The Unsettled Ambiance of Cameroon
A country as a microcosm
I never found a secure footing during my week in Cameroon, a roughly triangular-shaped country occupying the corner where the western coast of Africa turns sharply south. I traveled here with my travel buddy Mike, with whom I’ve taken a number of trips to Africa. Our journey would include the coastal city of Douala and the capital, Yaoundé, before moving on south overland into the Congo.
To clarify what ‘secure footing’ means. The best I can do is say that usually, within a day or two of arriving in a country, I can relate to it. My relationship to the place as a visitor is clear, and the boundaries are set. I feel comfortable with the specific challenges that will constitute my journey there. This feeling in Cameroon, however, stayed weirdly out of my grasp.
Our first destination in Cameroon was Douala, which we reached on an Air Maroc flight at 3 AM, passing over mangrove swamps and the towering volcanic edifice of Mt. Cameroon. Even at that hour, the airport money changers were sharp and braced to wrestle us for the best exchange rates.
Seven hours later, after a bleary attempt to recover a night lost to fragmented sleep, I sat at the hotel room window and watched the moving puzzle of cars and motorbikes around a traffic circle as they managed to get where they needed to go in what seemed like effortless, unconscious coordination.
The Lonely Planet guide calls Cameroon ‘a microcosm of Africa’. I believe they meant that in more than one way. The nation includes plateaus and grasslands, thick jungles in the south, a coastline, and deserts in the north. Each of these environments is characterized by distinct cultures and traditions. Over 260 languages are spoken.
The other sense of microcosm is less positive. As with many other African nations, it is hampered by borders that both divide and lump together tribes that don’t necessarily feel much affinity for each other or share a common allegiance. Like a frayed straw basket overfilled with fruit and bursting at the seams.
This ungainly, seemingly unmanageable condition is, you may well guess, a product of colonial legacy. Originally demarcated and colonized by Germany, with a focus solely on strategic objectives, it was divided between France and England after Germany’s defeat in World War I. This perfunctory and arrogant European card game involving land and people guaranteed that independence would be hell.
We sat in a minivan one morning in a town west of Douala, waiting for it to fill. Our intended destination was Limbe, a coastal town in the far south west, not far from the Nigerian border. This is a part of the country that is currently being fought over between the Francophone Cameroonian government and Anglophone separatists, in a longstanding conflict known as the Ambazonia War. We expected numerous police and army checkpoints between the two cities.
Two men approached me as I sat there in the minivan. One began gesticulating at me and shouting aggressively in French. His friend had a sort of sly grin, hinting that this was an act. I eventually got the meaning: the shouter was angry about the Africa Cup quarterfinal held the night before, in which Cameroon went 0–2 against Morocco. He was convinced (pointing at my light skin) that I must be Moroccan. He griped that the referees always favor Arab North African teams over Sub-Saharan teams.
I assured him that I was also disappointed that Cameroon did not win and that I was from England, not Morocco (I’m not from England, but I chose a country where football is popular). We all became instant friends once I said this.
Hence, my own little intercultural conflict was resolved peacefully. Not so fortunate are the people along Cameroon’s entire border area with Nigeria, for whom the Ambazonia War and lack of Anglophone representation in Cameroonian politics are a constant threat to peace and stability.
At that same minivan station, I met a young, English-speaking woman named Judith who seemed more positive about the future. She was from Bamenda, a western town nestled within the contested region. She spoke about the ‘colonial masters’ of yesteryear in a detached, rancor-free way, using them only as placeholders to define the origins of today’s troubles. Granted, for her, the colonial period of Africa was already ancient history. Her concern was the conflicts of today: the constant struggles between Francophone and Anglophone groups that hampered regional development.
I asked her if she knew any nearby places to eat. She took me to a dark shack I never would have spotted on my own, with a few tables in front and two large pots in the back on a stove. The only thing on the menu was aro, a rich, spicy sauce with shredded leaves and scraps of pig skin, served with lumps of fufu (a form of pulverized cassava root). A bowl of water came with the meal to wash my hands afterward, since the messy affair was meant to be eaten without utensils.
I don’t eat pork or beef, but it was easy to separate the hairy bits of skin from the leaf sauce, which I scooped up with the gelatinous fufu paste.
We never made it to Limbe, but we did manage to catch the attention of the local police in Douala. Riding along in a taxi, a policeman on the back of a motorcycle waved us to stop. I thought it was to do a random license and registration check of the driver, but after only a cursory inspection of the license, he turned to us for our passports.
Once he had seen them, he asked for our standard international vaccination certificates. This was a highly unusual request for a policeman. The only place I ever get asked for this certificate is at international borders. Having seen them, he leaned further into the vehicle and interrogated us in French.
“What is in your baggage?”
“Just clothes.”
He looked at the two backpacks stuffed in the back seat with my travel companion and pointed at them. “Do you have any medicines or perfumes?”
“No, of course not.”
He took photos of us and the taxi before waving us off to continue our way. It was a bit unnerving in that it defied a simple explanation. I chalked it up to just another strange officialdom encounter and hoped it would be the only one.
Walking around Douala left me with odd snippets of a place I couldn’t fully digest at once. We passed a parade of dressed mannequins, carried upright on people’s heads as they strolled, used to advertise clothing in an extremely crowded market where showing wares above one’s head was the only way prospective buyers could see them. I crossed paths with a mentally disabled woman, completely naked, strolling down the street with no one around paying the least attention. And two young men in a grassy traffic median, bent attentively over the feet of a richly-dressed matronly woman, giving her a pedicure as she sat on the ground scrolling through her phone.
Our tickets to the National Museum of Yaoundé included a guide. The museum was housed in the palace of the first president of independent Cameroon, renovated for its current use in 2015.
The museum surprised us with the care it took in representing the country’s different ethnic groups. Tribal allegiances are strong, and each still has its own system of local councils, chiefs, and regional palaces.
There were the Grassfields people, who inhabited areas where animals could graze open prairies and low forests, across a plateau region where the air was cooler. On the coast were the Sawa people, with their fishing vessels and colorful festivals dedicated to the water spirits. In the thick jungles of the south were the Fang-Beti, who built houses of wood or banana leaves, and whose most famous sub-group is the Pygmies. And finally, the pastoralist Sahelian and Fulani people of the north, living in semi-desert conditions, who are overwhelmingly adherents of Islam.
I regretted that some of these regions would have been impossible to visit, even if we had the time, due to civil conflict. This is especially true not only with the restive western border (as mentioned above), but also in the northern dry scrublands, where the same Islamic jihadist group that plagues northern Nigeria has taken up residence.
There were several statues featuring a mother with a newborn twin on each knee. Both the mother and twins were depicted with pained expressions, as if in agony. Our guide explained that this was an analogy to Cameroon’s independence in 1960, when the colony gave birth to two nations: a thick Francophone portion to the east and south, and a thin Anglophone strip along the western border.
“The birth of our country, as twins, was accompanied by much pain,” she said matter-of-factly.
This existence as twins was short-lived, as by 1961, the thin, frail Anglophone part of the country was given a choice to join either Cameroon or Nigeria. It broke in half, with the southern piece joining Cameroon. This rearrangement, in retrospect, has created as many problems as it solved.
There was a whole room in the museum dedicated to Cameroon’s current, arguably authoritarian, president, Paul Biya. Not surprising, I suppose, as he is the second-longest serving African leader, having been in power since 1982. He has weathered numerous re-elections, though just as numerous have been allegations of electoral fraud and intimidation. The office of the vice-president was left vacant for many years, perhaps an indication of how strongly he wished to guard his position against usurpers.
This, however, brought to mind two other long-standing authoritarian leaders: Jozef Tito of Yugoslavia and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. Once released from their long-lasting, iron-fisted grip, those countries had fragmented. Could the same happen here?
The strange vibe I felt in Cameroon, to be fair, had nothing to do with the people I met. There was the owner of the African restaurant we ate at two nights in a row. She was so happy to see us chowing down on her traditional food that on the second night, she brought her mother and sister out from the back to meet us and ask about our travels. And the manager at a long-distance bus station, who took great pains to explain how the bus system worked, and was there later, waving and smiling, when we returned to take said bus to make sure we got on the right one.
I suppose it had more to do with the feeling that this was a broken land, tired and static on a continent where, in many countries, economies and infrastructure are moving rapidly upwards.
There was a sense of desperation in the vast, open Yaoundé market, where merchants laid out vegetables, phone cases, and shoes for sale on the dirty sidewalks or draped shirts and pants over fencelines. It was here that someone came up behind me and tried to surreptitiously unzip my day pack, an attempt at petty thievery that is, in my experience, rare in most African countries.
I felt that desperation again when a bus we were riding at night was pulled over by two soldiers on the roadside, who proceeded to harass the passengers for identification. They declined to return our passports, even though they admitted there was no problem with our visas. It became clear that they wanted a bribe, but Mike and I were in no mood to make it easy. Finally, our bus driver, fed up with all the stalling, grew impatient and, using some threat I didn’t catch, managed to pry the documents out of their hands.
It was only on the third attempt that we managed to enter the Blackitude Museum in Yaoundé, as the opening hours were a mystery. I had been looking forward to viewing this famous private collection of Cameroonian cultural items.
We were ushered into an office and introduced to the owner, Her Majesty Ngo Nab Fô I Nana Agnès Sunjio, a radiant woman wearing an endearing rainbow-colored hat who spoke in quiet, raspy French. She spoke of her father, a well-known Grassfields chief, who left her many important cultural artifacts upon his death in 1982, as well as his honorary titles. On the wall were displayed photos from when she met various dignitaries, including Cameroon’s current president. Her current role is as cultural ambassador, a liaison between all the tribal chiefs and the Cameroonian government.
The museum was also a school, where students from all over the world could study the traditions of the country’s various tribal groups. She told us her hope was to keep the youth engaged in understanding the traditions and in learning the skills to recreate traditional housing and tools. To this end, the museum had accumulated many more items since the original bequeathal.
In a large downstairs room filled with masks, fetishes, and ritual artifacts, I was struck by an eerie, imposing costume. It was a full-body gown with a mask and headdress, designed to fully disguise the wearer. Five goat horns protruded from its top. The gown was composed of red fabric with hundreds of cowrie shells sewn in. Real human hair hung down from the headdress in long, tightly bound braids that must have taken a long time to create.
I asked the young, English-speaking assistant who was guiding us through the room about the costume, and he explained that it was from the Bamileke (a Grassfields tribe) and was only brought out for special ceremonies.
“This costume is forever linked to the tribe that created it,” he continued, “it is too important to give away, and they only lend it to us for now, to teach others. They can come and take it back at any time for ceremonial use.”
The prolific use of cowrie shells reminded me of shamanistic costumes I’d seen in Benin. I commented as such.
He nodded, “They symbolize great spiritual power. To us, this is not just a cultural artifact. It lives, like a person.”
That night, we left the capital city on a bus bound for the Congolese border. The unsettled feeling I’d had since landing in Douala never left me. Cameroon had conjured up too many questions for me to answer, too many odd encounters and strangeness for me to feel at home with the rhythm of the place.
Maybe I wasn’t ready for it, or needed more time. This weird and wonderful, fragmented country left me with an urge to return and try again.
Fascinating read.
Fantastic read. "The strange vibe I felt in Cameroon, to be fair, had nothing to do with the people I met." - I felt it. Very sincere and deep way of writing by the way.