We unfolded our map, sans Lake Nyos. We explained that no one had told us about the Restricted Zone and that garbled media reports had falsely located Nyos village, describing it as ‘on the lakeshore’ and ‘remote and inaccessible’ – which it is not, being on the ring-road.
‘But,’ said Basil dryly, ‘the ring-road is almost impassable during the rains. And if you were a journalist, straight in from Paris or New York, inspecting the area by helicopter, you might imagine it was remote and inaccessible! But why were you not stopped at Ise? Did you not see the army camp? Many troops are posted there to stop people going near the lake. And did you not come to a big barrier of trees on your path? Did you not think then perhaps you should stop and turn back?’
We admitted that we had noticed the camp but had seen no soldiers. And the barrier on the path had seemed a relatively minor obstacle which we soon got over.
‘You get over too many obstacles!’ said Basil. ‘That is why you have so many problems! Now you wait here for the Chief, tell him your story, then come to my home and we shall see how things develop.’
By then Headquarters was coming to life. We sat in the sun outside reception, overlooking a flooded parade ground. Three friendly SSPS in mufti (but with revolvers stuck in their belts) were listening to two elderly villagers being passionately disputatious about goats. One billy (old) had killed another (young). The old billy was free, his victim tethered. As it is illegal to leave goats untethered the victim’s owner was claiming the old billy as compensation. But he, being fat, was worth 20,000 CFA (about £45) – whereas his victim, being thin, was worth only 10,000 CFA (about £22.50). Nothing had been decided when another pair of litigants arrived – younger, but also goat-centred. One man’s billy had been tethered so close to another’s nanny that he killed her by strangulation – a far knottier problem than the first and one to which the elders now applied themselves with as much enthusiasm as though it were their own.
Even in my hung-over state, I perceived an incongruity here. Why were these goat controversies taking place at the Headquarters of the Special Security Police? What did internecine conflict among goats have to do with National Security? A charming SSP with only half a face (the other half had been blown off when his gun went wrong) elucidated. All these litigants were followers of SSP officers and so deemed it expedient to seek justice here rather than at the Gendarmerie. By then we were so Cameroon-attuned that this seemed a perfectly logical explanation.
At 10.20 a.m. the Chief appeared, now grandly uniformed but looking frail. He seemed not to recall that I was his grandfather’s double. Realising that for him this was our first meeting, we played it that way.
‘Why you were arrested?’ he asked.
I told my story, ending with profuse apologies for having unintentionally broken the law.
‘You should have permit from highest sources of Yaounde,’ said the Chief. He had, we suspected, taken in little or nothing of what I said. He held out a hand: ‘Please, give me your passports, to send to Yaounde. You wait in Wum – is good?’
‘But you have our passports!’ I protested. ‘Your duty-officer kept them last night!’
The Chief wrinkled his brow and looked as if that hurt. ‘Here are no passports – I do not have – give me!’
‘Someone here has them,’ I insisted, beginning for the first time to feel genuine alarm. It seemed hideously possible – even probable – that that duty-officer had allowed our passports to be eaten by goats or termites.
‘Come back tomorrow,’ ordered the Chief. ‘Your passports may be found – maybe not …’
‘At what time tomorrow?’ I asked, being obstinately White.
‘At any time,’ said the Chief. ‘I am always here, at your service. I am a public servant. It is my duty to help people.’
Thus began another Wum passport saga.
From Wum, the town nearest Lake Nyos, the mass-burials were organised and to Wum came many survivors for medical care and ‘rehabilitation’. Now, emboldened by our new feeling of personal involvement, we initiated discussions of the tragedy and discovered an unravellable accretion of rumours, allegations, contradictory statements of ‘fact’ and fresh Nyos-myths. Perhaps this turmoil of gossip, accusation and fantasy was being used as an anaesthetic to dull the local awareness of what actually had happened. In Wum even the most dogged investigative journalists had been forced to abandon their quest for hard facts – details of who had done wrong, and why and how and where. And I had no stomach, after walking through the village of Nyos, for probing scandals. No one could be blamed for the explosion. It was a natural disaster, or an act of God, if one chooses to believe in a God given to such actions. In my then mood it didn’t matter who was making away with emergency relief supplies, or if the government said more or less people died than was the case. Everyone in Nyos village died. And statistics become supremely unimportant when everyone is dead. (In fact everyone didn’t die, as we were soon – and shatteringly – to discover.)
We were told of a European scientist – some said English, others German – who in the mid-1970s warned the locals that Lake Nyos was likely to give trouble. We were also told of a quarterchief from the area who in 1982, after Mount Cameroon’s latest eruption, foretold a disaster and urged everyone to move away. His prophesy was based not on traditional magic but on personal observations of ‘strange things floating in the water and bad smells around the shore’. But his advice was misinterpreted as a ploy to clear good land for occupation by friends of his from ‘outside’.
In a shebeen a youngish Bantu man was bitterly eloquent. He had lost fifteen of his family and denounced the mass burials as ‘shameful and not necessary’. He and his friends had buried their dead in their compound, where people should be buried, because they could afford to bribe police jeeps to take them to Nyos. Almost every family, he said, had survivors who should have been helped by the authorities to hurry to Nyos to bury their dead ‘with respect’. ‘For us this is more important than you people realise. We stay close to our dead, they are not gone – forgotten – finish! They stay with us still, in the compound. They have a part to play in the family, helping the living. Even if scientists say the lake is safe again, government has made it hard’ for many people to go back to Nyos. Too many dead have been treated badly and will be unhappy and angry. For the Fulani it will be easier – they have different feelings.’
Basil, who organised the mass burials, told us later that given the delay in discovering the tragedy, the state of the ring-road and the need for quick burial in a tropical climate, it would have been impossible to organise family burial parties – and dangerous to try, because of the risk of epidemic disease.
A Fulani evacuee was also embittered. The government had promised financial compensation to surviving Fulanis who could show vets’ certificates proving cattle losses, yet after eight months no one had received a franc. Like everyone else, he derided the ‘1,746’ official death toll. Many had been buried before the security forces arrived with their shovels and quicklime – many others, in isolated compounds, after they left. ‘But the government wanted to seem in control, that way more aid would be sent from other countries. They are trying to get big money from Israel to build a new modern town for all people now in camps! But this is dishonest. We don’t want to live in a modern town – we are village and cattle people …’ (When news of the Nyos disaster reached Yaounde, the then Prime Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, was on an official visit to Cameroon and Israel at once provided most of the medical aid needed – and much of the equipment for the camps.)
Basil’s exertions on our behalf won-der-fully abbreviated that second passport saga. After a stern interrogation by the Biggest Man around – far transcending in importance any Chief of Police – our passports were returned and we left Wum next morning with changed plans. The Mbembe Forest Reserve was out: all of the Restricted Zone lay between us and it. So our new goal was the Bambouto Mountains, to be reached via the hitherto elusive Bafme
ng. Basil had seemed understandably anxious that this time we should get out of his jurisdiction in – metaphorically – a straight line, without further unscheduled wanderings. Therefore we attached ourselves, on the outskirts of Wum, to four wood-collecting children who guaranteed to put us on the correct bush-path.
Just beyond the town, as I was bringing up the rear, a handsome, well-built, sad-faced young man emerged from a side path and quietly returned my greeting. He was carrying an axe and was oddly dressed, in a shirt and shorts of grey and black striped material. When I asked if he was going to Bafmeng – hoping we might have a guide all the way – he replied in excellent English. He wished he could go to Bafmeng, but he was a good-conduct prisoner who, having served seven years of his sentence, was now allowed out once a week to collect firewood for the prison kitchen.
This frankness encouraged me to ask ‘Why were you imprisoned?’ and his reply shook me because one couldn’t not believe him; he was that sort of young man. His father, a prosperous We farmer, had set him up as a butcher in Wum market at the age of eighteen. A few months later he bought twenty cattle from a Fulani who had rustled them. In court he claimed not to have known they were stolen and proved that he had paid the full market price. Yet he was sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment. And the Fulani was executed by firing-squad.
Despite the brevity of that encounter it remains one of my most indelible – and saddest – Cameroonian memories. There was something extraordinarily moving about the dignity with which this young man accepted a gross injustice. We shook hands where he turned off to climb a jungly hillside and I stood for a moment watching him walk away alone through the bush. I felt our short conversation had helped him; that meeting had a curious flavour – almost as though it were designed.
Six energetic hours later our approach to Bafmeng coincided with the sort of storm that goes down in history. At first we imagined it to be a normal manifestation of the real rainy season (now close) but even by Cameroonian standards it was freakish: ripping off roofs, felling mighty trees, destroying several square miles of crops and demolishing five substantial buildings including a Catholic church. When it began without warning we were some four miles from Bafmeng but already under shelter, in an isolated off-licence-cum-huxters. Luckily this little shack stood in a slight hollow; had it been on a ridge-top it might well have been blown away and would certainly have lost its roof. The parents and three children seemed disturbingly ill-nourished and apathetic, reminding us how rare poverty is in rural Cameroon. When we arrived a skinny little fellow, aged about six, was amusing himself by rearranging the very few goods displayed on dusty shelves behind the bar: washing soap, torch batteries, small boxes of loaf-sugar. His younger sister lay restlessly asleep on a wooden bench; she looked feverish. Then, as we raised our bottles to our parched lips, the sky was suddenly black – and Father slammed the door as an uncanny howl, not immediately identifiable as wind, seemed to fill the world.
The thunder and lightning were not – could not be – any more dramatic than what we had already witnessed. But never have I experienced such darkness at midday. And the rain seemed not rain but falling water – as in a waterfall. Then it was mixed with thick hail, the size of ping-pong balls, that bounced three feet off the ground and might have concussed us had we been exposed to it. Opposite the shack a mature eucalyptus wood became frighteningly beautiful as trees flung themselves this way and that, like mad tormented dancers staging a frantic arboreal ballet. At first the gale had been blowing from behind us, where the ground rose slightly. When it veered abruptly Father rushed to shutter the wide window but was too late to prevent a flooded floor.
Two hours later the hurricane had dwindled to a storm, the torrential rain was hail-free and we continued – though in such a wind neither umbrella nor capes could protect us. We were now on a hilly ‘fair weather’ motor track which in foul weather becomes a swirling dark brown river. Schoolchildren, wading through the flood, looked scared: what might they find when they got home? Many tin roofs and unrooted eucalyptus lay strewn about; items of colourful enamelware were perched high in mango trees; plantain groves, coffee bushes and almost-ripe maize had been smashed into the ground. This was a heartbreaking scene of industry defeated, the innocent punished, the hard-working deprived.
We splashed into Bafmeng’s first off-licence through a wide red-brown lake below the track. A dozen men and a few women were bewailing the hurricane damage, none quite sober at 4.45 p.m. An elderly Big Man sitting in a corner (Commander Emmanuel) commiserated with our sodden shivering and ordered beers for ‘these sad people’. His ‘son’ Barnabas, a follower inherited from his father, was unpleasantly drunk with bloodshot eyes and refused to shake my hand.
‘First I salute Madame! I know how to behave with ladies – I know Germany!’ He turned to embrace Rachel, at some length, and leeringly informed her, ‘I have spent time in Germany, there I was very nicely looked after by girls like you – yes? You love me?’ He swung around, seized my bottle of beer and drank deeply before returning it.
I said, loudly and distinctly, ‘I am Madame. This is my daughter. Her name is Rachel and I am her mother.’
Here gender confusion reached its bizarre apogee. Barnabas came towards me and turned nasty. ‘You are lying!’ he sneered, thrusting his face into mine. ‘You are man – why you want to pretend you are woman?’
Wearily I unbuttoned for the breast-baring routine, but with Barnabas it didn’t work.
‘Artificial things are not good!’ said he. ‘We don’t want that kind of trouble in Cameroon! We don’t like this here, we don’t have such problem in this country, we don’t like it brought from outside … We have no saints here but we are better than Europe which has many saints. We in this country can’t be fooled by you people – you are man!’ By now he was staring at me quite wildly and swaying as though about to topple forward onto my suspect bosom.
Commander Emmanuel, who had been trying to intervene, at last made himself heard. He shouted something in whatever Bafmeng folk speak and his follower was temporarily silent. The Commander then turned to me, apologetically. ‘Madame, this is bad! You come here wet and he talks of Germany – for what? What help for you to talk of all countries he’s seen? He is my son but only because I have to take him when my father dies – I do not like him. But we are all God’s children, whichever church – or no church – you attend. For us all God had love enough to die – you are Catholic?’
Before I could reply, Barnabas borrowed Rachel’s Beaufort, took a swig, then began a loud confused account of his time in Germany, his two-day visit to East Germany and his views on Communism. When it emerged that he had worked as a docker in Hamburg his reaction to my bosom became less baffling.
An hour later the rain stopped and the evening sun slanted across a waterlogged Bafmeng. Opposite the off-licence was the European-orderly Catholic Mission, an unusually large complex of buildings set amidst neat almost-lawns shaded by rows of spreading trees. The Commander (we never discovered why he was generally known as ‘Commander’) said that we could spend the night either at the Mission or in his younger brother’s nearby empty house. Brother was ‘a very big army officer’, living in Yaounde, and his new house was unoccupied. At the Mission they had a visiting medical team of three, caring for Nyos refugees, so perhaps we should stay in Brother’s villa? Gratefully we agreed and a very small boy led us through knee-deep (for him) water, head-carrying our rucksack apparently effortlessly. In a huge bedroom two posh Dunlopillo double-beds were made up with fresh sheets and warm soft blankets. Each (urbanisation running wild!) had a bedside locker and the glazed window was securely grilled.
We dined in the Commander’s own villa, a hundred yards away. In a spacious living-room, sparsely furnished, he invited us to admire a collection of firearms, dating from various eras, on the whitewashed walls. The party consisted of our host, another follower (a local teacher) and Sister-in-law, who divided her time between Yaounde and Bafmeng because someone
had to supervise the cultivation of Brother’s many rich acres. This was the only time a woman shared a meal with us – and with men – in rural Cameroon; but of course Sister-in-law was used to Yaounde ways. By then both Commander Emmanuel and his follower were truculent-drunk. They shouted angry abuse at each other throughout the meal while Sister-in-law looked disapproving but resigned. Perfectly cooked rice and herby mutton stew were served from giant food-thermoses and cutlery was provided for all, though not used by the men. It seemed tactful to retire the moment we had finished, leaving Sister-in-law to pour palm oil on increasingly troubled verbal waters.
We chose the bed by the window and were almost asleep when our host came lurching in, a lantern in one hand and a gun in the other. This was no home-made brass-studded job, nor had it been left behind circa 1640 by the Portuguese. It was a gleaming new army rifle and when the Commander had put down his lantern he pointed it at us and said he wanted Rachel on the other bed. A fate worse than death seemed improbable; our host’s competence on that score was unlikely to have survived his beer intake. But death itself seemed quite probable, if the rifle were loaded and its owner continued to wave it about while fiddling with the safety-catch. I spoke soothingly, as one does to a toddler who has got hold of something so dangerous he mustn’t be startled. Rachel was pretending to be asleep and I protested that she was exhausted – it would be very cruel to wake her – but in the morning she would certainly join him in his bed.
The Commander persisted; he wanted my daughter now. Suddenly he sat heavily on the edge of the other bed and again targeted me and hiccupped. By this stage my heart was hammering with fear and my palms sweating. Then he changed his demand: if I would join him now he could wait until morning for my daughter. Another flourish of the rifle accompanied this proposal. I tried to sound as though it fired me on all cylinders, then explained that I, too, was exhausted. However, after a few hours sleep it would be my privilege and pleasure to enter his bed.
Cameroon with Egbert Page 36
