It is my last day in Douala. I am sitting on the deck of a charmingly run-down little establishment, a wood-and-reed restaurant perched on wooden stilts on the river’s edge. I hide here from the tensions of the world, watching the to-and-fro between the land and the waters of the estuary, where the wide river meanders into the sea.
The freighters of the world edge in and out of Douala port along this river, large ones and small ones, some looking reasonably seaworthy, many so rusted that it is hard to imagine them seriously surviving a
passage across the perilous seas.
The life of the men and women who take to the ocean wave for a living has always been the same, each sortie an adventure that they might not survive, setting them apart from those who dare do no more than live out their days on dry land.
For weeks I have been watching a huge ship that has seemingly been abandoned on a sand bank close to the mouth of the estuary. It is prevented from drifting out to sea, or into the path of other ships in the channel, by a single chain attached to a single anchor that has been dropped from its stern. It has a leftward list, swinging slowly through 180° and back all through the day and night. It doesn’t look as if anyone will ever be inclined to come and claim it.
The estuary is tidal. When the tide is in the young men of the land stand thigh-deep in the brown waters, indolently pulling one small fish after another out of the waves on the end of their fishing lines.
When the tide is out neither the young men nor the pathetic little fishes that struggle on their hooks are anywhere to be seen. The young men do not make the effort of striding out the half kilometre to where the waters have retreated. They prefer to await the coming of another tide.
When the tide is in the whole world looks different. The water is alive with life, the river an exuberant force in its own right. The waves rush forward like the sea, plunging against the planks of my retreat with ever-growing passion, till I am forced to withdraw from my table at the edge of the deck and take refuge further back.
It is like the give and take of life out here, with the people and the creatures of the land and sea in a constant dance with each other and with the elements, judging each others’ changing moods and ready to take advantage of any sign of weakness.
For now it is low tide. A few tiny fishing canoes move back and forth in the deeper waters of the channel, casting their nets to scoop up those fish that have escaped the young men’s hooks. Where the freighters moving with silent power through the deep channel speak of transient power and the commercial imperatives of the wide, insensitive world, the little canoes represent survival and poverty, the calm acceptance of a life that is lived at the barest level of subsistence, yet has been reassuringly the same since the beginning of time.
The canoes disappear far up the river, out of sight among its languid twists and turns through the thick forest.
The previous weekend we had taken time out to go to a little town up the coast, far from the madding crowd. No sooner had we arrived than the madding crowd caught up with us, in the limping form of a young man who said his name was Tarzan.
He was as agile as Long John Silver as he came smiling up to us on his wooden crutch, dragging his withered leg along with careless ease. He invited us to sample the finest grilled prawns at his beach restaurant, another few more kilometres up the forested coast. And on top of that, he would arrange a trip up the river to see the pygmies.
At last we would have an opportunity to see what secrets life held where those countless Cameroonian streams penetrated the eternal jungle. We climbed into the big canoe and headed upstream.
From the way Tarzan described it, you would have imagined that you couldn’t get further from civilisation than the village of the pygmies. He also told us that the pygmies would entertain us with some traditional dances. We fell for the bait.
All our senses were on double alert, peering into the deep vegetation for a first glimpse of the little people.
The village was almost deserted. The first person we came upon was the chief, lying on his back on a bench in an open-sided hut, his chest racked by periodic fits of coughing.
He was not as tiny as we had superstitiously expected. Nor were the few members of his village who gradually appeared out of nowhere when they sensed that more tourists were around. They looked at us with friendly indifference and offered their small hands to be shaken, but didn’t offer to dance. They were waiting for us to do our commercial transactions and then go away.
We took pictures, handed over money, hovered awkwardly with nothing to say, and then got back in the canoe and went back down the river. Other canoes with small groups of French and German tourists aboard were heading in the opposite direction, off to see the pygmies too.
Globalisation, it struck me, is merely a new buzzword for something that has already been with us for a long time. The pygmies are as much in the thrall of Coca-Cola as the rest of us.
The canoes and the freighters cutting through the waters of the estuary are all part of the same food chain, however much we may try to deny it. The sea and the forest have no mysteries anymore.
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