A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  We were 2 litres in before I realised it was 7½ per cent. I read somewhere that Guinness sold more beer in Cameroon than they did in Ireland.

  ‘So how did it go with the Portuguese?’

  Patrice’s face darkened.

  ‘Oh, he said things. Made promises. Nothing will happen.’

  ‘It was a long way to go.’

  ‘Yes. But I am twenty-nine! For professional rugby I do not have much time.’ He cracked his knuckles. Patrice’s clothes were very clean, and not cheap. I gathered he was a person of importance in his region, near Bafang, in the north-west of the country: his father was a chief. There was a held-in frustration about him, the bone-deep unhappiness of someone who had been raised to aim high, and blessed with talent, and had had some breaks, and yet – the stars remained beyond his reach. His laughter, his consideration and the generosity and courtesy with which he treated the woman who served us were all the more touching, considering he was in the middle of a 500-hundred mile defeat.

  Woozy with booze and rugby chat, we picked our way across the red mud to another bar, where there were two large pans of food. One contained fish cooked in a green stew of something like spinach; the other, cooked in the same stew, held monkey jaw-bones. We plumped for the fish.

  The Hotel du Port was a wooden shelter with tables for drinking at, a concrete room with more tables, and behind these, four wooden huts divided into two with a crucifix of corridors between them. We would be taking a truck later that night, Patrice said: we might as well all rent rooms. Blue Hat, a quiet, gentle man called Pascale, agreed. He had travelled this way many times before, he said, buying and selling cocoa in Congo, in a region on the south bank of the Sangha. The truck might not leave for a long time.

  The room was a dark wooden crate, infused with damp. There were spiders on the walls, frogs in the corridor and a great many mosquitoes. Out the back, over a wet red mud-bank, there was a washroom and a lavatory, both popular with cockroaches.

  Nothing happened in Socampo that afternoon. One or two trucks passed through. Men sat around, ate, drank and wandered off. Patrice forbade me to investigate the bar on the other side of the square. ‘Bad’, was all he would say.

  The grey day faded into a syrupy night. The frogs began a chorus and moths batted themselves against the hurricane lamps. I washed under a bucket, attended by the largest cockroach I had ever seen. The truck would leave at four-thirty in the morning, Patrice said. We met at four-fifteen, under blatting rain, our feet sliding in the mud. The truck would leave at six, we learned. We met at a quarter to six. The truck would leave at half past nine . . .

  Socampo woke to another soaking hot morning. Rain in the night had deepened and extended the puddles. Down by the river swallows were hunting; a large group, their swooping and flickering speed made the human world seem almost petrified in comparison, our borders and rituals ludicrous, our travel tortuous. Upriver another yellow truck was pulled across the water on its barge. In front of the customs hut the clerk raised the flag of Cameroon and saluted; the flag hung limply. The Gardien was there, hands in pockets, head down, half-smiling as he listened to gossip from an informant. Opposite the Hotel du Port one of the bars was serving coffee and bread.

  The truck had a wheel problem. A motorboy changed one of them, bouncing on a long spanner with both feet to break the tension in the nuts. Our bags were flung up to the top of the cargo, Patrice firing them 25 vertical feet with barely a grunt. The lorry was loaded to the sky with crates of empty bottles. We piled into the cab – Pascale, Patrice and I on the broken bench behind the driver; the Drama Queen and an old man with a stick in the front passenger seat.

  ‘How many days to Yaoundé?’ I asked again, just to check.

  ‘Three,’ Pascale replied.

  ‘We have to be strong, Horace,’ Patrice smiled, grimly.

  ‘But we reach Yokadouma tonight?’

  ‘Yes, if we are lucky.’

  ‘I do this every month,’ Pascale said. The truck’s gears crashed and we began to climb another incline. The road towered and dipped, twisted and turned; the forest here rose and fell on waves of hills. As we ran down slopes the bottles behind us leapt and bounced, swayed and concertinaed with a spectacular noise that threatened to turn into avalanches of breaking glass. At the bottoms of valleys we steamed forward as fast as possible, making a run at the next slope which we would top at walking pace. Sometimes we ran out of power: then the driver gunned the engine, whipped through the gears, sweated and cursed: at such times his effort and dexterity and will were all that rowed us on.

  The bench at the back of the cab was falling apart: iron struts stabbed up through torn foam rubber. We balanced between them as best we could, as tense as jockeys.

  ‘Every month?’

  ‘Yes – twice!’

  ‘You must be crazy!’

  ‘Ah, but I have a wife and child.’

  We stopped in villages to take on sacks, passengers and more charred pig: all this went up on top of the crates. The passengers were mostly boys and young men riding from village to village.

  ‘How is the cocoa business?’

  ‘Good. And there is gold.’

  ‘Gold?’

  ‘Yes, I can show you – give me the map . . . see – here, there is gold here.’

  ‘Right – do many people know about it?’

  ‘Yes. Some. More will come.’

  ‘Give me some of that water there,’ Patrice boomed.

  We came to a truck on its side. It was one of the older machines, nothing more than a cab and a long drive-shaft stretching to the back wheels. Above the drive-shaft were the tree trunks. The driver had taken a nasty right-hand bend on a down slope too quickly. Now he and his motorboy were sitting in the shade under the trunks, and grinning. We offered them a lift but they declined, seemingly relieved to be off the road.

  Our truck was an old Mercedes, blue, battered and tireless but very slow. The vast majority of the traffic was composed of the yellow logging trucks which rumbled through the forest in an irregular stream. We pulled over for them: they must have been twice as heavy as us, but they went faster. They were made by Renault, either brand-new or in excellent condition, and each of them carried three or four or sometimes only two massive bodies of felled trees. The trunks were extraordinarily straight and a beautiful dark red-brown. In the medieval world of the forest, where the villages were little collections of huts, animals, people and cooking fires, the yellow trucks were like spacecraft: the unbelievably long arm of a rich and distant planet, reaching into this misty world of laterite red and dark glowing green, efficiently plucking its treasure.

  As in the Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, a dictator has been a huge benefit to the European powers doing business with Cameroon. French, Belgian and Italian logging companies dominate the plunder of the forest: France is the largest importer of tropical hardwoods in the European Union, with a 28 per cent grip on a trade estimated at €500 million a year and almost certainly worth much more. The logging companies receive direct and indirect support from the French government and meet no opposition in the wilds of Cameroon: once they have secured a concession, the forest is at their mercy. The loggers are particularly fond of salvage permits, which were originally designed to allow for the sale of trees which stood in the way of road construction. Officially outlawed for a decade, the permits are still widely used.

  Roads which were no more than trenches of mud arced off to either side of ours at regular intervals, many strewn with the trunks of small trees, apparently considered worthless. These tracks went nowhere and served no purpose, except that down them the bodies of great and valuable trees had been dragged. One of the leading French tropical timber companies, Rougier, admitted to procuring over 25,000 cubic metres of hardwood from this eastern region in 2004, five years after salvage permits of the kind it operated were made illegal. The logging companies might be forgiven for regarding legality as merely another surmountable obstacle: one
, Vicwood-Thanry, a French-operated, Hong Kong-owned conglomerate, happily pays fines of half a million dollars a year: a kind of formalised bribe to international law.

  The fruits of the plundered forest, one of the last primary rainforests on earth, may be seen sawed, stacked and stamped on the docks of most major European ports. They can be bought in DIY chains like Monsieur Bricolage, and admired in refitted kitchens all over Europe, Japan and China.

  ‘Women!’ Patrice rumbled, with surprise. We were coming into Lokomo, something between a village and a town composed of a long line of huts and shacks, a sawmill and a roadblock. I strained to see over the driver’s shoulder. Between Patrice’s biceps and the wall of the cab, barely a foot wide, my perch allowed for little movement. There was singing and a great deal of whistling. The sun poured down on a huge crowd, all in the same brown kikoys, speckled with yellow, red and white, and all female.

  ‘International Women’s Day,’ supplied the Drama Queen. She was a resourceful traveller; I had barely noticed buying her lunch (fish and manioc). The truck stopped and we climbed down, sighing as the blood flowed into our limbs, and stumbling slightly as the carnival engulfed us. Shouting, singing, cheering, whistling, dancing and, above all, drinking, the town was entirely in the hands of the women. They arrived in trucks, shouting and waving, and departed in trucks, still shouting and now waving bottles. They stormed the bars, eddied around the trucks, and clapped and stamped and swayed.

  The truck needed another wheel-change. The driver went to eat, the motorboy fetched the spanner and jack, Patrice and I were nominated to source the beer.

  ‘Which bar?’ I pondered.

  ‘That one?’ Patrice seemed equally tentative.

  ‘You ready for this?’

  ‘Oui!’

  ‘OK, don’t be scared, I’ll be your bodyguard.’

  From then on Patrice delighted in introducing me to everyone we met as his ‘garde du corps’.

  We laughed and puffed and squeaked in protest as we were pawed and wrestled, seized and danced with, pointed at and laughed into the bar, then out of it. With Pascale we formed a small tortoise around the motorboy who gulped his beer, wide-eyed, and rushed the wheel-change. The driver gobbled his meal and we took to the truck like spooked dogs, rattling out of town to a roaring chorus of leering women’s shouts.

  I climbed up onto the crates, unable to stand the crushing and stabbing of the bench any longer. The motorboy and his friend were amused: would I ride with them on the roof of the cab? I dared not, and made myself as comfortable as possible in the very middle of the top layer where our bags were stacked. Notwithstanding the flexing of the crates and the unsettling way the bottles below jumped up into my buttocks at every significant bump, it was an improvement, rocking along at a third of the height of the forest, staring into the kaleidoscopes of leaves, blooms and branches. In villages I was spotted and given cheers and waves: it seemed extraordinary that in the hundreds of kilometres we travelled, that day and the next, I never saw another white person, and not one of hundreds of locals showed me anything other than friendship. The logging, the chaotic but persistent destruction of their environment, was being perpetrated by European companies to feed the appetites of Europeans like me, but there was a simple visual cut-out between the planners and beneficiaries, and the victims. Apart from that glimpse of three white heads on the speedboat there was no sign that the outside world had anything at all to do with the pillage.

  The sun sank and the stars came out. We began a long descent which entirely collapsed what little orientation I had. It seemed to go on for hour after hour: how high had we been, that we could still be descending? I watched the stars through the high trees as planes of the world seemed to tip beneath us. Sometimes it seemed the truck must surely overbalance, heels over head like one of those slinky springs that can be made to tumble downstairs. The motorboy crawled over to join me for cigarettes. We accumulated more and more passengers, and more sacks, as we neared Yokadouma. They did not seem to pay anything; it was as though the beer truck was part goods-train, part public transport. Sometimes a group of boys sang as we went, a lovely sound which disintegrated into laughter when a particular lurch made us all grab our handholds tight.

  We arrive in Yokadouma not far short of midnight on 8 March. I only know the date because it was International Women’s Day. Dates would have been entirely irrelevant had I not had to hit certain windows according to my visas – Algeria’s in particular. We descend cautiously from the truck, watched by a quizzical woman cooking over a charcoal fire, and find our feet on the broken pavement.

  The Drama Queen says she has an arrangement and vanishes on the back of a motorbike. The roads, which are wide and sloped, darken swiftly as we move away from patchy lights. Everything is made of mud: the road, the pavements, the walls of houses, the floors of the hotels we found. The first place is too awful, even for Pascale, Patrice and I in our numbness. We settle for the second, a sticky, clammy roach motel. The walls weep and things scuttle away from the light. We find beer in a smashed bar – everything is broken, spilled and upturned, as if it has just hosted a monumental fight – and then go to look for food, cursing the motorbikes which slice out of the darkness rattling like gunfire, climb pavements and rip up to the front of bars. There are only men and excited boys: perhaps all the women have gone to Lokomo for International Women’s Day. There is an angry, worked-up atmosphere; drunks lurch out of the darkness and shout things I do not understand. Yokadouma seems to be a function of the logging business: illegitimate, unloved and unbalanced. A little way back up the road, still lethal with truck-traffic, exhaust floating spectrally in the red glow of rear lights, we find men eating and drinking at a single crammed table. Patrice orders for us.

  ‘Donnez-moi des oeufffs là!’ he commands, like a small Etna, throwing out an indicative finger on the end of one huge, imperative hand. We drink milky sweet coffee and eat golden eggs, chewy bread, oil, salt and processed French cheese. Tearing into the bread I feel a click in my mouth and a large section of one of my canines breaks off and falls into my mouth, leaving a raw socket. Oh hell, I think, spare me a Cameroonian dentist. But there is no real pain, so I spit the tooth into the gutter and carry on with the meal. Later we drag ourselves back to the hotel and a damp oblivion. The bus is at first light tomorrow.

  ‘Ça va, Horace?’ Patrice mutters, as we lug ourselves over the mud to the bus station in a sullen dawn.

  ‘Bien sûr! Quelle bonne matinée!’

  We laugh and slap hands. Today will be our hardest. We will be crammed in rows of six into a little blue Renault bus the shape of a small loaf of bread. It will have no springs. When the sun comes out it will become very hot. The road will mostly be ridges, teeth-clashing, head-banging ridges that go on and on and on. I will get a window again and pay for it with a constant pressure from the body beside me, driving my ribs into the side of the bus: I will collect a fat bar code of bruises down my right side. We will travel out of the forest, into woodlands. We will be stopped at a dozen roadblocks. We will have to bribe one, and the entire bus-load of us will be involved in an argument at another on behalf of a young man whose identity papers will be questioned. I will feed a stream of rehydration sachets to a small girl, travelling with her father, who has a sinister grey diarrhoea. Three children will travel with us in a day-long odyssey, impossibly harsh by European standards, at which none will complain even once. I will see two groups of swallows, heading into a north-westerly breeze.

  In mid-afternoon we arrive in Batouri, where the driver and our most important passenger, a fat army officer whose presence has melted the roadblocks, burst into roars of laughter at the sight of my face, coated in the orange-red dust of the road. I try to shift the red coating with a backyard bucket, suspiciously observed by chickens, while Patrice and Pascale order fish – a dorade, served with mayonnaise and a small cloud of envious flies. The plates were washed in a bowl of brown water, the cook’s fingers were thick with fat and stained
with ash and the flies were so persistent that they barely left the fish for an instant when you flapped a hand at them. We eat with our fingers, with relish. I have no fear for my stomach: I will eat anything put before me now, regardless of the conditions of its preparation. All trace of my fastidiousness has gone. Partly because I am so thoroughly inoculated, partly because nothing can be as bad as Ebola, and partly because what little food we come across is delicious. The dorade is cooked to perfection.

  In the evening we change bus in Bertoua. The composition of the travellers shifts: many are Muslims, all are men. We set off at higher speed into the gathering dark. First the road runs through forest, then at last the shuddering ceases and we hit tarmac. We stop once more, beside a long bright strip of shops and bars, where gas lights, bright hand-painted signs and activity of people eating, drinking and milling around take on an hallucinatory quality: we shuffle around yawning until the driver herds us back into the Toyota where we reassemble into a drowsy heap, heads on each other’s shoulders, feet under the armpits of men in front and half wake, half doze as a large moon rises, the lights disappear, reappear, flash and thicken, and then roads, and houses, and at last, at midnight, Yaoundé gathers around us. It is huge and shapeless, with many more buildings than lights. It seems to have no centre, no focus – dark streets, shacks, hills covered in lightless buildings. I am suddenly grateful I am travelling with friends. It would be no fun to arrive here alone, exhausted, late at night.

  Pascale is going on to Douala, a journey which will take the rest of the night. His endurance is spectacular; we have all found a place in our heads where we can take refuge, leaving our bodies swaying and bumping to the irregular rhythm of the road, but for Pascale to do this journey twice a month must take another level of steel. We swap email addresses and embrace.