Cameroon with Egbert

by Dervla Murphy

  We quitted the hut before dawn, leaving all as we had found it (apart from the sugar box) and hoping our host would not feel compelled to burn his contaminated dwelling.

  Between us, during the next four hours, we must have covered at least sixteen miles – ascending and descending, peering into jungle patches, following stream beds, scrutinising little valleys from above. We found two more tiny compounds where communication was impossible but milk was offered.

  Back at base we ate more nuts – there was nothing else left – and admitted defeat. Surveying as much of the surrounding chaos as was visible from the camp, we realised that our task had in fact been simplified by the nature of the terrain: many places didn’t have to be searched because no equine animal could possibly reach them. By now we felt certain that Egbert was not straying within a radius of eight miles or so. Yet it was improbable that he had wandered farther on his own, simply because he could not have done so without tackling gradients that no sane horse, surrounded by good grazing, would even consider.

  ‘Either he’s been stolen,’ I said, ‘or he’s dead in one of those ravines. And why should anyone steal a horse when the place is swarming with them? I think he’s dead.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Rachel. ‘I’m sure he’s been stolen. The local horses are wild, you can tell no one ever goes near them. Egbert’s valuable if you need a broken horse.’

  ‘So who stole him?’ I demanded. ‘How many people have we seen since we got here? That timid family and a few men near the other compounds …’

  ‘I wouldn’t trust the two we met this morning,’ interrupted Rachel. ‘Maybe he’s been horsenapped and they’re waiting for us to offer a big reward – or hoping we’ll buy a donkey instead. If only someone spoke a few words of French!’

  I looked at my watch; it was 10.40 a.m. ‘Somehow we’ve got to hire a donkey,’ I said, ‘and it’s no good trying to communicate with the locals. Let’s go towards where we saw that grass-fire.’

  A difficult rocky climb took us onto quite a big path, which we later discovered was a route to Makelele. By one of those happy coincidences which spangled our Cameroonian experience, we reached the path as an elderly man in a sky-blue robe was passing by. He had the air of a man on a long journey but paused to greet us – and proved to be a brilliant sign linguist. Had a hidden television crew been filming our encounter they would certainly have produced a prize-winner: the Year’s Funniest Film, with my excellent imitation of a donkey braying as its highlight. In retrospect, one marvels at the complicated communications sometimes possible despite language barriers. It is safe to assume that we were something new in this man’s life – two filthy, haggard and more than slightly distraites Whites who had inexplicably lost a horse and were in need of a donkey to carry gear to Sambolabbo. Yet after five minutes of intense concentration he had grasped the essentials of the problem. A donkey was available in Hama Aoudi, the village from which he had come. Like our cyclist benefactor, he pointed to the sole of his new plastic shoe, then pointed to its print in the dust. By following his trail, we could hire an ‘Eee-aw, Eee-aw’. Wordlessly but powerfully, he conveyed sympathy for our predicament. There were tears in my eyes as I gratefully shook his hand; understandably, I was in an over-wrought state.

  That clear path was, at least towards Hama Aoudi, short-lived. Without shoe-prints we would have got hopelessly lost in a steep wilderness of volcanic boulders, leading to miles of undulating grassland criss-crossed by the usual cattle-tracks. There were no compounds in sight. Ahead, some two miles away, a long ridge of grey shale and loose rock stretched across the green plateau like a man-made wall. Crossing it we met a nomad migration, including three bulls carrying household goods. Their herds – an old lean horseman and two youths on foot – glanced at us with a blend of timidity and scorn. Here the shoe-prints were obliterated but from the ridge-top Hama Aoudi could be seen in the distance, a prosperous-looking crescent of compounds at the base of jumbled mountains.

  Half an hour later we were hesitating near the first compound – some distance away on our left, below the (now clear) path. Then a young man came towards us from that compound, carrying a small suitcase on his head, a trannie in one hand and a brolly in the other. Here was the answer to Rachel’s prayer: someone who spoke a few words of French. Babale Mbambo’s words were very few, yet he understood Rachel well enough. Frowning and looking worried, he beckoned us to follow him to the compound. There we could borrow or hire a pack-donkey, but the owner was up on the grassland, contemplating his cattle, so we must wait …

  An oddly unreal quality marks negotiations between people of vastly different cultures who are all the time struggling to overcome a language barrier. The rest of that day required us to abandon our own way of conducting affairs and take things as they came.

  While a youth went to fetch the donkey owner we sat on the verandah of a new guest hut, the only tin-roofed building in an attractive, shrub-surrounded compound. Its two empty rooms looked raw, as though the builders had just left. When a boy brought a large basin of boiled milk we emptied it so fast that Babale looked anxious, then led us to the next compound (his uncle’s, some 200 yards away) and ordered food.

  Uncle lay on his iron bed in a thatched hut listening to a Ramadan prayer-service being broadcast from an N’gaoundere mosque. His handshake was limp and fever-hot; he had been ill for weeks, Babale said. As we relaxed on goat-skins small children peeped – then fled, shrieking with half-real alarm, when we greeted them. Uncle smiled wanly and asked Babale to explain that nowadays village children don’t see Whites. Angst struck again when a boy arrived with freshly cooked fufu and a generous bowl of tender mutton in thick gravy – at a time of day when nobody cooks and during Ramadan … But despite our guilt we fell upon the food; we had after all recently expended vast amounts of energy, fuelled only by glucose tablets and nuts. As we ate Babale brewed strong tea in a kettle on a fire in the centre of the floor, then drew a battered holdall from under Uncle’s bed and produced four large white ‘shop buns’. Even by local standards these were very stale, yet to us delicious. And the symbolism was moving; shop buns are Hama Aoudi’s equivalent of caviare.

  Returning to the donkey compound, we remarked on the pitiable state of Uncle’s maize crop. Babale looked doleful and said that even if the rains came now they would be too late. Those parched and stunted shoots would have to be dug up and the fields replanted.

  Outside a small hut Babale removed his shoes and respectfully called, ‘Salaam Alaikum! Salaam Alaikum!’ as he bent to look through the entrance. Two grey-bearded gentlemen emerged – brothers, it seemed – both wearing flowery robes with the star and crescent embroidered on their caps. These donkey owners were malloums and Babale showed them the sort of deference normally reserved for chiefs.

  Two perilously unsteady chairs – evidently the products of some carpenter’s unpromising apprentice – had been placed on the verandah in anticipation of our return. A twenty-minute palaver followed and at one point the elders seemed upset and angry. Later Babale hinted that they believed Egbert to have been stolen; the three families who lived near our camp were not highly regarded locally.

  Gradually it emerged that all our hosts’ donkeys had gone to Sambolabbo on a trade mission and wouldn’t be back for days. (At the time – significantly – it never occurred to me to wonder why we weren’t told this on arrival.) Then it transpired that Babale, when we met him, had been setting out for the village of Mbabo, via our camp and the ‘timid’ compound. The elders suggested that before going on his way he should accompany us to Hama Aoudi’s Chief, who might be able to supply a donkey. But now new hope was flickering – though faintly. Just possibly Babale’s intervention might bring about a reunion … So we chose to return to camp with our interpreter. The elders then ceremoniously presented me with six new-laid eggs which I carefully placed in my bush-shirt breast pockets; by then I had brought the transportation of raw eggs to a fine art.

  Babale’s route – an effec
tive but nightmarish cut-short – bypassed the shale ridge and the conglomeration of boulders. Instead, it wound level around a bulge not far below the summit of the highest grassy mountain. This very narrow path was treacherously strewn with loose pebbles and overhung a 400-foot drop. On the long climb up from Hama Aoudi I had had to slow down for Babale’s sake; here he and Rachel had to slow down for mine. ‘There are horses for courses,’ shouted Rachel, watching me crawling around that ghastly bulge, my eyes averted from the chasm inches away to the right. In middle age one’s head for heights deteriorates dramatically.

  At the timid compound Father was as usual away with his cattle and Babale resolutely refused to talk to the womenfolk, either because that would have been improper or because he thought females too inferior to do business with – his attitude suggested the latter reason. We then urged him to leave us to fend for ourselves; he had already done far more to help two strangers than might reasonably have been expected. However, having ordered the eldest boy to fetch Father he moved to a nearby herd’s hut and lay down to sleep under a thin anti-fly cloak taken from his suitcase.

  Rachel looked anguished. ‘He’s devoting his whole day to us! And we can’t give him money! What can we give him?’

  ‘The watch,’ I said. Our gift-box held one good wrist-watch, purchased for just such an emergency.

  We lay outside the herd’s hut – envying Babale his fly-deterring cloak – and I remarked that his endeavours on our behalf perfectly illustrated the African attitude to time. When we met he was setting out on a long journey of some importance; he had an appointment with an ‘official’ (function unspecified) in Mbabo. Yet our difficulty, suddenly interposed between him and his goal, at once deflected him. What that moment presented took precedence over the future expectations of someone awaiting him in distant Mbabo. Had that someone been a White official they would very likely have reprimanded him for breaking an appointment and would not have been placated by his explanation that he was ‘helping people’.

  When Father arrived an hour later another long palaver began. He claimed to know nothing about Egbert’s disappearance; until then he had believed us to be the owners of the dying horse. The four local donkeys belonged not to him but to Dawa, who lived in one of the other two compounds we had visited during our search. Possibly the stallion might be borrowed, if anyone could catch him.

  Dawa’s compound lay below this mountain-top and Babale began the day’s third palaver from the edge of a sheer 200-foot cliff. The three of us sat on the brink, while Babale and Dawa shouted at each other. Then Dawa and a friend slowly ascended to our level – obviously feeling the effects of their Ramadan fast – and all five of us sauntered off, apparently in search of the donkey herd. We found Dawa unlikeable; he had a disconcertingly cruel mouth and shifty eyes. If anyone had stolen Egbert, it was probably he.

  Very gradually, this palaver bore fruit. The stallion could carry our gear as far as Hama Aoudi, but no farther. From there chiefs would organise transport to Sambolabbo via Makelele. On arrival in Hama Aoudi we were to unload the donkey, point him towards home and leave him to return on his own – a distance of some six miles. When we questioned this procedure Babale reassured us, ‘He will always hurry back to his wives and children!’

  An hour was spent finding the donkey herd and then it took five of us forty minutes to capture the stallion. Few people realise how swiftly donkeys can move, when they want to … We optimistically named him Angelo. (Many years ago, I had an unfulfilling relationship with an Ethiopian donkey named Satan.) At once Angelo’s forelegs were hobbled with a length of vine torn from a tree and as strong as nylon rope. Surprisingly, he did not object to this restriction and we then took a crash-course in the management of Cameroonian pack-donkeys. These are driven, not led, and are steered in the right direction by the waving of a very long stick, from behind, in such a way that the donkey glimpses the stick out of the corner of his eye. We practised this technique by driving him to the camp – a difficult uphill route – with Dawa in attendance. Babale had urged us to load up quickly and spend the night in his uncle’s compound. He disapproved of our sleeping in the bush and overlooked the fact that beginning the journey at 6 p.m. would mean driving an unknown donkey over a wide plateau by starlight: not a very practical idea.

  Dawa left us when we reached the ledge, offering no advice about loading Angelo. We then had a dress-rehearsal, in preparation for a dawn start. Ingeniously Rachel adjusted the girth and crupper – no mean feat – and we loaded up. The effect was comic; Egbert’s blanket met under Angelo’s belly and he looked like a furry toy beneath the load. But he accepted it philosophically and seemed bemused when it was at once removed.

  We were boiling our eggs when Babale, to whom we had already said goodbye, loomed out of the dusk. He had decided to spend the night at the timid compound but then began to worry lest, without an interpreter, we might have problems at Hama Aoudi. So he had undertaken another hour’s hard walking, on his Ramadan-empty tummy, to write a letter explaining our requirements. We provided pen and paper and he spent fifteen minutes laboriously requesting the Chief to help us, in Arabic script. Like many pupils of Cameroon’s Koranic schools, he was literate only in Arabic. This final thoughtful gesture quite overwhelmed us.

  At 5.45 a.m. we left our most beautiful and most ill-starred campsite – forever, as we then mistakenly thought. Dawa had warned us not to unhobble Angelo until we got to our destination, but his pathetic efforts to hop up dangerously rocky paths prompted us to risk freeing him and he behaved impeccably – trotting briskly, with ears pricked, once we reached the plateau.

  Hama Aoudi’s Chief was as surly as the village’s malloums had been gracious. Leaving Rachel and Angelo to wait outside his spacious compound, I caused much alarm by inadvertently intruding on the purdah quarter. Eventually I found the fat, grey-haired, scowling Chief sitting cross-legged in the morning sun reading an ancient edition of the Koran, inscribed in soot-ink and blood on yellowed parchment. Bibliomanically, I ached to examine this manuscript. But the Chief treated me with open contempt; appearances can count for a lot in Cameroon and by then I looked like something off a refuse dump. A minion was ordered to read Babale’s letter, the Chief declining to receive any document from my filthy paws. Happily the minion was sympathetic. When my entourage had been summoned many small hands unloaded Angelo, our two-litre water-bottle was filled with milk and two of the Chief’s thirty-four children (boys aged ten or so) were told to carry our gear to Makelele. To simplify life, I presented the picket and saddle to the Chief – who didn’t thank me. Meanwhile Rachel had led Angelo back to the track, where at once he began purposefully to trot towards his wives and children.

  An hour’s fast walking took us to Makelele, where our old friends provided bowls of milk and the Chief ordered Ibi, a muscular young Bantu, to carry our load to Sambolabbo. We protested that it was much too heavy for one man, however muscular, but our scruples were laughingly dismissed. Not for the first time, we remarked on the medieval quality of Cameroonian rural life. The exquisite courtesy of the Fulani ruling caste seemed not to belong to the twentieth century. And the relationship between the Chief and Ibi was – starkly – master-slave.

  Twenty minutes after our arrival we were leaving Makelele; that day was freakishly without delays – everywhere events moved at an un-Cameroonian tempo. Then the Chief came hurrying after us, waving a hen above his head and followed by a youth bearing a tray of gigantic tomatoes and half a stale baguette. The tomatoes and bread were for sustenance en route; the hen was for our supper. Appalled, we watched her being tied to the load on Ibi’s head. ‘This is worse than factory farming!’ muttered Rachel hyperbolically.

  We were about to continue when a tall, pot-bellied, dark-skinned man hastened down the slope on our right. He spoke fluent French and had an air of authority; he was a vet based in Banyo but with a junior wife and family in Makelele. His work took him all over the Tchabal Mbabo and he was quite sure that Egbert had been
horse-napped.

  ‘Please give me your address,’ he said. ‘To find this horse may take many weeks – you were among bad people – I know them! But if he is found I will write to you.’

  We gave him the Parkinsons’ address in Bamenda; later we realised that we should have told him about Egbert’s hernia as a ‘distinguishing mark’.

  Four hours later we were in Sambolabbo; the cut-short was so drastic and so perilous that we felt glad to have missed it with Egbert. A double guilt afflicted us as we watched poor Ibi toiling up near-vertical slopes like there would be no tomorrow – for him – while the wretched hen gasped on his head as though about to die of heatstroke. It soon became plain that Ibi was malarial, with a high temperature and severe headache; he made no fuss but his condition was dreadfully evident.

  ‘What must it feel like,’ said Rachel, ‘to have a malaria headache under a horse’s load?’

  Hoping that Ibi might not be fasting, we offered him food, glucose and pain-killers. But he was strictly observing Ramadan and, though pouring sweat all the way, he drank not even a sip of water. A learned mallourn could have told him that he was being over-scrupulous, that ‘the fever’ released him from his fasting obligations.

  Seeing the beer-truck outside Andrew’s bar, incredulity was our first reaction; we had been prepared to spend days in Sambolabbo, awaiting that truck. Now Andrew told us that within an hour it would be leaving for Banyo and on payment of 1,500 CFA (about £3.40) each we could have seats on the crates.

  Having dashed Ibi in proportion to the circumstances we urged him to rest until the following day; he grinned broadly and without even a moment’s pause headed back to Makelele.

  As we relaxed over ‘33’s, Rachel began to think about the ethics of adaptability. Should we have been assertive in Makelele and insisted on two men to carry? Should we have refused to accept the hen, thus sparing her the misery of that journey? When is it right to impose one’s own standards on other people? When is it wrong not to do so? At home it would be inconceivable for either of us to condone – let alone cause such cruelty to a man or a hen. Yet had Rachel not raised this question it would never have occurred to me. I had agonised every arduous step of the way over Ibi’s palpable misery and at each of three streams I watered the hen through a leaf. But it never entered my mind that I could have averted the sufferings of both.