Travelling up the main highway from the coastal city of Douala to the administrative capital of Yaounde, you are struck by the rich variety of food sources in Cameroon. The land seems to be positively heaving with a profusion of nourishing fruits and roots, not to mention the beasts of the river, the Earth and the sky.
When I had first visited Uganda (claimed by some to be the true site of the Garden of Eden) some years before, I had been struck with the same image of abundance. An Ugandan whom I had never met before
seemed to be reading my thoughts when he suddenly told me, à propos of nothing, that the reason Ugandans were constantly being buffeted between political poles was that they had never had to work very hard to ensure that they were well fed. If trouble came to the village, people merely had to run off into the forest and live off jackfruit and wild bananas for a couple of months.
“A hungry man is an angry man,” quoth the late Bob Marley. But a man with a full belly is a difficult man to mobilise.
The late Bob also said: “In abundance of water, the fool goes thirsty.” Here in Cameroon, you get the impression that only a fool could go hungry. You do not even have to exert yourself excessively to access this abundance. There’s always someone there to do it for you, at a very reasonable price.
At regular intervals along the side of the highway, people are displaying their wares. Nearer the coast, where the wide rivers start to churn into the ocean, boys dangle fat, gaping carp from sticks to attract passing motorists. As the ground gets higher and the rivers give way to dense vegetation, the fish disappear and the sticks are now festooned with “bush meat”: small antelope, large rats and porcupines. Monkeys are popular. So are snakes and armadillos.
The taste for bush meat is not confined to the bush. In town, there is always a healthy demand for the delicacies of the forest. But how the bush meat gets to the point of sale in the cities, enveloped as they are in a veneer of sophistication that seeks to blot out the primal past, is sometimes a curious affair – as I discovered when I came across the old man with the python on the streets of downtown Yaounde.
The only reason the old man could have brought the full-grown python into town would have been to try and sell it. At lunchtime, the streets are full of business people, civil servants, soldiers, scholars and casual passers-by. Surely someone would want to take the python home – not to keep it as a pet for a few months and then flush it down the toilet when they got bored with it, as they would have done in New York. They would rather have wanted to kill it for the family pot. It was a lot of python. It would have kept an average family’s belly busy for quite a few days.
The old man’s marketing technique was simple. Anonymous as he was, in his woollen hat and tattered suit, he had the element of surprise on his side.
In the midst of the passing crowds, the old man stopped, laid the heavy nylon sack on the pavement, untied the rope that held it closed at the neck, and slowly pulled out the writhing serpent. The beast must have just eaten, for it proceeded to uncoil itself lazily and then worm its way slowly towards the nearest patch of shade.
It just happened that the nearest patch of shade was the open air cafe where a few dozen casual diners, myself among them, were tucking into their midday meal.
The python’s effect was immediate and electric. Everyone was on their feet in an instant, knocking over tables and plates and bottles in their haste to take refuge against the walls, or on top of their chairs, or in the wide open spaces of the teeming street that had suddenly ground to a halt. Everyone wanted to run, but everyone also wanted to stay and see what the fearsome animal wouldnn get up to. The old man had succeeded in gaining the undivided attention of the entire neighbourhood.
The old man played the crowd and the python like a ringmaster in a circus. He allowed the beast to get just close enough to a screaming pocket of terrified Africans before he casually stepped forward and scooped its heavy, muscular body into his hands.
He held it high above his head, talking to it softly and intimately. Then, still holding its body aloft with one hand, he slowly lowered its beady, tongue-flicking head into his mouth with the other and held it there for a full half minute.
We were appalled and fascinated.
The show could have gone on indefinitely while someone toyed with the idea of making the old man an offer he couldn’t refuse. But temporal authority intervened before anyone could make a move.
Four gendarmes in olive fatigues emerged out of nowhere and, from a safe distance, ordered the old man to put his nonsense back in its sack and accompany them to the charge office. This was not the countryside, where anything goes, and men and nnserpents and good and evil spirits mingle in an endlessly unfathomable dance of life and death. This was the town.
The old man and his sack of nonsense were marched off down the street. The rest of us sat back down to our civilised plates of hamburgers, chips and grilled chicken.
The serpent and its temptations had once more been relegated to the backburners of our minds.
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