Travels with Myself and Another

by Martha Gellhorn

  Yaoundé looked more hopeful from the air, pimple hills, a town straggling and nestling, red dirt roads. But the same low milky sky, and the muffled scalding sun. The locals are awfully pleased about being grown-ups on their own, and crazed with pleasure over their bureaucracy. You have to fill out a landing card, name, age, occupation, motive of trip etc. etc., which is such a bore and waste of good trees, at every stop here, not just when crossing frontiers. All formalities, health, customs, are again repeated.

  The taxi ran all right for a bit, since we were coasting downhill; after that I could have passed it at a walk. My blessed friend, who told me to take my troubles to the R. and W. King Co, Traders, will receive her crown in heaven. My luggage was deposited in front of the R. and W. King godown, in a dusty compound of warehouses and a one-storey office building, and I asked for the manager.

  The manager, a Frenchman of perhaps thirty-three or four, was very tall, good bright greenish eyes, thin as string, grey-white in colour and worth making the trip for. It is one of the best treats in life to find someone that you can laugh with, immediately. I had plenty of troubles. My heel was infecting; I was greasy with sweat; there was no room in the Yaoundé hotel; I did not know where or how to proceed, and something mysterious was going wrong with me, in that my feet and ankles, hands, face and middle area were swelling as if a bicycle pump had been applied, I was acquiring spots on my face, and felt both poisoned and suffocated. It seemed unfairly soon to be mowed down by Africa. I must have been a tasty sight in my rumpled and sweaty cotton dress, my fisherman’s hat, limping and frenzied. C. took this all with ease and apparently with pleasure. He asked me to stay at his house; he asked if I would like to go for the weekend to friends in the bush, he sent me off with his driver to buy shoes.

  The shoes were a pair of men’s sandals, with crêpe rubber soles, made by Bata, coarse, ugly, comfortable and costing $10. I keep noting the prices because they so astonish me; but I suppose one is paying for the transport, not the object. I got a pair of men’s cotton khaki socks, equally repellent, and a pair of men’s khaki trousers and shirt; and am now equipped with the clothing that the blacks buy, if they have the money.

  C.’s house is a bungalow at the edge of town, darkened and cool, with the impersonal comfort of bachelors’ quarters, a view over near hills topped with feathery pepper trees, and my own bathroom. After lunch we separated for the chloroformed sleep which strikes one down in this climate. In the late afternoon we set off for M’Balmayo.

  This is Conrad’s Africa, not the one I had longed for, but authentic. The road was bad and thick with dust; when passing the few cars, we rolled up the windows fast, so as not to choke on the floating red cloud. There were villages—a straggle of shacks—at the edge of the road, with jungle behind. The trees are immensely tall and skinny, like all jungle trees, and no one knows the names of any of them. I recognized only what I took to be ceiba. This pushing, twisting, grappling mass of vines, trunks, bushes is as ominous as prison walls. The blacks drifted around their villages and along the road, dressed in faded calico; bathed in stagnant jungle pools; chatted. One could not see how they lived. (C. has explained to me that I must not say nègre, which is an offensive word here; one speaks of les blancs and les noirs, the acceptable usage.)

  Conversation in the car: C. has been here fourteen years and is addicted to Africa. Worked for years at the R. and W. King station in M’Balmayo. Says nothing about own past or background; natural reserve which is not snubbing or paralysing as the English can be. Immediate sense of his being very sane, very wise, very tolerant.

  He says (remembered in a jumble): In Africa you have to know how to play bridge, a life saver; there is no conversation and since one cannot always read, one must find some means of being with others painlessly. I imagine they all know each other both too well and too little, like jail-mates. American Embassy is second biggest building in Yaoundé; Americans contriving their usual golden ghetto; Embassy and its dependent houses divided into flats (nice-looking) for staff. Though wood is the main visible product of Cameroun, and everyone else has locally made furniture, they have shipped from the U.S. every piece of their furniture, including for the least of secretaries. Also their food. They give some official parties where plainly they are unhappy; but what they do is stick together, always. Hardly seen by other European residents. No Americans in Cameroun except them, and I think no U.S. business interests. The English diplomatic staff who wind up affairs of British Cameroun are two people. Size and grandeur of U.S. outfit produces wry, jeering distaste.

  France gives large subsidy to Cameroun. Why? French still here, were never landowners or farmers. Civil Servants, military, traders, professional men. All went easily in granting independence—I should say because no French financial interests harmed. Compare with the muck of Algeria.

  Local product at this season is peanuts; traders buy from natives; small traders go from village to village, then sell to bigger trading company. R. and W. King has outposts and travellers. Women cultivate peanut crop, simplest primitive agriculture. R. and W. King imports anything anyone wants and can pay for.

  President Ahidjo has nine cars (very little road to use them on). Lives in palace of French Governor-General; lovely tropical kind of White House. Formerly avenue lined with fine trees; now cut down (so you can see the splendour) and avenue lined with those awful street lamps newly erected in London, neon band on a metal pole. There’s a regular item in the national budget for graft. Seems sensible when one thinks of it, providing it’s enforced. Graft inevitable, therefore allow for it but limit it.

  Most discouraging; plenty of water and no place to swim. River through Yaoundé, forming lake; water filthy; can’t use. Water always filthy (disease) or full of something that bites or eats you.

  M’Balmayo; an opening in the bush and not a big one. The entrance to the home of C.’s friends is just behind the gas station; squalid. Immediately changes, after coming through their gate. A low small white house, with a living room that reminds me of Cuernavaca; beams, a fireplace (incredible; when used?), sofas, basket chairs, nice plain dark wood tables, messed with books, bits and pieces; evident signs of taste. No electricity, shower is a bucket with holes in the bottom. Brilliant, simple object available in local hardware stores; a string releases a shutter over the holes; the bucket goes up and down, to be filled, on a pulley.

  The Kolars have a green lawn, fenced in, and a big tree for shade (of the amate species I think.) Their servants—cook and boy—live in a little house behind theirs. It is primitive, attractive, and comfortable. The Kolars see no charm in it.

  Their story: they are in their early thirties, Czech refugees. She looks like a Parisienne, small, slender, well-built, golden skin, pretty face, chic high hair-do, blonde peroxided hair, good makeup. She was wearing white tennis shorts and shirt as she keeps her body in shape with great care, during the exile here—exercise and sunbathing (heroic act to go voluntarily into the furnace). He is tall, romantic dark good looks, fashionably dressed in the sort of clothes men wear along the Mediterranean, pastel-colour linen trousers and matching sport shirt. They would fit into the international smart set anywhere in Europe, by appearance.

  He escaped from Czecho about twelve years ago—they have been in Africa twelve years—by holding up a Czech airliner in mid-flight and forcing the pilot to land it in France. She married a mutual friend, a foreigner, purely as a form, in order to get out and join him; that first chaste marriage annulled. They are both devout Roman Catholics.

  They grew up under the Nazi occupation of Czecho. By birth both of them (I sense) were well-off upper middle class. Instead of leading that sort of life—Aya would have studied art or music or done nothing much, like a pretty young lady; Jean would have gone to university, probably abroad—the Germans fixed things differently. The Czechs, it is to be remembered, were regarded as a slave race and ultimately were to be sterilized into extinction; Czecho was to become part of the Greater Reich. So this slave rac
e, when young and under German domination, was not allowed to enjoy higher education and all had to learn a useful trade. I don’t know what Jean did; Aya became a pharmacist, and this is the first good turn I ever heard of the Nazis doing for anyone.

  Because now, they own the pharmacy in M’Balmayo; Aya is the technician and Jean manages the business. There are no local doctors; Aya practically operates as one. Amazingly, this tiny shack of a shop, in the African bush, provides them so rich a living that they can spend half the year in Paris, where they have a flat. Jean is a writer; he sold his first novel, in French, to the movies. That windfall is allowing them to build a house in Corsica. But the pharmacy is the gold mine. The reason for this economic miracle is the blacks’ passion for medicines.

  They have no children and seem perfectly suited to each other.

  We sat in the garden and drank whisky and soda. I can hardly swallow anything, and look as if suffering from hunger oedema. Jean’s conversation at first startled me; my main impression was that a man so young could hardly talk such trite die-hard Tory stuff. Then I began to think what he knew of the world: the Nazi occupation of his country, and a lack of heroic resistance to it by his people; the Communist occupation and again a lack of resistance; and his escape from that into postwar France where democracy can hardly have been said to shine at its brightest. I keep forgetting the limitations and impoverishment of the experience of the young, especially the Central European young. When you think of it, it is amazing that they can believe in anything, considering what they have seen, none of which was likely to arouse faith. It is not, on the other hand, surprising that these two, who are intelligent and concerned people, should have put their faith where it is safe, because it cannot be disproved, and has a quality of timelessness: in the doctrine and ritual of the Catholic religion.

  Both Jean and Aya have had Africa; they are sick to death of it. Though full of contempt for the blacks, intellectually, they get on with the blacks easily and nicely, in practice. They have become French citizens and have the love of the converted or the adopted; great reverence for France as “civilization.” They consider the white race infinitely superior, and think all the blacks will do on their own is destroy whatever civilization the whites brought them, and revert to their natural savagery. I have no impression that the whites have brought much civilization myself; I feel the whites have brought a certain number of modern conveniences for themselves, have restrained the blacks from a certain amount of mayhem, again for white safety and comfort; and have made money. The missionaries are something else; their object has not been to make money, but I am suspicious of them, mainly because I look at our white world and cannot see that nearly 2,000 years of Christianity has cured our savagery. So it seems conceited to foist off our notions of religion, which we have never practised, on to people whose savagery is after all disorganized, personal and small-scale compared to ours. Missionary schools and hospitals are another matter.

  Jean wanted to know about books and writers; Aya about fashions, plays, the Twist. My memory has really gone to pot. I can remember nothing about Europe, scarcely believe it exists; and find it so irrelevant to everything here that it has no interest.

  These two are spellbinding when they talk local lore. None of us knows enough to speculate well, and one finds the mind turning ashy with large issues and generalizations. Thus I particularly remember their news on the blacks’ passion for medicines. It seems that all the natives, who can afford it, take castor oil constantly and colonic irrigations three times a week. They showed me a picture of a colonic being given to a tiny baby by a large black woman: simple system, the woman spits water up the child’s anus. The blacks adore injections, that feared hypodermic needle, and especially adore anything which gives a violent reaction—pain, swelling and fever.

  Black medicine is mysterious; a boy was crushed between a wall and a truck, Aya and Jean gave him up for dead, too many broken bones, too much loss of blood. They wanted to take him to hospital (but the blacks do not like hospitals; they like buying their stuff at the pharmacy); his family carried the shattered and unconscious boy away and the witch doctor and herb woman got busy. The Kolars do not know what is done but believe it is herbs, leaves, applied to the body, and unimaginable concoctions to drink. Anyhow the boy returned, walking, in three months.

  More: the blacks are all becoming drunkards. They used to drink a homemade beer; having more money they switched to cheap French (or Algerian?) red wine: pinard, as one says. With more money, to rum; the richest now drink whisky. They drink compulsively; having started a bottle it must be finished at one go.

  The blacks begin their sex life at about the age of twelve. By twenty, young men are impotent and come to the pharmacy asking for aphrodisiacs. They also use native ones. A young man cannot marry because a wife costs 150,000 francs, a fortune. The result is that older men can afford a wife or wives. No woman is faithful; syphilis is general. If a man is caught as an adulterer, he must pay the injured husband a fee for the use of the deceitful wife: tribal courts attend to this. The blacks like children, and illegitimacy is no sin or shame, and the children mooch around contentedly in a general family huddle. It sounds rather nice and cosy and easygoing. The syphilis part is no good though, and perhaps explains some of the deformity I have seen, bad eyes, etc.

  The Kolars insist that the blacks have no real feelings of personal affection, individual love, loyalty. They are attached to their family; they belong in it and would be helpless without it. There are also family customs of hospitality, which put the kibosh forever on individual effort. Any relative (and everyone must have dozens and dozens) can come and park on a richer relative, gratis, thus literally eating him out of house and home. No one may refuse this burden or burdens (if richer, more relatives settle in). For if you do refuse you are socially outcast, a swine in the eyes of all; and also, if in need yourself one day, you would not find a single helping hand. There is not much use in getting ahead, acquiring the goods of this world, on the level of the average tribal black (maybe it does not work like this in the higher echelons—a very thin slice of higher echelon exists anyhow). The relatives will hear about prosperity all too soon.

  We ate dinner around a blazing fire, outdoors; glorious sausages and rolls and pickles and potatoes roasted in the coals. I would not have believed, after the airless heat of the day—it is like being wrapped in a damp blanket from top to toe and like being slugged—that a fire would be possible; and not only that but a sweater over one’s shoulders for the part not exposed to the flames.

  Tomtoms began to beat in the jungle. Very loud, very insistent, and curiously frightening. I cannot describe their beat, which was varied; sometimes it gave the impression of a voice screaming a warning and sometimes of a voice mourning. The Kolars said it was just news being sent around; a wedding, a funeral, whatever was going. The blacks talk all day long, endlessly, to each other, about nothing: exact, trivial bits of information. At night, they continue to do so with drums. I see the point, though. If any country could make people frantic to keep in touch, it’s this one. You sense that the land is hostile and wants no one on it; it feels dark all the time. A kind of panic must be inborn, and people usually natter when afraid—until the point where fear is so great that it produces choked silence.

  I should say at once and get it over with that I hate mosquito nets, both for themselves and for what they imply. And dread wriggling myself somehow inside and somehow tucked in and then, hot and stifled, realizing, in the dark, that something else is in with me—what?—a spider, an unknown flying or crawling insect, the insomnia-making mosquito? That’s my first and last report on mosquito nets; otherwise I’d talk of them daily.

  January 28: This is the 9th Annual World Day of the Lepers. I saw a notice to that effect in the Yaoundé post office, and Jean knows all about it. There is a handy Leprosarium; Africa apparently swarms with these wretched people. At 9.30 a.m.—which is late in the morning—we arrived at the leper colony. We turn
ed off the main dust road on to a dust track and after a few minutes were in a small clearing in the bush. Around a central dust square, the lepers have their houses, square mud shacks with thatched roofs, crumbling. I think there were twenty such huts in all, though I went into a state of shock at the beginning and failed to see well throughout. We had missed the Mayor and other notables (who can they have been?) who made speeches in honour of the day; no one was left except the resident lepers and their visiting families. Apart from small children, everyone was drunk, cheerful to roaring.

  Aya wore high-heeled white sandals and a pretty sleevless cotton bouffant dress, suitable for a garden party. Jean and she know many lepers well; they are clients of the pharmacy. (Lepers move about freely; no quarantine.) My hosts called greetings and shook hands. I was filled with a despicable cowardice; had worn my khaki socks, to keep my feet protected, and now could not touch anyone. I smiled and smiled, it must have looked like a jack o’lantern afflicted with the horrors, and bowed and began to feel that I was not really here, some disembodied part of me was moving around this fearfully hot and abominably smelling place. The lepers were in high spirits, and their visiting families showed no signs of disgust, dismay, nerves (contagion); they might have been at a party or reunion in a normal village.

  The band sat in the shade of some matting held up on poles; four musicians as I remember. (No good going on with how blurred it all is.) Their instruments were hollowed-out sections of tree trunk, made into drums, and a small home-made wooden xylophone. On these, they beat such drumming as I have never heard, every sound different, very fast, very complex. (The musicians were tight too.) The special feature was that some of them had no fingers at all, but only stumps of thumbs; one, I seem to think, beat with the stumps of his wrists, being handless.