confirming that this odd bod really was female. Whereupon several young women rushed to shake my hand and/or embrace me.
A small boy arrived then with our supper. He offered the dish first to the Chief, who removed its lid and took one symbolic morsel, to prove it wasn’t poisoned, before signalling that the rest was for us. In darkness we groped through a thick, highly spiced sauce and found little bundles wrapped in bristly hide. These contained bush-meat (beef) which we were hungry enough to relish despite the bristles.
As we ate, the Chief expounded on family life: ‘Some foreigners would like to sell birth-controls in this country but it is wrong to think of economics before children. We love our children, we can’t have too many. Ntem has two-and-a-half thousand people and more than one thousand are schoolchildren. So we have built a second schoolroom where you will sleep. We built it without help from government but now we hope they will give us more teachers – and good teachers! Bad teachers are worse than nothing. But too many good teachers don’t like to live in the bush. I have had difficulties, giving education to twenty-nine children – my daughters also have education. See! There is one speaking good English!’ He indicated a comely young woman talking to Rachel. ‘But these difficulties are not important. I have seventeen sons and twelve daughters and each one is a gift from God. I am grateful.’
Hearing that I have only one child, the Chief was deeply sympathetic. He obviously felt that his question had been a faux pas and hastily changed the subject. This awkward topic of my infertility came up almost daily without its ever occurring to anyone that a personal decision might be involved. For most villagers, choosing to have only one child is literally unthinkable. And the few who can grasp that idea consider it grossly immoral. (Or at least the men do; some women, significantly, are more ambivalent on this matter.) It would have been futile as well as rude to try to explain to the Chief why, in future, women should have no more than two children each. Many Whites look ahead, most Blacks don’t. To us, but not to them, the African birth-rate of 47 per 1,000 is menacing. Nowhere else in the world has ever experienced such a population increase: 3.2 per cent per annum, despite one child in seven dying before its fifth birthday. Even without droughts, food production cannot keep pace with such a breeding-rate; an estimated 99 million Africans were starving before the 1982 famine. Throughout the 1970s Africa’s total food production rose at an annual rate of 2.1 per cent, as compared to the First World’s 1.8 per cent. Yet in 1982 production had fallen, since 1965, by 12 per cent per person. During the same period, throughout other developing regions, it rose steadily per person – by as much as 49 per cent in Asia. Nor should cash crops be blamed, as they often are in the West, for Africa’s starving millions. The overall acreage under cash crops fell by 9 per cent during the 1970s and the per capita cash crop production has also been falling, even more dramatically than food production.
Only one incident marred that happy interlude with the Chief. A small boy, carrying a heavy saucepan of jammu-jammu into the off-licence, tripped over the rough threshold and fell, spilling his precious burden. As he burst into tears the crowd roared with laughter – and continued to laugh while he threw himself face down on the ground and lay weeping inconsolably.
Ntem’s large empty schoolroom had lakes
of water on the mud floor, but one corner offered ample dry space for our flea-bags. The heat was still stifling though there were neither doors nor windows – unnecessary trimmings in such a climate. We lay talking on our bags, naked yet dripping sweat, and by torchlight consulted the USAF, trying to work out the distance to Sabongari. But in this area, curiously enough, the USAF had given up; a white blank on their map was marked RELIEF DATA INCOMPLETE. That day we had asked twelve people ‘How far to Sabongari?’ and got twelve different answers ranging from eight to seventy miles. Miles or kilometres mean nothing to rural Cameroonians – who also tend to give wildly inaccurate estimates of distances in walking-hours.
In fact Sabongari is about fourteen miles from Ntem. We arrived there at 12.30 next afternoon, speechless with heat-exhaustion.
The first two hours, through flat, dull farmland, were cloudy and just tolerable. In the hamlet of Ngu we enjoyed an eccentric breakfast of avocados, salt and beer; to my secret relief, neither Top nor coke was available. But beer for breakfast, when it’s 95°F in the shade and there isn’t any shade, must be condemned as irresponsible and probably contributed to our sorry noon state. However, at 8 a.m. Ngu’s off-licence was already quite crowded with jolly male drinkers who didn’t have to exert themselves during the heat of the day.
The usual juvenile swarm gathered to watch us but soon grew bored and resumed their play. As so often, this consisted of impromptu dancing to the music (surprisingly sweet) of instruments ingeniously contrived from old tins, scraps of wood, lengths of string, bits of wire. From the day Cameroonians can toddle, making music and dancing come as naturally as breathing. Why do some British Blacks, and White anti-racists, scream ‘Stereotyping!’ if one refers to the Africans’ inborn sense of rhythm? Pretending that Africans are not exceptionally gifted in this respect is like pretending they have straight hair.
Around Ngu most huts were palm thatched, a less attractive roofing than grass though vastly better than tin. There were many more dogs, of indeterminate breed but well cared, and numerous ungainly short-coated sheep – peculiarly ugly animals, who always look dirty and dishevelled, if not actually mangy.
By ten o’clock the sun was trying to murder us through an odd haze – our first encounter with the harmattan. By eleven o’clock I was opining that we should rest, that we were stupidly inviting heat-stroke. But Rachel argued that Sabongari must now be close and that lying in the bush, being preyed upon by insects, is not restful. Against my better judgement, we proceeded. Later, when feeling the ill-effects of walking under the noon sun, Rachel conceded that we should indeed have chosen insects as the lesser of two evils.
Sabongari is a large village – torpid, gritty, smelly and scarcely fifteen miles from the Nigerian border. Its ‘Africa hotel’ consists of two rows of oven-hot rooms behind one of several off-licences. When we booked in the fat friendly proprietor smiled knowingly. ‘Hah! You go to Nigeria with your horse – there you get plenty, plenty money for him!’ We were too exhausted to put the record straight. It would take time, Mr Ndanga explained, to prepare a room. No rush, we assured him, subsiding in the bar and gulping four ‘lemon’ Tops each. At a certain stage of dehydration, one’s scorn for Top evaporates; it is marginally less unpalatable than chemically purified water.
As we drank, an agitated young man in a ‘CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY’ T-shirt appeared in the doorway, frowning and shouting at us. We had met him thrice during the morning, as he delivered beer at Wannti and Ngu – and also in the middle of the uninhabited bush, where he replaced three cases of empty beer bottles with full ones. (A significant measure, we thought, of local honesty.) At each meeting he had urged us, in limited English, to go to the border police post as soon as we arrived. ‘Go to office quick! In Sabongari you see police very quick!’ His concern in the matter baffled us and now he seemed ridiculously upset by our having paused to drink before ‘going to office’. I said soothingly that soon we would go but five minutes later he was back with a policeman, who seemed only mildly interested in us and readily accepted my assurance that we were en route to the office. After he had gone the young man hung about and insisted on leading us to a mud but with ‘POLICE OFFICE’ chalked on its rickety door. Then he vanished and we never saw him again. Daily life in Cameroon was peppered with such mystifying incidents.
The Police Office, some ten foot square, was furnished only with a small unsteady table and two chairs. One dog-eared ledger occupied the centre of the table. Behind it sat a stout, blank-faced Francophone gendarme who very slowly went through our passports, page by page, saying nothing – and probably understanding nothing. I sat opposite him in a semi-coma. Rachel sat on the mud floor beside me, slumped against the wall, fast asleep. The room had no ceiling and it seemed the sun’s midday rays were being magnified a hundredfold by the low tin roof.
Two other Francophone officers entered. They shrugged when I said, ‘Speak English only!’ and for ten minutes stood on either side of their colleague, watching him studying our vaccination certificates. (I asked myself what would happen, on a similar occasion, when our visas had expired. With luck nobody would notice.) Then, ignoring us, all three gendarmes disappeared with our passports into the only other room in the hut.
Time passed. The village was silent. Rachel snored gently. I wondered why Francophone officers are posted to Cameroon’s border with an English-speaking country. Meanwhile Egbert, tethered to a mango tree, looked increasingly dejected.
Twenty minutes later the stout officer returned, handed back our passports without comment and said, ‘Bon voyage!’ I woke Rachel, who asked if we might pasture Egbert on the indifferent grass across the road. Permission was given and we hastened back to the doss-house to unload.
Our little room was ready. ‘A hell-hole!’ groaned Rachel, falling onto the rectangle of uncovered foam-rubber that served as a double-bed mattress. Soon she was asleep again. A table and two chairs completed the furnishing. I tried to write my diary but soon gave up; leaving the door and two windows open did nothing to counteract the tin roof but gave access to clouds of those tiny biting flies which were rapidly becoming my most hated Cameroonian insect. Then suddenly the sky darkened and a half-hour deluge blissfully lowered the temperature.
When Rachel woke we had acrimony about the local water. As it came from a deep well, between the rows of ‘guest rooms’, I decided ‘Definitely a double dose of pills!’ Rachel protested that double-dosed water nauseated her and the matter was settled only after my visit to the latrine, a sentry-box-sized tin hut less than four yards from the well. I was at once put to rout, for the first time in twenty-five years’ travelling, and went instead to Egbert’s field. On my return I told Rachel, ‘That water is having a treble dose!’
We went shopping and were grotesquely overcharged for Algerian sardines. Here White travellers are taken for granted – and, if possible, taken for a ride – though only a few score use this crossing-point each year. Later, reviewing our trek, we identified Sabongari as the only uncongenial village en route; so much for tourism improving international relations. Even our five Francophone fellow guests, all on their way to or from Nigeria, seemed sullen in a non-Cameroonian way. ‘I daresay we seem sullen, too,’ observed Rachel. ‘Something about this place brings out the worst in one.’
We looked for the cut-short to Sonkalong, so that no cool moments need be wasted next morning, and eventually found it beyond the market-place. Near the stalls someone had recently built a large restaurant with pretensions to being chic. Unsurprisingly, it was closed. But promising aromas came from a busy eating-house next door, to which we resolved to return for supper. We hadn’t had a square meal since leaving St Augustine’s, as Rachel more than once reminded me.
At sundown I settled in the empty bar to drink lots of beer while writing my diary by lantern-light, but a variety of winged insects – mostly large and all noisy – seriously impeded me. At one point I counted seven species simultaneously crawling across the page.
Outside the
eating-house we met Peter – tall, handsome, articulate, the eldest son of a local Big Man and a law student at Yaounde. The eating-house was owned by his father and staffed by two of his sisters. The chic restaurant was also Pappa’s, a memorial to over-optimism about Cameroon’s tourist trade. At a very cramped corner table we sat in semi-darkness. ‘Here there is no kerosene,’ explained Peter apologetically, ‘so the lamp must be turned low. Transport is a big problem in Cameroon – you have seen our tracks, not many vehicles like to use them often. Only beer trucks move regularly. Only the brasseries can sell enough goods to make it worth while to wreck vehicles.’
Peter gave us a glimpse of the Anglo/Franco tensions that can exist among middle-class Cameroonians. He was fiercely anti-French, denouncing Yaounde University for discriminating against Anglophone students – a common complaint.
‘Even if we have very good A Levels, Francophones with worse marks get preference. The French side is much more corrupt, even in the bush – you will find this tomorrow when you move in there.’ (We didn’t.) ‘And so many French employers living here encourage corruption. They give jobs only if you pay them 10 per cent of your salary for two years. The British are always honest, they hire on merit alone. But they have not stayed on like the French to make money. Now Cameroon has many, many more French settlers than before Independence. Everywhere in French West Africa is the same. They only pretend to let go. Economically they keep their grip and by corruption make it tighter.’
Cameroon with Egbert Page 12