Travels with Myself and Another (22 page)

I lay under the mosquito net and thought white people were boobs. Africa has nothing to do with us and never will have. I also thought of politics: Cameroun has a black gentleman in European clothes representing his nation at the UN in New York. The naked pagans and the barbaric chiefs will be spoken for, in French, by an African who has learned the European tricks, and will be a black copy of the other gentlemen gathered in that glass palace on the East River. African politicians, outside Africa, must represent their people even less than politicians generally do; or else they represent how their people might be a hundred years from now.

It is all mad and a joke. We are fools; we believe in words, not reality which the words are supposed to describe. Politics—the bungling management of the affairs of men—is a game played among themselves by a breed of professionals. What has politics to do with real daily life, as real people live it?

February 3:
At 8 a.m. the chiefs and their bands are filing to their appointed places, along a narrow road which runs behind my bucaroo. The music now sounds rather like bagpipes, again the same tune and drumbeat endlessly. There was a band of archers preceding one chief, with huge bows, clad in purple tunics and trousers; their sergeant-major wore turquoise blue. Very beautiful; very wild.

Financial news: the car cost $55 a day, and I travelled, in four days, a total of 214 miles and it was bone-breaking hard work.

The toilet in this bucaroo is too eccentric; it ejects water at the sides. One needs Equanil here too, not only in our white urban civilization: tranquillizers against impatience, against the hysteria induced by heat, and the disgust at dirt.

At 11 a.m. I got a ride to the airport, to be on hand for the arrival of the two Presidents. This event was pure Waugh and sublimely funny: the reason for its being a cause of concealed and supercilious white giggles was that today the blacks were putting on a show copied from the whites, and when they copy they are absurd. (Since 8 a.m. the chiefs and retainers had been waiting, immobile, on the road to the airport.) At the airport, always under this sun, in the burning dry still air, the Jeunesse Camerounaise was lined up in ranks. Boys and girls, dressed in a uniform of orange and green calico, printed with the Cameroun flag and the portrait of President Ahidjo; their clothes were the first treat, and to see them being serried, “scoots, clin in taught, word and did,” was hilarious. The tarmac of the airfield looked as if it would bubble and boil any minute. Important chiefs sat under black cotton umbrellas, near the airport building; masses of the superior gentry stood in the sun between the Jeunesse Camerounaise and the chiefs; there were some uniformed soldiers, a guard of honour. The whites of the town were all present, wearing jackets and ties; ladies also nattily gotten up in hats and gloves. The bar did a roaring business in anything wet and cold.

One hour late, the Presidential plane (naturally flown by a French crew) landed. The two great men and their staffs, in business suits with briefcases, descended. They started to walk across the frying tarmac, to salute the guard of honour. Halfway there, one feels by accident, the band struck up the national anthems of Liberia and Cameroun. These are both very long, tunes pinched from bad light opera, of an indistinguishable mediocrity. During this ordeal by music, the Presidents stood, Tubman bareheaded with hat over heart, Ahidjo, being a lucky Moslem, able to keep on his little white round embroidered cap. The sun hammered down on them.

Clearly relieved by the end of this sunstroke nationalism, they were at last able to move. President Tubman was heavenly; he beamed at the Jeunesse Camerounaise who shouted slogans in unison. Alas for all political youth movements and shame on the grown-ups who direct them. When he reached the massed but privileged public, he began shaking hands like Nixon himself, with a will; hands stretched over heads, hands thrust at knee level; he shook and shook them all, finishing up with the standing chiefs. It took a long time. Everyone was delighted; the performance was proceeding with a fine democratic dignity, fit for any western newsreel camera.

Finally, the two Presidents took a well-earned rest in two comfortable chairs, inside the airport. They had nothing to say to each other. President Ahidjo is a large young man, lineless, pale café-au-lait, with a politician’s face; amiable, bland, and shrewd. He wore loose fresh white robes and his Moslem cap. President Tubman is small, solemn, very black, dressed like a prosperous Southern undertaker (he looks highly American), smoking a cigar in a gold holder. Then the Presidents entered a big open American car and, followed by their dignitaries in all the available cars (my Citroën, sketchily dusted, was used by some lower-downs with briefcases), the cortège whizzed off. They passed the line of chiefs at forty miles an hour; not kosher, they slipped up there; the Queen of England, the President of the United States would never have made such a disdainful gaffe. The rest of us got out of the blazing heat as best we could. What, I wonder, is this jamboree in favour of; what politics bring these two great men to the distant northern Cameroun; what fences are being mended?

It would be self-indulgence to describe the food we are served; enough to say that I’d put this place high on the list of ptomaine centres and only need drives one to eat at all. At lunch, a young American spoke to me; he was a Jew, whose family came from the Sudan—he has relatives through the whole Middle East and Italy and Spain. He is a big nice-looking boy and the crown prince of a great leather business. He was given a leather factory in northern Nigeria by his papa and is now learning the business from the ground up, and loving it. He is first-generation American and adores the U.S. and is as patriotic and devoted to the American way of free enterprise as any pure WASP of long standing. Yet he learns everything here, the language, the customs, and is surely more adaptable than most Americans; and hardship and dirt do not dismay him. His life and background are interesting, he is not; but I’m getting used to that in far-off lands where every foreigner leads a singular life and ought therefore to be a singular person. It does not work this way at all.

After the usual deathlike sleep of the afternoon (I have about enough energy for five hours of living per day), I walked to the Hôtel de Ville, to see the festivities in honour of the Presidents. It is a curious sensation to be alone, the only white on foot, in a great African crowd. They ignore me, do not stare or laugh; I feel that I am a non-person.

The Hôtel de Ville has a terrace; on this the notables were seated and here the Presidents, in due course, would watch the charge of the chiefs and their retinues, a charge up the main street, with a salute to the Presidents as the mounted men thundered by. Too early for that; no Presidents in sight, but at the edge of the street there were dancing groups and semicircles of spectators. One group was depicting hunters; the men were old, heavily clad, with monkey tails sewed to the back of their clothes. They circled in a crouch and sprang; again and again. Another set wore beards of monkey fur and made jerking movements of their heads, while three boys stood alongside holding folded black umbrellas. No idea what that was about.

Far down in the town, away from the grand people on the Hôtel de Ville terrace, there was a real dance. The dancers were young Kirdis, young men and girls. The girls wore little white woven aprons, size of pocket handkerchiefs, as cache-sexe, and strips of leather between their legs; the boys wore ragged homemade shorts. There were no drums. Suddenly, the boys would leap into a circle; they made a sound which at first I thought was the copy of a barking dog, but then decided was the sound (their very own) of a man panting in the act of love. They slapped their bent left arms hard against their sides; this was the music; it was also the sound of two bodies striking each other in a fiercer kind of sex than we know. They leapt, jumped, panted—barked, bucked, slapped their arms against their sides. Then a girl attached herself to one man, behind him, touching his shoulder with her hand and swaying her body, or danced in front of him. The girls’ dance was thrusting sexual motions of the pelvis, and gestures of the hands showing how the belly will swell with child. They were very handsome blacks, and their dance was a most direct sexual statement. It was exciting to watch, and I began to imagine what the three months’ drinking and dancing and fornicating orgies of the Kirdis must be like.

Time for the horsemen. These people, who had been travelling for days to get here, had been stuck in the sun for two days—first to practise, then to receive the Presidents—and ignored for their pains, made their final gesture towards the great men, and neither President was there on the terrace. Each chief, at the head of his own band, galloped his horse at top speed up the cement of the main street, lance on high, dipped it to the absent Presidents, swerved his horse and galloped off to the side of the Hôtel de Ville until he could rein in. They rode as though joined to the horse, and they rode very fast, and were an imposing sight.

The local authorities however, in what I now regard as par-for-the-course lack of foresight, had allowed cars to be parked where the horsemen were to pass, alongside the Hôtel de Ville. No one told the horsemen. I watched the first wave, at full gallop, come straight on to the backs of the parked limousines; and held my breath; they managed to pull their horses up standing. No one moved the cars; the horsemen had to adapt themselves. Evidently here, as everywhere, the city slickers rule and win; the country boys get the dirty end of the stick. The country boys are the ones for me, though; they look terrific and their own men. The others, who have a thin patina of western civilization, set my teeth on edge; they are like a conceited but untalented amateur theatrical company, putting on a stupid play in the mistaken impression that they’ve got the lines and gestures right, just like the whites.

Tonight there is a reception for President Tubman at the house of the French Resident. I don’t understand what the role of the French civil servants is, now; as advisers? Anyhow, that house would obviously be the grand place, so there the party is to be. The R. and W. King (or “Le Keeng” as called throughout Cameroun) manager tried to get me invited; he was tactful, not mentioning the subject again when he could not swing it. I am too insignificant. It is another angle; not the Quiet American, not the Ugly American: the Unknown American. I found this pleasing and took my weary bones to bed; but the tam-tams (drums) beat all night; and I waked to the same music. The horsemen were passing my bucaroo again, for the last time, on their way home to the bush.

February 4:
President Tubman’s visit brought many strangers to town and two days ago at the hotel bar I saw two French women who filled me with shame for my sex. They looked more slovenly and old than their age, which I’d put in the early 40s. They were drunk on bar stools, one with her hair falling down, one with gluey eyes; a horrid sight. I steered clear of these ladies until this morning, when my transport to the Pitoa market—some ten kilometres out of town—failed. They were going in a Landrover with a Cameroun official, and offered me a ride. I learned that the drunkenness was an error and due, they said, to their inexperience of booze. But what a queer pair, even sober.

One of the ladies is an old Cameroun hand; she introduced herself as
“ethnologue, sociologue et avocat.”
She is a compulsive talker and braggart, without a shred of humour or self-consciousness, and she evidently knows a great deal about the blacks and this country. She wore very short aquamarine shorts, a blouse with lace, and canvas leggings over sneakers. She has the sloppily pinned-up unwashed hair that only a certain kind of French concierge would be caught dead with. Her chum is a peroxide blonde, pale, with glaucous eyes, a simpering manner, but restfully clad in a dress. The blonde sat in front with the driver and our host, her arm along the seat back, her head too close to the African official, whispering. The word “avid” might safely be used, as description. The ethnologist etc. said her friend had lost her job after seven months and now she was waiting. For what? A black protector?

On Sunday the tribes from all around walk to Pitoa market; it is a big market and richer than any other native market I have seen. The things on sale—specially repellent fish, vegetables, salt, cloth, cattle—were not interesting; the people were.

The Bororo are a nomadic tribe, herdsmen, and the handsomest yet encountered. The women wear sarongs and are extremely thin and narrow-bodied, with fine bony faces like ancient Egyptian sculpture or like beautiful Jews. (But then Akhenaton the Great looks exactly like a Jew.) They are copiously tattooed on the face; they have wide eyes. Their hair is dressed in the most complicated way, braided with coloured wool, yarn, and somehow laced around their heads. Their men are very tall, also with these wonderful Semitic faces, wearing embroidered caps, robes and swords.

The Fali are a Kirdi tribe (i.e. naked pagans) and the women wear a fringed leather
cache-sexe
, bands of something that looks uncomfortably like horsehair between their legs, ending in a brush behind, like a chopped-off tail. Their jewelry is the most painful to date: silver buttons on the outside of the nostrils, a large (silver dollar size) round stone ornament, like dull mother of pearl, set into and jutting out the lower lip, and holes all around their ears for silver rings. They dress their hair in braids with oiled red earth, so that they seem to be growing dozens of pieces of dark red macaroni or little sausages.

We wandered among these people and the
ethnologue
pointed, discussed, lectured, with lofty condescension. I felt miserably embarrassed by this arrogant performance. She told me that the black women know herbs to use for abortions, and do so constantly. She said that once, in the bush, she had been ill and taken native medicines and thought she would die of it; she concluded that their intestinal arrangements are quite different from ours. I wondered whether the locals hadn’t tried to poison her.