Cameroon with Egbert

by Dervla Murphy

  Still he persisted, his speech becoming increasingly slurred. He wanted me now– and again he began to fiddle with something on the rifle that went clickety-click. I decided to join him; even should he prove unexpectedly virile, there is no fate worse than death. Then abruptly he threw himself back on the bed, clasping the rifle to his chest. A moment later he stretched out a hand and turned off the lantern – a very un-Cameroonian thing to do, yet he seemed far too drunk to be planning anything cunning. I was beginning slightly to relax when he again mumbled ‘Madame! Come under me now!’ Further clickety-clicks followed and seemed even more alarming now that I couldn’t see which way the rifle was pointing. Fleetingly I considered snuggling down with our host, then grabbing the gun. But if it were loaded that could be suicidal. Then I heard – sweetest of sounds! – a long snore; and it was followed, rhythmically, by others. Yet that was an unrestful night. Whenever the Commander muttered and tossed, as he frequently did, I became not only alert but hypertense.

  From 5 a.m. I was wide awake and twenty minutes later our host sat up, slid off the bed and said in a small meek voice that he was going to his compound where we must join him for breakfast at 7.30. Then he slung his rifle over his shoulder and slunk away into the grey dawn.

  I felt a bit sheepish as we dressed; very likely the rifle had been unloaded.

  ‘You really were scared,’ recalled Rachel, amused by this maternal over-reaction. ‘I’m sure that thing wasn’t loaded – where would he get ammo, in Bafmeng?’

  ‘From his very big officer brother,’ I retorted. ‘But you’re probably right, I was just being jittery.’

  ‘You look haggard!’ said Rachel. ‘Did you not sleep well? You are silly!’

  At 6 a.m. the church bell was ringing as we crossed the almost-lawn to salute Father Peter before leaving for Fundong. In Wum we had been told, ‘He’s been in Cameroon twenty-eight years, he knows us better than we know ourselves! He’s doing more than anyone else for Nyos people, he’s a perfect Christian!’

  A tallish figure in a white surplice was strolling beneath the trees, reading his breviary. When he saw us his smile melted our hearts. He had thick snowy hair, pink cheeks, big bright blue eyes – and disconcertingly I found myself thinking that pink and blue people look odd… His voice was gentle yet he radiated power – spiritual power. After a few moments’ conversation he urged us to spend another day in Bafmeng, at the Mission. ‘Be with us today and meet my poor people from the Nyos villages – it will help them.’

  The English language seems to lack words for describing this sort of person without sounding mawkish. Rachel wrote in her diary: ‘Angelic! – or at least saintly.’ I wrote in mine: ‘Being a perfect Christian has nothing to do with it. The last person I met who at once gave this impression of sheer, pure goodness was an agnostic – our beloved Martin Ryle.’

  The Bafmeng Mission was injudiciously founded as a convent; European nuns should never have been expected to flourish in the heart of the Grassfields. When that enterprise collapsed Father Peter laboured alone from his little bungalow and for twenty years the rows of cramped cells lay empty. Then the Nyos evacuees moved in: some men and youths, but mostly women and children from Subum, Cha and Fang, whose menfolk had all died.

  An Argentinian lay-missionary woman doctor, based in Fontem but seconded to Bafmeng for a fortnight to deal with evacuee health problems, mentioned a theory that more men than women died, and more adults than children, because alcohol leaves the body extra-vulnerable to carbon dioxide. Yet in some compounds more children died. And in the huts where children only survived it may have been because at that time of evening they were asleep under thick blankets. (Cameroonians usually sleep with covered heads.)

  Here I felt no inhibitions about talking with and questioning Nyos victims. Perhaps absurdly, yet in a way that felt very real, our own reactions to Nyos seemed to have given us the right to sit with them and share their grief. But Rachel soon sensibly retreated to the living-room to write her diary. At eighteen there is a limit to what one can handle and it is a wise youngster who recognises this.

  Most harrowing of all were the Nyos village children who survived. A boy, aged four at the time, spoke no word for eight months – never, under any circumstances, to anyone. Then a few days before our arrival he saw an older boy digging a hole to plant a tree and suddenly screamed, ‘No, stop! No dig hole!’ Having spent thirty-six hours locked in a hut with the dead, he had watched Ise men digging and digging and then burying all his family in the compound.

  One little girl, aged twenty-two months at the time, was put on my knee in an ex-cell. Her aunt, a survivor from Cha, told me that she had been tied so tightly to her dead mother’s back that she couldn’t free herself. She was not found for two days – two days in a room with seven corpses – so ‘She have Mama’s neck for chop.’ This victim, now aged two and a half, sat listlessly on my knee, the very antithesis of a Cameroonian toddler – usually by that age singing and dancing and bubbling and twinkling with joie de vivre.

  Even more disturbing was the little girl, aged just three at the time, who was found on the Monday morning, three and a half days after the explosion, in a hut with nine fast-decomposing bodies – her parents and all her older siblings. When the gendarmes entered she came crawling out from under a bed; Basil had mentioned her, saying the men who found her were utterly shattered and cannot rid themselves of the memory of her face at that moment. She had reacted to nothing since, though everyone focused extra love and attention on her, attempting to arouse some emotion – fear, anger, hate, anything … Every evening after supper Father Peter holds an informal and very moving prayer service in the living-room for the older evacuees, followed by a sing-song and dancing. This little girl is always brought in, to provide her with as much stimulation as possible. She courteously accepts caresses, sweets, biscuits – but passively, expressionlessly, with dead eyes. I shall never forget that child’s eyes.

  Afterwards we wondered if, in the cases of the most profoundly shocked small children, adoption by Whites and removal to a totally different Western environment might be a good idea, though normally such well meant interventions are inadvisable. I couldn’t help feeling, in the unjustifiable way one does, that it would have been better for those children had they not survived.

  One Nyos man, whose wife and five children had died, told me he was found unconscious and flown by helicopter to Wum hospital where he came to after another thirty-six hours. He said, ‘When you walked from the lake you passed my fine compound – it is by that path – you have seen it. I don’t like to see it again. Why they make me live? For why? Why they not leave me to die with my woman and my pickins? Five pickins, all good, loving God, then God destroy them – why?’ He was obsessed by the fact that there had been no warning sound, just suddenly an inability to breathe. He seemed to resent this as unfair sneaky – and to believe that had there been a warning he could somehow have protected his family. (Which of course is not true.) He denied that it was ‘a quick easy death’, the consolation those attempting ‘rehabilitation’ had been offering to the survivors. ‘Not quick! Much, much suffering for some, dying ten minutes, tearing their clothes off and all fear – try to breathe but no air – and so frightened, so frightened!’

  That victim was aged about thirty-five and restored to full physical health. Yet I had a strong feeling that soon he would die. Throughout that spacious convent-compound, for all Father Peter’s sensitive care, the lack of the will to live was apparent. The Mission had provided the evacuees with ample good land to cultivate for their own use (work therapy) but they had no heart for it – those once-vigorous young women who had been so proud of their skill as cultivators, so tireless in their to-ings and fro-ings to all the local markets to sell surplus crops to pay school-fees or buy new clothes for the children …

  After lunch, on Father Peter’s advice (he may have noticed me looking over-harrowed), we went to pay our respects to the Fon – as we should have done on arrival,
but the hurricane was our excuse. Bafmeng, like We, is a traditionally important trading centre, not the creation of a motor-road. In extent a town, it has a village feeling. Long stretches of cultivation separate its various quarters and the Fon’s palace is about three miles from the Mission.

  On the way we met Norbert, a Douala airport gendarme who insisted on escorting us to the palace. ‘The Chief is my good friend and I like to talk English. It helps me in my job if I sound like English person.’ Norbert had lost seventeen in Nyos village: ‘My parents, two grandparents, the rest brothers and sisters.’ Significantly, he seemed not to have been traumatised in the way most Bafmeng evacuees were. One of his wives and most of his children lived in Bafmeng but his world, now, was Douala. For him life went on, post-Nyos, as it could never do again for those whose world was their compound or village. He told us that Nyos and Bafmeng people are ‘same tribe with same language’ and the Fon is chief of the whole area. Then he led us on a detour, up a steep forest path, to meet his Bafmeng (senior) wife. We found an attractive twenty-two-year-old sitting on a low stool outside .a big thatched hut in a coffee-surrounded compound. She was suckling her hefty fourth son. ‘Is good woman!’ said Norbert. ‘She have only boy babies!’ Eleven of her immediate family died in Nyos and her welcoming smile did not light up her eyes.

  Bafmeng’s palace is as big — if not quite as grand — as Bafut’s. The Fon, an ex-secondary school teacher, was a fubsy character who suddenly became formidable when discussing Nyos. In 1977 and 1978, and again after Lake Manoun’s explosion, he wrote to both local and central government departments expressing concern about Lake Nyos’s ‘moods’ and reporting the unprecedented subsidence of huts in nearby compounds. Inevitably, those letters were ignored. But he told us he kept copies which are now of some interest to scientists — and of some embarrassment to the government.

  When Rachel sought permission to smoke she was told that nicotine is taboo in the palace. But alcohol is not and an ancient retainer, wearing a long loose gown, soon appeared with a raffia bag that clinked promisingly. Taking four glasses from a corner shelf he polished them on the end of his gown — which, being itself dust-laden, left them markedly less sparkling than before. This large, long, shadowy reception hall was decorated with an eighteen-foot python skin, a selection of ancient firearms, and faded photographs of the Fon’s father and grandfather, surrounded by their respective councils.

  By the Fon’s reckoning, Lake Nyos killed more than 2,000 people. I asked if he approved of the Restricted Zone policy being indefinitely maintained. Yes, he did: Lake Nyos should never again be trusted. He told us about a Peace Corps teacher who had been stationed in Fundong, a few hours’ walk away, for the past two years. Steve Tabor (in whose back garden we were soon to camp for two nights) had been one of the first Whites to arrive in Nyos and he helped with the mass-burials. A scientist by training, and considerably older and shrewder than the average PC volunteer, he had been closely studying Lake Nyos since the explosion (more closely than most of the international experts then busily writing papers about it). Four months and nine days after the explosion he observed a long red gash on the jade-green water, the shape and size of a giant submarine. He photographed it from the cliffs on the west shore and later showed us his pictures. At the Yaounde conference most scientists agreed that this was not evidence of another comparatively minor eruption but had probably been caused by a rock-fall. To this statement my previous comments on rock-falls may be applied with even more force; Steve’s photographs show exactly where to look for signs of such an event.

  ’If a rock-fall can again turn some of the water red,’ said the Fon, ‘why should my people go back? Cameroon is not over-populated, they can be settled on the high ground beyond We. There they would be within reach of Bafmeng and relatives and the markets they know.’

  I aired my theory that the Aghem highland is under-populated because of a previous crater lake disaster lingering on in the folk-memory.

  ‘That is likely,’ replied the Fon. ‘But now we know the gas can’t move up. Heaviness is its characteristic. So there is no reason for my people to avoid that area.’

  But, as Norbert observed afterwards, the Fon of We might not agree …

  On our way back to the Mission Norbert told us that the Fon had been deserted by his wife (his only wife) who was also a teacher and had refused to leave Bamenda and her good job when he was selected. He longed for her to join him in Bafmeng though she was — according to local gossip — tight-fisted, spiteful and ill-tempered. No one could understand why he didn’t just forget her and have lots more wives, as was in any case a Fon’s duty. Unless — could it be that what she said about him was true?

  That night, lying on the concrete floor of a new Mission schoolroom, I slept much more soundly than on Brother’s Dunlopillo mattress.

  13

  Re-enter Egbert

  TEN COINCIDENCE-PACKED days later we were in Yaounde railway station, buying single tickets to N’gaoundere.

  In Fundong we had camped in Steve Tabor’s compound for two nights and riotously celebrated Cameroon’s Day of National Unity. Then, continuing towards the Bambouto Mountains, two misfortunes simultaneously befell us in a Babanki doss-house: severe toothache (mine) and nemesis (Rachel’s). At first I thought, ‘Toothache — hell! — ignore it and it’ll go away.’ Rachel had similar dismissive thoughts about a crop of tiresome little sores on her legs, to which I also paid no attention, being then too ignorant to recognise incipient tropical ulcers. (These were the fruits of her rash incursion, with bare legs, into that thorny cleft by Lake Nyos.) However, our upper lips were unstiffening by the time we had almost got back to Bafut, via gruelling bush-paths over precipitous, uninhabited mountains.

  Then, on the edge of the town, Rachel’s malaria flared again, as malaria will when the body’s defences are down — and a dozen tropical ulcers, even when incipient, quickly lower defences. We spent that night where she collapsed with a raging fever at 4 p.m. Our room, behind a sleazy shebeen-cum-chop-house, reeked of achu and was shared with numerous restless small children. By sunset my right jaw was swelling fast and I suspected, correctly, that this was no mere toothache (an affliction to which I am not prone) but an abscess. A double dose of pain-killers did not kill — or even diminish — the searing shafts of pain now affecting my whole head.

  Next morning Rachel’s fever was down though she remained groggy. I then noticed her much-enlarged leg sores and she conceded that they were ‘quite painful’. At 6 a.m. we walked slowly into the town centre; it was market-day and the tracks were thronged. Soon we met Omo, the Fon’s ‘Tourist Manager’, who confirmed that Bafut’s only doctors are medicine-men. A kind youth, he proposed that we should stay in his tiny shack at 1,000 CFA per night, while recovering.

  Omo lived on the far side of the town, beyond the palace, and when he had swept the floor — raising dense clouds of dust — Rachel collapsed on his frail pallet. Then, noticing two books in a wall-niche, she eagerly asked to see them and I handed her a bilingual (Farsi and French) History of Iran and an English Methodist Hymnal. She was by then so print-starved that she read the latter. We each began a course of our broad-spectrum antibiotics and I took lots more pain-killers before unrolling my flea-bag and collapsing on the floor. Illogically, I believed that soon we would both feel better.

  By 3 p.m. we both felt much worse. I was being driven crazy by pain; Rachel’s sores were violently inflamed and swollen and beginning to ooze ounces of pus. The Parkinsons were only fifteen miles away, in Bamenda. Clutching my throbbing jaw, and looking at the appalling happenings on Rachel’s legs, I reckoned we needed the Parkinsons, very badly.

  ‘But we can’t!’ groaned Rachel. ‘They’re so kind — we can’t go sponging again!’

  Remembering the quality of the Parkinson welcome, on our arriving unexpectedly post-Egbert loss, I didn’t share her inhibition. On that unforgettable evening I realised that the Parkinson-Murphy friendship was not just one more of t
hose agreeable but superficial relationships formed as one wanders the world. In temporal terms we were as yet mere acquaintances, but friendship is not to be measured temporally. I had no doubt that Joy and John are the sort of people who, if they knew we were in dire trouble in Bafut, would not have wanted us to be inhibited. We dashed Omo and took a shared taxi to Bamenda, arriving at the Parkinsons just in time for tea.

  There was much to be discussed and not until after dinner did John remember that a letter awaited us; it had come the day before. A letter? Puzzled, I looked down at the envelope. It was post-marked Banyo and my heart — perhaps disordered by too many pain-killers — seemed to stop beating.

  Rachel translated the Francophone vet’s hard-to-decipher scrawl, written fifteen days previously. No details were supplied, merely the bare facts that Egbert had been found and was being looked after by the vet. His finder would return him to us in exchange for 20,000 CFA (about £45). It was unclear whether or not the finder and the vet were separate people.

  Joy and John — old Africa hands — chuckled. Rachel gasped, ‘He must be joking! That’s bare-faced holding Egbert to ransom!’

  My elation left no room for negative feelings. ‘Who cares?’ I said. ‘When we go back we just take him. We have Doi’s fiscal-stamped receipt. No one can stop us walking away with our own horse!’

  ‘Don’t get too excited,’ cautioned Rachel. ‘It may be the vet trying to flog someone else’s horse. And anyway does it make sense for us to bush-taxi back to Makelele? We’ll have to spend more on fares than we’re likely to get when we sell him.’

  ‘Don’t be sordid!’ I snapped. ‘I don’t care about selling him, I only want to be sure it’s Egbert and he’s OK. If we haven’t time to find a buyer we can leave him with the Foxes in Mayo Darlé.’