Central African Republic - part 1

The leg through the Central African Republic from the western border to the capital at Bangui was perhaps the only stage of my whole journey where I mildly regretted not having my own transport. The minibuses were slow, cramped and uncomfortable, it was difficult to see out due to a combination of cracked windows and rain, and there was usually little to see anyway except the jungle growing tall on both sides of the road. Just occasionally, however, we would climb a few hundred feet up, the vegetation would break for a moment, and there would be a brief glimpse of a huge vista of empty land covered in trees from one horizon to the other, illuminated by shafts of light as the sun fought its way through the storm-clouds. We broke down quite frequently but never, it seemed, anywhere with a view.

A frequent event

My neighbour for part of the route was Bernard. He was a teacher, well-qualified he claimed, but unable to get a desirable job in Bangui because “my family is not well connected”. Forced to work in the remote provinces, he was heading to the bright lights of the capital for entertainment during the summer holidays. I shared the cost of a room with him at an overnight stop. Its only furniture was an extremely long single bed, with a rather serious design flaw: instead of cross-ways slats, it had length-ways slats. With a mattress this might not have been so unfortunate but of course there was none, and with just a thin sleeping-bag thrown over it for padding, it was impossible to lie in any position where the slats did not dig in sharply somewhere. I slept instead on the comfortable mud-floor, leaving Bernard with the bed. Due to complications with finding the right change, I had paid fractionally more than my half share of the room price, and moreover I had bought him a warm Fanta at dinner, so he protested that this entitled me to claim the bed; I was quite certain that it entitled me to claim the floor. When I woke next morning, he was still fast asleep… on the ground not the bed.

The Fanta had been necessary to cope with the food. The only choice was sticks of some sort of dense, dark, barbecued flesh. Probably it was goat, but it looked like snake and it was definitely venomous. A small skewer was sold accompanied by about a teaspoonful of chilli-powder in a twist of paper, for dipping in an attempt to make it edible. The vegetable accompaniment was manioc, a grey white tube that looks, smells, feels, and (OK I am guessing here) tastes like a condom. It was also sold accompanied by chilli-powder, for the same reasons.

In the next town, drowning the food with warm beer from a street bar in preference to warm Fanta, I met a middle-aged Frenchman who had lived the majority of his life in Centrafrique. He had come over with “the Legion” he said (there was still a huge French military presence), and then stayed on. The country was going steadily downhill, successive governments worse than their predecessors, despite the regular coups and revolutions each promising a better future. “Il faudra que quelque chose changera” he stated determinedly, gesturing with a fist – something has to change. I asked why, if things were so bad, he did not return to France. “I know no one in France,” he replied, “it is thirty-five years since I was in Bordeaux. How would I live there? My wife is African. I cannot go back.”

The French connection was even stronger in Bangui itself. Back in Algeria I had met a young Frenchman turning around after his vehicle had irretrievably broken down even before attempting the Sahara crossing. On learning that I might end up in Bangui he had scribbled an address and a rather cryptic note in the back of my diary: “Hello Marie, please give lodgings to this guy, I will be back when I can, Jean-Pierre ‘the devil’”. Having nothing to lose I presented myself, was offered a reasonably priced bed with clean white sheets and a splendid mosquito net, and discovered that this was the capital-city hostel for the VP, the French equivalent of VSO (voluntary service overseas). As the VP offered an interesting alternative to doing military service it was not short of volunteers, and when a group of them returned in late afternoon they cheerfully invited me along to the evening’s entertainment.

We headed to a Lebanese-run restaurant, with a full Lebanese-mezze meal, served entirely free of charge; the ingredients were presumably expensively sourced from the inevitable French supermarket. (The troubles in Lebanon had driven something of a diaspora, although it was difficult to understand why anyone with a free choice would select the Central African Republic.) The tables were then cleared away, diesel generator power up, the sound-system turned to full volume, disco-lighting switched on, the bar opened-up by a large group of staff, and a further free bottle of beer mystifyingly issued. Rather baffled by this gratuitous hospitality, I awaited developments. After perhaps half an hour, minibuses began to arrive outside, and disgorged their contents: large number of French soldiers with a week’s pay to burn. Local girls in extremely short skirts or skin-tight jeans began to drift in looking for customers. The reason for the free hospitality became clear: our group of volunteers included a number of young Frenchwomen, and their presence helped create the illusion for the soldiers that the nightclub was better than just a clip joint. There were clearly some regulars; around midnight the dance-floor cleared suddenly, the music changed, and a burly soldier and lithe African girl proceeded to give a spectacular exhibition of rock-and-roll dancing.

Next evening, after a disorientating visit to the cinema to see an English film dubbed into French with English subtitles, I was invited by the same group to “our house in the country for the weekend”. A small contribution to the cost of food and drink was requested, and in the morning we set off in a couple of battered vehicles via the supermarket. A couple of hours from Bangui, we pulled up in a village outside a nondescript concrete building. The driver disappeared inside, and emerged with an extraordinarily well-groomed girl in tow. His girlfriend he explained. I assumed she was another French volunteer, until she introduced herself in French but with a strong American accent. The building was the Central African training centre for the US Peace Corps, she explained, and she was the training manager. She would bring the new recruits out, but please would I remember that they were forbidden to speak any language other than French, except for 30 minutes each day during their evening meal. They trooped out, mainly rather bewildered looking girls, and a surreal conversation ensued in first-form French. They had each volunteered to work in Africa, but had not nominated any country preference or else their preference was “full”. Accordingly they had been assigned a country at random, in this case one that they had mostly never heard of until receiving their posting. (Advice to young American gentlemen: should you wish to enjoy almost unlimited time in the isolated and exclusive company of numerous attractive and educated young American ladies looking for supportive companions, learn a little French in advance, and then volunteer for a Peace Corps placement in Africa).

I was slightly reluctant to leave, but eventually we headed on to pick up a trio of post-training “placed” volunteers, young women despatched in pairs to isolated villages in the middle of Africa where they were expected to educate the local population. In one case, the girl’s partner had become ill and so she had a territory to herself, based out of a small, if solidly built, village hut. She looked glad of the company and appeared to enjoy the weekend, but she told me later that she had grown to appreciate the quiet of the jungle and was not sure she was looking forwards to her time as a volunteer ending, despite the seeming futility of the actual educational programme she was supposed to deliver.

As I talked to these volunteers, this theme recurred over and again. Mostly they were enjoying the unconventional freedoms that remote Africa brought them (especially the French, muttered the Americans sourly, because they received double the monthly allowance as VP work was considered equivalent to military service and not simply volunteering), but they found it difficult to believe in the actual work itself. The reason was consistent: they were supposed to be educating the local population with new skills, in a sort of “train the trainer” scheme, but instead ended up simply performing the tasks themselves. “I am taking a year out in the middle of training to be a vet,” one told me, “I should be teaching these people the fundamentals of animal medicine. Instead I am a bush doctor patching up wounded sheep.” The Peace Corps programme was mainly focussed on nutrition, essentially trying to get the villagers to eat their greens, a task one of the girls compared with the similar training of her baby sister except that the locals could just ignore her and say no. Evidently they preferred their regular diet of venomous goat and rubberised manioc.

Cameroon

Cameroon was wet... very wet. Double-checking a map online to write this, I have just discovered that a village close to where I first stayed in the country is listed as one of the five wettest places on earth. It certainly was while I was there. Travel on unmetalled roads was slow and tedious as they turned into swamps. Travel on metalled roads was slow and tedious as the foot traffic which would normally have stayed in the verges strayed out onto the carriageway in an attempt to avoid the worst of the mud.

There were compensations however. Cameroon boasted a Guinness brewery under licence, the drink was still being sold under the “Guinness Is Good For You” slogan, supported by the traditional Toucan-advertising, and was available bottled in most bars and cafes. Coffee and chocolate are both significant cash crops. For a couple of days I indulged in a dark brown diet.

Being English was a significant advantage. The biggest (non-political) event in recent Cameroon history was the (soccer) world cup of 1990. Cameroon began gloriously by beating the reigning champions Argentina in the opening game, and were eventually knocked out in a quarter-final which finished 3-2 to England after two English penalties in extra time, and despite Cameroon probably objectively playing the better. Penalty decisions are invariably a source of controversy, and on discovering my nationality every citizen aged 13 or over wanted to discuss them in detail. Although football is by no means my preferred sport, fortunately I had watched the match. By the end of my time in Cameroon, I could discuss those penalties fluently on a second-by-second basis. It helped to pass the tedious journeys through the rains, and discussions that could switch mid-sentence from French to English – Cameroon has both as official languages, a legacy of the post first world-war partition of the previously German colony – helped to add to the time-passing value.

Being unable to orientate myself in the rain on arrival in Yaounde, the capital, I opted for a short taxi ride. As the taxi pulled away, someone shouted a warning through the window “that man has a knife monsieur, get out”. Travelling light has its advantages. (Nine kilogrammes, or about 20 pounds, of luggage including a sleeping-bag saw me around the world for a year. Compare your suitcase weight next time you check-in for your flight for a week’s holiday). At the next traffic pause I did get out with my bags, before the driver could react. An alternative taxi took me more sedately to the landmark of the inevitable capital-city-aid-agency-workers’ French supermarket, from where I was able to get my bearings and locate a place to stay. Tired from the wet journey and another Guinness, I fell asleep at dusk, only to be woken abruptly a couple of hours later by an incessant, and extremely loud, bass beat: the roundabout just along the street from my ground-floor room apparently doubled up as the Saturday overnight street disco. Dancing in the streets, OK, singing in the rain, maybe, but singing in the torrential and continuous downpour seemed a bit unreasonable. I was surprised the wiring didn’t simply fuse.

For the journey northeast, hopefully into a slightly less damp region, there was a train with magnificent new sleeping carriages. The ticket office only seemed to open for a few random minutes at a time, requiring most of a day spent in a nearby café spying on it before seizing the moment and sprinting over before the window shut again. I was lucky and secured a sleeper ticket, sharing a compartment with a junior air-force officer going home to visit his family. The majority of the remaining passengers in the carriage appeared to be well-to-do French tourists, heading to the drier north intending to shoot things in various private game reserves.

The border with the Central African Republic (CAR, or more euphoniously Centrafrique in French) was a slow, dripping clearing in the jungle, with the usual queues of patient trucks negotiating passage. The CAR border guards evidently felt the need to supplement their income, and had devised an unusual way to do so. A medical checkpoint had been added to the usual steps of checking documents and looking hopefully through luggage in search of confiscate-able items of decent resale value. Yellow fever vaccination? I had the standard issue certificate. How about cholera? The nurse had refused to inject me with it, pointing out that the vaccine was now reckoned to be useless and probably actually increased susceptibility. She had, however, been prepared to salve her conscience and issue an internationally valid certificate of cholera vaccination after injecting me with a microscopic quantity of saline solution; as she pointed out, it probably increased my immunity when compared with receiving the vaccine itself. Then how about meningitis? There was no recognised documentation for this, and it must have brought in a steady income for the border guards. I was equal to it: I had a letter on impressively headed notepaper, bearing the names of multiple doctors and signed with a dramatic flourish. The guards admitted defeat after a few minutes half-hearted argument regarding translation (meningitis in English = méningite in French, close enough for victory to be mine), and I was waved through.

Queueing at the border

They were missing a trick: there was one vaccine which I definitely did not have. When the nurse had asked for a list of countries I planned to visit on my trip, I pointed out that I didn’t really know. In the end we settled on a list which seemed to promise a comprehensive portfolio of standard travel immunisations. She then scanned a lengthy printout: “are you planning to visit southern Tanzania?” Maybe, maybe not, I shrugged, and asked why. “Do you want the bubonic plague vaccine?