Cameroon with Egbert

by Dervla Murphy

  Other books by Dervla Murphy published

  by the Overlook Press

  Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

  The Waiting Land: A Spell in Nepal

  On a Shoestring to Coorg: An Experience of South India

  Eight Feet in the Andes

  Muddling Through in Madagascar

  Copyright

  First published in 1990 by

  The Overlook Press

  Lewis Hollow Road

  Woodstock, New York 12498

  Copyright © 1990 by Dervla Murphy

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-521-0

  Contents

  Also By Dervla Murphy

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  Dedication

  Map

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: To Bamenda: Looking for the Other Four Feet

  Chapter 2: Enter Egbert

  Chapter 3: The Forbidden Ranch

  Chapter 4: On and Around Mount Ocu

  Chapter 5: On the Tenth Day …

  Chapter 6: Mayo Darle and Beyond

  Chapter 7: The Tchabal Mbabo

  Chapter 8: Spooked in the Tchabal Gangdaba

  Chapter 9: Exit Egbert

  Chapter 10: Fun Among the Fons

  Chapter 11: Wandering Towards Wum

  Chapter 12: Trapped by Lake Nyos

  Chapter 13: Re-Enter Egbert

  Index

  Illustrations

  (between pages 144 and 145)

  1. Girl with sister of the Kwondja tribe

  2. Ngah Bouba, traditional doctor

  3. Village chief with wives, Ngybe, near Mayo Darlé

  4. Koranic School, N’gaoundere

  5. Hairdressing session

  6. Yamba women working their ground-nut fields

  7. Mbororo girls returning from the river, near Mayo Darle

  8. Yamba man trimming palm-tree

  9. Yamba woman and child harvesting sweet potatoes

  10. Jacqueline’s friend Dijja, with her youngest child

  11. Dijja’s daughter, Fatah

  12. Yaya Moctar, who ‘adopted’ Egbert

  13. Egbert and his new owner

  14. Rachel’s one day in the saddle

  For permission to reproduce the above illustrations, the author and publisher would like to thank John Fox (Plates 1-9 and 11-14) and Jaqueline Fox (Plate 10).

  For Jane and David Hughes, who inspired

  our Cameroonian journey, and for Joy and

  John Parkinson, and Jacqueline and John

  Fox, without whom we would not have

  survived it.

  Introduction

  CHANCE WAS RESPONSIBLE for our going to Cameroon. During the autumn of 1985 an Anglo-Pakistani couple, based in Kano, invited me to Northern Nigeria. When I hesitated, explaining my dread of West African heat, they assured me that after the rains it would be cool enough – and fertile enough – to trek from Kano to Lake Chad with a pack-horse.

  Soon after, a Sunday Times interviewer asked me ‘Where would you like to go next?’ I was then in the middle of writing a book and uninterested in forward-planning. But, when questioned, that Nigerian trek popped out of my unconscious and was in due course announced to the world – or as much of it as reads the Sunday Times.

  Months later came a letter from Cameroon, its envelope half-obscured by enormous, vivid bird-stamps. It was a delightful echo from the past; thirteen years previously we had stayed with the writers, Jane and David Hughes, in their Coorg (South India) home. Since 1982 they had been based in Cameroon; a friend had sent them that Sunday Times interview; they felt sure Cameroon would be much more my scene than Nigeria and urged me to use their Bamenda home as my base while I negotiated for a sound Fulani stallion. I was still immersed in my book but the enthusiasm with which the Hughes described Cameroon penetrated all my defences against distraction. Gratefully I replied, ‘See you in March.’

  It was then my intention to trek alone. In June 1986 Rachel had left school and migrated to India, to spend six months of her ‘in-between’ year teaching English to Tibetans and travelling solo. On her return she planned to earn some money in Paris before going up to university, but on hearing of my Cameroonian plan she quickly wrote back asking if she could come too. Like many another foot-loose adolescent, she found the prospect of returning to the First World disconcerting – something to be postponed for as long as possible. This felt like good news to me. For fifteen years we had been travelling together – most recently, in 1986, to the United States – and in an odd way we seemed to have become a team, despite natural changes in the quality of our relationship.

  The tall young Cameroonian in the Holland Park embassy was slender and impassive and spoke no English. He stood behind a small uncluttered desk in a long, sparsely furnished room and scrutinised our passports and return tickets to Douala. Then he gave me six forms to fill in and requested £18; our visas, he said, would be ready for collection in forty-eight hours.

  In a much smaller room across the hall three plump ladies sat at huge desks piled with documents and overshadowed by giant filing-cabinets. They all spoke English but were rendered inarticulate by the notion of two white women wandering through the bush with a packhorse. The senior lady admitted, ‘We have no tourist information.’ A younger lady suggested, without much conviction, that the nearby Cameroonian Trade Office might be able ‘to advise’.

  The Trade Office occupied another enormous building but only two staff were visible, a timid hall porter and a Trade Attaché who provided a ‘Factsheet’ and took umbrage when asked about Cameroon’s varieties of malaria. ‘Every country has malaria’ he snapped. ‘But in our country there is malaria only in the cities, where flies breed on garbage. In the bush there is no malaria!’

  In the tube I read my Factsheet, dated 1 March 1986. It seemed on the whole a lucid document, designed to help businessmen, though I couldn’t quite understand why ‘Prior Ministry of Finance approval is required for loans contracted abroad by public or private physical or moral person habitually residing in the country.’

  The Republic of Cameroon, lying in the Gulf of Guinea, has an area of 183,000 square miles and an estimated population (June 1983) of 9.6 million, of whom 53 per cent were then under twenty years of age. (By March 1987 an estimated 60 per cent were under sixteen.) The 1984–5 per capita income was $820 and the rate of inflation 10 per cent. This means that Cameroon is the second richest, by far, of the Central African states. Only Congo is ahead, with $1,230. Burundi ($240) and Zaire ($170) are more ‘normal’. All these are World Bank figures and perhaps not very meaningful if you live in Central Africa.

  For the past ten years oil has been Cameroon’s most valuable product. Her other main products are coffee, cocoa, bananas, palm kernels, cotton, rubber, wood, aluminium and tobacco. In 1984 her exports to Great Britain were worth £132.5 million, including £122 million worth of oil. Her imports from Britain, worth £23.3 million, included beverages, chemicals, specialised machinery and road vehicles.

  Cameroon’s official languages are French and English; some three hundred African languages are spoken throughout her territory. Religiously, the population is about equally divided between Islam, Christianity and Traditional – i.e., what used to be known as ‘pagan’ in less semantically sensitive times. The form of government is official
ly defined as ‘Unitary State, Presidential regime, monocameral assembly’. Unofficially, Cameroon is generally recognised as a benevolent (most of the time) dictatorship. The country is divided into ten provinces, forty-one divisions and numerous sub-divisions. It has a 200-mile coastline on the Gulf of Guinea and the local time is GMT plus one.

  Our visa’d passports were handed to me precisely forty-eight hours later, but the visas were valid for only thirty days. I protested that I had applied (and paid) for ninety-day visas, the maximum allowed to tourists. The young man shrugged and turned away; he either couldn’t understand or couldn’t be bothered. I continued to protest and he continued to ignore me. When I sought support from the three ladies across the hall their leader insisted that tourists could see all they needed to see of Cameroon in thirty days. I counted ten before explaining, slowly and calmly, that a thirty-day visa is useless to a travel writer. I asked to see the First Secretary but the ladies chorused that that was not possible. I repeated, through clenched teeth, that I must see the First Secretary, at which point the hall door banged and the senior lady yelled, ‘Bosco, we need you!’

  A tubby, middle-aged gentleman of indeterminate status joined us and listened impatiently to my complaint. ‘You have no problem,’ he assured me. ‘Your visas are very good. Don’t be in a hurry! You must wait …’ He ushered me back to the large room and commanded, ‘Sit!’ as though I were an unruly dog. The young man regarded me with faint disdain, before locking his desk and departing. Bosco then sat heavily on the edge of the frail desk and rang a friend to whom he talked animatedly, at great length, in one of Cameroon’s three hundred languages. Seemingly his friend was a wit; he roared and rocked with laughter until the desk crackled ominously.

  Embassies are foreign territory, both legally and emotionally – places where visitors feel suspended between the contrasting worlds of home and away. Immediate reactions tend to be conditioned by ‘home standards’, yet already one is striving mentally to adapt to ‘away standards’. My own reactions to this hiatus were classic. It threatened to wreck our plans for the rest of the day and early next morning we were to fly from Heathrow. At first I roved restlessly up and down the hallway and around the big room, thinking racist thoughts. Then the Cameroonian vibes got through and quite suddenly I unwound – OK, our plans were being wrecked, but so what? They could be remade, or simply forgotten … As Bosco rang another friend I settled down by a wide window, overlooking an agreeably undisciplined garden, and resumed my rereading of Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa. I had got to page 330, where she observes, ‘The cannibalism of the Fans, although a prevalent habit, is no danger, I think, to white people, except as regards the bother it gives one in preventing one’s black companions from getting eaten.’

  An hour later Bosco – who meanwhile had been entertaining the ladies – peered around the door. ‘Soon,’ he said, ‘you will see our Big Man.’ I tried to make grateful noises.

  Twenty minutes later Bosco reappeared. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you will see our Big Man.’ He beckoned me to follow him upstairs.

  In the First Secretary’s small office I got my first whiff of what we came to know and love as the real Cameroon. Mr Deng was tall and burly, exuberant and amiable. He received me with a vast smile and an enthusiastic, lingering handshake. Our visa application forms were still lying on his desk and I pointed to my unambiguous request, in CAPITAL LETTERS, for ninety-day visas. Mr Deng chuckled and slapped the forms dismissively. ‘You have no problem, these are not important! In every town your visas can be renewed. When you go to the Immigration Officer he will immediately renew – we don’t make difficulties for tourists, you must feel no worries!’

  Déjà vu assailed me. This was a re-run of arguments in the embassies of Pakistan, Ethiopia, Mexico, Peru, Madagascar … The refusal to grant adequate visas, the assurances that renewal was easy within the country, the expiry of visas a fortnight’s walk from the nearest town, the danger of being arrested for overstaying, the much more alarming risk of being expelled from the country half-way through a trek … Making no attempt to conceal what has by now become a visa neurosis, I explained to Mr Deng that we were not tourists but travellers, that our route would take us far, far away from Immigration Offices. For good measure I added a graphic description of our arrest by Peru’s Political Police and our expulsion from that country.

  Mr Deng’s face puckered with concern. ‘No, no! It is not possible that you can be arrested in Cameroon! Your visas expire, you get a bush-taxi to the next town – there is no problem.’

  ‘Except,’ I said, ‘our horse. I know bush-taxis can carry most things, but not horses. Also, we may not be anywhere near a motor-road when the visas expire.’

  ‘Your horse?’ said Mr Deng. ‘You are both riding on one horse? That is cruel!’

  ‘We are walking,’ I reassured him. ‘The horse will be carrying our gear, only.’

  Mr Deng drew a deep breath, held it, then exhaled, ‘Won-der-ful! Won-der-ful! You are walking through my country? From where to where are you going?’

  We moved to stand before a faded wall-map hanging above a decrepit, sofa. I felt reluctant to admit that as yet we had only a vague notion of where we were going. Tentatively my forefinger wandered from Bamenda to Wum, Banyo and points north, keeping to the coolish highlands. ‘Wonderful!’ repeated Mr Deng. ‘You white people have courage, no Cameroonian women will make this journey. Even men will be afraid, beyond their own land.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’ I asked.

  Mr Deng turned away, avoiding my gaze. ‘There are many things to fear. Storms, floods, lions, tigers, maybe volcanoes, maybe finding no food or shelter as it gets dark – so many dangers!’

  I refrained from pointing out that the area in question is lion-less and that there are no tigers in Africa. It would have seemed impolite to instruct Mr Deng about the fauna of his own country. Then suddenly he cheered up. ‘You must stay always near villages, then you will be safe. Everywhere people will help you, giving meals and shelter and showing you the path. Nowhere need you fear people – in the bush we have no criminals, no bandits, no bad men. But Douala – be careful in Douala, very careful. All big port cities have so many bad men!’

  This was refreshing; the embassy staffs of most countries, when confronted by trekkers, at once predict bandit-trouble, though their predictions rarely come true. There was something won-der-fully soothing about Mr Deng, despite his inexplicable resolve not to issue ninety-day visas. He made me feel that even if we were arrested in Cameroon it wouldn’t much matter. My neurosis receded, I pocketed our passports and we parted amiably.

  At 11.40 p.m. on 16 March I finished my book on race relations in Britain and early next morning – an auspicious date for Irishwomen to begin a journey – we shouldered our rucksacks and took the tube to Heathrow. I was then rather below par: exhausted, distressed and bewildered after an intense two-and-a-half-year involvement in Britain’s confused and confusing inner-city-cum-race-relations scene. As our Aeroflot plane took off I felt a sense of liberation; it seemed safe to , assume that Cameroon was free of ‘race relations’ in the fraught, quasi-political British interpretation of that term.

  During an eight-hour wait at Moscow for the Tripoli-Douala-Brazzaville flight, glasnost was startlingly apparent. Far fewer armed soldiers than usual were patrolling the airport and the very young passport officer was of a new breed. His predecessors habitually scowled at arriving capitalist pigs but this youth smiled shyly at me and winked flirtatiously at Rachel – a superficial change, perhaps, but it felt quite significant. Later I had a long discussion about the future of mankind with a comely young woman wearing a natty Intourist uniform. She denounced not only NATO and us foreign policy but Soviet bureaucracy, lethargy, corruption and drunkenness. Such an encounter would have been unthinkable on any of our previous stop-overs.

  When the bar closed at a puritanically early hour – a spin-off of perestroika? – we were fed massively at Aeroflot’s expense. Then w
e wandered down to that vast area of green tiles and uncomfortable shiny seats where passengers condemned to small-hours departures droop silently. Or the Whites do – not so the Blacks. Their ebullience, at midnight, was enviable. The men in our group were pin-stripe-suited young lawyers, handsome and confident, returning to Douala or Brazzaville from an international conference in Stockholm. Mostly they were very black and very tall and their vivacious wives wore African robes with Gallic panache. They spoke French among themselves, while excitedly discussing the inevitable crates of hi-tech goodies piled beside their gold-embossed leather suitcases. Each couple seemed to have at least three small children, happy bundles of energy who romped tirelessly.

  We had another two hours to wait. Rachel escaped into Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories and I looked around for an interesting companion. Mrs G. T. Jackson, travelling alone with the Guardian in her hand-luggage, beamed when I sat beside her. ‘You have a beautiful daughter!’ she said, which got us off to a good start.

  Mrs Jackson’s two thick sweaters, under a tweed overcoat, made her seem fubsy but as a young woman she must have been quite beautiful. She came from a village near Maroua in the far north of Cameroon, close to Lake Chad. Although her Muslim family had disapproved of her marrying an Englishman she was forgiven after father’s death. ‘Now’, she explained, ‘I go home every other year. I love to see my own people and I need heat! For three months I store it up in my body to get me through those terrible, terrible English winters!’

  Mrs Jackson knew nothing about West Cameroon or even Adamawa, where the population is largely Muslim. ‘For us those areas are like another country – Cameroonians do not travel within Cameroon unless they have to, for their jobs.’ She did not however think our trekking plans remarkable. ‘The English are like that,’ she observed. ‘My husband when he worked in Nigeria was always away in the bush, camping and riding.’ On hearing that we are not English she nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s good you have this feeling about being Irish. Our government has to work so hard to make Cameroonians feel Cameroonian … Why should we? What is Cameroon? It is a European invention, like all African countries!’