Unloading took a long time; my fingers were numb and the knots rain-tightened. Tethering Egbert nearby, I changed into garments that were damp rather than wet and joined our host in his simple but comfortable living-room. He poured me a beer before saying anything. Then we shouted at each other about Rachel’s symptoms. Her diary for 2 April records: ‘Felt lousy and was diagnosed as having malaria. A sweet black Sister gave me a chloroquin shot in the bum.’
6
Mayo Darle and Beyond
THE ‘SWEET BLACK Sister’ had, I was relieved to hear, used a new disposable needle. In most parts of Africa basic medical equipment, taken for granted in the West, is so hard to come by that ‘disposable’ needles are used again and again – and are regarded, by some doctors, as an even greater AIDS hazard than promiscuity.
Rachel’s ‘shot in the bum’ was supplemented by massive doses of chloroquin pills at six-hourly intervals and after a semi-delirious night she was up, though still very weak, on the following afternoon. However, the experts pronounced that she needed at least three days’ rest and would be well advised to ride Egbert for another few days. Relapses, they said, are brought about by too much exertion too soon. Mayo Darle (population approximately 5,000) has no doctor but through personal experience most of its inhabitants have become malaria experts.
From Egbert’s point of view this was a lucky break; he had perceptibly lost condition on the hot plain. After the storm Yaya Moctar, a young Fulani malloum (religious teacher) and noted local horseman, put him to graze with his own herd beyond the river. Often I turned my binoculars on that grassy hillside, almost opposite the Mission, to enjoy watching him stuffing himself.
Yaya was a friend of the Foxes, a young lay-missionary couple who, after four years in Cameroon, spoke a marvellous multiplicity of languages including Foulfoulde. They lived in a bungalow in the Mission compound and, with Franz, formed Mayo Darle’s White colony. John Fox (from Ireland) was a teacher and photographer; Jacqueline (from Holland) was a Primary Health Care worker, away in the bush when we arrived. At sunset John dragged himself over to the big Mission bungalow and Franz introduced us. The Irishman was then a shocking sight: tall, gaunt, haggard, with sunken eyes and a ghastly pallor. He could eat nothing and drink only water. Frequent and severe attacks of malaria wreck the digestive system, even when the patient is a strong, well-nourished White. Hence it is a main killer-disease in areas where many are ill-nourished.
Franz was a comparative newcomer and after two years in Kenya, working deep in the bush with one large nomadic tribe, he found Cameroon’s patchwork of languages and clans somewhat daunting. ‘Where do you start?’ he wondered plaintively.
My unspoken reaction was, ‘Why bother to start?’ It is hard to see any possible spiritual benefit accruing to Africans in the 1980s from the presence among them of White missionaries, however sensitive and sympathetic. The dispatching of those men and women ‘to save souls’ in Black Africa is unrealistic, if only because of the missionaries’ past symbiotic relationship with colonialism. Inevitably we contrasted the roles of Franz, the ‘formal’ though flexible mission priest, and of the Foxes, new-style lay-workers whose practical activities gave shape and meaning to their lives in Cameroon. The demands made on Franz by his flock were minimal: an annual average of ten confessions heard and ten baptisms administered. (Of course he also provided daily Mass: but that was not a demand.) Across the compound, the demands made on the Foxes’ skills were endless.
On meeting Jacqueline, I at once got the sort of charge that comes from recognising a kindred spirit. The morning after the storm, as Mayo Darle sweltered on its lowish riverbank under a cloudless sky, she invited me to accompany her to the Health Centre at the local open-cast tin-mine, which we had noticed on the way from Somie. Mayo Darle’s Mission was founded to minister to the mining settlement, when the French forcibly imported hundreds of workers from the Central African Republic in 1935. (Most inconveniently, the terms of their League of Nations Mandate forbade them to subject Cameroonians to the conditions then prevailing at the mine.) In 1974 the Mission moved to its present site because the tin – and miners – were dwindling. A new church was built in 1985, its design incomprehensibly based on a Fulani compound although in Africa, as elsewhere, the Muslim-to-Christian conversion rate is, and always has been, negligible.
By 1987 the miners’ community was down to about 250 and many company dwellings – grimly resembling prison-compound huts – lay empty. A recent attempt to revive the mine had failed and closure seemed imminent. In a small shed, shaded by mighty mango trees, the sad, gentle manager showed us minute quantities of tin being processed with the aid of primitive but adequate (he said) technology. Apart from the rows of dwellings, now half-obscured by vegetation, this ecologically benign enterprise has left the beauty of the surrounding mountains unspoiled.
A decrepit primary school, devoid of what we consider basic teaching aids, catered for two score happy children who seemed to have an excellent relationship with their kindly if ineffectual teacher – and with Jacqueline. But what does the future hold for those grandchildren of forcibly displaced persons? Probably many will migrate to a city and compete desperately for the most menial jobs. The wiser ones will remain around Mayo Darle and clear enough bush to provide meagre sustenance for a family – very meagre, as the local soil is ungenerous to those without cattle.
Jacqueline had won the rare distinction of being accepted as a friend by the area’s notoriously aloof Fulani semi-nomads. These clans refused to accept Islam and take part in don Fodio’s Jihad and so reaped none of the conqueror’s rewards, which didn’t in any case appeal to them. Some have now settled with their cattle in otherwise uninhabited and uncultivated bush. But none think of themselves as belonging to any nation-state and the majority remain seasonal nomads, migrating twice annually with their enormous herds and few possessions. Unlike Muslim Fulanis, they never marry out; a girl who became pregnant by a Bantu would probably be killed and her baby certainly would. (Many Fulani warriors took Bantu women into their harems to consolidate alliances, hence the high percentage of dark-skinned upper-class Fulanis in modern Cameroon.)
I was touched when Jacqueline suggested a day-trip to the compound of her closest nomad friends; she is not the sort of person to display friends as ‘tourist attractions’. From Mayo Darle we drove south-east for half an hour, the jeep weaving like a hunted hare to avoid this international highway’s numerous fissures. On our right, far below, the Somie plain was a heat-hazed blur. On our left, hilly grey-green scrub and thin jungle, apparently unpeopled, stretched away to the horizon. Parking the jeep under a wayside mango tree, we walked through those steep hills for forty-five minutes on a surprisingly well-defined path. Many of the low trees were unfamiliar and, Jacqueline said, a valuable nomad food-source. They gather an abundance of wild fruits, berries, roots and medicinal leaves and herbs. We glimpsed a few groups of turkey-sized black birds strutting through the bush; I have never seen others like them. This high, silent hill country was yet another of Cameroon’s many contrasting ‘worlds’ – harsh yet tranquil.
Jacqueline talked, with affection, of the nomads. Naturally they keep no record of ages; youngsters marry when physically mature. Babies are named a week after birth and cattle killed to celebrate the event. There are no family names and personal names change at different stages of development – and sometimes for other reasons, to do with unusual events in an individual’s life. All of which, added to a lack of fixed addresses, makes Fulani nomads peculiarly difficult to catch in bureaucratic nets; and the Cameroonian government sensibly leaves them to their own devices.
Those very few nomad children who have sampled schooling find it uncongenial. Their academic concentration span is short, like that of their White contemporaries from Tv-dominated homes. Yet out in the forest, when hunting, herding or honey-gathering, they can concentrate on detail for hours at a stretch, showing exceptional patience and persistence.
We passed only o
ne compound, at some little distance; the few low huts merged into their surrounding bush and but for Jacqueline I might have missed them. Her friends’ compound was altogether grander, occupying a large, dusty, unfenced clearing amidst spindly trees. Their new main hut was, on the local scale of things, a Yuppie residence, made of imported (from beyond Tignere) bamboos, with circular walls of pre-woven straw matting bought at a market. A small boy and slightly larger girl fled at our approach, despite my being escorted by their beloved Jacqueline.
Jacqueline’s special friend, Dijja, was sitting in the sun on a frayed raffia mat, bare to the waist, and for a moment her appearance frightened me. No Famine Appeal poster could have been more harrowing. She was, literally, skin and bone; never before had I met anyone at such an advanced stage of emaciation. Obtusely, I assumed her to be very, very old. In fact, according to Jacqueline’s calculations, she was scarcely fifty – but had been suffering from untreated tuberculosis for seventeen years. A lesser being would long since have died but these nomads are hardy folk. When she rose to greet us her breasts flapped like strips of dried leather yet she stood erect and moved with agility. Her greeting was gracious and warm and after the initial shock one forgot her appearance. An extraordinary vitality burned within that skeletal frame. Dijja was among the most impressive people I met in Cameroon: brave, witty, vivacious, with strong views and a formidable air of authority – a grande dame of the bush.
We had to bend very low to enter the main hut. Inside, close enough to the doorless entrance for smoke to escape easily, a few sticks smouldered between three stones. Dijja at once added twigs and began to blow on them as two daughters and a daughter-in-law hurried in to welcome Jacqueline and her guest. We sat on one of three homemade beds and gratefully received pint mugs brimming with fresh milk. A teenage girl lay close beside us on another bed, completely invisible beneath a goathair blanket and moaning softly at frequent intervals. She had ‘stomach ache’, whatever that might signify, and throughout our four-hour visit remained immobile but for an occasional convulsive movement when stabbed by pain. Nobody, except Jacqueline, took any notice of her.
The children soon joined us, after a cautious preliminary peeping session. The handsome three-year-old boy was stark naked; the frail girl (Dijja’s youngest) looked about eight but must have been twelve, Jacqueline reckoned. All the men were away, tending their many cattle and fewer sheep. The latter are cash-livestock, to be sold whenever money is needed – which isn’t very often. Cattle are rarely sold for cash but are in themselves a form of currency, being used to pay debts or clan-imposed fines, and for such ceremonial obligations as brideprices.
The hut was some thirty feet in diameter and the roof rose to quite a high point. Wood in convenient lengths had been stacked near the fire. A stand made of uneven branches held several calabashes and a few of their modern equivalents, bright dishes imported from Nigeria. Previously a woman’s calabash collection was her pride and joy; now enamel-ware is ‘in’. Flies swarmed and as my eyes became adjusted I observed that the floor was unswept, the food dishes unprotected from flies and the general level of cleanliness (except bodily cleanliness) way below normal. This is one reason why other Cameroonians, including Fulanis, despise the nomads as ‘backward’. But, Jacqueline explained, they are also feared and grudgingly respected for the efficacy of their magic. Never having ‘gone over’ to Islam or Christianity, they are believed to be more closely in touch than most with the spirit-world and their magic is proportionately powerful.
All the young women were good looking, graceful, high spirited. But one was a problem. Fatah, aged twenty-five, refused to marry – or at least to marry any man suggested by her family. She should have been a wife for nine or ten years, yet she had remained steadfastly anti-marriage in a way that would have been impossible for a Muslim – and hard to imagine for any other Cameroonian outside the Westernised elite. Jacqueline suspected that the family blamed her for indirectly encouraging, through her own example as a career-woman, Fatah’s claims to independence – though the rebel had been twenty-one, and set in her apparently celibate ways, when Jacqueline came on the local scene. Fatah didn’t strike me as a natural celibate: rather the reverse. Was she perhaps a nomad drop-out who felt an inexplicable longing for the wider world and hoped somehow to reach it through a self-made marriage? Or was she simply an unconscious pioneer of feminism in the bush, freakishly individualistic and determined not to become any man’s property? Did she, I wondered, have a lover in Mayo Darle? I didn’t care to ask Jacqueline who, had she received any such confidence, would not have wished to break it.
The hours passed agreeably. Dijja herself prepared our ‘treat’ – aromatic fried butter, onion-flavoured and spiced. This was placed on the floor between us in a little bowl, together with a large communal bowl of cold rice left over from breakfast. Chunks of rice dipped in the hot butter sauce tasted surprisingly good and I stuffed myself while a relaxed triangular conversation flowed between Jacqueline, her friends and myself. Meanwhile the little boy – already an apprentice herd, when the cattle are nearer home – was romping desultorily with a half-grown dog of infinite tolerance who lay close beside Dijja when not being required to romp.
This family belonged to a group known as the Aku who speak their own dialect and have their own hair-styles and dances. They still migrate to and fro across the border mountains; Dijja was born in Nigeria. They have no conception of the world beyond their own territories. Douala means no more to them than Dublin. But the local markets are important, socially rather than economically. Twice or even thrice a week someone walks to a market – this may involve a thirty-mile trek – and returns full of entertaining gossip.
The latest gossip concerned an unusual domestic tragedy. Nomad marriages are arranged very early, sometimes during babyhood, though the ceremony never takes place until both partners are fully mature. However, husbands are free to choose their second and subsequent wives, which occasionally provokes friction – or worse. In this case an unprepossessing first wife became so jealous of a comely second wife that she bit off two of her rival’s fingers at the top joints and thrust her face into a kitchen fire, wedging it between the stones. The young woman was dreadfully scarred and her sight permanently damaged. Having recovered enough to walk, she took refuge in her parents’ compound – and stayed there. Which was the object of the exercise. The neighbours’ reaction to this drama proved how unusual it was. A self-contained society, operating beyond the laws of the land, also has to be self-regulatory. Therefore strong taboos ensure that such violent urges are usually repressed.
An hour or so after our rice course a huge bowl of delicious creamy curds was placed at our feet – and soon emptied. Some time later we were handed two filthy tin spoons and encouraged to help ourselves from a dish of thick, dark honey, newly gathered in the forest. It was faintly smoke-flavoured; a fire is lit below the hive – hanging from a tree – to disperse the owners. At this stage we restrained ourselves; honey is hard-won and an important nutrient.
Dijja also suffered from asthma and when an attack began Fatah rushed to fetch a large bottle of spray-on scent which she applied lavishly to her mother’s back as a ‘cure’. Those grotesquely incongruous ‘ First World’ fumes seemed to aggravate the attack but everyone inhaled them appreciatively and the little boy begged for scent on his hands; this was evidently a regular routine.
The maverick Fatah had her own tiny hut which it was de rigueur for me to visit before we left. A frame of rough branches supported a tousled grass thatch and there was just room for the three of us to stand beside the hide-covered pallet. On a little shelf above it stood an improbable array of shampoos, deodorants, insecticides, toilet soaps, scents and cosmetics. Plainly Fatah’s imagination had been seduced by the Big Bad World where not only cattle are important. She now impulsively decided to accompany us to Mayo Darle and spend the night in the Foxes’ bungalow, as she quite often did when the opportunity arose. But first a hen had to be caught; n
o honoured guest may leave a compound without a gift of a hen – or a cock, should he prove easier to capture. I carried the unfortunate bird back to the jeep.
Later I asked Jacqueline if, in her view, the Cameroonian villagers’ connubial sleeping arrangements mean that most couples’ sexual relationships are strictly functional, for the physical relief of males and the fertilisation of females.
‘Just so,’ replied Jacqueline. ‘Village women get their emotional satisfaction from mothering. They couldn’t even imagine what we mean by love-making – maybe that’s why they seem content without sex while suckling. It’s fantasy that Africans enjoy gloriously uninhibited, passionate, voluptuous sex-lives!’
Near Mayo Darle we met a young nomad woman carrying a large basin of milk to the market; having sold it she would buy the supplementary food needed during this in-between season. She sat behind with Fatah, on the spare tyre, and as we jolted down the track it distressed me to see much of her precious liquid sloshing onto the floor. She often drove with Jacqueline: this was not the first time she had lost a significant percentage of her load. Yet the basin was adequately lidded, had the lid been held firmly in place. I felt utterly baffled; she didn’t seem stupid and Jacqueline confirmed that in her own world she was shrewd and resourceful. But she couldn’t grasp the simple laws of science that prevent liquid from spilling in a jolting jeep.
This must be the sort of incident that prompted generations of White colonialists to scorn ‘thick Blacks’. It reminded me of our Bamenda conversation with an anguished and mildly intoxicated English architect who asserted – after working for fifteen years in Africa – that one cannot train a team of Black construction workers and then leave them to get on with the job.
‘Unless you’re supervising,’ he had said, ‘something will go radically wrong. Most Blacks are fine builders in their own styles but anything else defeats them. I don’t exactly mean intellectually – some of them learn very fast. But then they won’t concentrate. And all the basic principles we’ve taken for granted for centuries are new to them – so they won’t take them seriously if you’re not watching. I’m not talking only about modern technology – looking after machinery and so on. It’s more complicated. Seven hundred years ago we were building the great cathedrals of Europe. Seventy years ago, they were building mud so-called palaces – that was the apogee of their architectural ambition and still would be if we hadn’t come along. Is it racist to say this? Should we only think it? Or should we pretend it’s not true or doesn’t matter? But if you’re living and working here it does matter, one helluva lot! For your own peace of mind you’ve got to try to understand why Africa has such problems – otherwise you’d become professionally embittered and intolerant and really racist. And probably an alcoholic …’
Cameroon with Egbert Page 15