Our tepid fufu and jammu-jammu cost 500 CFA for both (smallish) portions. ‘Bad value,’ Rachel decided afterwards. ‘Think of all the bananas and avocados you could buy for that!’
Peter warned us to secure our room, as best we could, against mosquitoes. ‘This is the worst malaria time, at the start of the rains. In one week hundreds of people here will be sick and children will die …’ He declined our invitation to have a beer in the hotel bar. ‘I don’t like this man!’ he whispered vehemently, glaring at poor Mr Ndanga who was dozing behind the bar, cradling a transistor radio, and who seemed to us perfectly inoffensive if a trifle dim-witted. But, as we had already noticed, Big Men and their families are not always on good terms with the hoi polloi. By 6 a.m. we were on the cut-short; by 6.05 we were removing our boots to cross the first of the day’s three rivers: a shallow stream, some twenty yards wide. The sky was overcast, the air fragrant after a night of heavy rain and the abundant birdlife unusually visible, where our path ran level through an unpeopled mixture of thin forest and scrubland. Often I fell far behind the others, revelling in the best ornithological opportunity of the entire trek.
Next came miles of recently settled land, rudimentary cultivation interspersed with stretches of untamed bush – an extraordinary contrast to the intensively farmed country around Kumbo. In the few compounds of small thatched huts most women wore only wrap-around skirts though it is now illegal for Cameroonian women to go topless: a dotty law in a country where every village woman of child-bearing age has a breast almost permanently exposed.
Here we were overtaken by a little girl, carrying a big basket of bananas, and two little boys and three dogs – one a bitch, being led on a leash of plaited vine. Having left us behind the children paused to confer, then waited for us and gravely presented a hand of bananas.
‘Dash?’ wondered Rachel in an anxious whisper. But I thought not; only kindliness had inspired that gesture. We continued together, the children clearly baffled by our caravan. They were an enchanting trio, their bodies well developed, their big smiles revealing perfect teeth, their few garments ragged but freshly laundered, their dogs happy, their composure complete. And it was well we met them where we did, for soon the path divided.
‘Sonkalong?’ we asked. The girl pointed to the least likely looking route, semi-obscured by high dense greenery. And there we said goodbye.
The day’s second river was wide, thigh deep, strongly flowing. Both banks supported the remains of a substantial colonial bridge, witness to the decline of empires. In times past (German times?) an important road must have run where now there is only a path – and one so faint that several times we almost lost it. Tropical Nature quickly reasserts herself.
The third river, amidst dense forest, was nasty – less a river than a smelly, slimy, stagnant creek approached through an expanse of deep black mud concealing tree-root snares. A humans-only two-pole bridge spanned the creek and Rachel tripped across; it was my turn to lead Egbert. By then we had learned that he would tackle almost any obstacle, if allowed time to think about it, so I gave him his head and when I became entangled in hidden roots he cleverly pulled me through. The still water was full of horrid little creatures – half-swimming, half-crawling.
Soon we were in more broken country, close to the mountainous border with Nigeria. Sonkalong, where we rejoined the motor-track, straggles over a low hill and was our first Francophone village. In the off-licence (here known as a bar) Rachel conversed with two laid-back gendarmes who assumed us to be friends of a young Englishman living in Somie. They didn’t know why he was living there; he wasn’t a missionary, he just sat around talking to people.
‘An anthropologist,’ diagnosed Rachel.
The gendarmes kindly led us to a nearby hilltop and pointed out the track to Somie via Lingham, a red thread winding through scrub, forest and cane fields. According to them, we would get to Somie by sunset; we knew we wouldn’t. (‘Why,’ puzzled Rachel, ‘can’t they correlate time and distance?’) In fact the sun was near setting as we approached Lingham, having been refreshed en route by a brief heavy shower.
Lingham’s ‘main street’ was soap-slippy and poor Egbert fell heavily, provoking shrieks of laughter from the pullulation of children in our wake. Then the Reverend Mr Eyobo introduced himself: ‘I am Baptist minister, it is my duty as a Christian to give you every help.’ He was lovable at first sight: aged fortyish, slightly myopic, small, slim, energetic, caring. Swiftly he organised our immediate future. We could spend the night at the home of Mr Makia, the quarterchief; Egbert could graze on ‘the fat grass’ by the Baptist church; Mr Eyobo himself would lead us to the palace to pay our respects to the Muslim Chief. As we unloaded, a passing youth was summoned to lead Egbert to his grazing. Mr Makia, our elderly involuntary host, looked somewhat taken aback when we dumped our dusty/muddy gear in his already overcrowded living-room before being swept off to the palace.
On that long walk, past flat hectares of maize and sugar-cane, Mr Eyobo explained that there are two Linghams, the old mainly Muslim village around the palace and the new Christian village – an overflow from the Nso region – where he ministered. ‘In Cameroon when places get too many people there is room to move. So my Christian people came here, cleared the bush, made gardens. It is too hot, but they have food. We are not poor if we work. The Chief is a good man, a Muslim who helps Christians!’
It was dark when we reached the palace. The Chief sat on his ornamental stool in an enormous shadowy reception-hall – thatched, high-ceilinged, dimly lamp-lit and furnished only with a row of tall drums along one wall. Several men were kneeling around him in attitudes of supplication and we sensed that we had interrupted something important. Our audience was brief. Mr Eyobo explained us; the Chief graciously gave us permission to rest in Lingham; we expressed gratitude and withdrew.
It is often alleged that a disproportionate number of chiefs are Muslim because Mr Ahidjo, Cameroon’s first President who ruled for twentyfour years, was himself a Muslim. But Mr Eyobo dismissed these allegations. ‘For thousands of years many villages have Muslim chiefs, from times when Fulanis came for slaves and beat local warriors and took land and power. This is not modern politics!’
In Mr Makia’s neat back-yard water and soap had been provided for our ablutions but around the kitchen-hut there was, alarmingly, no sign of activity. As we settled down to be sociable in the living-room, Mr Eyobo proudly drew our attention to three newish, over-varnished Nigerian wooden wall-plaques depicting violent biblical scenes – to us a source of anthropological speculation rather than aesthetic thrills. But the ancient Yoruba carved wooden chest that served as a sofa was truly a work of art, though not highly regarded by its owner.
When tea and bread were offered, I tentatively suggested beer as a more appropriate refreshment at the end of a long hot day. Moments later no mere bottle but a crate arrived. Lingham’s tolerance was pleasing: a Muslim Chief helping Christian settlers, Baptist teetotallers providing crates of beer … And at bedtime we had to argue strongly before being allowed to pay for the four bottles consumed.
I asked if there were any conversions, either way, between Old and New Lingham. Mr Makia admitted that some Christians become Muslims because they wish to prosper as traders. ‘For so long, only Muslims have traded long-distance – they have all contacts, networks, set up. They have their own kinds of handy arrangements about money and credit. For too many years, all over Africa, men have become Muslim to trade big – and their women do not like this change!’
As his friend spoke Mr Eyobo sighed heavily, shook his head and pulled his fingers through his curls. ‘Mammon!’ he murmured. Then he asked, ‘You are Protestant Christians? What is your denomination?’ Both he and our host seemed genuinely distressed when we confessed to having no religion, or none that has a label; they felt acutely that as unbelievers we were impoverished people.
Later, when we begged leave to retire, Mr Eyobo asked gently, ‘Can you wait for a little prayer?’ And ta
king a bible from the window-ledge behind him he read aloud, ‘The Lord is my shepherd …’ Then he looked up at us and improvised his own exquisitely appropriate prayer for our safety, as we trekked. We were quite overcome, moved beyond any possibility of expressing the gratitude we felt.
Now I always recall Mr Eyobo, when Whites assert that Christianity is unsuited to Africa. Perhaps what Whites have made of it doesn’t transplant well, but Christianity didn’t start in Europe. We adopted it and fashioned it into a many-branched religion to suit our own cultural/intellectual/national inheritances, shedding much blood in the process. And then, characteristically, we pronounced that ours was the real Christianity. Africans have for a few generations been in the process of refashioning it to suit their inheritance. And what right have we to judge that Black Christianity is less ‘real’ than the White version?
I often wondered about the beliefs of people we passed in the bush. We noticed many charms in the fields: bones and palm fronds hanging over junctions on the pathways, little archways of saplings erected between fields, bundles of feathers and leaves secured to rocks with lengths of vine, plaits of straw tied to bamboo poles. Undoubtedly, despite much mosque- and church-going, many villagers remain close to their ‘traditional religion’, known in my youth as ‘paganism’. Recently, ‘paganism’ and ‘heathenism’ have been excluded from civilised vocabularies not only because they offend Westernised Africans but because their heavy connotations of ‘irreligious’, ‘immoral’ and ‘unenlightened’ are grossly misleading. By instinct Africans are profoundly religious, in the sense of not believing that feeble and fallible mankind can fend for itself. They believe in a Creator, one remote all-powerful God, who may best be worshipped through intermediaries – various spirits (not thought of as gods) and the living-dead. Those last are family members so recently dead that they can be remembered by someone still alive. Their importance in the traditional scheme of things is incalculable and they are thought to be very much amongst those present – helping, or if necessary punishing, their descendants.
Hence Mr Eyobo’s distressed reaction to our ‘irreligious’ state, a reaction that was many times duplicated in conversations with Cameroonians of all faiths. In their terms, by refusing to worship a Creator one is denying human feebleness and fallibility and so committing the cardinal sin of Pride. They may never have heard of Lucifer, but if they did make his acquaintance they would regard him as a very bad boy.
We slept restlessly in a hot cubby-hole behind the living-room, sharing a narrow pallet. From within our gear, piled in a corner, came many rat-scufflings and shrill, aggressive squealings, recalling a night spent in a disused coffee-warehouse in Madagascar. Rats everywhere speak the same language.
As we dressed in the dark a vigorous drummer was walking through the village: Mr Eyobo summoning his flock to matins. And successfully summoning them: his large round church (a tin roof on tall tree-trunks) was more than half-full when I fetched Egbert in the grey dawn-light. Women stood on one side, men on the other; everyone swayed, clapped and fervently sang to the music of ten or twelve drummers. And from the Presbyterian church, hardly fifty yards away, came the sound of no less enthusiastic worshipping. The rival congregations were unmistakably competing in the decibel stakes, an endearing manifestation of sectarianism. As I stood listening to those powerful waves of sound, rolling towards each other across the street, a long bank of cloud to the east was suddenly faintly pink. Soon it would be hot – very hot.
By 6 a.m. we were on our way, musing over the semantics of money. Our host, looking agonised, had protested that he wanted no payment: 'I only want dash!’ On being assured that the 2,000 CFA just pressed into his hand was indeed dash, he beamed and pocketed the notes. Perhaps fortunately, Mr Eyobo wasn’t around. We felt sure he had intended Mammon to play no part in our relationship with Mr Makia.
Our up-and-down cut-short to Somie ran through thickish jungle, parallel to low, round, densely forested hills from which came many monkey-calls, including blood-curdling sounds that we had learned to identify as baboon quarrels. The morning cloud quickly dispersed and by eight o’clock we were sweating hard. An hour later we reached Somie, a small village near the base of a steep escarpment – our escape route from the hot plain. We planned to seek out the anthropologist (always an interesting species) and relax until three o’clock, leaving ourselves time to reach the cool heights by sunset.
Few of Somie’s five hundred inhabitants were visible, both sexes having gone to the fields – even, to our grief, the bar proprietor. (Somewhere along the route we had lost our inhibitions about beer for breakfast: a process known in times past as ‘going native’.) A young Fulani pushing a bicycle – cyclists are not uncommon on the plain – spoke fragmentary French but was nonplussed when Rachel asked the way to the Englishman’s compound. She should have said ‘White man’s’; no one in Somie has ever heard of an Englishman. But at last the franc dropped and the youth volunteered to fetch Dave, who was also in the fields.
I led Egbert to scanty grazing beyond the village and on my way back Dave on his bicycle overtook me – an emaciated young man, too fair skinned to be tanned, wearing a huge conical straw hat and looking dazed. An Englishman who has been living alone in Somie for two years has much to say to fellow-English-speakers and we soon scrapped our plan to leave that day; luckily there was ample grazing close to Dave’s three-roomed hut. The Chief, an ex-teacher and fluent French speaker, was away. But Dave said his wives would be perfectly agreeable to our staying in the palace guest suite, where, he insisted, we must burn one of his mosquito-coils. He seemed sceptical about the value of our prophylactics: ‘Nowadays the mosquitoes are on top, they’ve got the measure of all those pills.’ And he was shocked to hear that we were travelling without our own hypodermics: ‘Who knows what percentage of Cameroonians have AIDS? What happens if you need an injection? Do you really want to die?’
During that forenoon we drank a lot of tea and learned a lot about spider divination, Dave’s particular interest of the moment. He had just achieved a hard-earned breakthrough and been promised that he could attend a local divination ceremony. Modesty forbade him to explain what an honour this was, but I recognised it as the ultimate proof of trust, respect and acceptance. Diviners are as paranoid as the British Government about their Official Secrets.
According to John Mbiti, the Kenyan scholar equally distinguished as philosopher, theologian, linguist, Christian clergyman and pioneer of ecumenism:
Diviners are the agents of unveiling the mysteries of human life. This is done through the use of mediums, oracles, being possessed, divination objects, common sense, intuitive knowledge and insight, hypnotism and other secret knowledge. They also keep their ears and eyes open to what is happening in their communities so that they have a store of working knowledge which they use in their divination … The art of divination presents us with puzzling problems which I make no pretence to solve. A certain amount of communication goes on between diviners and non-human powers (whether living or otherwise or both). It is difficult to know exactly what this is: it might involve the diviner’s extra-sensory ability, it may involve spiritual agents, it might be telepathy, it might be sharpened human perception, or a combination of these possibilities. Whatever it is, divination is another area which adds to the complexity of African concepts and experiences of the universe. Divination links together, in its own way, the physical and the spiritual worlds, making it a religious activity.
In cases of particular importance, requiring sensitive diplomatic solutions, spider divination has long been the most popular form in many areas of West Africa, including Western Cameroon. The earth spider (Heteroscodra crassipes, large, black and hairy) lives in burrows and so is in touch with the sacred underworld where dwell the ancestral – and some other – spirits. Thus he is well placed to serve as interpreter of their will and is among the animal elite, credited with unique wisdom and to be seen in stylised form on door-posts, finger-rings, tobacco pipes, orna
mental stools and tattooed around women’s navels. In some areas the earth spider was considered so sacred, less than a century ago, that death was the punishment for deliberately killing one; and those who might know the identity of an accidental killer had to conceal it from the rest of the community.
Diviners keep their spiders in burrows in enclosed shrines, to which leaf-cards are taken when a client seeks advice. These are made from the leaves of an African plum tree (Pachylobus edulis) and each is marked with a separate symbol. (They may not exceed three hundred to a pack.) Early in the morning some edible (to a spider) green leaves, or freshly killed insects, are placed inside the burrow under the leaf-cards. An upturned pot or basket ensures that the spider works in darkness until the diviner and his client return, near sunset, to interpret the cards as they have been ‘arranged’ by the hungry spider. Should the diviner feel that the will of destiny, or the spirits’ guidance, has not been made plain, the whole process may be repeated again and again.
As it is not always possible to find earth spiders, land-crabs may be used instead – and are, around Somie. Even now the evidence provided by spider divination is accepted in courts of law – official government courts, not only traditional village courts. Men who could not possibly be convicted on other grounds have been sentenced to life-imprisonment ostensibly on the strength of the spider’s arrangement of leaves.
Dave’s lunch – fufu and stewed liver – arrived from the palace at noon on a little girl’s head; the Chief’s wives provided all his meals for a fixed weekly sum. We discussed our emergency rations for the thinly-populated Tchabal Mbabo and Dave suggested an afternoon groundnut quest. This was the scarce in-between season, but he knew a man …
That quest took us around a forested mountain and along the edge of a deep narrow valley where many women – bright little dots from our vantage point – were planting and weeding. We passed two earth spider (or land-crab) burrows, darkened by wickerwork funnels about eighteen inches long. One of Dave’s friends accompanied us, a cheerful character wearing a long gown and carrying a long spear with which he hoped to secure a plump bush-rat or monkey for his supper. He paused to bend over the burrows, but didn’t touch them: that would have been taboo.
Cameroon with Egbert Page 13