Cameroon with Egbert

by Dervla Murphy

  This seemed a suitable moment to test David’s ju-ju. Ritualistically unfolding the Attestation I presented it to Monsieur Topi with the air of someone solving a problem. He looked at it uneasily – very uneasily. Then he passed it to his companion who pointed to one of the seals and muttered something. They looked at each other … The Frenchman returned the document to me, nodded curtly and drove on.

  ‘Marvellous ju-ju!’ I enthused, carefully replacing the fetish in my passport.

  Soon after, our descent was broken by a level fertile shelf, a couple of miles wide and several miles long. Here dozens of Fulani brood mares grazed in paddocks with First World fencing; their foals all looked half-bred. In one field, some 200 yards from the track, a mixed-sex work-gang was briskly clearing stones – so briskly that I studied them through my binoculars. All were youngsters, being supervised by a man carrying a long stick. We went quietly on our way, glad not to have been observed.

  Ahead lay the unpeopled Ranch Headquarters. Apparently an ambitious ‘development’ had been abandoned, or at least had had its completion postponed. Four extra-outsize brand-new tractors stood in a spacious yard enclosed on three sides by wire fencing and on the fourth by a high mud wall like the first stage of a medieval fortification. In the centre of this entirely irrelevant obstruction, a tractor-wide corrugated-iron gate stood open. Beyond were a few inexplicable breeze-block buildings (stables? granaries?) and several fancy bungalows set in unsuccessful gardens. On either side of the track stood long rows of what can only be described as roofless, mud-brick terrace houses with quasi-Moorish archways instead of doors and quasi-Gothic embrasures instead of windows.

  ‘An embryonic tourist centre?’ I speculated. ‘With horse-trekking as the centre-piece?’

  This suspicion was strengthened when we came upon the weed-infested foundations for some colossal structure – a Holiday Inn?

  We were puzzling over the absence of people when a burly shouting man, barefooted and pock-marked, pursued us. Mysteriously, one of his trouser-legs had been cut off at the knee, which gave him a misleadingly clownish air. At first his manner veered oddly from subservience to truculence: then he settled for the latter. He spoke a mixture of Pidgin and broken English but his intentions were clear. We must report to the office – we had caused offence by not greeting anyone – we couldn’t leave the ranch without his permission because the road out was blocked and guarded by his friends …

  ‘He just wants dash,’ diagnosed Rachel. ‘Give him something and let’s get out of here!’

  Then the Land Rover reappeared; I waved at it and our companion cowered. The Man from Yaounde leant out and yelled something as the vehicle turned off towards a bungalow. Our companion discarded truculence, cordially shook hands and wished us ‘Bon voyage!’

  Moments later we heard thundering hoofs; eight little boys were galloping after us, riding bareback and shrieking ferociously to urge on their mounts. Hastily I led Egbert into the trackside scrub. As the stallions raced past we glimpsed exultant faces: ‘The only cheerfulness around!’ noted Rachel.

  Volcanic landscapes are magnificently unpredictable. From the ranch shelf our track plunged into an arid red chasm, too irregular to be called a valley, a ravine or a cleft – an eerily unfinished area, as though Nature, like the Men from Yaounde, had postponed completing this development. The track, gouged out of cliff-faces by people rich enough to acquire bulldozers but ignorant of road-building, had already been so eroded that no truck could possibly use it. ‘Now we know,’ I remarked, ‘why that cattle-trailer has been abandoned.’ Here the cruel gradient, combined with sharp loose surface stones and deep cracks, caused poor Egbert some distress.

  The noon heat radiated relentlessly from fissured precipices and chaotic rocky gullies. Then, as we slowly climbed from the chasm floor, a watercourse appeared ahead: a dramatically green thin line on the flank of a vast parched mountain. A road-block also appeared, looking more like an international border post than most such do in Africa. My binoculars revealed a heavy pole, stretched between two smartly painted red and white sentry boxes, and three men sitting on camp-chairs.

  Where the stream crossed the track, out of sight of the sentries, we watered Egbert, washed, and filled our bottles. As we approached the men I made ready to flourish my fetish but they insolently ignored us. All looked moronic and wore vaguely military tattered tunics. One was abstractedly masturbating and didn’t bother to button up when we stood beside him requesting the lifting of the barrier. At last the co stirred himself and sauntered around Egbert, eyeing the load. He scowled, made a ‘No pass!’ gesture, and seemed to be insisting, in Pidgin, that we return to Ranch Headquarters. I was about to argue when Rachel moved forward decisively, raised the barrier with one hand and led Egbert through. Quickly I followed, then turned to wave to the co. He was staring after us, looking comically nonplussed. When I congratulated Rachel she observed, ‘It’s too hot for palavering!’

  It became hotter still as we descended. All around us angular black and red rocks, a few hundred feet high, stuck out of the ground looking oddly like peaks without mountains. Not until 12.30 p.m. did we come to a few warped dwarf trees. Unloading, we left Egbert to make what he could of a straggle of wiry grass and collapsed in sweaty heaps. The trees afforded only minimal shade and were pullulating – every trunk and branch – with giant black ants. These fell upon us in showers – accidentally, but none the less irritatingly. Minute black flies bit us savagely and incessantly. That was the first of many unrelaxing midday ‘rest’-stops.

  An hour later we rejoiced to see a fleet of dark rain clouds come sailing over the mountains. We were about to load when another Range Rover appeared, going towards ‘Headquarters’. Two of the passengers were German-Swiss cattle experts; the third was a polite but wary-looking Cameroonian in jeans and a facetious T-shirt. When we had introduced ourselves the senior expert, leaving his companions standing by the vehicle, walked with me towards Egbert. He looked more than slightly demented and suddenly turned aside to sit under a tree.

  ‘So you have seen this ranch!’ he said. ‘So you can believe my frustrations – right? All this, it is what you I think call arseways on – AI to make big animals before they have food for them! So the cattle become sick, right? And when calves are born many cows die. Zebu cows are narrow, calves with Holstein daddies are broad – right? Years ago I come, study everything, tell them, “First you spend time and money making new, richer pastures. Then you have Holstein semen for some cows, for those who can carry such calves.” But no! no! no! At once all cows must have big calves! Then I come back and look again and tell them, “Now you have made half-European cattle, you must give them European feed! In the dry season these animals need brewers’ grains, rice bran, cotton seed cake, bone powder, trace minerals.” But no! no! no! They want only to see big animals, not to spend big money – only to make it … For them AI is White Man’s Magic, never they connect big breeds with scientific feed! When animals go sick or die they say we give bad semen – you see I have frustrations? Why do I come back here wasting time? Never will they listen – not these Big Men. The Fulanis they would work with me, they could learn. These rich men, they are all from areas without cattle, they think this is just one more way of quickly getting richer.’ He looked around as his colleague called impatiently. ‘Now I go back to my frustrations! Some day maybe we meet again and I can tell you more. Much, much more! But only when I am leaving this country for the last time – you understand? Ha, I see you do! You are an old lady of the world, yes?’

  As we continued I felt a twinge of sympathy for the Men from Yaounde. It is largely our fault that so many Africans are confused about the application of White farming methods to Black countries. For decades agricultural aid advisors have been preaching totally impractical gospels. Our Swiss acquaintance was right to assume that Fulani cattle-men would have co-operated with him; but how many ‘experts’ from USAID, the FAO or the World Bank appreciate the intelligence, common sense and
inherited wisdom of Third World farmers?

  In 1985 the World Bank analysed the results of seventeen massive agricultural aid projects in Africa: thirteen were failures. The economic returns on livestock projects averaged minus 2 per cent, compared with an 11 per cent gain in Asia and Latin America. Those projects were the idiot brain-children of doctorate-laden academics keen to save Africa’s illiterate peasantry from the consequences of their own ignorance. It was assumed that results obtained in high-powered research stations could be duplicated by villagers. Chemical fertilisers were introduced and promptly increased the soil’s acidity in humid regions while making almost no difference to yields in dry regions – and thus failing to cover their considerable costs. Monocropping was encouraged at the expense of intercropping. Imported heavy machinery destabilised frail fields. Rainfall variations were ignored. New technologies, seed varieties and crops were introduced, regardless of the disastrous effects they might (and usually did) have on delicately balanced systems. Over the past quarter-century I have heard a lot about – and quite often observed – the crassness of Western aid ‘experts’ on other continents. But nowhere have they been so destructive as in Africa.

  Approaching the big village of Kikfuni, we attracted much amazed/ amused attention. No less amazing, to us, was a youngish man wearing a lime-green track suit, expensive runners and a white Panama hat. He welcomed us to his village, introducing himself as George Charles Akuro, home from Hamburg on a two-month holiday. His swaggering progress was attended by several adult ‘followers’ – male relatives and family connections, all no doubt dependent on the rich exile’s largesse – and by half a dozen children clad in garments of German provenance. He had been working in Hamburg as ‘an import businessman’ for ten years.

  ‘I am home to arrange more business and marry my new wife – we have four children and many others will come!’

  I asked how and why he had settled in Germany. Vaguely he replied, ‘My missionary friend wanted me to go.’ When I provocatively enquired if he would bring his new wife and their four children to Europe he looked quite shocked. ‘They would be unhappy and cold! It is very, very cold in Germany. There I have another wife who is used to the weather.’

  George stayed with us when we stopped at the first suitable off-licence – suitable because of a lush patch of grass nearby. It was crowded, as village off-licences often are from breakfast-time onwards, and a shiny Nigerian cassette-player rendered conversation impossible. Beer and soft drinks were the same price: 200 CFA (about 44p) per half-litre. Cameroonian soft drinks (brand-named ‘Top’) are loathsome ersatz ‘fruit juices’, dyed a sinister orange or green. Cameroonian beer, on the other hand, is of a consistently high standard.

  We sat outside the door, on sharply uncomfortable plastic beer crates, and at once George commanded the bar girl to bring a chair. As it appeared I murmured ‘Thank you,’ being not as yet fully attuned to Cameroon’s social mores. I was about to move when George swung the chair around to face us and settled himself comfortably, looking expectant. We had however learned one lesson: never offer a drink to a casual acquaintance. Too many other customers then expected free drinks from the rich White.

  George quickly gave up hope and ordered for himself and his followers. ‘This is a bad country!’ he complained. ‘A poor bad country where the people are very lazy!’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked. ‘We think it’s a good rich country where people are kind and mostly have enough to eat and the landscape is beautiful. There are more homeless and hungry people in the USA than there are here!’

  ‘Cameroon is very bad,’ insisted George. ‘All these bush people, they don’t know how to live – they are backward stupid people! In Hamburg I have everything – big home, big car, deep freeze, fridge, cine-camera, television, stereo-system, swimming-pool for my kids. See! I show you!’

  He drew a thick wallet of photographs from his briefcase and the children crowded eagerly around to marvel yet again at his achievements. There was George, leaning nonchalantly on the roof of a Mercedes by the open driving door – and George removing a silver-foil-wrapped dish from a face-level microwave oven – and George posing by an open refrigerator taller than himself and packed with colourful goodies – and so on. There were dozens of photographs, all of a professionally high standard and looking remarkably like advertisements for the objects illustrated. I wondered … George somehow lacked the aura of a wealthy import-export merchant.

  Watching the children staring with awed incomprehension at these emanations from another world, I remembered those who are working hard and patiently, without publicity or luxury funding, to introduce ‘appropriate technologies’ to rural Africa. Ease of communication, when it means bright pictures of the enviable unattainable circulating in Cameroonian villages, is not necessarily beneficial. On being shown how well a jiko can work, young Africans might understandably ask, ‘Why is an ex-tar-barrel oven appropriate for us and a microwave oven appropriate for you?’

  Questioned about The Ranch, George was uninformative. ‘These are good rich men, making good plans for this area.’

  ‘But who are they?’ I persisted. ‘And what are their plans?’

  ‘It is not known,’ said George.

  Kikfuni is a widespread village of prosperous compounds embedded in greenery; it took ten minutes to walk from that off-licence to the big eight-day-market place in the village centre. The many rows of roughly constructed thatched stalls were empty, but a line of small shops by the side of the track sold a few basic goods. We left loaded with the cheapest Cameroonian foods: bananas at 5 CFA each and giant avocados at 10 CFA each.

  The local weather, we were beginning to realise, is Irish-capricious during the little rains. We had been expecting an afternoon downpour but although the sky clouded over and the temperature dropped perceptibly no rain fell.

  Here the level land was densely cultivated – an apparently untidy, uncontrolled jungle of crops: kolanut, pawpaw and mango trees, coffee bushes, beans, groundnuts, sugar-cane, bananas, plantains and young maize already a foot high. Such areas give the impression of a land so rich and lush, so smiled upon by Nature, that merely scattering a few seeds around ensures super-abundant food. This false impression has an echo in one of Britain’s most offensive racial stereotypes: ‘Those lazy Blacks! Trouble is no one has to work where they come from, they just lie around in the sun all day watching things grow!’ In fact such ‘unruly’ regions are agricultural works of art, the result of sophisticated planning based on centuries of precise observations and imaginative experiments. But unfortunately such intensive cultivation is not the rule in Cameroon, being found only in heavily populated areas where the surrounding terrain makes shifting cultivation impossible.

  The track was busy as women and children went to and fro from their fields, laughing and gossiping and occasionally quarrelling. The adults greeted us cheerfully, the teenagers giggled shyly, the children seemed half-scared. In maize plots women hacked vigorously at tangles of weeds; where crops flourish, so do their weed competitors and insect foes. One motive for burning fields is to kill weed seeds and insect larvae, another is to reduce soil acidity. The ill-effects of indiscriminate burning are not yet understood.

  Some 75 per cent of Cameroonians remain on the land, growing over 90 per cent of the country’s food. Moreover, the land is their own. Outside of Zimbabwe and Kenya (for obvious reasons) there are few landless peasants in Black Africa. This may partly explain why rural Cameroonians seem so much more self-confident, relaxed and contented than their fellow peasants in Peru or India. Life is hard, but they are independent. The disadvantages of a rural economy based on subsistence smallholdings are of course considerable, though less acute in Cameroon than in most Black African countries. One snag is the lack of an influential ‘farming lobby’ organised by large landowners. Many villagers complained to us about the government monopoly on cash crops (notably coffee) which are bought for scarcely half the world market prices. Yet Cameroon h
as been comparatively lucky; her individual smallholders know that they are people of consequence on whom the national well-being depends. Both President Ahidjo and President Biya have emphasised the importance of agriculture for Black Africa. Neither was lured by outside interests into giving priority to industrial development: hence Cameroon’s minute national debt, at a time when most of her neighbours have been ruined by the need to import expensive foodstuffs. Yet red lights are flashing. The population has recently been increasing at about 200,000 a year and, since the mid-1980s, there has been a need to import grain to feed villagers newly settled in the cities. President Biya has stated, ‘Agriculture must and will remain the priority sector within the context of the National Development Programme.’ But he is ominously silent on the subject of birth-control.

  The average Cameroonian holding is less than three hectares (about seven acres) yet throughout our journey we noticed much cultivable land to spare, apart from what was lying fallow. A shortage of labour is one factor limiting Africa’s food production; there are no swarms of landless peasants. This situation could be partially remedied if men’s working habits became more flexible. Traditionally they confine themselves to clearing new land, turning the soil and growing cash crops: coffee, cocoa, palm oil. The cash is usually kept by the men for their own use. Women are expected to grow enough to feed the family; and what they earn by selling surplus food locally will, with luck, pay for the children’s clothing. Meanwhile they also have to bear and rear those children, fetch water and gather firewood (often from considerable distances), prepare and cook meals (a lengthy and tiring process when all the grain has to be pounded), do the laundry, wash-up and clean the compound. Not only ardent feminists condemn this division of labour.