When supper arrived – rice, avocados, stewed fresh fish – our host suddenly disappeared, perhaps to soothe the generator which had run out of fuel and seemed about to explode. A well-trained bitch and two pups sat patiently by the table while we ate. Then we discovered that Papa had quit his room for us. We lay feeling oddly regal on a high four-poster with twenty-two chief’s cloaks on hangers around the walls, forming a sort of tapestry. Many were very beautiful; Papa’s boast that each was worth 50,000 CFA (over £100) seemed plausible. Unfortunately the generator dwelt nearby and continued to growl and rattle all night while giving off near-toxic fumes. Across the flimsy partition the youngest wife and baby were sleeping close beside us; at intervals I could hear the contented snufflings of a suckling infant.
Before breakfast Papa showed us around his estate, some of which was devoted to the growing of medicinal herbs, bushes and trees. Fifteen of his progeny were already toiling in the fields and he acknowledged that he attached little importance to schooling. ‘You have much land like I have much land, you no need school for city jobs.’
If I kept a personal Book of Records, that morning’s breakfast would have to be entered as ‘The Biggest’. Avocados, mangoes, cocoyam, rice, jammu-jammu, fish and Bournvita – all in prodigious quantities. I walked back to Wum rather slowly, when Rachel and the rucksack had bounced off on the pillion. A slim eleven-year-old daughter accompanied me, bearing a huge basket of mangoes. To us it seemed barbarous that Papa on his machine should leave a child to carry such a load for five steep miles. But it would be unthinkable for him to be seen taking goods to the market, even by motor-bicycle. On the way the girl begged for money to buy shoes and I wondered, uncharitably, if she had been instructed to do so. Her manner suggested that this soliciting of funds did not come naturally to her.
Wum offers quite a choice of chop-houses, palm wine shebeens and off-licences. There are also two hotels, using that word in its loosest sense. When we found our passport problem still unresolved – Basil’s Monday order must have gone astray – we booked into the Happy Days Hotel at 1,000 CFA per person. This is not the place to go for happy nights. The staff of two young men lay asleep in the bar all day because their disco-cum-brothel operates until dawn seven nights a week. As we lay sweating and awake, hour after hour, the decibel-level became a form of mental torture. Even amplified Hindi film-music is far preferable to those abominations of the electronic age (chiefly Congolese and Nigerian) which made it impossible for even Rachel to sleep. However, the Happy Days lavatory quite often flushed and a tap beside it provided a reasonable supply of water. But unluckily our disintegrating balcony overlooked a gully full of banana plants and town garbage – and it was asphyxiatingly evident, especially after heavy showers, that many of Wum’s citizens do not have a lavatory.
The ‘Peace, Unity and Hygienic Restaurant’ became our favourite chop-house, as much because of its name as its cuisine – though that too pleased. There we met a unique (in our experience) individual, a Cameroonian who took AIDS seriously. He was aged thirty and eloquent: ‘Every evening I go home to my wife before dark! After dark is when I get tempted with women – in daylight I am safe. Now I stay always with my wife after dark, only with my wife. Before, I have plenty, plenty women – too much women! Now one woman only – I am very afraid!’
All along our route we tried to discuss the AIDS threat with our drinking-companions, male and female, and found many touchy on the subject. Some of the worldly-wise (police and army officers, government officials, secondary school teachers) dismissed the ‘AIDS from Africa scare’ as an invention of decadent, scapegoat-hunting Whites. The virus, they insisted, had been brought to Africa by American perverts and was not a serious threat because among Africans homosexuality is almost unknown. They refused to believe that African blood banked in Kinshasa in 1959 held HIV antibodies and were sceptical about the role of heterosexual promiscuity. Sometimes I quoted stark statistics: ‘A few months ago in one trucking town in eastern Zaire 76 per cent of barmaids were found to be HIV positive and 33 per cent of long-distance drivers passing through. And some of those were on their way to or from Cameroon.’ But statistics, however ominous, made no impression. As Rachel remarked, ‘They won’t take it seriously until they see their family and friends dying!’
Even if Cameroon’s government had the will, money, equipment and trained personnel to confront this crisis, there are formidable ‘mindset’ problems. Westerners now see a new disease as a challenge, but to most Africans disease remains something that must be accepted unless the medicine-man can intervene. So they react fatalistically to warnings about a new lethal virus. Also, they tend to live in the present and to become bored or impatient if advised to take precautions now to avert disaster several years hence.
The longer we spent in Cameroon the more I appreciated Professor John Mbiti’s stress on the importance of the African concept of time. To him an awareness of that concept is crucial to any understanding not only of African traditions but of African behaviour ‘in all areas of the modern world’. Africans, he explains, have always regarded time as two-dimensional:
… a long past, a present and virtually no future. The linear concept of time in Western thought, with an indefinite past, a present and an infinite future, is practically foreign to African thinking. The future is virtually absent because events which lie in it have not taken place, they have not been realized and cannot, therefore, constitute time … Actual time is what is present and what is past. It moves ‘backward’ rather than ‘forward’; and people set their minds not on future things, but chiefly on what has taken place … Since what is in the future has not been experienced, it does not make sense; it cannot therefore constitute part of time, and people do not know how to think about it – unless, of course, it is something which falls within the rhythm of natural phenomena … People have little or no active interest in events that lie in the future beyond, at most, two years from now; and many African languages lack words by which such events can be conceived or expressed. This basic concept of time underlies and influences the life and attitudes of African peoples in the villages, and to a great extent those who work or live in the cities as well. Among other things, the economic life of the people is deeply bound to their concept of time.
Our dangerous ‘time is money’ notion has no meaning in Africa where, as Professor Mbiti points out, apparently lazy people ‘are actually not wasting time, but either waiting for time or in the process of “producing” time.’ These incompatible attitudes to time have probably been at the root of more Black-White misunderstandings than anything else. The Black attitude explains a myriad everyday anomalies and what, in ‘the modern situation’, look like monumental official blunders. It often reduces to rubble those Five-Year-Plans so beloved of economists. And on the personal level it produces a remarkable number of abandoned, half-built swanky residences on the outskirts of Cameroonian towns. Nor is it unconnected with the (to us) inexplicable delay before our confiscated passports at last reappeared.
12
Trapped by Lake Nyos
BEFORE LEAVING WUM we called on the Catholic Mission and passed its neat camp for 250 of the 4,000 (or so) villagers displaced by the Lake Nyos tragedy and awaiting official decisions about their future. Many of those ‘aid’ tents were as big as a small hut. Some of the children were playing with the mangled remains of expensive Western toys. Not surprisingly, the camp seemed very quiet. There were none of the frabjous sounds – songs, laughter, cheerful teasing arguments – that normally emanate from groups of Cameroonians. We hesitated on the edge, longing to talk to these victims of one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious natural disasters. But we couldn’t bring ourselves to intrude on them. During the previous eight months, Wum had had more than its share of eagerly beavering journalists from every continent.
As we landed in Douala, on 18 March, almost one hundred scientists were mid-way through a six-day Yaounde conference to try to determine why Lake Nyos explode
d, on the evening of Thursday, 21 August 1986, releasing within an hour an estimated 1.3 billion cubic yards of toxic gases – mainly carbon dioxide. This gas instantly killed almost everyone in the village of Nyos and the surrounding compounds. About five hundred people were also killed in the neighbouring villages of Cha, Subum and Fang, as the heavy gas filled fifteen miles of river valley. More than 3,000 cattle died on the mountains around the lake – as did birds, snakes, insects. No creature was left alive.
The conferring scientists included vulcanologists, geophysicians, physicians, ethnologists and sociologists from Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia, North and South America. They debated the nature of the disaster and tried to decide whether or not it was likely to be repeated – either in Lake Nyos or one of the Grassfields’ other three dozen volcanic lakes – and also if any warning system could be devised. Subsequently we met a few experts who had stayed on to pursue their investigations from Bamenda’s tourist hotel, while they sought to rent a Bamenda house in which to install equipment which would tell them what was happening, at any given moment, on the distant floor of the 680-foot-deep lake. They entertained us with lively accounts of the usual experts’ in-fighting at Yaounde.
A minority faction, mainly Swiss, French and Italian, believed that a volcanic vent cap below the bed of the lake was blown off by the pressure of heavy gases which then, erupting through the water, followed the river course to the valley. They argued that similar disasters could happen elsewhere without warning, including in the dormant volcanic lakes of France, Italy and the United States. The American vulcanologists maintained that the gas had not been violently discharged from the lake floor but had gradually escaped and saturated the water. Felix Tahoun, a Cameroonian scientist, agreed in principle with the Americans, but believed the release had been triggered by a massive rock-fall or some other external agent such as a particularly fierce storm. (August is the real rainy season, during which daily storms make those we experienced seem like April showers.) Oddly, no one seems to have asked why the experts, instead of dissenting about the possible role of a rock-fall, had not expended some of their energy, during the previous months, on looking for evidence of such – which would surely be visible to the naked scientific eye, or indeed to any observant eye.
Professor Tchaou of Yaounde University also supported the American theory and argued that it should be possible to monitor and siphon off accumulated gases from all Cameroon’s potentially lethal lakes. He and his Cameroonian colleagues urged the founding of a National Centre for the Study of Natural Risks, which would monitor crater lakes as its first duty. Alas! this is the sort of ‘prestige project’ which over-excites too many Third World academics and governments – though on such matters the Cameroonian government is more levelheaded than most. It would be monstrously expensive to establish and fund. It would offer fat salaries to an elite corps of scientists. Its monitoring, if done efficiently, might possibly, at some future date, save another village from extinction; but the resources thus squandered would be out of all proportion to the good achieved, given the fact that most Cameroonian towns and all villages lack adequate (or any) health care. And in Cameroon’s hospitals patients have to provide not only their own food, fuel and bedding, but their own medicines, dressings, hypodermic needles, plaster of paris – you name it, they must buy it. Natural Risks would therefore seem to be a less pressing danger than humdrum diseases.
After the Yaounde conference (sponsored by UNESCO and other money-wasting international organisations) various newsagencies naively reported ‘lengthy on-the-spot investigations by experts from all over the world’. In fact not many scientists spent much time around Lake Nyos, though during the months after the tragedy they enthusiastically attended Nyos conferences in Hawaii and elsewhere. One American team, neglected by its helicopter, was stranded on the shore for days – of course without camping equipment, as they had expected to be back in Bamenda for sundowners. Apparently it occurred to none of them to go to Bafmeng, scarcely six hours walk away. I’d like to have been a fly on the cliff-face during those days.
The media also announced that 1,746 people had been killed by Lake Nyos, the figure decided upon by the government for global consumption. Local estimates varied from one to two thousand. Given the Cameroonian vagueness about figures, and the circumstances of the burials – most very hurried, under quicklime – there could be no question of anyone compiling accurate statistics. Especially as the military and police gravediggers, and collectors of decomposing bodies, were themselves distressed, unnerved and often terrorised by their task. Several deserted, escaping over the mountains, and have not been heard of since.
The Yaounde conference was unanimous on only one point: the locals should not be allowed to return to the evacuated area (some forty square miles) until many more scientific observations had been made. Nobody in authority took account of the fact that some of the villagers and Fulani compound dwellers would have preferred to risk another explosion rather than to sit around indefinitely in the demoralising atmosphere of the ‘refugee’-camps – in Wum, Nkambe and other points. In the camps rumours were constantly circulating and no one could find out what was likely to happen to them in the future – could they return to their land or would they be resettled elsewhere?
So far as is known, comparable disasters have taken place on only three other occasions this century: in Indonesia in 1979 (seventeen killed), near the Columbian volcano of Turace in 1949 (sixteen killed), and on the Indian Ocean island of Karthala in 1903 (deaths not recorded). It would be interesting to know if any of those areas has similar religious beliefs centred on local lakes. In Cameroon the spirits of Fons and other important religious and military figures dwell in lakes, which also have their own powerful tutelary spirits – how powerful, Lake Nyos proved.
Oddly enough, those puzzled by the sparse population of the Aghem highland, quite close to Lake Nyos, seem never to have speculated about the strong local tradition of (in Bantu terms) cosmic catastrophe. Yet there are vivid ancient legends of exploding lakes and ‘walking’ fish – live fish thrown in their thousands onto lake shores. The recently arrived Fulani, who settled happily in Aghem, are not so culturally and emotionally enmeshed with lakes – though already they have been, to some extent, influenced by Bantu feeling.
In hot Benikuma we had eagerly asked the way to the local crater lake, hoping for a swim. But we were advised, begged, persuaded and almost ordered to avoid it. Therefore we did so. Given the post-Nyos twitchiness, we might have greatly upset the locals by breaking some taboo and thus angering the lake’s spirits. (Or we might have felt, as at Lake Ocu, that we didn’t after all feel like swimming …)
When we left Wum, to find our bush-path way to Bafmeng, Nkambe and the Mbembe Forest Reserve, we knew little about the details of the Nyos disaster – the human details, as distinct from the scientific debate. The unspoken taboo had restricted in-depth conversations to the Bamenda scientists. Otherwise our information was sketchy, picked up at the time of the explosion from vague media reports.
Somehow we mislaid Bafmeng; none of the paths that we had been told about in Wum was marked on our map. After two days’ exhilarating trekking – through narrow valleys, some rugged, some lush, and over high Fulani territory – we found ourselves at sunset on the wide summit of a long grassy ridge. (The final stage of that climb had been the steepest yet, an Ndung descent in reverse.) There we spent a psychologically uncomfortable night in a large Bantu compound of tall square dwellings. The many men, women and children seemed unaccountably scared of us and never relaxed, though their hospitality was lavish. No one spoke a syllable of any recognisable language, which was particularly unfortunate because at that stage we were, even by the standards of the Murphys in Cameroon, very lost.
We left at dawn – the sky a quiet glory of dove grey and shell pink –and soon reached a puzzling turn of the broad path. It was visible for miles ahead, decisively going away from Nkambe. Yet there was no obvious alternative. Near
a rich hamlet-sized Fulani compound we sat beside a handsome herd (chocolate or white-and-grey-speckled) and waited for milkers to appear. From this western edge of the ridge we were overlooking a beautiful but baffling world of many other crisscrossing ridges, stretching away to the horizon. Directly below – some 1,500 feet below – was a mile-wide irregular chasm, its jungly sides almost sheer, its floor a confusion of twisting streams, neglected cassava fields and thick scrub. Beyond rose a solitary rock peak – square and grey, a parody of an English Norman church tower based on a steep grassy mountain. Apart from the unsuitable path we had abandoned, none other was visible, anywhere; but we presumed pathlets existed.
Soon two elegantly gowned young Fulanis appeared, accompanied by tiny herd-boys wielding sticks twice as long as themselves. We asked, ‘Nkambe?’ They spoke some English and by then Rachel spoke scraps of Foulfoulde. It became clear that to get to Nkambe we must first get to Ise, a village not marked on our map. And to get to Ise we must descend into the chasm, cross a river, climb around the base of the churchy peak, turn left along a bouldery saddle and continue up and up to the crest of a high forested ridge where we would find a big track going direct to Ise. Then, before entering the village, we must turn right onto a small path which, after a few days, would join the ring-road near Nkambe.
Four strenuous hours later (the details of negotiating that chasm could themselves fill a chapter) we were on the Nkambe path with Ise about a mile away on our left. Near where we left the track, many military tents on a hillside puzzled us – the only army camp we saw in Cameroon.
Cameroon with Egbert Page 33