Cameroon with Egbert , livre ebook

Other books by Dervla Murphy published by the Overlook Press
Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle
The Waiting Land: A Spell in Nepal
On a Shoestring to Coorg: An Experience of South India
Eight Feet in the Andes
Muddling Through in Madagascar
Copyright
First published in 1990 by
The Overlook Press
Lewis Hollow Road
Woodstock, New York 12498
Copyright © 1990 by Dervla Murphy
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-521-0
Contents
Also By Dervla Murphy
Copyright
Illustrations
Dedication
Map
Introduction
Chapter 1: To Bamenda: Looking for the Other Four Feet
Chapter 2: Enter Egbert
Chapter 3: The Forbidden Ranch
Chapter 4: On and Around Mount Ocu
Chapter 5: On the Tenth Day …
Chapter 6: Mayo Darle and Beyond
Chapter 7: The Tchabal Mbabo
Chapter 8: Spooked in the Tchabal Gangdaba
Chapter 9: Exit Egbert
Chapter 10: Fun Among the Fons
Chapter 11: Wandering Towards Wum
Chapter 12: Trapped by Lake Nyos
Chapter 13: Re-Enter Egbert
Index
Illustrations
(between pages 144 and 145)
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 Darle
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).
For Jane and David Hughes, who inspired our Cameroonian journey, and for Joy and John Parkinson, and Jacqueline and John Fox, without whom we would not have survived it.

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 Sunday Times.
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 Sunday Times 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 packhorse. 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 regime, 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 B