Father James, sixty hours after the event, and before meeting any other White with whom to discuss the situation, wrote a report to his bishop which said almost as much about the causes and consequences of the explosion as any of the scientists’ reports after their series of expensive international conferences.
As I panted after my laden but speeding daughter – she must have been attaining five miles per hour – it occurred to me that her speed was futile. Darkness was coming early, under a low, leaden, sullen sky, and we were still passing stricken compounds. According to the map, all Rachel’s hurry could achieve would be our arrival at another ghost village before nightfall. (Subum, where Father James found his cherished Anthony burying friends – though we were then unaware of those details.) Beside the track raced the fatal river, narrow and mud-brown and swift even on the valley floor. Rocky mountains rose close by on either side; between them and us were fields of tall coarse olive-green grass mixed with overgrown dying cane. Soon we would have to camp on the muddy track, unless we chose to share a compound with the dead.
Here the ring-road (we had sufficiently recovered our wits to identify it) was in ruins; no heavy vehicle could possibly have used it. If the little rains can cause such havoc, what must it be like in August? No wonder news of Nyos was slow to get out and help for survivors slow to get in. Twice we came to vegetation barriers, bushes heaped on the track with shreds of cloth tied to them. I mistook the first for a ju-ju, then realised these must be to warn vehicles that the ground beneath had subsided and was flooded, requiring extraordinary action. But what vehicles?
As the light faded I trotted to catch up with Rachel and propose settling down on the track before another compound/burial plot came into view. Then we turned a corner and were astounded to see a bush-taxi jerkily heaving itself towards us through the mud. It stopped. We stopped. For an odd little moment nobody moved. We stood staring, the passengers were evidently doing likewise. Then we advanced – and a gendarme in a strange uniform emerged.
We asked, ‘Where is the next village?’ – meaning inhabited village.
That gendarme may have been as unnerved by our appearing out of the empty dusk as we had been by the tragic young Fulani’s materialisation. He was extremely angry, as some people tend to be in reaction to such scares. Banging his fist on the vehicle’s bonnet he said we had broken the law – we were in a Restricted Zone – no vehicle was allowed to pass through without a Special Security Police escort, no pedestrian was allowed without a permit from Yaounde! Did we have a permit from Yaounde? No? Then where did we think we were going? The way we were heading there was no village for forty-four kilometres. There were no compounds, no human beings, everyone was dead or evacuated. We were arrested, he must take us to Wum where we would be punished.
Was ever anyone so happy to be arrested? Not a night in the rain on the track among the dead but Wum – Gussie, Papa, Chief Barnabas, the Happy Days Hotel, the Peace, Unity and Hygienic Restaurant and above all our dear Basil who would surely somehow stand between us and punishment …
The gendarme said we must ride on the roof; there was no space inside. The roof consisted of a few iron struts. My adaptability failed. Criminals we might be; ride on those struts, in the dark, over the chasms of the ring-road, we would not. Those rare moments when one becomes a bully seem shameful in retrospect yet feel like common sense at the time. Among the passengers some two youths must be better equipped than we were – physiologically and psychologically – to ride those struts to Wum. It embarrasses me to recall that fracas. Briefly I became autocratic and declared that we would not allow ourselves to be arrested unless we could ride inside, in the back of the vehicle – we weren’t demanding extra-special treatment, like front seats. The gendarme then batoned two youths as he ordered them onto the struts; neither had protested, seemingly he struck them as a precautionary measure to ensure that they wouldn’t. Everybody was edgy, there in the twilight, with restless spirits – their burials unceremonial and therefore unsoothing – roaming the canefields and the mountainsides.
Later I guiltily asked Rachel, ‘Was that “racism”, throwing my weight about to get us inside?’
After a moment’s thought she replied, ‘No, it was what’s now known as “classism”!’
‘Inside’ was no big deal. I don’t know what happened to Rachel but I was sitting on a knobbly sack of unripe mangoes behind the driver’s seat with a heavy tin trunk on my feet and a sharp object, in the pocket of the fat man beside me, sticking into my left hip. Wedged somewhere above me was an incontinent kid. Spurts of warm urine trickled down my back at frequent intervals. When the dramas of the road surface partly dislodged the creature it was able to establish an even closer relationship and began frantically to suckle my left ear.
‘You are not comfortable,’ understated the youth on my right, attempting to thwart the kid.
‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured him, ‘I like goats.’ (Oddly enough, this was still true.) ‘But,’ I added, ‘if you could ask the gentleman on my left to adjust the sharp object in his pocket I’d be much obliged.’
‘He can’t move,’ the youth pointed out. ‘There is little room. In this bush-taxi are too many people.’ But when we stopped at the next subsidence, where everyone had to disembark and pull on ropes to get the vehicle across, the fat man politely adjusted his sharp object. I had not been neurotically imagining sharpness; it was a new spearhead.
On re-embarking, a replacement hazard appeared before my eyes. One of the youths condemned to ride the struts was now directly above me and his huge bare feet, with rock-hard heels, swung in front of my face, banging my cheeks and forehead as the taxi bucked and slithered. ‘Lean forward!’ urged the solicitous youth on my right. ‘Then you will be more safe.’ ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘Someone’s cauldron is on my lap.’
This Nyos youth, Martin, had lost all but one of his family. Only he and his sister, both then at school in Wum, had survived. She was sitting in front – with a ludicrous number of other comparatively privileged people – being chatted up by the gendarme. As we passed through Cha, seven miles from Nyos but also stricken, Martin pointed towards a mountain bulking black on our left. Its lower slopes had belonged to his uncle – now, with all his immediate family, dead. Many, many acres of bananas grew on those slopes and Martin thought it cruel of the government not to allow survivors to return briefly to the area, if only on police-escorted day-trips, to harvest all the good food being wasted. ‘This would be better for people than sitting idle in camps.’
Our taxi was an ex-limousine, converted to a pick-up. ‘Nothing bigger can go on this road,’ said Martin. ‘It is not a good road.’
Near Cha another subsidence required more extraordinary action. As the vehicle was being hauled across this chasm, we were startled by demented abusive screams. Momentarily the headlights showed an old man, almost naked and with wild hair, running by the edge of the track pointing a stick at us. ‘He has gone crazy,’ Martin explained. ‘He came back from Nkambe to his compound and all were dead and taken and buried – no one knew where. Now he looks and looks, he does not believe they are dead. He lives like a monkey on fruit. If anyone tries to catch him he fights. But he was a very quiet old man.’
Martin and his sister were returning to relatives in Wum (‘They are trying to give us a new family’) after a visit to friends in the biggest camp, near Nkambe. All our fellow-passengers, he said, had been directly involved in the Nyos tragedy. ‘Only such people now have permission to travel through this Restricted Zone, with the Special Security Police to guard them and watch them and not let them go running back to their fields. With time passing more people want to go home, when at first they were too afraid. But I would not like to return – it would make me cry again.’
Soon after, the storm broke; we stopped again and a tarpaulin was spread over the struts. It would in any case have been inadequate: with two passengers up there it was a bad joke. However, those unwittingly brutal feet had now disappe
ared; the youths were lying full length under the tarpaulin. I began to fret about them as we descended, swerving and skidding on that narrow track above sheer drops too well illuminated by sky-wide sheets of blue lightning. It would be our fault, only, if they were pitched into the abyss … The fat man beside me, squashed against the side-struts, bore the full force of the gale-driven rain and occasionally whimpered softly, like a distressed puppy – a surprising sound from his vast bulk. Martin and I, in the middle, were less exposed but far from protected. It was suddenly very cold and I began to look forward to those warm dribbles from above where the kid was now bleating feebly in sodden misery. Somewhere towards the rear Rachel – also against the struts – was using very bad language sotto voce.
Certain interludes, if one hadn’t kept a diary and written it all down at the time, would afterwards seem like mere hallucinations – not credible to oneself, never mind anyone else. The few hours after our arrival in Wum come into that category.
As the true rainy season approaches Cameroon’s storms lengthen, sometimes continuing all night, and it was still down-pouring when we stopped outside the Happy Days Hotel. (After the Nyos silence, those dire disco decibels sounded almost agreeable.) Moving off the mango sack, I fell into Martin’s arms – my feet had been numbed by the tin trunk. Our captor then ordered us to stay put and we assumed everyone else would disembark. Six did, including an enraged young woman who owned the mangoes. She claimed that my weight had rendered them unsaleable and demanded 6,000 CFA (about £13) compensation. The SSP officer shouted to her to get lost but for her the SSP held no terrors. Resolutely she stood outside the vehicle, her sack at her feet, haranguing through the storm and gesticulating like a windmill. I yelled that her mangoes were so hard they couldn’t possibly have been damaged. Surprisingly, I seemed to have popular opinion on my side. Then the taxi leaped forward, causing me to fall again – this time onto another kid, hitherto unnoticed, lying on the floor. It shrieked in agony and I felt sick and began wildly to apologise to its unidentifiable owner.
A cheerful voice said, ‘No problem, sir! Tomorrow we eat it!’
Our driver proceeded erratically but rapidly, trying to avoid the deeper rain-lakes. Water sprayed up in sheets on either side, as though we were in some sort of aquatic Dodgem Park, and by now ‘inside’ was awash. I supposed we were going to deliver the remaining eight passengers to their destinations, before we were delivered to our place of punishment. But no. They had become the innocent victims of Murphy criminality and were doomed to spend hours at the mercy of the storm while our captor tried to get rid of us.
Apparently we posed an unprecedented problem. At two official buildings, miles apart, guidance was sought but was not available. Finally the taxi – now coughing and shuddering – forced its way up and up, through a raging torrent, to a ridge top. There stood a sprawling conglomeration of newish buildings. At the entrance the headlights picked out a large notice: DIVISIONAL HEADQUARTERS OF SPECIAL SECURITY POLICE. A much smaller notice had an arrow pointing our way and said, simply, PRISON. We began to feel slightly uneasy. Did the SSP operate quite independently of Basil and his merry men? Already we had tried dropping his name, to no effect. Yet our unease was very slight; one cannot feel seriously threatened among the genial Cameroonians.
The taxi could have been driven into Headquarters and parked under cover; instead, it was left out in the deluge while we and the driver (as witness) raced after our captor across a wide yard to ‘Reception’. When we had been handed over to a junior duty-officer, behind a long high counter, the other two vanished. Only one notice was displayed in that cavernous hallway, a list of names headed ‘Football Duty for 17/5/87’.
We were drenched and shivering and exhausted; since dawn we had walked some twenty-seven miles on a hand of bananas. Rachel collapsed on a narrow concrete bench, opposite the counter, and fell asleep with her head on the saturated rucksack. I presented passports to the duty-officer, who was polite and amiable but looked like an unkind caricature of a Third World bureaucrat. Slowly he opened an enormous ledger, designed for commercial uses, and picked up a biro which only reluctantly yielded its ink. While ‘entering particulars’ he frowned, narrowed his eyes and breathed loudly as though carrying a heavy load uphill. Thumbing conscientiously through our health certificates, which have a fatal fascination for semi-literates, he asked if we had ever had leprosy? I controlled an hysterical urge to giggle and gravely assured him that we were not, and had never been, lepers. Finding our visas, he stared silently at them for long moments, then pronounced that their validity depended on their date of issue rather than on our date of arrival in Cameroon.
‘That is not so,’ I said, quietly but firmly. ‘Will you just take my word for it?’
Disarmingly he beamed, ‘Yes, sir! I must believe you! You are educated gentleman!’
I let that pass; he was already sufficiently addled; a gender debate might have unseated his reason. Inexplicably, Rachel’s passport was now causing him mental torture and our problem became bilingual.
‘Your wife is born in city of EIRE in country of England – yes?’
‘My daughter was born in London, in England. “Eire” is the name of our country, Ireland, in the Irish language.’
‘Hah! And Sassenach is your place of residence?’
‘“Sassenach” is “England” in the Irish language.’
‘So why this book say you live in Sassenach when you come from this country of Eire?’
‘It doesn’t say so, it says my daughter was born in England.’
‘But she is only eleven years! So big for eleven years! You marry too young – in Cameroon we do not marry before twelve years, smallest.’
‘My daughter is eighteen – you can see the date there – born December 1968.’
‘But now we have the year 1987 – this time I think you make mistake!’ He drew a scrap of paper from beneath the ledger and began to do sums, holding the tip of a carmine tongue between advertisement-perfect teeth. ‘See!’ He pushed the scrap of paper triumphantly towards me. ‘If she is eighteen she must be born 1948 – it is written there!’
I felt that my own reason was about to be unseated. Abandoning all hope of keeping our encounter on rational lines, I seized his pen and did my own sum while he watched enthralled. ‘Hah! You have another way of making figures! Is this way right? Is it good in Europe now?’
Mercifully our mathematical tete-a-tete was interrupted at this point.‘Here is Big Man!’ exclaimed the duty-officer, saluting a figure wearing what might have been a Fon’s cloak and cap. He was loquaciously drunk and said that I reminded him of his grandfather who always wore khaki bush-shirts. And Rachel reminded him of a Peace Corps girl he wanted to marry and she liked going to bed with him but went back to America and never wrote to him though she promised she would. Then, placing an arm around my shoulder – as much to steady himself as to express affection – he continued affably, ‘Let me show you the cells.’ As one’s host might say, ‘Let me show you your room.’
The cells were bare and clean and unoccupied. They recalled Mr Ndango’s store-room in Acu – minus the noisy generator – and we felt that we could, if necessary, sleep well in them.
‘These are nice cells,’ said the senior officer. ‘But we have not many to put in them. Wum is too quiet. You are spies from Nyos? Do you have bedding?’
As though on cue our captor reappeared, looking distraught. He was quite likeable despite his proclivity to baton youths for no good reason and leave passengers sitting around in the rain. He had, after all, only been doing his duty when he arrested us. And now, clearly, he did not wish us to be imprisoned. The drunken officer seemed to have no strong views on the subject. Given Wum’s limitations as a centre of international espionage, he would have liked to see one of his nice cells occupied by bona fide spies. Yet he too seemed personally well disposed towards us – indeed towards everyone, by that hour of the evening. It was agreed that our passports should be confiscated (‘Not aga
in!’ groaned Rachel) and we promised to present ourselves to the Chief of Security Police at 8 a.m. for further deliberations about appropriate punishment. Spies, we reckoned, would have an easy ride in Wum.
Back at the taxi we found our fellow-passengers all huddled together using the tarpaulin – inside – as a tent. When they had disentangled themselves we grovelled abjectly but they chuckled cheerfully. There was no problem, it wasn’t our fault: ‘Life’s like that!’ said one. Yet they were soaked through; I could hear several sets of teeth chattering.
Our captor offered to drop us off at the innocently named Gay Lodge Hotel: ‘This is finest hotel in Wum, only 1,500 CFA for a clean bed.’ But it was away on the other side of the town so we booked into Happy Days. Rachel’s hunger-pangs were hard to cater for as most chop-houses had closed. I was past hunger. I felt like a football hooligan; I only wanted a bottle of beer in each hand.
At 8 a.m. no one could find the Chief of Security Police. He was, it then transpired, our drunken friend, and 8 a.m. was never his finest hour. It wasn’t mine, either, that morning. I had over-drowned my Nyos trauma.
‘At some stage,’ said Rachel, ‘we’ll have to contact Basil. We’ll never get anywhere with this lot.’
The pyjama’d SSPS who had greeted us seemed to have gone back to bed and there was no one behind the reception desk – no one anywhere in sight. I toyed with the notion of trying surreptitiously to unconfiscate our passports …
Then Basil walked in; his junior officer escort looked astonished to see me hugging and kissing him like a long-lost son. Our kind captor had told him the Murphies were in trouble again.
‘At first,’ said Basil, ‘I didn’t believe him. I thought, these women cannot be like paratroopers, reaching Nyos through the mountains! And now you have a big problem here. This is not my business, but give me your details and I will try to help!’
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