Cameroon with Egbert

by Dervla Murphy

  The French were intent on developing their Mandated Territory, by fair means or foul. Hospitals, schools, administrative buildings, hotels, churches, office-blocks, telegraphic services and shopping-arcades proliferated; roads and railways were maintained or extended. Meanwhile British Cameroon regressed; apparently Britain regarded its mandate as a genuine White Man’s Burden, to be shouldered uncomplainingly but unenthusiastically. From 1922 to 1939 the Government of Nigeria had to spend more, annually, on Cameroon than it received in revenue from the area, a position that need never have arisen had Britain taken over the confiscated plantations in 1920.

  The 1920s were a difficult decade for the British administrators. In April 1922 they had officially adopted the Indirect Rule policy, which meant ignoring pretty well every ‘native excess’ apart from poison-ordeals and human sacrifices. (All the members of the Bagham Chief’s court were hanged for having been professionally involved in a human sacrifice, which seems not quite cricket. Presumably the executed men were following some immemorial tradition and acting according to their consciences. But it did prevent – or at least prevent the discovery of – further human sacrifices in the Grassfields.) Indirect Rule enraged the missionaries of various nationalities and denominations, and their more fanatical converts. The latter argued that the Administration – manned, they assumed, by God-fearing Englishmen – should prevent Chiefs from practising polygamy, from using their followers’ womenfolk as goods to be exchanged in the market and from enslaving girls as concubines and boys as palace ‘pages’. They also refused to pay their taxes to the Chiefs – an integral part of Indirect Rule – and demanded to be allowed to pay them instead to the Missions. This the grievously embarrassed Administration could not allow; nor could it do anything about ‘human rights’ without first abandoning Indirect Rule.

  Egged on by their European mentors, many converts (especially Roman Catholics) became quite paranoid in their opposition to ‘the old ways’. No doubt some missionaries enjoyed being the new ‘Supreme Authority’, to whom the converts submitted as unreservedly as once they had to their ‘natural’ leaders. Originally those leaders had been well disposed towards missionaries. But when the converts rejected all traditional customs and standards of behaviour, and refused to contribute their share of public work – being too busy building churches, schools and houses for priests – they were, naturally enough, regarded as subversives and severely ill-treated by the Chiefs and their followers. And things became even more fraught when it was discovered that in several areas Chiefly wives, who had been encouraged to run away from home to study Christian doctrine, were also studying the Christian male anatomy.

  It is doubtful if there were many genuine Christians among that generation of converts; both their behaviour and the speed with which they were absorbed into various Churches suggest a limited understanding of the new religion. Yet one can see the inevitability of this grim phase in Cameroon’s colonial experience. The missionaries believed it to be their duty to oppose the Chiefs’ disregard for ‘human rights’ and some reckoned that it made sense to use converts to oppose them, thus avoiding direct Black versus White confrontations. Nowadays, when the value of many elements within ‘paganism’ is widely recognised, the Chiefs might have been challenged more imaginatively and sympathetically. But in the 1920s and ‘30s Christian/ pagan antagonism was raw, crude and implacable.

  Between 1938 and 1945 the unlikely alliance between Cameroon’s Chiefs and the men from Whitehall was gradually replaced by a new policy based on the recruitment into the Native Authority administration of mission-educated public servants. As Bill Freund has noted in The Making of Contemporary Africa:

  Conquest brought a quickening tempo to mission activities and in some areas mass conversions by the 1920s. Some of this may be comprehended as part of a desire by Africans to succeed in, and be accepted as part of, the new regime. In all the colonies where schools were common the missionaries completely dominated the new formal education and insisted on conversion as part of the price of schooling. So an ardent Christian faith became a part of the cultural baggage of many African accumulators. Missions were often of great significance in the acceptance of new commodities, commerce and crops and the source of technical and artisanal skills. They were par excellence the vehicle for capitalist values in much of the continent.

  1

  To Bamenda: Looking for the Other Four Feet

  WE TOUCHED DOWN at noon, precisely, and dragged our stiff, over-fed bodies through what felt like a substance – Douala’s humid midday heat. In the small uncrowded Arrivals Area Rachel muttered, ‘There’s a bureaucrat to every passenger!’ Anxiously we waited by the conveyor-belt: was our irreplaceable gear in Douala or Ulan Bator? Beside us stood Rosa, a young Italian linguist specialising in Pidgin and embarking on three months’ research in Anglophone Cameroon. She was being met by a compatriot, a road-building engineer, and had generously offered us a lift into Douala. When her suit-cases appeared she promised to wait for us at the entrance.

  Dreadful things can happen to rucksacks on aeroplanes and at Heathrow we had packed ours in a tough orange survival-bag, together with bit and bridle, riding-hat and picket. The picket had been specially designed and made for this trek by a young welder friend who knows a lot about horses – but not enough, as we were to discover, about Africa. It was a formidable object: two feet long, heavy and thick, with a wide loop on top, a four-inch half-bar and foot-long swivel-chain two-thirds of the way down and a very sharp point. To anyone unfamiliar with pickets (99 per cent of most modern populations) it must have looked like a weapon bought in some kinky Martial Arts shop.

  Our sack was the last item to be disgorged. As we marched out to the Customs area – Murphy Junior wearing a hard hat and a bridle round her neck, Murphy Senior grasping the picket – a frisson of alarm went through the assembled bureaucrats and jostling porters. We might have been arrested then and there – instead of much later – but for Rosa’s friend. Bernard had taken the precaution of bringing with him a senior police officer who quickly surmounted, on our behalf, the numerous hurdles of a Third World airport. Yet even a police escort did not deter one customs officer – while our protector was coping with ‘health’ – from attempting to appropriate a tin of mini-cigars.

  ‘For me!’ he exclaimed gleefully, delving into my hand-luggage and grabbing a tin.

  ‘Not for you!’ I contradicted with a wave of the picket.

  ‘I am joking!’ he gasped, dropping the tin and backing away. I began to see that this picket might have secondary uses.

  Some four-letter words are peculiarly graphic. When a city has been described as a ‘dump’ the speaker need say no more. At once we can visualise the place, on whichever continent it may be, and so I had vivid preconceptions about Douala. Those few who know it speak ill of it. I cannot recall a single person, Cameroonian or otherwise, who did not denigrate its climate, architecture, insects, morals, entertainments, prices and unrelieved dullness. Clearly no one would choose to live at sea-level on the Bight of Benin, yet for me there was an intense excitement about this arrival in Douala, my first point of contact with Black Africa. (I don’t count a 1967 trek through northern Ethiopia, with its distinctive history and Coptic culture, or a 1983 journey through Madagascar, which is not purely African.)

  All was rampantly green by the road from the airport: trees, shrubs, vines, grasses and crops seemed aglow despite an overcast sky – an eager greenery that invades and softens the city streets. The traffic seemed sparse, the few pedestrians sluggish – it was siesta time – and both roads and pavements were scarred with the standard man-trap holes. Behind expensive bars, restaurants and shops, catering for Douala’s large expatriate colony, we glimpsed pullulating street-markets, rowdy shebeens and collapsing or collapsed lean-tos. Just as some ugly people can be attractive, so is Cameroon’s biggest city – which has a population of less than half a million. Tales of murders, muggings, pickpocketings and car-thefts are common, yet one’s
antennae pick up no threats. Most of the inhabitants are recent arrivals from all over Cameroon, optimists who imagine that fortunes can be made where industry burgeons, and the atmosphere is more rural than urban.

  Rosa had booked into the Catholic Mission city-centre guest house. Otherwise the choice was between (tower-block) Tourist Hotels, where bed-minus-breakfast costs £40 to £60 a night, and Unclassified Hotels – otherwise known as ‘Africa hotels’ – at £4 a night. In the latter, asserted Bernard, our property, our virtue and even our lives would be gravely endangered. So we left our gear in his flat and accompanied Rosa to the Mission, five minutes’ walk away.

  Missionaries have been busy in Douala for more than a century and we found a substantial but characterless three-storey colonial building half-surrounding a bare dusty compound. Beside a broken-down truck, full of medical supplies, a young Dutch priest was being semi-hysterical. Someone at the docks, where the vehicle was held up for five weeks, had removed a vital part. What to do? The priest was a newcomer to Africa and had moral scruples about giving bribes …

  In a tiled hallway languid goldfish drifted through the clear water of an ornamental pond fed from a coolly-splashing mini-fountain. A row of wall-cabinets, facing the door, contained specimens (happily deceased) of Cameroon’s more spectacular creepy-crawlies. I averted my eyes from the palm-spider – very common, the size of a tea-plate and the only living creature for which Gerald Durrell can feel no affection.

  A surly German priest in ‘Reception’ could find no record of Rosa’s booking. Sister Veronica might know something about it but wasn’t around. When would she be around? No one knew. But all bookings must be confirmed before 5 p.m. We tried to confirm them with Father Surly but only Sister Veronica could handle bookings.

  Back in the hallway Rosa wondered, ‘Do Europeans become mentally African after they’ve been here for years?’ As she had an appointment with a potential landlady we volunteered to wait for Sister Veronica and sat on a wide verandah overlooking a swimming-pool fringed with hibiscus, dwarf palms and poinsettia.

  This was the Mission bar; a tall money-in-the-slot refrigerator dispensed beer and soft drinks (same price) to those who struck it with sufficient violence on both sides simultaneously. Here we had our first bottle of excellent Cameroonian beer – the first of how many hundreds?

  During the next two hours a cross-section of expatriates wandered in, sat around for a while and wandered out. There were pairs of nuns coming from or returning to the bush, and emaciated young lay-missionaries who looked as though their guts and blood were permanently parasite-infested, and elderly priests with weather-withered skins, yellowish eyes and nicotine-stained fingers. Dermatologically, even the youngest looked as though they had already spent too long in West Africa. Then there was a French colonial antique – part of the establishment – very short-bodied and long-armed, with a tangled white beard, spindly bow legs and a gross belly hanging over knee-length khaki shorts. Otherwise he wore only pink plastic flip-flops and a limp straw sombrero. His lips were set in a demi-snarl, revealing jaggedly broken teeth, and he was forever busy: refilling the refrigerator, testing the water in the pool, hurrying in and out of storerooms, fiddling with air-conditioning machines.

  Father Surly came to the refrigerator for a beer but ignored us; he had a bushy blond beard and hard pale eyes. On that verandah no one ever smiled and conversation was restricted to occasional murmured comments. Even the few servants who drifted to and fro were – most unusually for Cameroonians – dour and silent.

  We received quite a few openly hostile glances. ‘I suppose they think we’re spongers’ remarked Rachel, ‘and you can’t blame them.’ She told me then about a scandalous guidebook, available in English and German, which advises ‘over-landers’ on how to travel through West Africa without spending any money. Such travellers were beginning to infest Cameroon when political chaos in the surrounding countries put a stop to their predatory gallop.

  At 4.30 I went map-hunting, leaving Rachel to cope with the evanescent Sister Veronica. In London, where we had been able to get only United States Air Force aeronautical charts – hardly ideal for trekkers though better than nothing – a young man, then writing a guidebook to West Africa, had misinformed us that detailed maps were available only in Yaounde. In fact we could have bought them from the Topographical Institute at 36 rue Joffre, ten minutes walk from the Mission; it was consistent with our whole Cameroonian experience that we made this discovery only on our return to Douala, when we were about to fly home. However, it wasn’t for lack of assistance that I failed to find even an oil-company road-map; two men and a woman went out of their way to lead me to stationery-cum-bookshops.

  I then began to notice a difference between the évolué and the ‘normal’ Cameroonian – a difference not apparent in Anglo-Cameroon where the colonial power had no grand design for the mass-production of Black Englishmen. Douala’s affluent ‘Black Frenchmen’ (and women) were perceptibly less friendly than the majority. They also looked less happy, as though they saw being sophisticated and Frenchified as incompatible with spontaneous bonhomie. A superficial French influence is apparent in all Franco-Cameroon’s small towns – themselves French or German creations – but only during our brief visits to Douala and the capital, Yaounde, did we encounter this disconcertingly haughty middle class.

  The late afternoon heat was just tolerable; I sweated steadily, but not to saturation point, as I walked down the crowded Avenue Poincare. Long limousines were parked on the pavements, forcing pedestrians to disrupt the traffic and risk their lives by walking on the streets. Watching for tourists, I saw only expatriates: one can’t confuse the two. France is notorious for retaining an economic grip on ex-colonies (unless, as in Madagascar, neo-colonialism is actively combatted) and independent Cameroon has many more French residents than colonial Cameroon ever had.

  At street junctions cheerful men stood by tiny cigarette stalls selling American brands at negotiable prices. Outside smart European-type delicatessens cheerful women stood by tiny vegetable stalls hoping to sell a few avocados, or misshapen blotchy tomatoes, or minute purple onions. The larger wayside greengrocery stalls, some twenty yards long, were piled with local and European fruits and vegetables including, absurdly, imported Golden Delicious apples. Douala’s big stores stock everything, at a price. Given the money (as expatriates are, or they wouldn’t be in Cameroon) one could live as well here as in Paris. Yet the rich-poor contrast is much less distressing than in Bombay or Lima.

  One’s first day in a new country is largely a sensory experience: body-contact between the stranger and a myriad unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells. These have an acute – oddly animal – importance while the traveller’s mind is uncluttered by personal knowledge or acquired opinions. There is nothing to puzzle over, analyse, dissect; one is merely a passive, though excited, receiver of impressions. Also one’s psychic pores are open wide, absorbing messages – their significance not yet understood – from a whole new cultural-spiritual environment. That first day rarely deceives. And having escaped from Douala’s rather tiresome West End, I felt certain that I was going to enjoy Cameroon and the Cameroonians.

  In a large side-street bar beer cost 120 CFA (about 25p – 100 Cameroonian francs is equivalent to about 22p) a half-litre, as compared to 1,200 CFA (about £2.50) in the Akwa Palace. I had to shout my order above three different tunes simultaneously emanating from battered juke-boxes. The place was so crowded – mainly with young men and women – that I took my drink outside; a row of blue plastic beer crates had been placed on the pavement for the overflow. A young man from Bamenda, now working for the Port Authority, at once joined me, shook hands and asked, ‘You are missionary?’ (This, I thought, spoke well for the present generation of missionaries; I doubt if many of their predecessors were found in bars.)

  When I explained myself – not an easy task – the young man looked worried. ‘This journey is too difficult! You must not walk, you will be tired! In Came
roon we have plenty bush-taxis – you must use them!’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘we like to get away from motor-roads, into the bush.’

  The young man leant forward, almost toppling off his crate, and grasped my elbow. ‘In the bush people are savages! You will not like them. They have no toilets, no beds, no water, no bread, no shops, no light from electricity … They eat only fufu – you know fufu? It is not nice!’ (Fufu is a tasteless but sustaining maize-flour dumpling.)

  I assured him that almost any food is nice at the end of a day’s trekking and stood up to go.

  ‘Where is your daughter?’ asked the young man. ‘I would like to meet her, please bring her here now. She is married?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘she’s only eighteen.’

  ‘Eighteen!’ exclaimed the young man. ‘Why are you waiting? Does she like Cameroonian husband? Can we meet now?’

  ‘Not now,’ I said, ‘because early tomorrow we go to Bamenda. But perhaps – who knows? – another time …’

  Returning to the Mission, I relished not being one of a dominant, and too often domineering, White majority. Recently I had been living in a British city where many Afro-Caribbeans were tortured by a sense of inferiority or embittered by White refusals to accept them as equals. Now it felt good to be among Blacks who could unselfconsciously regard me as a potential mother-in-law.

  Sister Veronica was still missing so Bernard invited us all to spend the night at his construction company’s flat, where three bedrooms lay empty. But we hesitated to impose on him until Sister Veronica, materialising out of the dusk, revealed that a three-bed room would cost us 4,500 CFA (L10) each.

  At 5 a.m. Douala’s wide colonial streets were dark, silent and very hot. After walking a mile or so, we were sweat-soaked. According to Bernard’s houseboy, Bamenda bush-taxis left at dawn from the railway station. He was however mistaken and someone advised us to take a shared taxi to another ‘motopark’ four miles away. We shared with two thin men, three fat women and five squirming children.