Cameroon with Egbert E-Book

Dervla Murphy

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Accompanied by her daughter Rachel and a loveable horse named Egbert, Dervla Murphy journeys across Cameroon, discovering a land of astonishing natural beauty and friendliness. Dervla and Rachel are frequently mistaken by the locals for husband and wife during their time in the country, leading on one occasion to Dervla exposing her chest as proof of her femininity. They are, by turns arrested, drenched by tropical storms and burnt by the hot African sun. Yet at the heart of this account is the two women's endearing charm, and their fondness for the amiable, laid-back Cameroonians with whom they become well acquainted.

Leseprobe

DERVLA MURPHY

Cameroon with Egbert

For Jane and David Hughes, who inspiredour Cameroonian journey, and for Joy andJohn Parkinson, and Jacqueline and JohnFox, without whom we would not havesurvived it.

Contents

Title Page Dedication IllustrationsMapIntroduction   1. To Bamenda: Looking for the Other Four Feet   2. Enter Egbert   3. The Forbidden Ranch   4. On and Around Mount Ocu   5. On the Tenth Day …  6. Mayo Darlé and Beyond   7. The Tchabal Mbabo   8. Spooked in the Tchabal Gangdaba   9. Exit Egbert 10. Fun Among the Fons 11. Wandering Towards Wum 12. Trapped by Lake Nyos 13. Re-enter Egbert PlatesCopyright

Illustrations

  1. Girl with sister of the Kwondja tribe

  2. Ngah Bouba, traditional doctor

  3. Village chief with wives, Ngybe, near Mayo Darlé

  4. Koranic School, N’gaoundere

  5. Hairdressing session

  6. Yamba women working their ground-nut fields

  7. Mbororo girls returning from the river, near Mayo Darlé

  8. Yamba man trimming palm-tree

  9. Yamba woman and child harvesting sweet potatoes

10. Jacqueline’s friend Dijja, with her youngest child

11. Dijja’s daughter, Fatah

12. Yaya Moctar, who ‘adopted’ Egbert

13. Egbert and his new owner

14. Rachel’s one day in the saddle

For permission to reproduce the above illustrations, the author and publisher would like to thank John Fox (Plates 1–9 and 11–14) and Jaqueline Fox (Plate 10).

Introduction

CHANCE WAS RESPONSIBLE for our going to Cameroon. During the autumn of 1985 an Anglo-Pakistani couple, based in Kano, invited me to Northern Nigeria. When I hesitated, explaining my dread of West African heat, they assured me that after the rains it would be cool enough – and fertile enough – to trek from Kano to Lake Chad with a pack-horse.

Soon after, a Sunday Times interviewer asked me ‘Where would you like to go next?’ I was then in the middle of writing a book and uninterested in forward-planning. But, when questioned, that Nigerian trek popped out of my unconscious and was in due course announced to the world – or as much of it as reads the SundayTimes.

Months later came a letter from Cameroon, its envelope half-obscured by enormous, vivid bird-stamps. It was a delightful echo from the past; thirteen years previously we had stayed with the writers, Jane and David Hughes, in their Coorg (South India) home. Since 1982 they had been based in Cameroon; a friend had sent them that SundayTimes interview; they felt sure Cameroon would be much more my scene than Nigeria and urged me to use their Bamenda home as my base while I negotiated for a sound Fulani stallion. I was still immersed in my book but the enthusiasm with which the Hughes described Cameroon penetrated all my defences against distraction. Gratefully I replied, ‘See you in March.’

It was then my intention to trek alone. In June 1986 Rachel had left school and migrated to India, to spend six months of her ‘in-between’ year teaching English to Tibetans and travelling solo. On her return she planned to earn some money in Paris before going up to university, but on hearing of my Cameroonian plan she quickly wrote back asking if she could come too. Like many another foot-loose adolescent, she found the prospect of returning to the First World disconcerting – something to be postponed for as long as possible. This felt like good news to me. For fifteen years we had been travelling together – most recently, in 1986, to the United States – and in an odd way we seemed to have become a team, despite natural changes in the quality of our relationship.

The tall young Cameroonian in the Holland Park embassy was slender and impassive and spoke no English. He stood behind a small uncluttered desk in a long, sparsely furnished room and scrutinised our passports and return tickets to Douala. Then he gave me six forms to fill in and requested £18; our visas, he said, would be ready for collection in forty-eight hours.

In a much smaller room across the hall three plump ladies sat at huge desks piled with documents and overshadowed by giant filing-cabinets. They all spoke English but were rendered inarticulate by the notion of two white women wandering through the bush with a pack-horse. The senior lady admitted, ‘We have no tourist information.’ A younger lady suggested, without much conviction, that the nearby Cameroonian Trade Office might be able ‘to advise’.

The Trade Office occupied another enormous building but only two staff were visible, a timid hall porter and a Trade Attaché who provided a ‘Factsheet’ and took umbrage when asked about Cameroon’s varieties of malaria. ‘Every country has malaria’ he snapped. ‘But in our country there is malaria only in the cities, where flies breed on garbage. In the bush there is no malaria!’

In the tube I read my Factsheet, dated 1 March 1986. It seemed on the whole a lucid document, designed to help businessmen, though I couldn’t quite understand why ‘Prior Ministry of Finance approval is required for loans contracted abroad by public or private physical or moral person habitually residing in the country.’

The Republic of Cameroon, lying in the Gulf of Guinea, has an area of 183,000 square miles and an estimated population (June 1983) of 9.6 million, of whom 53 per cent were then under twenty years of age. (By March 1987 an estimated 60 per cent were under sixteen.) The 1984–5 per capita income was $820 and the rate of inflation 10 per cent. This means that Cameroon is the second richest, by far, of the Central African states. Only Congo is ahead, with $1,230. Burundi ($240) and Zaire ($170) are more ‘normal’. All these are World Bank figures and perhaps not very meaningful if you live in Central Africa.

For the past ten years oil has been Cameroon’s most valuable product. Her other main products are coffee, cocoa, bananas, palm kernels, cotton, rubber, wood, aluminium and tobacco. In 1984 her exports to Great Britain were worth £132.5 million, including £122 million worth of oil. Her imports from Britain, worth £23.3 million, included beverages, chemicals, specialised machinery and road vehicles.

Cameroon’s official languages are French and English; some three hundred African languages are spoken throughout her territory. Religiously, the population is about equally divided between Islam, Christianity and Traditional – i.e., what used to be known as ‘pagan’ in less semantically sensitive times. The form of government is officially defined as ‘Unitary State, Presidential régime, monocameral assembly’. Unofficially, Cameroon is generally recognised as a benevolent (most of the time) dictatorship. The country is divided into ten provinces, forty-one divisions and numerous sub-divisions. It has a 200-mile coastline on the Gulf of Guinea and the local time is GMT plus one.

Our visa’d passports were handed to me precisely forty-eight hours later, but the visas were valid for only thirty days. I protested that I had applied (and paid) for ninety-day visas, the maximum allowed to tourists. The young man shrugged and turned away; he either couldn’t understand or couldn’t be bothered. I continued to protest and he continued to ignore me. When I sought support from the three ladies across the hall their leader insisted that tourists could see all they needed to see of Cameroon in thirty days. I counted ten before explaining, slowly and calmly, that a thirty-day visa is useless to a travel writer. I asked to see the First Secretary but the ladies chorused that that was not possible. I repeated, through clenched teeth, that I must see the First Secretary, at which point the hall door banged and the senior lady yelled, ‘BOSCO, we need you!’

A tubby, middle-aged gentleman of indeterminate status joined us and listened impatiently to my complaint. ‘You have no problem,’ he assured me. ‘Your visas are very good. Don’t be in a hurry! You must wait …’ He ushered me back to the large room and commanded, ‘Sit!’ as though I were an unruly dog. The young man regarded me with faint disdain, before locking his desk and departing. Bosco then sat heavily on the edge of the frail desk and rang a friend to whom he talked animatedly, at great length, in one of Cameroon’s three hundred languages. Seemingly his friend was a wit; he roared and rocked with laughter until the desk crackled ominously.

Embassies are foreign territory, both legally and emotionally – places where visitors feel suspended between the contrasting worlds of home and away. Immediate reactions tend to be conditioned by ‘home standards’, yet already one is striving mentally to adapt to ‘away standards’. My own reactions to this hiatus were classic. It threatened to wreck our plans for the rest of the day and early next morning we were to fly from Heathrow. At first I roved restlessly up and down the hallway and around the big room, thinking racist thoughts. Then the Cameroonian vibes got through and quite suddenly I unwound – OK, our plans were being wrecked, but so what? They could be remade, or simply forgotten … As Bosco rang another friend I settled down by a wide window, overlooking an agreeably undisciplined garden, and resumed my rereading of Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa. I had got to page 330, where she observes, ‘The cannibalism of the Fans, although a prevalent habit, is no danger, I think, to white people, except as regards the bother it gives one in preventing one’s black companions from getting eaten.’

An hour later Bosco – who meanwhile had been entertaining the ladies – peered around the door. ‘Soon,’ he said, ‘you will see our Big Man.’ I tried to make grateful noises.

Twenty minutes later Bosco reappeared. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you will see our Big Man.’ He beckoned me to follow him upstairs.

In the First Secretary’s small office I got my first whiff of what we came to know and love as the real Cameroon. Mr Deng was tall and burly, exuberant and amiable. He received me with a vast smile and an enthusiastic, lingering handshake. Our visa application forms were still lying on his desk and I pointed to my unambiguous request, in CAPITAL LETTERS, for ninety-day visas. Mr Deng chuckled and slapped the forms dismissively. ‘You have no problem, these are not important! In every town your visas can be renewed. When you go to the Immigration Officer he will immediately renew – we don’t make difficulties for tourists, you must feel no worries!’

Déjàvu assailed me. This was a re-run of arguments in the embassies of Pakistan, Ethiopia, Mexico, Peru, Madagascar … The refusal to grant adequate visas, the assurances that renewal was easy within the country, the expiry of visas a fortnight’s walk from the nearest town, the danger of being arrested for overstaying, the much more alarming risk of being expelled from the country half-way through a trek … Making no attempt to conceal what has by now become a visa neurosis, I explained to Mr Deng that we were not tourists but travellers, that our route would take us far, far away from Immigration Offices. For good measure I added a graphic description of our arrest by Peru’s Political Police and our expulsion from that country.

Mr Deng’s face puckered with concern. ‘No, no! It is not possible that you can be arrested in Cameroon! Your visas expire, you get a bush-taxi to the next town – there is no problem.’

‘Except,’ I said, ‘our horse. I know bush-taxis can carry most things, but not horses. Also, we may not be anywhere near a motor-road when the visas expire.’

‘Your horse?’ said Mr Deng. ‘You are both riding on one horse? That is cruel!’

‘We are walking,’ I reassured him. ‘The horse will be carrying our gear, only.’

Mr Deng drew a deep breath, held it, then exhaled, ‘Won-der-ful! Won-der-ful! You are walking through my country? From where to where are you going?’

We moved to stand before a faded wall-map hanging above a decrepit sofa. I felt reluctant to admit that as yet we had only a vague notion of where we were going. Tentatively my forefinger wandered from Bamenda to Wum, Banyo and points north, keeping to the coolish highlands. ‘Wonderful!’ repeated Mr Deng. ‘You white people have courage, no Cameroonian women will make this journey. Even men will be afraid, beyond their own land.’

‘Afraid of what?’ I asked.

Mr Deng turned away, avoiding my gaze. ‘There are many things to fear. Storms, floods, lions, tigers, maybe volcanoes, maybe finding no food or shelter as it gets dark – so many dangers!’

I refrained from pointing out that the area in question is lion-less and that there are no tigers in Africa. It would have seemed impolite to instruct Mr Deng about the fauna of his own country. Then suddenly he cheered up. ‘You must stay always near villages, then you will be safe. Everywhere people will help you, giving meals and shelter and showing you the path. Nowhere need you fear people – in the bush we have no criminals, no bandits, no bad men. But Douala – be careful in Douala, very careful. All big port cities have so many bad men!’

This was refreshing; the embassy staffs of most countries, when confronted by trekkers, at once predict bandit-trouble, though their predictions rarely come true. There was something won-der-fully soothing about Mr Deng, despite his inexplicable resolve not to issue ninety-day visas. He made me feel that even if we were arrested in Cameroon it wouldn’t much matter. My neurosis receded, I pocketed our passports and we parted amiably.

At 11.40 p.m. on 16 March I finished my book on race relations in Britain and early next morning – an auspicious date for Irishwomen to begin a journey – we shouldered our rucksacks and took the tube to Heathrow. I was then rather below par: exhausted, distressed and bewildered after an intense two-and-a-half-year involvement in Britain’s confused and confusing inner-city-cum-race-relations scene. As our Aeroflot plane took off I felt a sense of liberation; it seemed safe to assume that Cameroon was free of ‘race relations’ in the fraught, quasi-political British interpretation of that term.

During an eight-hour wait at Moscow for the Tripoli-Douala-Brazzaville flight, glasnost was startlingly apparent. Far fewer armed soldiers than usual were patrolling the airport and the very young passport officer was of a new breed. His predecessors habitually scowled at arriving capitalist pigs but this youth smiled shyly at me and winked flirtatiously at Rachel – a superficial change, perhaps, but it felt quite significant. Later I had a long discussion about the future of mankind with a comely young woman wearing a natty Intourist uniform. She denounced not only NATO and US foreign policy but Soviet bureaucracy, lethargy, corruption and drunkenness. Such an encounter would have been unthinkable on any of our previous stop-overs.

When the bar closed at a puritanically early hour – a spin-off of perestroika?– we were fed massively at Aeroflot’s expense. Then we wandered down to that vast area of green tiles and uncomfortable shiny seats where passengers condemned to small-hours departures droop silently. Or the Whites do – not so the Blacks. Their ebullience, at midnight, was enviable. The men in our group were pin-stripe-suited young lawyers, handsome and confident, returning to Douala or Brazzaville from an international conference in Stockholm. Mostly they were very black and very tall and their vivacious wives wore African robes with Gallic panache. They spoke French among themselves, while excitedly discussing the inevitable crates of hi-tech goodies piled beside their gold-embossed leather suitcases. Each couple seemed to have at least three small children, happy bundles of energy who romped tirelessly.

We had another two hours to wait. Rachel escaped into Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories and I looked around for an interesting companion. Mrs G. T. Jackson, travelling alone with the Guardian in her hand-luggage, beamed when I sat beside her. ‘You have a beautiful daughter!’ she said, which got us off to a good start.

Mrs Jackson’s two thick sweaters, under a tweed overcoat, made her seem fubsy but as a young woman she must have been quite beautiful. She came from a village near Maroua in the far north of Cameroon, close to Lake Chad. Although her Muslim family had disapproved of her marrying an Englishman she was forgiven after father’s death. ‘Now’, she explained, ‘I go home every other year. I love to see my own people and I need heat! For three months I store it up in my body to get me through those terrible, terrible English winters!’

Mrs Jackson knew nothing about West Cameroon or even Adamawa, where the population is largely Muslim. ‘For us those areas are like another country – Cameroonians do not travel within Cameroon unless they have to, for their jobs.’ She did not however think our trekking plans remarkable. ‘The English are like that,’ she observed. ‘My husband when he worked in Nigeria was always away in the bush, camping and riding.’ On hearing that we are not English she nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s good you have this feeling about being Irish. Our government has to work so hard to make Cameroonians feel Cameroonian … Why should we? What is Cameroon? It is a European invention, like all African countries!’

‘But at least,’ I said, ‘it’s been more successful than the neighbouring “inventions” – Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea. Why? Are Cameroon’s tribes in some way different?’

Mrs Jackson thought hard, running her ringers through tight grey curls. Then she asked, ‘Have you noticed how little is known about the history of our area?’

I had noticed; London’s libraries and bookshops had yielded no History of Cameroon, only histories of West Africa containing brief references to Cameroon. As a Cameroon Airways booklet states: ‘In the 5th century B.C. Hanno, a Carthaginian, explored the Gulf of Guinea and discovered an active volcano which he christened the “Chariot of the Gods”. From that period onwards and for twenty centuries, events related to this country remain hazy.’

‘No history makes Europeans uneasy,’ my companion went on. ‘They feel they can’t understand people today if they can’t study their past. But maybe it’s easier to keep a new state peaceful without history shadows lying over it? I often read about your country in the newspapers and watch television programmes – and maybe you have too much history? Our population is about one-third Muslim, one-third Christian of many different denominations, one-third pagan. If we were as history-conscious as you we could have a lot of tension. My Muslim ancestors invaded a few centuries ago, enslaved thousands, took over tribal lands and ruled many pagans until the Europeans came. But most Cameroonians don’t know this. They’ve no written native languages and no interest in their own past, apart from keeping in touch with family ancestors. Of course there’s some suspicion and jealousy and animosity between the religions, especially Christians and Muslims. The pagans are quite primitive and keep in the background. But we never have serious trouble about the awful things we did to one another centuries ago and there are advantages in having no big swollen sense of being a nation. Around Maroua we’re now sheltering and feeding a quarter of a million refugees from Chad that the world has never heard of. It’s not a rich area but my neighbours accept those refugees without resentment. They don’t think of them as foreigners, just as frightened hungry people who had to run away. International boundaries don’t mean much to our villagers – even now they can’t really understand them. Maybe it’s a mistake to try to make a Cameroonian identity … But you asked if our tribes are in some way different. I don’t know about that, I only know our leaders have been very different – how would we be now if we’d had at the top mad devils like Idi Amin and Nguema and Sekou Touré and Bokassa? To name but a few! You must have heard we’ve been lucky in our two Presidents. And this is all-important in Africa, where the people are helpless. That’s the first lesson of our experiences since Independence. In Cameroon less than a thousand men form our ruling class and no one else has any real power – or any hope of ever achieving it.’

Clearly Mrs Jackson did not devote all her time to housework. When challenged, she admitted to being a lecturer in political sociology and we discussed some of the obstacles she has to overcome at a British university.

‘My students don’t like to hear the truth about Africa. They don’t want to know that in most African countries the villagers are materially worse off now, after a generation of “Independence”, than they ever were in colonial times. This is partly because of neo-colonialism, but that only works so well because there are so many corrupt Black rulers. Our first President, Ahmadou Ahidjo, didn’t encourage multinationals to exploit the country more than they were doing already. He was a wise man, a Muslim from the north who managed our resources well for twenty-two years. And he was quite honest. People say he only embezzled a few million French francs, which most Cameroonians think is a fair reward for a lot of hard work. He wasted no time pretending to run a democracy. But even though he was an absolute dictator, in practice, he couldn’t control corruption. And it got worse during his last decade in power. When he suddenly retired in ’82 he appointed our second President, Paul Biya, a Christian from the south, who’d been working with him for years. He’s said to be very honest. Certainly he’s been running a major anti-corruption campaign – but is it doing any good? He’s also encouraging more foreign investment, from the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, China. And because Cameroon is so stable big corporations are keen to invest. But there’s a trap there. Maybe our stability is tied in with a lack of foreign investment, so far. Big corporations bring big opportunities for massive corruption, which could lead to new political factions with conflicting interests. Some think Biya isn’t as far-seeing as Ahidjo. There’s less corruption in Cameroon than in most Black countries, but still it thrives. When most people don’t think it’s wrong, how can anyone clean it up? The best you can do is what Ahidjo did: limit the opportunities.’

By the time our flight was called, at 2.30 a.m., Mrs Jackson had taught me more than any ‘Factsheet’ could.

There was a certain piquancy about our stopping at Tripoli on the way to Cameroon. In the fifth century BC Hanno, the Carthaginian navigator and would-be coloniser, sailed from Tripoli with sixty ships and thousands of men and women to begin his voyage to the Bight of Benin. Extraordinary courage was required to sail through unknown waters around an unknown coast. But, according to the Greek translation of Hanno’s Periplus, West Africa’s humans and animals so unnerved the brave Carthaginians that they soon abandoned their colonial ambitions and for the next 2,000 years no one else dared follow in their wake.

Yet West Africa was not, as many imagine, completely cut off from the rest of the world before the arrival of the fifteenth-century Portuguese. Herodotus reports that a regular Tripoli-Kawar-Chad trade route had been established by the fifth century BC. And this trans-Saharan so-called ‘salt trade’ flourished until the turn of the nineteenth century, forming a link between the Mediterranean world and what is now northern Cameroon. In Roman times gold, ivory, carbuncles and ostrich feathers were exported from the areas around Lake Chad in exchange for salt. But the most important export, then and for another 2,000 years, was slaves – about 10,000 a year when the trade was at its most flourishing. Young men had to walk in leg-irons, chained together by the neck; girls and women walked free. Not all survived the three-month desert crossing and the route was littered with skeletons. At Fezzan the survivors were held for a time in a prison compound while being fattened for the Tripoli market. People still argue passionately, though rather pointlessly, about which was the crueller: the trans-Saharan or trans-Atlantic slave-trade. Probably the former, in terms of suffering en route, but at least those who made it to Tripoli were not condemned to a lifetime’s misery on plantations. As ‘luxury goods’, they could be reasonably sure of considerate owners in Albania, Cyprus, Turkey or Tunisia.

When the Portuguese first entered the Wouri estuary – the Cameroons River – they found the water swarming with prawns and named it Rio dos Camaroes: River of Prawns. In due course this became the Spanish Camerones, the English Cameroons, the German Kamerun, and finally the French Cameroun.

Douala’s past is as murky as the waters of its estuary, from which unreckoned thousands were transported to the New World on British ships. From the fifteenth century Europeans favoured the estuary as a trading-post; it not only provided a cosy harbour but offered valuable direct water-links with the interior. European traders preferred to remain on the coast, buying slaves from local middlemen like the Douala merchants. These Cameroonian Chiefs were cannier than their neighbours up and down the Slave Coast. They refused to allow Europeans to build forts, arguing that their own control of trade – and even of their followers – would be endangered by the presence of organised European communities. Dealing therefore took place aboard vessels permanently anchored in the estuary. At first, and for a long time, barter was used: beads, cloth, alcohol, guns and gunpowder in exchange for slaves, ivory, palm oil and palm kernels. Thus armed, the slave-raiders of the interior became much more efficient. Trade prospered and for centuries the coastal Cameroonians remained firmly in control. Europeans were allowed to operate only as individuals who, being dependent on local goodwill, had no choice but to provide lavish credit while also paying duty on their human merchandise. In exchange, the Chiefs built sturdy prison compounds where slaves were stored while awaiting shipment.

By the mid-nineteenth century Douala was made up of the affluent towns of trading Chiefs: Hickory Town, Bell Town, George Town, Akwa Town. MacGregor Laird described the last in his diary:

In the morning we went ashore to visit King Akwa. After viewing his house, which was of two stories with a gallery surrounding it outside, we walked through the town, which in order and beauty far exceeded anything I had yet seen in Africa … The principal street is about a quarter of a mile in length, about forty yards wide, perfectly straight, and the houses being of the same plan give a regular and handsome appearance.

As competition between European traders increased, following the abolition of the slave-trade and the development of European industry, the Africans demanded and received more and more credit. This out-of-control situation contributed significantly to the German take-over. By 1884 the powerful commercial house of Woermann had allowed the Douala Chiefs so much credit that the Germans would have been hard hit by a French or British annexation.

Europe’s colonisation of West Africa was inspired less by imperialistic territorial lust than by nervous jealousy about ‘spheres of influence’; the present-day echo is Soviet and American interference in (or provocation of) Third World conflicts. Britain was notably reluctant to get involved in the administration of any part of the White Man’s Grave. British soldiers were being sent from India to ‘pacify’ and ‘relocate’ East African tribes – and to slaughter them if they refused to be displaced from their salubrious highlands to make way for White settlers. But West Africa was so uninviting that in 1881 the Douala Chiefs felt it necessary to dictate letters to Queen Victoria and Gladstone, probably at the instigation of British traders and missionaries, begging for annexation. The best known of these does sound suspiciously like a trader-inspired concoction:

Dear Madam,

We your servants have join together and thoughts it better to write you a nice loving letter which will tell you all about our wishes. We wish to have your laws in our towns. We want to have every fashion altered, also we will do according to your Consul’s word. Plenty wars here in our country. Plenty murder and idol worshippers, perhaps these lines of our writing will look to you as an idle tale. We have spoken to the English Consul plenty times about an English government here. We never have answer from you so we wish to write you ourselves. When we heard about Calabar River that they have all English laws in their towns, and how they put away all their superstitions, oh, we shall be very glad to be like Calabar, now.

Had the French not been moving towards Douala from several points – annexing territory, setting up factories and imposing tariffs to protect French goods – the British might have ignored the pleas of Kings Bell and Akwa. As it was, Edward Hewett, newly appointed Consul of Calabar, was dispatched in April 1884 to sign treaties with the Douala Chiefs. But he was too late. Sailing into the estuary, he saw the German flag flying over Douala. While the Brits had been fretting about those devious Froggies, yet hesitating to take action, the unconsidered Krauts had moved in. Dr Nachtigal, the personal representative of two German commercial houses – Woermann and Jantzen und Thormahlen – had been instructed to ‘treat with the natives’ and explain Germany’s wish to annex their territories. He had also been authorised by Bismarck to sign treaties and ordered to claim for the Emperor of Germany all the land his employers had already acquired, or planned to acquire, in what was soon to become Kamerun.

By then the meddling and squabbling of European traders and missionaries had reduced coastal Cameroon to chaos. So the Douala Chiefs, despairing of a British take-over, reluctantly put their marks to a treaty with Dr Nachtigal. A Nigerian historian, Onwuka Dike, has pointed out that ‘the petty kings of the Cameroons were perhaps unable to distinguish between informal control and outright annexation’. They soon learned the difference, when the Germans cynically broke the 1884 treaty by seizing the Douala Chiefs’ cultivated land, which they held, by tradition, on behalf of their followers. Mini-rebellions then became frequent and Douala’s English missionaries, who loathed the German occupation, were suspected of inciting their flocks to violence.

By 1885 Kamerun had been created – its borders agreed on by Britain, France and Germany – as one of Germany’s African colonies. (The others were Togoland, South-west Africa – now Namibia – and Tanganyika.) Sir Clavel MacDonald has described the invention of the ‘border’ between two hypothetical ‘nations’, Nigeria and Cameroon: ‘In those days we just took a pencil and a ruler and we put it down at Old Calabar and drew that line up to Yola …’

The German Zintgraff became the first White to explore inland from Douala. He found a society which accepted occasional human sacrifices, frequent poison-ordeals and regular slave-raids as part of normal village life. Yet no attempt was made to bring South-west Cameroon under German control until 1901; there are still people alive who remember how that area was compelled to adjust to European mores.

When the Germans set about establishing their administration they were assisted in Adamawa, and points north, by those Fulani rulers who a few generations previously had reduced the indigenous population to semi-serfdom. The Germans had no time for the anarchy, as it seemed to them, of the multitudinous village ‘governments’ of the south. But they admired the Fulanis’ efficiency and interfered as little as possible with the sixty or so Muslim Lamidats, an ‘indirect rule’ policy later adopted by the British in West Africa.

Although Fulanis began to move into Northern Cameroon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, few settled in the South-west until the turn of the twentieth century. Their origins are disputed but for at least seven hundred years they and their herds have been gradually wandering further west across that vast area – some 3,000 miles wide – between Dakar and the Gabon. Despite their more or less Caucasoid appearance they speak a purely West African language, belonging to the Niger-Congo group – which much mystifies the experts. The majority remained pagan until the eighteenth century, though many of their Bantu neighbours were converted to Islam long before. By 1800 most had been converted, after a fashion, and were ready to take part in Uthman don Fodio’s Jihad, declared in 1804. Before this they had co-existed peacefully with the settled Bantu farmers; during those uncrowded centuries pastoral and agricultural communities were often symbiotic.

In 1902 the Germans built a military station, durable but dour-looking, on the edge of the escarpment overlooking the Bamenda Plateau. This area interested them only as a source of manpower for their coastal plantations, the linchpin of their whole Cameroonian enterprise. High poll-taxes forced men to leave their villages to earn cash, a favourite ploy of all colonial governments. Prisoners were taken from the gaols and made to do plantation jobs; anyone caught resisting the German take-over of the interior was punished by exile to the plantations; peace treaties with defeated Chiefs insisted on their regularly providing hundreds of workers. Many did not survive the long journey from the cool malaria-free plateau. And resistance to unfamiliar coastal diseases was lowered by fear of the unknown and by loneliness for home, family and friends. The plantation death-rate soon became an ugly scandal. Herded into filthy, overcrowded, humid living-quarters, the half-starved labourers died at the rate of 30 to 50 per cent per annum.

In many parts of Cameroon colonialism irreparably shattered traditional social structures. For centuries, elaborate long-distance trading missions had been organised by numerous Chiefdoms, large and small. But the colonial demands on the labour-force, not only as cultivators and carriers but also as construction workers, were of another order. The forced migration of thousands of men, and the recruitment of women and children to load-carry, caused the disintegration of scores of local cultures. At one time, on the 150 miles of track from the port of Kribi to Yaoundé, 85,000 men, women and children were employed in the transport of goods – a figure not including Hausa merchants’ slaves. Often the starving carriers had to raid villages for food and huge areas were reduced to chronic civil disorder. Other demoralising factors were the spread of hard liquor and venereal diseases, epidemics of smallpox and measles, the bribing of Chiefs with guns and gunpowder, the unavoidable neglect of farming and the loss of local handicraft skills.

In October 1915 a British force drove the Germans out of Bamenda. On 1 January 1916 the first British Senior Divisional Officer, Mr G. S. Podevin, arrived from Calabar and at once summoned the region’s Chiefs to a palaver. When those who had been allies of the Germans refused to come a military patrol was ordered to burn their villages. Yet Podevin was less inhumane than his German predecessors; before his death in the 1918 influenza epidemic he had reorganised the native courts and eliminated the worst excesses associated with plantation recruitment.

Under the League of Nations the Cameroons became Mandated Territories, five-sixths going to France and one-sixth to Britain. The French ignored the rules and behaved like colonists, allowing French settlers to buy land and exploit resources. The British allowed the Germans to buy back cheaply, in 1924, all their pre-war plantations – confiscated in 1916. By 1936, 300,000 British Cameroonian acres were owned by Germans and less than 20,000 by the British. Three times as many Germans as British were resident in the country, most of the plantation produce was shipped to Germany and half the territory’s imports came from there. Because the British administration ensured that working conditions were tolerable, the plantations attracted many migrants from French Cameroon – men eager to avoid forced labour on construction projects.

The French were intent on developing their Mandated Territory, by fair means or foul. Hospitals, schools, administrative buildings, hotels, churches, office-blocks, telegraphic services and shopping-arcades proliferated; roads and railways were maintained or extended. Meanwhile British Cameroon regressed; apparently Britain regarded its mandate as a genuine White Man’s Burden, to be shouldered uncomplainingly but unenthusiastically. From 1922 to 1939 the Government of Nigeria had to spend more, annually, on Cameroon than it received in revenue from the area, a position that need never have arisen had Britain taken over the confiscated plantations in 1920.

The 1920s were a difficult decade for the British administrators. In April 1922 they had officially adopted the Indirect Rule policy, which meant ignoring pretty well every ‘native excess’ apart from poison-ordeals and human sacrifices. (All the members of the Bagham Chief’s court were hanged for having been professionally involved in a human sacrifice, which seems not quite cricket. Presumably the executed men were following some immemorial tradition and acting according to their consciences. But it did prevent – or at least prevent the discovery of – further human sacrifices in the Grassfields.) Indirect Rule enraged the missionaries of various nationalities and denominations, and their more fanatical converts. The latter argued that the Administration – manned, they assumed, by God-fearing Englishmen – should prevent Chiefs from practising polygamy, from using their followers’ womenfolk as goods to be exchanged in the market and from enslaving girls as concubines and boys as palace ‘pages’. They also refused to pay their taxes to the Chiefs – an integral part of Indirect Rule – and demanded to be allowed to pay them instead to the Missions. This the grievously embarrassed Administration could not allow; nor could it do anything about ‘human rights’ without first abandoning Indirect Rule.

Egged on by their European mentors, many converts (especially Roman Catholics) became quite paranoid in their opposition to ‘the old ways’. No doubt some missionaries enjoyed being the new ‘Supreme Authority’, to whom the converts submitted as unreservedly as once they had to their ‘natural’ leaders. Originally those leaders had been well disposed towards missionaries. But when the converts rejected all traditional customs and standards of behaviour, and refused to contribute their share of public work – being too busy building churches, schools and houses for priests – they were, naturally enough, regarded as subversives and severely ill-treated by the Chiefs and their followers. And things became even more fraught when it was discovered that in several areas Chiefly wives, who had been encouraged to run away from home to study Christian doctrine, were also studying the Christian male anatomy.

It is doubtful if there were many genuine Christians among that generation of converts; both their behaviour and the speed with which they were absorbed into various Churches suggest a limited understanding of the new religion. Yet one can see the inevitability of this grim phase in Cameroon’s colonial experience. The missionaries believed it to be their duty to oppose the Chiefs’ disregard for ‘human rights’ and some reckoned that it made sense to use converts to oppose them, thus avoiding direct Black versus White confrontations. Nowadays, when the value of many elements within ‘paganism’ is widely recognised, the Chiefs might have been challenged more imaginatively and sympathetically. But in the 1920s and ’30s Christian/pagan antagonism was raw, crude and implacable.

Between 1938 and 1945 the unlikely alliance between Cameroon’s Chiefs and the men from Whitehall was gradually replaced by a new policy based on the recruitment into the Native Authority administration of mission-educated public servants. As Bill Freund has noted in The Making of Contemporary Africa:

Conquest brought a quickening tempo to mission activities and in some areas mass conversions by the 1920s. Some of this may be comprehended as part of a desire by Africans to succeed in, and be accepted as part of, the new régime. In all the colonies where schools were common the missionaries completely dominated the new formal education and insisted on conversion as part of the price of schooling. So an ardent Christian faith became a part of the cultural baggage of many African accumulators. Missions were often of great significance in the acceptance of new commodities, commerce and crops and the source of technical and artisanal skills. They were parexcellence the vehicle for capitalist values in much of the continent.

1

To Bamenda: Looking for the Other Four Feet

WE TOUCHED DOWN at noon, precisely, and dragged our stiff, over-fed bodies through what felt like a substance – Douala’s humid midday heat. In the small uncrowded Arrivals Area Rachel muttered, ‘There’s a bureaucrat to every passenger!’ Anxiously we waited by the conveyor-belt: was our irreplaceable gear in Douala or Ulan Bator? Beside us stood Rosa, a young Italian linguist specialising in Pidgin and embarking on three months’ research in Anglophone Cameroon. She was being met by a compatriot, a road-building engineer, and had generously offered us a lift into Douala. When her suit-cases appeared she promised to wait for us at the entrance.