A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  For a long time the elongated tail in male swallows was cited by scientists as a classic case of a male trait exaggerated by female choice, but recent studies have suggested the aerodynamic effect of the streamers’ ability to twist when the tail is spread allows a long-tailed male to avoid stalling in a high angle of attack, and also generates lift which aids manoeuvrability in slower, turning flight. Intriguingly, studies show that at their summering grounds in the north, where mating and breeding take place, male tails are on average 10 millimetres longer than the optimum length for flight – and it is well known that females select long-tailed males. The swallow’s pattern of moulting in the south and regrowing their streamers as they travel north thus forms a rather wonderful trade-off between the demands of migration and the demands of mating. When they most need their extraordinary powers of flight, the tail is at its best length to provide them. When they most need a seductively long tail, it is ready.

  The outskirts of Douala are rough and ridden with smoke. The heat pounds the train, radiating out of a sky the colour of new corrugated iron. The train moans slowly across points.

  At the station I make phone calls and establish that there is a boat to Calabar in Nigeria, which leaves tonight.

  ‘Where does it go from?’

  ‘Tiko. You must buy a ticket before five o’clock,’ says the woman on the end of the line.

  ‘How do I get to Tiko?’

  ‘There are buses, but – you do not have much time.’

  It is gone three o’clock already. I agree a fare with a taxi driver and we set out.

  ‘No trouble,’ he says. ‘It does not take too long.’

  We circle the hem of Douala, lurching through heavy traffic. It is much busier and much hotter than Yaoundé.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says the driver, ‘this is the economic capital; here everyone comes for money.’

  There are mills and the sweet smells of sawn wood. There are lagoons in which there are no birds, there are glimpses of ships and the roads are jammed with people, buses, cars, scooters and lorries. We drive along the edge of one market as crammed and chaotic as anything I saw in Brazzaville: only the pot-holes are not quite as fierce. We stop briefly to get a permit allowing the taxi to leave town, and stop again to have the permit checked. Then we are out onto a motorway. On either side, dense groves of thin grey trees all lean seawards and a familiar smell fills the car, the thin, tightly clean smell of a bicycle shop: we are driving through a huge rubber plantation.

  The taxi breaks down, steam boiling under the bonnet. The driver fills up a water bottle from the plantation’s irrigation system, which is intricate and hugely extensive: someone has a lot of money invested in these trees. It is something of a shock to be among them, to smell them; this is the odour of the stuff so many millions died for, that made so many thousands rich. And yet this is not the same plant that made King Leopold over a billon dollars, that baubled-up Brussels and seeded so many villains’ villas on the French Riviera: that was the rubber vine, which grew wild in Congo. This is the rubber tree, imported from South America and first widely propagated in this region after 1908, when Leopold was finally persuaded to hand over his fiefdom to the Belgian government. Here, in what was French Equatorial Africa, the rubber tree served French companies well, thanks to a Leopoldine system of hostage-taking, forced labour and brutal punishment. In 1911 competition from plantations in South America and Malaysia (largely under the control of Britain) caused a crash in rubber prices. Companies operating in French Equatorial Africa lost profits, so cut their expenditure. Transport and collection networks reaching into the interior were abandoned: it was plantations on the coast, like this one, which continued to operate.

  I could not prove it but there was no reason why the men crossing heavily, heads down, from one tract of trees to the next, and the trees themselves, should not be descendants of the people and the plants which were here a century ago. Only now, thanks to the hissing irrigation system, fewer men are required per hectare – each of which, it seemed reasonable to assume, supports even more trees.

  It is night in Tiko on the coast of Cameroon and hot under a smoky, black-brown sky. The moon is a sardonic yellow grin – 4° north of the equator it fills from the bottom, like a wineglass. The waiting room is a concrete shed, thick with heat and the smell of bodies. A fan makes no impression but the noise from the television reaches all of us. I am beginning to hate that television: tuned to a Cameroonian channel, it is showing one of the interminable soaps in which people are always weeping by hospital beds, finding each other dead on floors, overacting like mad and agonising about who will tell the matriarch the bad news this time. I have watched a lot of television, in various hotel rooms, and nothing has struck me as distinctive except a soap I saw in South Africa, set in an office and apparently focused on the lives of a bunch of gay Afrikaners in striped shirts.

  I wake from a half-doze on the hard bench to shouts: ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ Everyone leaps up in a flurry, grabbing their bags and children. We are herded out of the back of the shed into a yard where a huge lorry is waiting. It has four long benches, with room for twenty people on each, and is constructed like a giant crate with rectangles cut into the side. Light comes from a bulb swinging dimly above our heads. We clamber in with maximum panic, which does not augur well for our voyage. When we are all seated the truck fails to start – and fails again. Everyone sweats and tuts. I have picked up the habit of teeth-sucking to express disapproval. When eighty people do it at once the lorry suckles and bubbles with the sound of hissed saliva, as though we are a load of consumptive crickets. Teeth-sucking is wonderfully expressive. When stopped by a policeman, as we so often were in Cameroon, the whole bus sucked – ffsscch! (meaning ‘Bloody cops’). When a tyre burst, as every tyre seemed to, sooner or later, we sucked: wwssccchh! (‘Here we go again’). When the bus did not turn up, or the truck did not leave – mmwwch (‘Well, there you go’). When a ticket seemed expensive, when an hotel was full, when a room was grotty, mwvcchh . . . (‘We’ll just have to live with it, but we’re unimpressed’). It came so readily to me now, and was so viscerally, accurately expressive of feeling, I worried about doing it inappropriately: My wife is ill – mmmwwchh . . . (‘Well, that’s bad but what can you do?’). The words it saves are countless, and impossible for the hearer to misinterpret.

  After half an hour of sweating in the semi-dark the engine begins to turn over, unconvincingly. A man addresses me.

  ‘Hey, White Man, are you a mechanic? Can I see your qualifications?’

  ‘No, Black Man, I am not. Who are you – the police? Can I see your ID?’

  The woman opposite laughs at this, throwing her head back and jabbing her sack further into my groin. The truck starts. We bounce through Tiko, my stomach complaining about supper, which was rice with a lump of gristle and a short tubular section of rubbery artery. We pass a checkpoint and enter the port area, a dark swamp about 2 miles wide. The engine gives up after half a mile. There is more sucking of teeth, more sweating and more banging from the driver as he punishes the machine for its failure. The mosquitoes feast on us. Everyone piles out, then scrambles back in as the engine fires. We bump through the swamp to lights, shiny black water, two fishing boats, and ours. It is not a big boat, about twice as long and twice as high as the fishing boats, and it is entirely covered with people. It is Dutch-made and rusty. In the bowels is a canteen where a crowd is piling into spicy chicken on skewers, and beer. Lifejackets are stacked around the walls and all the seats are full. God help anyone down here if anything goes wrong. In the queue for food I meet Mark, a tall Cameroonian about my age. He is extremely quick and funny: we buy beers and withdraw to the upper deck to watch the rest of the loading.

  Mark speaks like this: ‘Heeeey, maaan! Have you ever had African pussy, maaaaan?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Where do you live, maaan?’

  ‘In London, some of the time –’

  ‘I live in Seoul in Korea
. I teach English to Korean kids – you should see them! They’re good!’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘And I own a hairdressing salon. I make about 3,000 US dollars a month, maaan – do you want to see a picture of my wife?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Look, here’s a picture of my car. God, I love my car, maaan – look, there it is, and my wife, in the snow. It’s such a great car – it’s so cheap to run. You know what I’ve been shipping CD players and things to Cameroon and because they actually work I’m making real money, maaan! There’s another picture of my car . . .’

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘It’s so easy to make money out there – and I love the attitude – not like Cameroon!’

  ‘I guess things are harder here.’

  ‘Huh! No good blaming the government, maaan! That’s all people do here, sit around and complain! They’re lazy! They don’t have to do anything! The food grows on trees! They want to make the country better they gotta get up, stop complaining, and make it better!’

  ‘But it’s a dictatorship and the army will shoot anyone who tries to change it, won’t they?’

  ‘True. But, well, I’m gonna make money in Korea then come back and help my country, because I love my country, maaan!’

  For complicated reasons which I struggle to follow, Mark is going to Nigeria to renew a visa, or fulfil the conditions of a visa which will allow him to continue to commute between Korea and Cameroon.

  The boat is being loaded with sacks of a leaf which looks like cocoa, and bags of an unidentifiable vegetable. These are rolled off trucks and bundled into the stern. The loaders are working quickly but not fast enough for the boat crew: an order is given and the front ropes are cast off. Every flat surface of the deck and superstructure is covered in men and women. Many are eating now; the journey is out of their hands for a while, and they are relaxing. There is shouting at the back, two more sacks are tumbled onto the deck, and the stern is untied. We move off, into dark channels. The helmsman switches on a powerful searchlight which probes ahead of us, roaming across dark masses of mangrove. It is eleven at night and still the sweat runs off us. The boat twists and turns, following the arm of the searchlight through the mangroves. Now large speakers on the rear passenger deck begin pumping out an Africanised hip-hop beat: it feels more as though we are cruising around the block trying to turn girls’ heads than setting sail for the Bight of Biafra and the Gulf of Guinea. Then a preacher starts up, bellowing over the music, haranguing the travellers who are packed together on benches under an awning – how is it, he wants to know, that God’s miracle has been proved for all to see? He has two accomplices. After a good harangue they bless us and we all join in with the Amens. The preacher prays fervently for our safety on our travels and we all join in with the Amens, even more fervently.

  ‘I went on a boat from Korea to China and it was nothing like this!’ Mark says. He looks rather shocked.

  Now a breeze picks up; a warm fluting of air around our sticky faces. We turn into the open sea. The boat puts on a gentle roll, which becomes a less gentle corkscrew. Looking through the window of the bridge Mark and I are relieved to see there is a radar, which is working. Suddenly everyone feels tired. Mark goes off to find some deck to sleep on; I lie down where I am, on the wing of the bridge, on the seaward side. Lightning flashes behind the clouds to landward. We are passing between Bioko island, part of Equatorial Guinea, and Mount Cameroon, but both are invisible. There are no lights, the moon has vanished and the stars are blotted out by thick cloud.

  CHAPTER 6

  Nigeria: Gulf of Oil, Coast of Slaves

  Nigeria: Gulf of Oil, Coast of Slaves

  WE WAKE TO rain falling quite hard with a hissing noise. Bodies are stirring around me, cursing quietly as those of us without shelter struggle and slither, crab-like, towards sheltered parts of the deck which are already over-full. I fall asleep in a sort of crouch. When the rain stops I move back to my former spot. It is wet but the air is still hot.

  At three in the morning the rain comes again, heavier this time. I struggle to my feet, drunk with fatigue. The land is invisible in the dark but to seaward half the horizon is on fire. Oil flares, rigs, supply ships and tankers form a motorway of light. In the depths of the night it is business as usual in the Gulf of Guinea, one of the hottest oil spots on earth. I stand there, swaying, staring at the illuminated sea, trying to distinguish between different ships and rigs, breaking the strings of light and fire into separate vessels, too tired to care about the rain and wishing I had some emergency whisky with which to fend it off. The door to the bridge opens and a figure beckons me in. It seems an extraordinary kindness: I can barely believe it. Thank you so much, merci, merci, I whisper, and curl up, making myself as small as possible in a corner. I black out and sleep deep and dreamless.

  Daylight comes with lots of ankles and legs, engine noise, conversation and the luxury of the hard, dry floor of the bridge.

  ‘Bonjour!’

  Heads turn, faces look down from above: ‘Bonjour!’ they grin. I stand, feeling excellent, as though all my muscles have been wrung out.

  ‘There you are!’ says Mark. We return to our spot, yawning. He found a good place to sleep too, he says. A man comes around with milky coffee and a sweet pastry, which, strangely, has some sort of fish paste in the middle.

  We are cruising up a wide channel of mangroves and palms. It looks like an ancient, eternal Africa of picture books, of Just So Stories and legends. The palms with their heads nodding slightly to one side and the mangroves, clutching the sea between their roots, seem to promise fever, snakes and slavers. Here and there, through breaks in the green walls, are villages made of reeds, half-floating. In the channel canoes are working: they are heavy wooden things, flat like big punts; some are being paddled, some sailed and one or two have motors. There are three men in each, throwing out and hauling in nets. The channel is thick with flotsam: lumps of wood and clumps of mangrove bob out to sea as large terns dive into the water, fishing, and supply ships steam past us, heading out for the rigs in the gulf.

  ‘What is the absolute proof of God’s mercy?’

  As it gets hotter the preacher starts up again. His assistants come round handing out leaflets, then the Bible, instructing us to read a bit and then pass it on. Around half past ten the channel turns right into a large river, and there is Calabar.

  There are houses along a ridge, warehouses and sheds by the water, naval vessels and wrecked boats half-sunk, and other wrecked boats so battered and rusty that they really ought to be sunk but which are in fact being loaded, and a wharf crammed with a crowd of hundreds of people. Over it all, against a hot silver sky, a huge green and white flag of Nigeria, the biggest flag I have seen, flaps slightly.

  The door of the captain’s cabin opens and the captain emerges. It is the first we have seen of him; we must have been in the hands of the mate. The captain looks fat and self-important in gold-rimmed shades. As children burst into tears and loud women fuss over them the captain takes over and noses us towards our berth. We edge between two rusty freighters, and all seems well until the captain forgets about our stern and it swings viciously. There are cries of alarm on the other boat, men run, and ropes stretched between one of the freighters and the shore first take then fail to hold the tremendous pressure of our weight. They drag the freighter towards us and there is a mighty crash.

  Disembarking means charging down a narrow plank off the nose of the boat into a heaving, howling, shouting, waving, surging throng of people. I am the only white, as at least a hundred people have noticed and a good dozen point out. Dozens more want to shake hands, say hello and find out where you have come from. I keep smiling and keep bullocking in. I am rapidly adopted by a young man who leads me in a kind of race around the immigration people, who stamp my passport, and the money-changers, who have stacks of naira which they manipulate at dizzying speed (a crowd of nodding faces assure you the exchange rate is fair), to the medical people.<
br />
  ‘You have a yellow fever certificate?’

  ‘Yes, it’s in the bottom of my bag.’

  ‘Your bag?’

  ‘Yes, here.’

  ‘OK, don’t worry about it.’

  The next thing I know I am on the back of a motorbike and ripping up the hill, out of the port and into the razzle-dazzle of Calabar’s permanent rush hour. In Nigeria, I surmise, they do not hang about.

  ‘Who are you – Simon Peter or one of the other disciples?’ demands Josephine, the receptionist at the hotel. She offers to show me around town when her shift ends in the afternoon, on the condition that I shave thoroughly and change. We set off in her little red Volkswagen.

  ‘My father gave me this car as a graduation present,’ she giggles. ‘I am still not very good.’

  ‘You are just fine,’ I gasp, soothingly, as we career around a roundabout. We go first to a salad bar, which is deserted but for a waiter watching a soap. Someone weeps by a hospital bed as Josephine picks over a huge salad of tinned vegetables.

  ‘I live with my brothers, but I am so fed up with them, they do not do any cooking! So I get up, cook their lunch, go to work, go home and cook their supper. My new boyfriend has a good job at a bank. Perhaps I will marry him and leave my brothers – ha ha!’

  Josephine says her job is a bore. She has graduated in Tourism and Hotel Management and now wants to move to a city, but as yet she does not have the money. It is a shock, after Congo, Cameroon and Zambia, where jobs like hers are in the hands of older people, mostly men, to find a young woman evincing exactly the same kind of dissatisfaction you would expect to find in a European graduate in a similar role: it is as though in crossing from Cameroon an older century, almost another continent, has slipped away. Josephine wears a crucifix and although she does not go to church she does believe in God, and in the tenets of the Church.