Suddenly, our time in Cameroon is drawing to a close. It has been a year and a half – a long year and a half, at times, plagued by Third World frustrations that could sometimes be taken as personal affronts: the thudding heat, the hideous airport, the dysfunctional roads.
Now that our days are numbered, I begin to truly
appreciate the good things of this place. It seeps into your skin, becomes part of you – the thick vegetation, the humid air, the grey clouds hanging just above your head, shrouding the massive, brooding mountain from view most of the year.
When there is that miraculous crack in the cloud, Mount Cameroon is suddenly there, tall and wide, with its pointed volcanic peak, its shoulders sloping down towards the sea on the one side, deep into the African interior on the other.
On just one memorable occasion in this whole long stay, the sky decided to open up across the full horizon, revealing the panorama of the Cameroonian landscape for the first and last time. Suddenly the whole thing became clear – the relationship between Mount Cameroon on the mainland and Malabo hovering way out in the ocean.
Mount Cameroon and Malabo (which should properly be called Bioko Island) are sister peaks in a massive mountain range that was partly swallowed up by the sea in some seismic upheaval many millennia ago. The two are one – which adds to the irony of each being claimed, at one stage or another, by a series of rival freebooters and colonisers from far across the seas.
Buea, on the foothills of Mount Cameroon, used to be the old German capital when the Kaiser’s boys were in control. There is nothing left of the German presence today, except for some old stone-and-wood buildings, including the former governor’s palace, and the odd sign in archaic German that seems to have been preserved to keep some kind of a handle on history.
When the Germans were routed during the course of World War I, the Cameroons, as they were then known, were divided up between France and Britain – hence the uniquely schizophrenic national profile, where the majority of Cameroonians speak French, and an important minority speaks English. Buea, having been steadfastly German, is now in the English-speaking zone.
Officially, Cameroon has a dual educational and legal system to cater for its two colonial heritages -something of a bureaucratic nightmare, as you can imagine.
In reality, the people on the ground communicate effortlessly among themselves in pidgin, ignoring both English and French in their daily commerce at the marketplace. Pidgin is the West African lingua franca, even spoken, I was surprised to discover, in Spanish-speaking Malabo.
Pidgin originated with English slave traders who needed a basic vocabulary of trade with their African counterparts. It was then taken further by freed slaves who spread out along the west coast from Liberia and Sierra Leone, bringing a language of communication that took on its regional variations as it went, but which remained, for some strange reason, true to its English roots.
Pidgin is the fanagalo of the Slave Coast, the cement that binds the diverse African cultures of the region into one whole.
And then there are the two mountains, joined together by an unseen ridge beneath the sea.
Mount Cameroon is one of the world’s active volcanoes. Our arrival all those months ago coincided with one of its periodic eruptions. At night, we could sometimes watch the mountain breathing in all its silent, devastating splendour, slow veins of lava dripping blood red down its flanks beneath a low, yellow moon.
The Earth seemed to be hurling its fiery insides up into sky on my brief visit to Malabo too, although this time, it was a man-made illusion.
Oil has been discovered under the sea. The foreign rigs pump gas and oil mercilessly round the clock. At night, you can see the muffled flames of a gas field lighting up the harbour, turning the clouds that hover over the edge of the old wooden town red against the hem of the night.
Africa is primitive and modern at the same time – oil wells cheek by jowl with the rickety, hand-to-mouth existence of the village. The stench of the marketplace, with African women hitching up their wide-beamed, brightly coloured boubous to perch precariously on the backs of bensikins – the moped taxis that weave crazily through the town.
How did a moped end up being called a bensikin? That’s pidgin again – Africa’s private, and often hilarious, dialect of old and new.
Bensikin, you see, comes from the phrase “bend skin.” You have to bend the skin of your behind to get aboard the little motorcycle. And from that descriptive phrase, a modern noun describing a modern mode of transport is born.
It is time to leave. I am sitting on the plane. We have flown over the tiny flames of more gas fields dotting the ocean below us, like candles on a birthday cake. Now we turn inland over the dark heart of the continent.
And finally, Johannesburg, twinkling down there with its billion lights sprawled over the Highveld. The sight is impressive after all those months in the wilderness – impressive but strangely cold, remote, sharply lacking in the exotic temper of what we have left behind.
Sometimes you only recognise what you truly desire after you have let it go.
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