Cameroon with Egbert

by Dervla Murphy

  By 6 p.m. we were climbing gradually between hilly fields. Some carried sugar-cane and others – just dug, in readiness for planting – were scattered with high cairns of stones. This was unpromising camping terrain but we rightly guessed there must be a village nearby.

  Acha (much smaller and less attractive than Kikfuni) lay at the base of an alluring jumble of mountains: Mount Ocu’s foothills. Rectangular tin-roofed mud huts straggled on either side of the track and Mr Nomo Zambo, the only person in sight, hurried from his doorway to invite us to stay. His wife was away in Kumbo, waiting to have her fifth baby at the Mission Hospital, but his nieces were looking after him and could also look after us.

  When Mr Zambo and Rachel had led Egbert away, to look for good grazing, a twenty-year-old nephew escorted me to the off-licence. Neuke was small, slight, handsome; he had clear bright eyes, glossy black skin and an open eager expression. The off-licence, furnished only with a few benches and a stack of crates in one corner, was empty of customers.

  ‘Here there are many Muslims who don’t drink beer,’ explained Neuke. He himself had become a Muslim quite recently, when he married – but he was not, he emphasised, teetotal. The family, we later discovered, were Bamunka; but Mr Zambo wore Fulani dress because ten years ago he had gone over to Islam after quarrelling with Christian relatives about land. To us this seemed something of a non sequitur, but that merely reveals our ignorance of local affairs.

  Neuke took two ‘33’s from a crate, since there was no one around to serve us. ‘I am lucky!’ he said. ‘Every morning I walk to study carpentry in Kikfuni and come home late. But not today because my teacher has fever. So now I talk to you and it’s good to talk English with White people because at school we have bad teachers. Last year two White people came in a Land Rover, to Lake Ocu, but they slept in a big tent in the bush. My uncle was sad and angry. To say “No” when you are invited is bad. We like to look after travellers and share everything we have.’

  Neuke deplored the war in Chad. ‘It makes me sad – too many dying and starving! But this is a peaceful country – you see how we have plenty, plenty food and no guns and fighting. If we like we become Christian, Muslim, pagan – no one makes trouble about it. No one asks questions about religion or politics. We are lucky, happy people!’

  It would be misleading to describe Cameroonian villagers as ‘politically aware’, yet most seem proud of their country’s record since Independence. Neuke was the first of many who expressed to us a genuine appreciation of Cameroon’s stability and prosperity.

  When I offered Neuke a second beer his response was unnerving – ‘I wait for your wife and my uncle, then we all drink together!’

  I am used to being misgendered at first glance, when clad and equipped for trekking, but never before had I sat talking to someone for half an hour without their diagnosing my sex. Moreover, it was hard to convince Neuke that Rachel and I are in fact mother and daughter – and even harder to convince Mr Zambo, when he and Rachel joined us.

  Throughout Cameroon this confusion persisted, not only in remote villages but in little towns where even government officials, or police and army officers – some from cosmopolitan Yaounde – invariably assumed me to be male. We decided that the problem was twofold: physical and psychological. My appearance did not conform to the Cameroonian image of elegant, fragile White women, an image derived mainly from magazine illustrations, or glimpses of expatriate wives swanning around the capital. Also, they could not conceive of two women wandering through the bush and camping out in the (to them) menacing loneliness of the night.

  Mr Zambo evidently took his conversion seriously, whatever its motivation, and though he stood Rachel a beer he would accept only Top from me. ‘Now I am Muslim, I don’t have strong drink.’

  Irish potatoes thrive in Cameroon and are now popular as a ‘special dish’, often spelt ‘Iris’ when chalked up on menu-boards in eating houses. So Mr Zambo and Neuke were much perplexed by our Irishness; to them being Irish meant being a potato – not a human being. I was tempted to tell them that Murphies are sometimes known as ‘Spuds’, which is another name for potatoes, and that potatoes are sometimes known as ‘Murphies’. But that would have intolerably confused the issue.

  We tried to describe Ireland but soon realised that our friends, like most of the Cameroonians we were to meet, could not visualise the world beyond their own region. They were vague even about Cameroon’s neighbours – except Nigeria, which is within walking distance of the Grassfields and not regarded as ‘foreign’.

  Before supper we were shown into a small yard behind the main hut. The latrine was on the far side, behind a raffia screen – a deep, wide, odourless hole criss-crossed by bamboo poles on which one squatted. On the ground in another corner a deep basin of hot water (four feet in circumference) had been provided for our ablutions, complete with a fresh cake of soap and a giant sponge. Cameroonians – unlike the Murphies when trekking – are almost obsessional about washing their bodies and their clothes. Apart from a few homeless semi-idiots, I cannot recall seeing one unclean individual in three months. Yet we were travelling in areas where tap water is virtually unknown.

  In the largest room, measuring some fifteen feet by eighteen, half the floor space was taken up by a four-poster bed – ours for the night. Here Neuke’s sister, an attractive fourteen-year-old wearing a BVM medal around her neck, served supper by lamplight. Uncle and nephew sat watching as she struggled to push aside the heavy raffia door-curtain while carrying a laden tray. She was followed by the eldest Zambo boy, a doted-on nine-year-old who stayed by his father for the rest of the evening but didn’t eat with us. The fufu was heavier than at Doi’s and rather gluey. Instead of jammu-jammu we had a mess of bony dried fish in a sauce not spicy enough to conceal the fact that the fish had decayed before being dried. We sat on home-made wooden chairs, bending over the low table to eat from the communal dishes and piling our bones on a communal saucer.

  Discussing our route, we discovered that this village, known as Acha in Kikfuni, was called something quite different by its inhabitants, who in turn called Kikfuni something beginning with ‘Mb’ – and so it went on, even towns like Kumbo having two or three names. ‘But what else can you expect,’ remarked Rachel afterwards, ‘when villagers living five miles apart don’t understand each other’s languages?’

  As we sipped our post-prandial Ovaltine, I casually enquired about The Ranch and its development. Neuke asked excitedly, ‘How did you get in? Did you see the Big Men?’ But Mr Zambo looked sharply at him and said, ‘We don’t know about these people.’ Whereupon Neuke said no more.

  By nine o’clock we were comfortably abed, sharing a blanket but each with a little pillow in a freshly laundered blue cotton cover. Overhead was a wickerwork awning, between us and the cobweb-laden rafters. Both inside walls were of cane and through their cracks lamplight shone faintly. Most Cameroonians won’t sleep in total darkness and Mr Zambo had been astonished when we assured him that no lamp need be left in our room.

  We speculated about our bed’s usual occupants. Mr and Mrs Zambo might seem a reasonable assumption – except that Cameroonian husbands do not normally share sleeping-quarters with their wives, merely visiting them briefly (though frequently) in their own huts or rooms. More likely this de luxe bed was shared by our host and his small sons.

  4

  On and Around Mount Ocu

  THE TRACK TO Lake Ocu is motorable but rarely motored; during a glorious five-hour climb, from 3,500 to 8,700 feet, we saw no vehicles and few people.

  Resting at one hairpin bend, we watched two tall lean men, armed with gleaming spears even longer than themselves, go bounding up a hillside: monkey-hunters, no doubt. The local small grey white-faced monkey is a favourite source of protein and its numbers are dwindling accordingly.

  For hours the track wound around the flanks of golden-grassed mountains, their craggy peaks silver against a cobalt sky. Sometimes tall trees shaded us; sometimes we were crossing
wide ledges which supported a few compounds and maize plots; sometimes quick clear streams watered broad green pastures where small boys tended large cattle. Then the mountains became more precipitous, huddled closer and were darkly forested. This track, originally hewn out of the cliff-face by Germans, overhung ravines too sheer for even the boldest hunter. Many monkeys were audible, but wisely remained invisible amidst their refuge of impenetrable vegetation.

  By noon we were on the cool top of the local world, walking level around tree-covered summits above profound forested valleys containing one of the few fragments of primeval forest we saw in Cameroon – untouched because protected by the mountains’ formation. Nowhere else have I heard birdsong of such variety and beauty: a continuous, complex flow of sweetness, a strangely moving echo from ages past, from a time when there was room on our planet for all Nature’s handiwork.

  I was walking slowly, my binoculars at the ready, when we were overtaken by three young men and two young women, the latter carrying enormous heaped baskets wrapped in bright blankets. One of the men was armed with a sling made of wood and tyre strips. As we continued together he amused himself by aiming at birds – not for food, just for fun. Even had he wanted to retrieve his prey the density of the forest, right to the edge of the track, would have prevented this. He and his mates could see more with the naked eye than I could with binoculars. Repeatedly he paused to pick up a sharp little stone and have another shot. When he scored his mates grinned admiringly but the women ignored him – though not, I fear, because their ecological consciences were smiting them.

  Where we gradually began to descend the forest thinned slightly on our left. By then the track’s twistings had addled even Rachel’s sense of direction and we might have missed the turn-off but for our companions’ guidance. That little path sloped gently upwards through monstrously abused woodland and we braced ourselves to meet the shock for which Mr Zambo had prepared us. ‘Beside the lake,’ he had said, ‘there is a house for tourists – a mighty house!’

  This hideous cross between a much-magnified log-cabin and a malformed Swiss chalet was an example of government-sponsored vandalism. It squatted on a bulldozed ledge – itself a raw wound on the mountainside – and seemed to have been instantly abandoned on completion. Its untreated boards had weathered to a dingy grey, its doors , and windows were rigidly shuttered and bolted and nearby stood a long rusty tin shed. All the surrounding once-magnificent trees were fire-victims and the morbid stench of stale compacted ash and rotting half-burnt vegetation powerfully irritated our nostrils. Apart from two old sardine tins, and an insect-repellent aerosol container (relics of the Whites who wouldn’t stay with Uncle?), there was no evidence that this ‘tourist house’ had ever been approached, never mind occupied, by anyone.

  Turning our backs on this tragic squalor, we moved to the crater rim and gazed over the bottle-green lake a hundred feet below. It lay absolutely still, about a mile wide and several miles long, surrounded by virgin forest. Only where we stood had its loveliness been desecrated. Yet ‘loveliness’ is not the right word: it too much suggests simple, lightsome beauty. And Lake Ocu’s atmosphere is unsettling. Without knowing anything of history, one would, I think, sense here a hint of the sinister. Although Cameroonians had warned us that it is lethal even to descend to the water’s edge, Whites had recommended it for swimming – and all morning, sweating uphill, we had been looking forward to plunging in. But now it somehow seemed untempting. Besides, in this horribly mauled place there was alarmingly little lunch for Egbert: no grass, only a few stunted bushes with which he was unenthusiastically toying.

  At 8,000 feet we were able to enjoy the midday sun while eating sardines and stale bread. Only our own munching broke the silence; Egbert had given up on the bushes and was dozing. No breeze ruffled the lake’s surface or stirred the foliage on the crater wall below us. We chanced to be sitting precisely at the centre of this rim and the whole visible world had an uncanny symmetry. Dark green water, lighter green forest, deep blue sky. The forest showed no botanical irregularity, the shoreline no geological irregularity. An eighteenth-century garden could not have seemed more formally ordered.

  ‘It’s a bit eerie,’ I remarked, ‘to be overlooking such an expanse without any sound or movement.’ But even as I spoke there was movement: a pair of golden-backed fish-eagles glided from the forest and began slowly to circle below us, their pinions scarcely moving, their grace and power superb.

  All Cameroonian lakes are to some degree sacred and Lake Ocu is more so than most. For centuries Ocu was an important chiefdom and at a new Fon’s enstoolment he was solemnly bathed in water from the lake. The ritual protection of the chiefdom was among his main responsibilities. (Palace officials looked after the practical details of administration and trade.) Every year, in February, during the guinea-corn harvest, he led his priests, of whom he was the chief, and his councillors, and a representative group of ordinary men and women, to the lake shore. There he conducted the ntul rite, to ensure the fertility of crops and women and invoke protection from all misfortunes. A goat was slaughtered and thrown into the water, together with corn and other foodstuffs. Neuke believed that humans as well as goats were sacrificed in pre-colonial times but Mr Zambo indignantly dismissed this as ‘a bad story missionaries told us to put us against our chiefs and religions’. However, missionaries did not invent Ocu’s ritual slaughtering and burial of slaves, which, together with the planting of trees, were essential components of alliance-building to end inter-chiefdom wars.

  Within ten minutes of rejoining the track we came upon a scene that has haunted me ever since. Here the mountains were slightly less steep and for miles ahead, in every direction, the ancient forest had recently been cleared leaving a blackened nightmare of desolation. On every slope the charred corpses of hundreds of mighty trees lay amidst the ashes of their precious jungle undergrowth. I felt physically shocked, as though someone had kicked me in the stomach. I couldn’t speak. But the younger generation, brought up in a world being rapidly devastated by human fecundity, have had to grow tougher carapaces.

  ‘You have too many people, you get this,’ Rachel noted laconically.

  In the day’s first village, a steep hour later, Egbert grazed ravenously opposite the off-licence while we sat with a score of beer-relaxed men. Numerous near-naked small children were romping and singing and dancing in the shade of the empty market-stalls. A few had worm-distended bellies; the rest looked vibrantly healthy. Here it was very hot and very lush. On the surrounding slopes many older children were helping mothers and grandmothers as they toiled in fields with punishing gradients.

  The locals called Lake Ocu ‘Lake Mawes’ and were intensely proud of the ‘tourist house’. One jaunty young man, home on holidays from ‘an office job’ in Douala, foretold that many, many tourists would visit Ocu when the funds came through (from Britain) for the new Bamenda ring-road.

  Continuing downhill, we crossed a narrow green valley of magical beauty before climbing again, along the flanks of well-wooded mountains, to the broad crest of a densely populated ridge. Having joined a genuinely motorable track, we passed through the elongated village (or little town) of Jakiri. It was 4.30 p.m. and when the sky suddenly darkened I suggested seeking lodgings. But Rachel pointed out that Egbert needed choice grazing, not just – as on the previous night – a skimpy patch of grass left over by the local goats.

  In the village centre a large thatched mud building had elaborately carved antique doorposts, featuring stylised naked men and monkeys. When I paused to examine these an unusual current of hostility emanated from three elderly men sitting nearby on stools no less elaborately carved – presumably the Chief’s clansmen, to whom the privileges of decorated doorposts and carved stools are traditionally restricted. They returned my greeting with un-Cameroonian coldness and I veered away.

  Soon a gigantic beer truck slowly jolted past us, its cargo rattling demoniacally. As there was room to take Egbert off the track, he kept his
cool; but further on, in the mountains, there might be no manoeuvering space. Realising that this narrow, erosion-fissured track was in fact the main motor-road to the important town of Kumbo, we followed a loaded girl up a steep ‘cut-short’ across a cultivated ridge.

  Half an hour later, as we were about to rejoin the road, a few heavy raindrops fell from a low, charcoal-grey sky. We hesitated, surveying our immediate surroundings through Egbert’s eyes. Probably any of the several nearby compounds would have willingly sheltered us: but there was no grazing in sight, only cultivated fields. Foolishly we continued, telling ourselves that storms are brief during the little rains.

  This one wasn’t. It quickly became the most spectacular meteorological event to which I have ever been exposed – and exposed is the mot juste. The landscape looked utterly unlike anywhere else we had seen and there was no vestige of shelter. From about 7,000 feet we were overlooking, on our left, an immense panorama of bare rolling hills and long ridges – all dug ready for planting. On our right a similar ridge of naked earth sloped up from the road. There were no trees, bushes, rocks or compounds. The soil was not red but an unusual (for Cameroon) dark brown. And we were still climbing, fighting now against a gale-force wind that made nonsense of the load’s waterproof covering. Our own capes flapped like demented things, further unnerving poor Egbert, so we took them off. Like all horses everywhere, he detested facing into a rainy gale. It astonished me that after each attempt to turn tail (literally) he responded to my coaxing – albeit very reluctantly – and bravely soldiered on.