‘I’ll take the rucksack,’ offered Rachel.
‘Oh no you won’t!’ I said. ‘It’s better to die at fifty-five than at eighteen.’
‘You mean we’re not going back?’ deduced Rachel.
‘Evidently not,’ I said. ‘Onward non-Christian soldiers!’
It was a three-hour descent, inducing indescribable hypertension; as an ascent it would have been harder on the body but much easier on the nerves. It was even worse than it looked. The rains had made it slippy. Small rocks, hidden by the vegetation, lurked to be stumbled over. Thin, taut vines were stretched like trip-wires within the vegetation. This was only my second day as a porter and I had not yet fully adjusted to the rucksack. (Later, it seemed to become part of my body.) I fell five times, Rachel twice. And that first precipice was not the end of the matter. We then had to climb another ridge, the descent from which was if possible even more gruelling because much wetter and impeded by hostile vegetation. But I learned something that afternoon; when the chips are down vertigo is a controllable condition because not controlling it would be fatal. Afterwards we remarked on the irony that ‘tame’ Cameroon had presented one challenge more formidable than anything encountered in the Himalayas or the Andes. We became instant-folk-heroines in Ndung when it was realised how we had arrived. Cameroonian villagers are not sissy but very, very few of them use that route.
Our ‘brake’ thigh muscles were throbbing as we sat gulping ‘33’s in Ndung’s one small huxters-cum-off-licence. And our hands were shaking, as Mr Bernard Ngu astutely observed.
‘You are too tired,’ he said, ‘you are shivering. From Bamenda you can get bush-taxi to Ndung. That would be better.’ He told us then about his fourteen-year-old daughter who, having had malaria for two weeks, had just developed a very high fever.
At once we provided a chloroquin course and Rachel wrote out, in capital letters, how many should be taken and when. We expected Mr Ngu to hurry off to administer the first dose. Instead, he pocketed the pills, ordered himself another beer and settled down to expatiate on St Patrick about whom he knew an inordinate amount. He was the only teacher at the local Catholic Mission school. The local Presbyterian Mission school had two teachers: ‘Always in this province there is too much Presbyterians.’ We were invited to spend the night in his sister’s compound; he had come recently to Ndung and while building his own house was renting two rooms from her.
It was dark as we slithered down a steep muddy slope, beside the off-licence, to a large palm- and banana-surrounded compound. The L-shaped house had eight rooms leading off the verandah and another row of rooms behind. Yet for all its prosperity this was not a happy compound; eddies of ill-feeling swirled and the numerous children looked unusually cowed. Sister’s husband worked in Bamenda; the whereabouts of Mr Ngu’s wife was not disclosed but she seemed to be elsewhere. He could have only one wife: ‘As teacher in a Catholic school it is too much difficult! I lose my job if I take more wives and to get teaching jobs is not easy.’
In the outer of Mr Ngu’s two rooms his fevered daughter lay on an iron bed; despite Bamenda’s nearness, she seemed pathetically frightened of us. The only other furniture was a long wooden bench where we sat hoping for fufu, having assured Mr Ngu that we had our own bedding and could sleep on the floor. When I reminded him of the chloroquin in his pocket he administered the first dose, gently and kindly. Then he fetched supper from the kitchen-hut on the far side of the compound; Africans deplore our nasty habit of cooking and sleeping under the same roof. Again it was rice and chicken; in this area rice is now popular, especially at the end of the dry season when maize stocks are running low. Sister’s rice tended towards sogginess and the stewed chicken had not been a chicken for a very long time. Mr Ngu placed the lantern on the floor by the two dishes; it would have illuminated them more effectively had he left it on the bench.
During the meal our host donned another mantle when an old woman arrived and grovelled on the ground beseeching a cure; Mr Ngu was, it seemed, a medicine-man in his spare time. After much palaver the patient gladly paid 600 CFA and a plump cock for an ounce of ground dried bark enfolded in a page of my notebook. Then she took her leave with respectful – almost worshipful – gestures and murmurings of gratitude.
‘My brother’ then joined us – an all-purpose kinship term meaning in this case sister’s husband’s brother. He hopefully asked if we would like some mimbu and was soon back with a gallon of the most powerful palm-wine I have drunk anywhere. It was more than twice the legal controlled price, but worth it. A few other men drifted in and we all became agreeably tiddly and discussed taking snuff instead of smoking (Mr Ngu had switched ten years ago ‘for health and money reasons’), and comparative cuisines and African politics.
‘South Africa needs Whites to run it,’ pronounced Mr Ngu, little guessing what effect his words would have on an anti-apartheid demo in Trafalgar Square. ‘It is a big rich modern state, too complicated for Black men to run alone. My father tells how more convenient Cameroon was under White men. Schools better, hospitals better, roads better. And seventy years ago there was fast telegrams where now we have not even slow mail!’
Poor Mr Ngu had a broken night. Twice his daughter needed to be escorted across the dark compound to the latrine and thrice she awoke screaming – expecting us, sleeping at the end of her bed, to kill her before dawn. No doubt the mimbu helped me to sleep well in between those interruptions, despite a moderate number of mosquitoes and a very bumpy floor – which was also, as we saw in the morning, very dirty. For all its many rooms and luxuriant garden, that was a slummy compound.
Achu is the Cameroonian dish most dreaded by expatriates. Joy Parkinson had told me of what and how it is made; the details were so horrendous I deliberately forgot them lest one day we might encounter it. And now it appeared for breakfast, a delicacy triumphantly borne from the kitchen by our host in honour of his White guests. It looks exactly like the sludge workmen dump on the road when clearing blocked sewers and its looks do not belie it. Mr Ngu kindly taught me how to cope with this ultimate gastronomic abomination, which comes on a vast communal dish, forming a semi-solid lake in a crater of whitish slimy dough. One takes a portion of dough in one’s fingers, working inwards from the edge of the dish, and having thoroughly mixed it with achu the consequent nauseating ball must be swiftly transferred to the mouth before it slithers through the fingers. On the previous evening, as we discussed international eating habits, I had by a cruel coincidence mentioned that breakfast is my main meal of the day.
‘This is sustaining food for your main meal,’ beamed Mr Ngu. ‘When we have finished all you can have more. In the kitchen is much more—don’t be shy!’
I stretched my face in a ghastly grin and mixed and slurped and gulped and felt myself going pale beneath my tan.
Rachel had gone pale as the Achu was unlidded. ‘I never eat breakfast!’ she asserted traitorously.
On our arrival Mr Ngu had assured us that it was not necessary to find the latrine: ‘In an African compound you can make water anywhere, the latrine is only necessary for different matters.’
This is untrue of Fulani – and many other Cameroonian – compounds, but it accounted for the ammoniacal pong around Sister’s homestead. After breakfast, when different matters took me to the stinking latrine behind the kitchen hut, an adolescent girl was shovelling its contents onto the roots of nearby banana plants. I decided not to share this observation with my more fastidious daughter; bananas were likely to be our staple food during the weeks ahead.
Mr Ngu begged us to visit his school: ‘It is good for me if I bring White friends to look at my scholars.’ We climbed steeply on slippy red mud paths, between fields of high maize, to a broad ridge-top. The large State school had not yet opened but Mr Ngu’s smaller academy, a two-roomed hut, was already full of large industrious pupils, sharing dog-eared text-books at crudely made desks. He coped alone with six classes, three in each room – a total of eighty-four scholars. Simple su
ms had been chalked on the blackboards and fly-blown alphabet pictures hung crookedly on the walls, interspersed with children’s poems – one of them touchingly good, about the rains coming. Mr Ngu’s intelligence had underwhelmed us, yet here one sensed more effort being made than in the average State school.
As we said goodbye a ragged young man came panting up the hill and insisted on our seeing the Catholic church. We followed him down to the ring-road and were nonplussed when confronted by an apparently abandoned mud but with a pile of stones at one end (‘The altar,’ our guide assured us) and a few tree-trunk pews lying on the floor. A gourd money-box lay by the pile of stones. ‘You dash Christ,’ urged the young man. I pretended not to hear; my CFA-padded hips were slimming faster than expected.
It was already too hot when we left Ndung at 8.30 a.m. For hours the terrain restricted us to the ring-road but this Metchum valley is so lovely – winding between high grassy or forested mountains, or through placid widths of cultivation – that we were not impatient to leave it. And all morning only three vehicles passed: the omnipresent beer-truck, an expatriate Aid Land Rover and a bush-taxi which paused to invite us on board.
Our bread-and-bananas elevenses were enjoyed by the Metchumm Falls, sitting on a cliff-edge beneath a cool canopy of trees with white water crashing and seething very far below our feet. These Falls are among Cameroon’s most boasted-of tourist attractions but as yet mercifully ‘undeveloped’. Mr Ngu had apologised for this: ‘You will pass the Metchum Falls but I’m sorry our government has made nothing nice there for tourists.’
‘It’s dramatic enough now,’ said Rachel, ‘so what must it be like after the rains?’
‘Let’s hope,’ said I predictably, ‘they never do make anything nice for tourists.’
‘You forget,’ retorted Rachel, ‘that tourists don’t want to sit on damp red soil in their nice new tropical outfits, being tortured by flies with ants dropping out of the trees into their hair. They need shiny little prefab cafes with red and blue plastic chairs.’
I shuddered, too easily able to visualise just that, when Cameroon’s ‘tourist potential’ has been realised.
The Metchum River is only occasionally visible from the road but at noon the heat drove us to seek it; we had been told swimming was safe if one picked one’s spot with care. While attempting to follow a dried-up stream-bed, deep in a ravine, we were thwarted by dense jungle. Then we had to climb an exhausting cliff covered with golden grass – tough, dusty, four feet high – and ‘fortified’ with piles of menacingly sharp pineapple leaves dumped from a nearby field.
Back on the road, I used the umbrella as a sun-shade and we collected ten unripe but delicious mangoes, lying under trees, and bought a papaya from a fruit-stall at a compound entrance. The uninspiring cross-roads village of Befang coincided with a torrential downpour during which we fruit-ate and diary-wrote in a would-be-smart (concrete and plastic) off-licence. Unusually, we were the only drinkers. A few youths begged for cigarettes, a few women sidled past the door to inspect us, a few small boys settled in a corner to watch us writing – and seemed mesmerised by the speed and unhesitancy of our pens. But that place felt rather unwelcoming, until an idiot girl laughingly presented us with kolanuts and softly stroked our arms.
The humidity was extreme when we continued under a cloudy sky. Now we had left the ring-road and our muddy path soon dropped to river level via a spectacular stairway of slippy boulders. In the depths of a tree-darkened gorge an old colonial suspension foot-bridge crossed the Metchum – eighty feet below, loudly surging between sheer rock cliffs. A faded but still legible notice reminded the natives that NOT MORE THAN TEN PEOPLE MAY CROSS THIS BRIDGE AT ONE TIME. Even in the colonial era, did anyone heed that well meant flourish of British paternalism?
Half-way across, I paused above the foaming brown torrent. That solid plank bridge, with firm handrails, was still sound. Time’s ravages, though perceptible, were not yet alarming; even such modest constructions have a way of outlasting empires. I gazed up at a mountain with a difference, cloaked in subtropical semi-rain forest. The mighty palms, taller than any seen elsewhere, were mingled with a variety of other, unidentifiable, giants. And the bridge ended as it had begun, with a boulder-stairway that took us straight into a moist, green-tinged twilight.
The next few hours had a magical, almost eerie quality: we seemed to be in a fantasy world. Nothing was familiar – fruits, berries, nuts, ferns, fungi, vines, mosses – even the leaves were strangely shaped and hued. The sounds and smells were also new; muted bird calls, though we saw no birds, and an amorphous rustle peculiar to this place as thousands of palm-fronds imperceptibly swayed all around and far above us.
This area gets more than its fair share of rain. The air was pungent with the odours of permanent damp, piquant fungi and who knows what mysterious, powerful herbs – the raw material of medicine-men. Sometimes the path was an almost sheer slope of skiddy mud and we had to help each other up. Sometimes streams racing to the Metchum formed miniature waterfalls, leaping from ledge to ledge. Occasionally the path wound level around outcrops of rock, from which massive webs of roots and vines hung like man-traps; on those stretches the black liquid mud was inches deep. Once this path must have been a main route, hence the bridge. Now it seems little used; on the southern side of the range a circuitous motor-track links Mukuru with the ring-road. We met only one man – not in a sociable mood – carrying a spear and followed by four hunting dogs wearing belled collars. These hounds– resembling black whippets but lower and with broader heads–had crossed our path several times before, always with hunters. This was the only distinct breed we saw in Cameroon.
Suddenly we came out on a ledge where the forest was no less dense but consisted of fewer palms and many more unidentifiable giants. Then we were surprised by a hamlet in a semi-clearing, a dozen small huts embedded in riotous greenery. This was the most forlorn settlement we came upon in Cameroon. How, why and when had these people been squeezed onto their hidden ledge? Not many were about; both men and women looked dispirited, debilitated and, when we appeared, apprehensive. Only one very old man, with a bad limp, seemed unafraid. Struggling to remember his few words of English, he gave me a military salute. From here a selection of pathlets led into the forest and, having shown us the right one, this veteran persistently demanded dash – the only Cameroonian who sought a reward for guiding us.
A gradual climb took us onto rugged grassland where cattle grazed. Their small herd deserted at speed as we emerged from the trees and watching him vanish over a hilltop I wondered, ‘How many Olympic Gold Medallists are blushing unseen in Cameroon’s mountains?’
‘Poor little chap!’ said Rachel. ‘Now he’ll be beaten …’
The sky had cleared and at this altitude the sun felt pleasantly hot. As we ate more bananas, the USAF told us that from the bridge we had climbed almost 3,500 feet. Yet all day our pace had been slower than usual; leg muscles take time to recover from an Ndung descent. Some two miles ahead, beyond gullies and spurs, we could see a long, low forested ridge, which didn’t feel low when the time came to climb it. On this severe gradient the forty pounds in our rucksack seemed like eighty. Here a square mile or so had recently been burnt; maize and groundnuts grew between prone tree carcasses. But over the top the forest was untouched and Mukuru remained invisible until we were there – on the outskirts of a widespread village, its neat substantial square huts glowing orange-red in the slanting light. When we asked a puzzled but smiling young woman the way to the Fon’s palace she called her little son and told him to guide us.
The compound of Chief Foto, Fon of Mukuru, lacks Bafut’s grandeur but retains all that Bafut has lost. It is a village in itself, complex, crowded and purposeful. Long irregular rows of mud-brick rooms occupy three sides of the sloping square. (Everything in Mukuru slopes.) A newish bungalow-type but stands on the highest ground, overlooking all. There the Fon has his Reception Hall-cum-office, an austere little room furnished only with the ch
iefly bamboo stool (actually a chair) opposite the doorway, and a small desk-table and chair by the unglazed window. He was busy with paperwork when we arrived, being among those Fons who have been incorporated into the Republic’s bureaucracy.
Chairs were at once unfolded on the narrow verandah. Before greeting the Fon we had removed our noisome boots and socks – exuding a deadly miasma of sweat and black mud – and discreetly left them around a corner. Now motor-tyre flip-flops were provided by a young woman too shy to do more than giggle when addressed. Then a thirteen-year-old son, who spoke fluent English, brought a dish of juicy mangoes – whereupon a plump nanny-goat, tethered nearby and clearly a spoiled pet, demanded the skins by placing her forefeet in my lap and thrusting her nose into my face. Consternation! – followed by relief when my predilection for goats was revealed by the simple expedient of hugging this cheeky creature and scratching her between the horns. As she hoovered mango skins from the verandah, less favoured relatives looked on enviously from beneath the eaves of thatched huts.
Soon our page was back: ‘Do you need hot water?’ He looked relieved when we said no and led us to a pile of large, round stones, reeking of urine and semi-encircled by a scrap of old tin roof. This high ground at the edge of the compound allowed an unimpeded view of our most memorable Cameroonian sunset. Above a corrugation of dark forested crests, masses of many-layered clouds became a celebration of bronze, green, gold, rose, saffron, plum. And against that pandemonium of shifting colours were silhouetted a lone giant palm and the pointed golden roofs of many huts.
Back on the Fon’s verandah, Rachel counted twenty-eight small children simultaneously in view, the seniors wearing school uniform. Many women were returning from the fields with hoes on heads. Others squatted outside huts, preparing stacks of greenery for jammu-jammu; like spinach, it reduces radically in the pot. On one long verandah a young woman was grinding maize in a hand-mill – a rusty, cumbersome machine, yet a liberation. Pounding corn is among the African woman’s most strenuous tasks. This was the first family hand-mill we had seen, though communal machines are quite usual in large villages and towns. As children scuttled to and fro, fetching water and firewood, the smoke of a dozen fires began to rise from various corners. Just below our verandah, one woman was endeavouring to split a long knotted branch against the grain. With baby on back, she hacked and hacked – her axe identical to those used 1,200 years ago by the people of the Grassfields. I was being tempted to intervene when the Fon, having cleared his desk, invited us inside.
Cameroon with Egbert Page 28