This was a new and pleasing landscape: lowish mountains, thick green scrub, thin jungle, poor land populated only by a few gaunt cattle and Bantu converts to Islam. For four hours the sky remained overcast and the temperature comfortable. Then the noon sun emerged, but just as we were beginning to wilt a pick-up truck, laden with Fulanis returning from the Id celebrations, gave us a free thirty-mile lift.
During the next ten hot miles I kept Rachel under close though unobtrusive observation, watching for signs of over-fatigue. But she seemed astonishingly fit – an impressive advertisement for Ampicillan.
That was one of our lucky days. In a tiny village an antique Tignere-bound lorry was already packed with people, poultry, goats, sacks and sheep; but somehow room can always be found for a few more bodies and after some haggling the driver agreed to take us cut-price – for 500 CFA.
Half an hour later a violent storm broke. Everyone had seen the black clouds speeding towards us from the north, across a flattish expanse of bush, yet the driver’s assistant waited until we were being drenched before beginning to untie the unwieldy tarpaulin. This had to be held down by all the passengers, including me, along the sides of the lorry, as the gale tried to tear it from our hands. The man beside me was wearing over his shoulder a quiverful of arrows – which threatened, in the dark confusion below the tarpaulin, to pierce my right breast.
Remembering the drought-stricken Tignere we had left, it was a relief to see the town flooded – the river impassable to motor vehicles. Regretfully we passed the Faro, unable to afford even a shared ‘33’, and as the sun set we hastened to the Mission and confessed to Father Walter that we were destitute. He already had another guest, a young priest recently arrived from London and touring the various Mill Hill Missions before settling down on his own patch. Rachel went early to bed (walking twenty-two miles on ulcerated legs eventually takes its toll) and the rest of us made merry on the newcomer’s Duty-free. I learned a lot that evening, listening to an exchange of illusions and disillusionments between an enthusiastic fledgling and a wise old owl who had spent more than quarter of a century in Cameroon. On one point Father Walter was emphatic. ‘Europeans and Africans never have understood each other and never will. You’ll meet many Europeans who’ll claim to know what makes the African tick, but either they’re fooling themselves or trying to fool you. Most Africans are more realistic. They don’t even pretend to understand the whiteman …’
As the sun rose, we were following that familiar motor track towards the Custom Post. I had considered using the Garbaia valley bushpaths, but if again lucky with lifts we would get to Makelele much more quickly by returning to Galim and ascending from Wogomdou. We therefore turned left, just before coming to the Customs Post, and stayed with the ‘fair weather’ motor track.
This was a sparsely populated and ruggedly beautiful region of jungly green mountains, deep red gullies and long, wide, scrubby slopes. We were climbing steadily, under a blessedly grey sky, and soon the air felt cool. Recent storms had reduced the track to chaos and after twelve miles Rachel wondered, ‘Is this still “fair weather”?’ But moments later we were extraordinarily lucky. The first and only vehicle to appear an almost empty pick-up truck – gave us a free ride to the far side of Galim, where the climb to Wogomdou begins.
A mini-meal of one baguette and four bananas felt like inadequate fuel for our long ascent below all those curiously decorated mountains. But we consoled each other with thoughts of fufu and jammu-jammu in the Chief’s compound. This track had by now been so rain-ravaged that in places it was almost impossible to keep upright; and in midafternoon a hailstorm further lowered morale. Yet we arrived outside the Chief’s palace at 5.15 p.m. Having carried the rucksack for twenty-seven miles I experienced a weird sensation of weightlessness when free of it and could empathise with astronauts on the moon. Walking into the Chief’s compound, I imagined I was about to lose contact with the ground.
Poverty brings out the worst in one; furtively I had been fantasising about free beers, this being the village where we so lavishly entertained the populace on our previous visit. But word soon got around that now we were destitute and our matutinal drinking-companions never reappeared. Instead, we were entertained until sunset by half a dozen youths – the Chief’s sons – who brought two more than usually uncomfortable folding-chairs and a giant basin of cold washing water. They apologised for its being unheated; following the late arrival of the rains, all women were away in distant fields doing emergency planting and not returning home in the evenings. As a half-moon rose, the youths said goodnight and vanished, leaving us sitting outside the thatched guest but in a strangely silent compound.
The entire village, we then realised, was smokeless; it seemed Wogomdou’s sexist men were going to retire empty-bellied.
We looked at each other, despairingly, by moonlight. ‘Surely,’ said Rachel, ‘someone must feed the Chief?’
Moments later he appeared, for the first time that evening, and welcomed us warmly, laying a faintly flickering lantern at our feet. Then he too said goodnight and withdrew to his nearby sleeping but with his youngest son, aged about eight.
We had one tin of sardines left, and two small stale shop buns.
‘Let’s eat them now,’ I said, ‘or we’ll be too hungry to sleep.’
‘Let’s wait till 8.00,’ said Rachel. ‘fufu may come.’ But it didn’t.
We supped sitting on the edge of our hut’s only furniture, a single unblanketed pallet covered with stiff goat-skins. As we ate, Rachel drew a nice distinction between hospitality (obligatory when strangers of any type or colour arrive in a village) and generosity, which here would have involved an individual decision to stand us a beer or two now we were down on our luck. Tradition does not encourage individual decisions and so does not prompt generosity.
At dawn, to avoid a 4,000-foot climb on empty bellies, we asked our host if bananas were available. Earlier, they had been cheap and plentiful in Wogamdou; now they were very scarce indeed. The Chief himself anxiously banana-hunted and twenty minutes later presented us with twelve chubby specimens which we ate on the spot.
Luckily it had been a rainless night; twenty-four hours previously no one could have crossed the ‘rock-bridge’ river. As it was, we needed advice and physical support from a young man guiding a donkey whose load was saturated. We also had difficulty fording another wide river, furiously flooded and waist deep, with high steep banks of soft black mud. This obstacle didn’t bother three heavily laden donkeys whose owner crossed dryly by hitching up his skirt and vaulting onto the hindquarters of the last animal.
It was market-day in Wogamdou and on the crest of a long ridge three laughing women, surrounded by pickins, were selling hot chunks of roast manioc for 50 CFA (about l0p) each. We sat indulging ourselves on a sun-warmed boulder, rejoicing to have found this cheap but effective fuel for the final, near-vertical ascent. Several colourful groups were descending from the heights, appearing and disappearing on the gold-green slopes ahead. When eventually we met them, most knew of Egbert’s loss and our present quest and we were greeted like old friends.
By 9.30 a.m. we were up and an hour later came to a milk-bar. There a courteous Nigerian worker requested a small boy to provide us with pints and pints and pints of what is, when the chips are down, the best drink in the world.
This direct (we hoped) Wogamdou-Makelele route crossed unfamiliar territory, though several distant peaks and towering escarpments were usefully recognisable. From the milk-bar a testing pathlet led us around a succession of ever-higher mountains. In the rain-cleared air, immense expanses of forested foothills were visible on our right with every detail distinct – like the three mighty waterfalls gleaming white on blue-green slopes many miles away.
At noon we reached wide green pastureland where the wind was strong and singing, and diaphanous scarves of cloud streaked a cobalt sky. Rachel suddenly exclaimed, ‘You’re right! This place is special!’ And we agreed that the beauty of the Tchaba
l Mbabo will be with us forever.
Towards sunset it seemed we would have to camp on the only available flat ground, the crest of a high ridge. A storm was imminent but the area appeared to be uninhabited; we had seen nobody for two hours. Then a Fulani came into view, carrying a load of long branches from a nearby wooded cleft. He paused, laid down his burden (an umbrella was tied on top) and waited for us. After the statutory greetings he pointed into a narrow valley, at the base of a colossal fluted rock-wall, and smilingly beckoned us to follow him. On the way down a fearsome gradient, we saw smoke beginning to rise from Mahounde’s hidden compound. He was, it later transpired, a quarterchief; but the rest of that scattered quarter remained invisible.
Soon the storm broke with menacing violence and continued all night; in our tent we would have endured eleven hours of hungry misery. As it was, we had two suppers. Mahounde permanently employed a Bantu couple, Mr and Mrs Asa-Ah, who occupied two square thatched huts (an unusual shape here) outside the wickerwork ‘wall’ of this otherwise tin-roofed compound. Mr Asa-Ah hurried to greet us on arrival. Then much later, when we had just finished a mountainous meal of rice and herby mutton stew, Mrs Asa-Ah hastened through the downpour, beaming and chuckling, to place before us a huge dish of mildly curried mutton and four giant puff-puffs.
Once the gender-confusion had been sorted out, our gentle and charming host brought his wives and adolescent daughters to sit with us. By this stage the language barrier was rather lower than it had been and we remember that compound-evening as one of our happiest.
Mahounde looked worried when we sped away, unfed, at dawn. The storm had just abated and for an hour our pace was slowed by a dense resting cloud which reduced visibility to some fifty yards. Our faint path was sporadic and, where it faded completely, one couldn’t see it reappearing ahead. But here my human compass covered herself in glory; she now knew exactly where Makelele was.
Mercifully the cloud had dispersed when we came to an Ndung-type gradient. The path, scarcely a foot wide, was interrupted by three long outcrops of sloping rock, smooth and damp and overhanging a sheer 400-foot drop. I sweated with fear as I crossed these. ‘You really do love Egbert, don’t you?’ commented Rachel.
Each of the region’s many streams was now a challenging tumultuous torrent and we were frequently saturated from the waist down – occasionally from the arm-pits down. ‘We’ll need luck,’ I remarked, ‘to get Egbert across those two rivers near Sambolabbo.’
‘I thought,’ said Rachel dryly, ‘our plan was to try to sell him in Makelele?’
‘We should get a much better price in Mayo Darle,’ I said tendentiously.
At midday we were walking for an hour above that most beautiful of all our campsites, where Egbert disappeared – the corner of Cameroon we know most intimately. Here Rachel became solicitous for my mental/emotional balance and warned, ‘Be prepared for this horse to be not Egbert!’
In Hama Aoudi many greeted us, and revived us with milk, and knew we had returned to be united with our lost horse.
‘It must be Egbert!’ I exclaimed, as we set off on the last lap.
‘It may be Egbert,’ said Rachel firmly.
By 4.30 p.m. we were in Makelele, where the beaming Chief himself conducted us back to his brother’s guest hut. At once all our old (young) friends joyfully swarmed around but the Chief left immediately and we expected ‘the horse’ to appear at any moment.
Milk was provided, followed by fried manioc. Time passed ... More time passed ... And yet more time passed ...
‘We really have gone native,’ observed Rachel. ‘For days we’ve been busting ourselves to get here and see this horse. But now somehow we’re able to wait genuinely patiently. Funny how Africa gets to one!’
She was right. I felt completely relaxed: but perhaps only because I had no doubt that ‘the horse’ was Egbert.
At 5.50 he arrived, cantering up the slope from the track with a grinning small boy on his back. Self-respect compels me to draw a veil over our reunion; intrepid travellers are supposed to be made of sterner stuff ... The family fell about. They understand people loving horses but they do not understand demonstrations of that emotion.
Predictably, our hero looked somewhat the worse for wear. Clearly he had been ridden hard and often; his coat was sticky and spiky with dried sweat. Also, he had several potentially lethal, vividly coloured ticks embedded near the root of his tail and around his genitals. When I had removed these I groomed him vigorously and within fifteen minutes he was looking much more like ‘our Eggles’. (His Irish head-collar had of course ‘got lost’.)
But what was the story? Where and when and how and by whom had Egbert been found? The vet was in Banyo and no one knew when next he might visit Makelele. His engaging fourteen-year-old son, Pierre – eldest of the Makelele family – spoke adequate French but was uninformative. We dashed him 2,000 CFA (about £4.50), set aside for that purpose (one-tenth of the specified ransom!) and Rachel wrote Papa an effusive thank-you letter in French. To this day we don’t know the story.
As we devoured our unadorned fufu (the jammu-jammu contained rotten meat), Pierre confirmed that it would make economic sense to sell Egbert in Mayo Darle. Horses abound in Makelele, and Egbert, being docile, was held in low esteem. Fulani horsemen favour fiery steeds, whom only the brave dare mount. And fieriness was not among Egbert’s many virtues; a toddler could have ridden him down a precipice. His market-value in Makelele was zero.
‘You do look pleased!’ said Rachel. ‘Are you really going to enjoy trekking for days on an empty belly?’
‘We won’t have to,’ I retorted. ‘Now we know we’ve got Egbert we can spend all we’ve left. We’ll surely be able to sell him for at least £50.’
Two Whites and a laden horse send Cameroonians’ eyebrows into their curls. Two Whites – one carrying a huge load – and an unladen horse confirm a widely held view that all Whites are nutty. But, ironically, our forced march to Mayo Darle (eighty-seven miles in three days) would not have been possible with a laden Egbert. Unladen, he often trotted of his own volition and I suspected him of wickedly relishing this ludicrous role reversal.
A forced march was essential because so little time remained before our unalterable date of departure from Cameroon. As it was, we could spend only two days in Mayo Darle: not long enough to find a suitably kind buyer, though Egbert looked glossily handsome after a prolonged soapy scrub-down in the river. So we left him with the Foxes, who lent us 35,000 CFA (about £80). The arrangement was that they would sell him to the sort of person who deserved to own him and keep the profit if any.
As we left the Mission compound, soon after sunrise, Egbert was grazing fifty yards away by the ‘parish hall’. I glanced at him, but chose not to say goodbye.
‘I’ll bet,’ said Rachel, ‘he reckons he’s well rid of those crazy Whites!’
Two months later John Fox wrote to us: ‘You are daily in our thoughts because of the continuing presence at Mayo Darle of Egbert, who is back in fine form after some horse complaint that required injections. Yaya takes care of him with a zeal and a devotion worthy of a Derby winner and has already initiated him into the repertoire of Islamic warhorse for the occasional parades which occur at the Lamido’s Banyo palace.’
Four months later the most significant of our Christmas cards – the one that really made our festive season joyous – was a large photograph of Egbert taken in mid-November. A beaming Yaya and his two-year-old son Ibrahim were in the saddle and Jacqueline’s letter reported:
‘As you can see, Egbert is still part of the family! Not so long after you left, Yaya fell in love with him and was praising his qualities and good-natured character every minute. So, guessing you would agree with me, I decided not to sell him but to leave him in Yaya’s possession.’
Index
Abdoulaye, of Makelele 128
Abdulla, of Tchabal Gangdaba 157–9
Acha 58–60
achu 194
Acu 188
Adamawa 142, 187, 208
Africa: birth-rate 82; colonisation 213; farming methods 54–5, 57, 58, 69, 70–1; food production 82; iron industry 93; irrigation 68; literacy 220–2; modernisation 108, 220, 222; religion 89–90; time, concept of 228
Age people 200
Aghem Federation 199, 218, 219
Aghem highland 185, 187; Germans in 219; products 208; raiders 199, 205; underpopulation 208, 232, 259
agriculture, methods 54–5, 57, 58, 69, 70–1, 187
Ahidjo, Ahmadou, President 8, 58, 88–9
AIDS 227–8; and prostitution 109
Aku people 106, 198, 199, 204
Akuro, George Charles 55–6
Akwa, King 11
alley cropping 70–1
Andrew, of Sambolabbo 118–20, 122, 124
Angelo, donkey 181, 182
antibiotics 34–5, 265
ants 45, 95, 206
arrest, in Restricted Zone 242, 248–9
Asa-Ah family 272
atmosphere, sensitivity to 161–2
Aziki, student 31
Babanki 260
Bafmeng 185, 232, 233, 237, 239, 250, 251–9
Bafut 185–6, 197, 260–1
Bali chiefdom 186
Bambouto Mountains 250
Bamenda 22, 25, 27–30, 37, 185, 261–3
Banbungo area 93
banks, problems with 27–8
Bantus 186; ‘adopted’ 210, 211
Banyo 110
Barclay, Alexander 223
Barclay, David 223
Barclays Bank 223
Barley, Nigel 95, 217
Barnabas, of Bafmeng 252–3
Basil, Wum policeman 220, 224, 227, 247–8, 250
Bassong, We Fon’s son 212, 214, 215, 217
Cameroon with Egbert Page 39
