Zaire - part 2

I began the journey along the track from Bumba to Lisala, where apparently I would be able to board a boat up the Congo, one late afternoon on the top of a grossly overladen goods lorry. It soon began to rain and many of the twenty or so other passengers elected to take shelter under the tarpaulin. As I preferred to be able to see out, even at the cost of getting wet, this allowed me to move to grab a spot at the front, overlooking the top of the drivers’ cabin. Initially there was some consternation at this, which turned out to be caused by the fact that I had chosen as a seat a cardboard box containing wine glasses. Zaire is not noted for its wine.

Peering ahead into the early evening gloom, I saw a woman some distance ahead flagging down our truck by waving her large black handbag. We slowed, the driver evidently anticipating another fee paying passenger. As we drew nearer to the woman, however, it became apparent that her handbag was in fact a dead monkey, its tail pulled up and around its neck before rigor mortis had set in and then employed as a waving-handle, which she wished to sell us for our supper. Our driver declined. I was glad of this at the time, but rather regretted it later when our evening meal, apparently included in the fare, turned out to include some exceptionally ‘mature’ goat stew. Fresh monkey, I could not help but feel – and that monkey could only have been fresher than my portion of goat – would have been greatly preferable.

After our disturbing meal, we continued in darkness until apparently we reached the end of our ride on this particular truck. We were in a small, sleeping village, and the other passengers quickly dispersed. I found a dry doorway and got into my sleeping bag.

Next morning there was no transport. A small stall sold warm Fanta and tinned Moroccan sardines (every stall in Africa sells tinned Moroccan sardines), so I bought some for breakfast. Many of yesterday’s passengers reappeared and settled down to wait for some means of leaving the village. I fell into conversation with a travelling businessman named Raoul. He was sitting on a large sack of plastic sandals purchased from the Central African Republic which he planned to sell at the market in Lisala. I bought him a warm Fanta while we chatted. At some point I revealed that I was English. A thoughtful look came into his eyes and he beckoned me over to a quiet corner.

 

“Do you know, about, ahh, men’s problems?” he whispered. “Problems with sex I mean,” he clarified. No reply suggested itself, especially in my O-level French, so I nodded noncomitally. He reached into a pocket and produced a piece of paper. It turned out to be a letter, written in the most ornate official-style business French, addressed to a firm in Minnesota which produced – presumably – devices which would assist with “men’s problems.” The names of the products had been laboriously, but unfortunately, transcribed letter by letter from their original English, probably from an advert in the back of a magazine. The letter solemnly requested samples be sent of, amongst others, the ‘Sunrise Ejection Assistent.’

“I sent this letter,” Raoul explained, sipping his tepid Fanta, “but I have had no reply.” I tried to imagine what the firm in Minnesota had made of an earnest written request in a foreign language for samples of their probably bogus products to be sent to a small town in Zaire. “I wonder,” went on Raoul diffidently, “if they did not reply because I did not write in English?” It was possible, I agreed, while attempting to conjure a picture in my mind of the Sunrise Ejection Assistent. “Could you possibly write me a letter in English expressing my request?” he asked.  It would pass the time constructively and make a positive contribution to a third world economy, so I set about a written request for a specimen Sunrise Erection Assistant for evaluation with a view to a larger order being made if its performance was satisfactory.

As I completed this task, a small van driven by a government contractor pulled up, looking for paying passengers to Lisala. Most of the other travellers had too much luggage for the van, and the contractor was asking double the usual fare as well, but pointing to my small rucksack they urged me to board.

Travel-stained

After the trucks of the previous days, sitting in a proper car seat, and unbelievably reaching 80km per hour at one point along the tracks, this was first class travel, Zairean style. Five of the other six passengers were a cheerful bunch too, sharing a bag of nuts with me and asking me what England was like. The sixth, strapped into a seatbelt and occupying a premium space on the back seat by the window, was a large white goat, which bleated conversationally throughout the journey.

They dropped me off in a “motel” at the edge of Lisala. I was shown to a pleasant looking room with a fine white-tiled bathroom and a sort of mock-chandelier with a lightbulb still fitted in its centre. I was in the process of haggling over the price when a maid hurried in. She set down a couple of candles and some matches on the table, and heaved her full bucket of water into the bathroom. “If you need more water to wash or to flush the toilet, you can ask Maria here, or you can draw the water from the well yourself.”

Zaire - part 1

I crossed the river border from the Central African Republic into Zaire at Mobaye, near a modern-looking hydroelectric dam. Whether it generated any electricity I was unable to discover; at no point during my time in Zaire did I encounter any functioning facility powered by mains electricity, although many buildings were optimistically equipped with fittings.

On the same ferry was a Landrover driven by a group of Australians. They were in desperate need of both fuel and the French vocabulary necessary to purchase some. The latter deficiency had apparently defeated them throughout the Central African Republic and their petrol shortage was now acute. They offered me a lift to the nearest town on their roof-rack in exchange for my services as an interpreter.

We arrived in Gbadolite, the hometown of President Mobutu, then still firmly in power. According to the locals, he maintained a substantial palace nearby, and ran the satellite settlement as a kind of show town. Amazingly, there was a supermarket. It stocked only Worcester Sauce. We changed some money with the manager. Zaire was suffering from the gradual onset of hyperinflation – the exchange rate to the dollar doubled during my month there. I received a large wad of impressively clean and new 50,000 Zaires notes, bearing Mobutu’s face on one side and a picture of mountain gorillas on the reverse. “Monkey money,” I was told later. “Look, you see, it has a monkey on both sides.”

 After a lengthy and complex negotiation including the tasting of both the surface and depths of the petrol to verify that it was not watered down, gasoline was successfully purchased and the Australians dropped me off on the track south. Northern Zaire has no useful road transport system, and in anyway no roads for it to use. I enquired why not: “A fellow dictator is overthrown by rebels and rings to ask Mobutu for help. ‘How did they come and get you?’ asks Mobutu. ‘They came by road,’ replies the fallen despot. ‘Ah well, I told you not to build roads,’ says Mobutu sagely.”

The only semi-reliable means of travel apart from the Congo river itself is to ride in/on goods trucks, not in the cabin of course, but as part of the load. Even this is hampered by whole towns being without fuel for days on end, disabling all trucks. However, my luck was in, and I was able to purchase a ride in the back of an empty truck bound for Bumba.

Situated on the northern bank of the Congo, Bumba is as attractive a town as its name implies, with nearly as much to do. It was in Bumba that I encountered “The Belgians”. The Belgians were an Explore/Encounter-overland type holiday operator, driving a rather splendid bright-orange truck with cutaway sides and throne-like seats for the tourists aboard. As I was to discover in subsequent conversations with other travellers, they enjoyed a legendary reputation.

The Belgians’ trip had, according to the stories, started in Ghana. Their tour was led by a charming husband and wife team. On the day their new party were due to land in Accra, Ghana’s capital, they had set out for the airport to meet their guests when they were stopped by the police. In common with many African countries, Ghanaian law requires that one carries ID documents – a passport for foreigners – with one at all times. The husband and wife had left theirs in the hotel. The normal procedure throughout the continent in such situations is simply then to negotiate an appropriate ‘fee’ with the police – “il faut discuter un peut” in francophone lands -, whose size is inversely proportional to how long you are prepared to hang around, and then everybody proceeds on their way. The husband and wife took umbrage, and so, therefore, did the police, resulting in a night in the local jail and their tour guests with no previous experience of Africa having to find their way to an unknown hotel in an unfamiliar city in a foreign language.

Neither husband nor wife could cook. Accordingly, they had hired a Ghanaian to carry out this very necessary duty in a land where restaurants can be few and far between and the food inedible even when there is an eatery. The Ghanaian had no papers, but somehow made it through Togo and Benin as far as the Nigerian frontier, where he was forced to leave their expedition. I crossed paths frequently with The Belgians over the next few weeks. “Monsieur Chris, we have some food spare,” was the usual greeting from the tour guests. Of course I was not about to pass up such free delights as tinned ravioli (prepared by the wife) accompanied by cream crackers (prepared by the husband). One day, I know not how, they offered me lumpy blancmange.

Much later, I heard that The Belgians had embarked their guests on the ferry up the Congo, but taken their vehicle by the overland route, where it became stuck in one of the coach-sized potholes which can obstruct travel along jungle mud-tracks for days on end when it rains. The grand finale of The Belgians’ trip was to be visiting a mountain-gorilla sanctuary near the Rwandan border (the troubles in Rwanda were not yet serious in early 1991). They never made it, and eventually had to fly home at great expense from a bush airstrip.

I first met The Belgians when they drove their truck very hard into the gatepost of my hotel.

The Belgians: whoops, missed

Central African Republic - part 2

I was dropped off at Sibut, a small town of low, brown-white houses set around a patch of red-earth mud, sleepy in the noon sun. Three ragged girls came to stare at me, the eldest, aged perhaps seven, clutching a large blunt knife. Their mother, arriving to chase them away, asked what I wanted and showed me the track to Mobaye. “You can wait here, the van will come soon,” she said, pointing to a welcome patch of shade under a broad tree.

Villagers at Sibut

To my surprise, the van did come soon, and passengers appeared as if summoned by a witchdoctor from the silent houses. The van itself was a small Toyota pickup of great antiquity designed to carry three people and perhaps a couple of goats in the back. There were more than twenty passengers in addition to the driver and his teenage son, so adding my rucksack to the great pile of luggage, I stood on the footplate at the back. There was little danger in this, for the Toyota could manage barely quicker than walking pace downhill. Uphill the younger men took turns to stroll to ease the load, and easily outpaced the van.

The Sibut bus service

 We had travelled maybe four miles of earthen road when something snapped inside the engine and we ground to a halt. Undisturbed, we dismounted while the driver and his son, after inspecting the damage, cut long strips of bark and set about tying back together whatever had broken. Someone plucked ripe wild avocados from plants growing near the track, and offered them around. I was the subject of many curious stares but no one ventured into conversation except to borrow my penknife for their avocado. It was very peaceful with barely even the hum of insects from the brushland through the hot, humid air to disturb the silence. The vast blue sky, the red-brown earth, the tall green of the plants, the battered Toyota a dazzling white in the vertical sun, the vivid costumes of the women: it was Africa painted by Van Gogh. Half an hour later we were on our way again, bumping sedately over the mud.

Perhaps five miles later, the engine gave out again, and we freewheeled downhill into a small village. There was more agitation this time, which was calmed only by the reappearance of the driver’s son with a villager holding a pair of two-litre plastic oil cans. They proved to contain not oil for the van but palm wine for the passengers. I was invited to join them, – “you have also paid your fare Monsieur” – rusted tins were handed round to drink from and a measure of thin yellow-white liquid poured into each.

The drink tasted largely of tin can  (I tried some elsewhere from a plastic cup and it still tasted metallic) but it was potent stuff; tongues were loosened enough to permit a detailed interrogation to begin. After some while we arrived at the inevitable “how much do you earn Monsieur?” I reduced the real figure by a factor of three, but it still brought envious looks. Of course I had to pay a great deal in taxes, probably more than half, I offered in mitigation of my unreasonable wealth. “Taxes are just theft by the government, to pay for guns and soldiers.” Maybe so in the Central African Republic, I agreed, but in England they pay for schools and unemployment benefit. This last concept fascinated them and I explained further under detailed questioning. There was much discussion in their native tongues before the follow up “what else do your taxes pay for?” I told them about the National Health Service, back home not necessarily a topic of great British pride. Out here it was a source of wonder. They listened, questioned, talked heatedly amongst themselves: was I really telling the truth? “C’est une vie sans peur!” – it is a life without fear -, cried one man in the end, convinced but amazed.

The van was mended, a state which lasted approximately five minutes, just far enough to be within pushing distance of the next village. The sound of women beating wooden pestles with giant wooden mortars pulsated through perfectly round mud-brick houses with straw roofs; coffee I was told on enquiry, grown further up in the hills. This time the passengers, sour with palm wine were less easily mollified. It was evening, we would have to stay in the village, our van driver should pay for our dinner. He was not in agreement, but twenty to one was difficult odds to overcome. Village children chased a pair of chickens down the track which, after much shouting and clucking, reappeared in our stew as night fell. After dinner we were shown to a pair of empty huts and fell rapidly into palm-wine induced stupor.

In the morning our van was, allegedly, mechanically sound once more, the driver and some villagers having worked all evening. It would not, however, start. The solution was apparently to roast the battery over a fire, which rather surprisingly did the trick. It stalled a couple more times on the way, and each time the lengthy roasting process resolved matters. About ten kilometres from Mobaye something else went wrong in the innards of the Toyota. We gave up and walked the rest of the way. A journey of twenty-five miles had taken twenty-eight hours.

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?

Nigeria - part 2

The Redemption Hotel International was featured in my guidebook, offered “breakfast and varied hot menus” and boasted a prime location next to the inbound long-distance minibus stop. It had a single room, whose double bed was already occupied, inappropriately in such a religious country by a (presumably) unmarried couple of fleas, attested to by occasional but not prolific bites no matter which half of the bed I chose to sleep in. There was electric wiring and sockets in every room, but no actual electricity; each evening a generator would be run for a couple of hours, powering a flickering black and white television through the evening news and an electric lamp to illuminate the evening meal. The family who ran it – Mr George, his wife and her sister – were charming hosts and even better cooks. Full board accommodation including three excellent home-cooked meals every day cost around five pounds despite the artificially inflated currency, and as I needed feeding up after my recent illness, I took most of my meals there.

Management and staff of the Redemption Hotel International

The food consisted mainly of a variety of mildly spiced stews, usually based on fish or chicken, accompanied by either rice or a very filling green staple with a texture halfway between mashed potato and play-dough. I was told this was made from cassava, but when writing this I have browsed the internet to find pictures of something similar without success – nothing I have seen has quite the same intensity of green colour. It was not very varied cuisine, but the possible permutations were increased by a variety of fresh fruit for dessert. My favourite was mango, ripened at source a completely different fruit from mango ripened in a supermarket, soft, properly juicy and sweet, and very messy to eat. Fortunately, although there was no running electricity, there was ample running water, and failing that I had only to step outside and hold out my hands – the rainy season had begun in earnest.

To pass the time, I took the ferry across the river delta to visit some memorials commemorating the early days of the slave trade and a then succession of subsequent 19^th century local rulers or Edidems (under British overlordship), splendidly named Eyo Honesty the Second through Eyo Honesty the Sixth. The passengers were mainly tired looking housewives, already on their way home after early-morning shopping in Calabar, weighed down by heavy bags, and a fertile audience for the hypnotic patter of a salesman trading in some sort of tablets. As far as I could tell they were either slightly out-of-date vitamin pills or possibly aspirin, but if his act were to be believed, they were capable of curing anything from headaches to heart-disease. Business was brisk.

Otherwise the wait for my Cameroon visa was peacefully restful, with only occasional minor interruptions by local policeman eager to make a lucrative “arrest”. My passport duly bearing a systematically misspelt stamp (including of the words Cameroon and Calabar), and mindful of only a couple of days remaining on my seven-day Nigerian visa, I caught the ferry to Oron, whence boats to Cameroon allegedly departed. The alternative option was a bus. My guidebook mentioned a minimum seven official police checkpoints on the way to the border (implying an uncountable number of further unofficial checkpoints) – checking out the sea-route seemed an effort well worthwhile.

Oron was a smuggler town, and strangers were not welcome. Wandering the few yards down to the beach in search of the passport office, I came across various small boats being loaded. Their crews unequivocally proposed that I return to my hotel and remain in there until my boat departed next morning. A determined lady marched me up to the passport control, and then firmly suggested that I followed the crews’ advice for my own good.

The international boat to Cameroon proved to be a fifteen foot dinghy powered by a small outboard motor steered by a very short man balancing on the stern, three patched inner tubes for its dozen or so passengers being provided as its life-saving equipment. As we set off down the flat-calm of the river delta, it seemed slow but unthreatening. More alarming was the customs-control gunboat which swiftly detected us, demanded via siren and load-hailer that we halt immediately, and then boarded. A “duty” was payable… Happily this was the only such obstacle en route, which to me totally justified the choice of boat over bus.

After a few hours we came to a small island, a few thatched huts visible through tall grasses and mangroves. Rounding the cove, it became clear that it was not some rural island backwater, but rather the largest spirits warehouse in West Africa. I have only once seen more strong alcohol in a single location, and that was in Tesco’s national UK distribution centre. There were cases and cases of the stuff, mostly premium export branded whisky and brandy, but with a wide selection of alternatives, especially gin and pastis. Presumably it was the principle source of “duty-free” supplies to most of Nigeria. My fellow passengers fortified themselves at one of several bars, but I was relieved to see the boatman resisted this temptation.

A couple of hours later, many of the passengers were regretting their choices of aperitif as we left the twin shelters of the delta and island and entered the open Atlantic. The weather was still tranquil light rain with little wind, but the rollers were high enough to obscure the view of the coast, and we seemed to be quite far out to sea. I surreptitiously took possession of one of the inner tubes. I am no sailor and not at all knowledgeable about such matters, but a fifteen foot outboard open dinghy did not feel like the best option for an ocean voyage.
It was almost dark when thankfully we finally landed, apparently in the wrong place. A cheerful official met the boat and asked us if we had purchased tickets to Limbé (we had). This was Idenao, he explained, two hours back up the coast. The boatman would now refund us the difference in price. After a brief, sullen protest, the boatman did so. I had the impression it was a regular and ritualised transaction. The official’s smile broadened as he stamped our passports. “Nigerians are all thieves. Welcome to Cameroon”.

Nigeria - part 1

Of all the countries I have been (80+ and counting) Nigeria is the only one to which I never wish to return. Endowed with vast reserves of oil, it should be a moderately prosperous country despite its 170 million people, instead of which its highly urbanised population live in a poverty exacerbated by systematically relentless corruption.

My problems began at the frontier. I had been issued a visa valid for a month, but in a gesture of solidarity with his fellow officialdom, the border guard arbitrarily reduced this validity to a week – I could get an extension in a variety of ways, all of which involved significant contact with Nigerian bureaucracy. By the end of the day I had decided that under no circumstances would I spend more than a week there, despite an expected 2-3 day delay while I obtained a visa for the next country Cameroon.

The driver had come prepared with a pile of small denomination Naira notes in the glove compartment of the car. Beyond the border stretched a broad dual carriageway along which heavy lorries and buses thundered, an abrupt transition from sleepy Benin, but every few kilometres the traffic was slowed to walking pace by a police checkpoint, marked by a plank hammered full of upturned nails to choke the traffic down to single file. At each one, the driver placed a note in the palm of his hand, shook hands carefully with the armed policeman, and the Naira mysteriously vanished. In this way we made reasonable speed.

Occasionally it seemed he misjudged the appropriate sum, and we were summoned out of the car. Generally the driver handled these situations with diplomatic astuteness (usually by dispensing another small amount of cash), but on a couple of occasions something went more seriously wrong. On the first, we were marched into the police station, where my luggage was searched and, on discovering my camera, I was loudly accused of being a spy. (They also discovered my lucky owl, a small stuffed toy presented to me by my parents before a previous journey in South America to keep me safe. John le Carré makes no mention of lucky owls in any of his novels). This was rather alarming but my driver muttered in French to be quiet, and then proceeded in the local language to establish that the “fine” for spying would be twenty dollars, swiftly negotiated down to ten. As Nigeria also sported one of the dreaded currency declaration forms, which the police had neglected so far to check and thereby discover I was still carrying a significant quantity of cash, I quickly agreed pending any higher demand. The second occasion was more disturbing, as we were marched at gunpoint into a small room, I was again accused of being a spy, and we were then left to stew for half an hour, before the policeman returned still gesticulating dangerously with his gun. I was by now quite frightened, but bizarrely the (apparently) standard twenty dollar fine was demanded, once again reduced to ten after discussions which still involved waving the gun around and periodically pointing it at me. Thankfully after passing around Lagos, which I had decided to avoid as its evil reputation suggested that as a lone traveller I would be excessively vulnerable to, at the very least, sudden separation from my rucksack, the checkpoints settled down again to the routine handshake process.

"Señor Optime": a small owl arrested for spying 

Next morning I stood outside my hotel, recovering from a cold shower (I hate cold showers even in the hottest stickiest climates, but there was inevitably no hot water) and trying to figure out from a wholly inadequate map which part of town I was in. A fellow guest introduced himself: he was a professional footballer playing for a team in Sweden home to visit his family during the summer break, and could he help? I explained that I was trying to figure out where buses departed to Calabar, a town in the Niger Delta area whose main attraction was the alternative Cameroonian consulate not in Lagos.

He very generously offered to drive me to the minibus station, helped find me a seat, and then passed the time waiting for the bus to fill up by showing me squad photos. Twenty years on, I can’t remember either his name or the team, so if you happen to be a Nigerian footballer from Ibadan playing in Sweden during the 1990-1 season reading this, then thank you for your help!
I was allocated a rearward facing seat, my back to the driver. My neighbour, in the centre seat, was a man in his late twenties, clean shaven and dressed in a dark suit and tie. No sooner had the bus started than he extracted a bible which he studied deeply, occasionally underlining passages, making small grunts of agreement as he did so. After a couple of hours, it became apparent that he had not selected his seat at random, and that his bible study was preparation for the religious service he now proceeded to conduct. Some stirring revivalist preaching went down quite well with the rest of the passengers, who chorused “praise the Lord” and “amen” appropriately in a rather subdued manner, but what really got them into the spirit were the hymns. Most were sung in English and everybody joined in enthusiastically, but we were travelling from Yoruba to Igbo areas, and the preacher occasionally successfully suggested a hymn in one or the other of these languages. Once he asked if anyone knew any Hausa hymns (the Hausa are the dominant group in northern Nigeria, and are almost exclusively Moslems), which raised a laugh but no tunes. It was almost cliché Africa, as the hymns were well chosen, and the passengers clearly knew them all well enough to sing parts in harmonies, with a bass voice at the back making an especially beautiful contribution.  I am not a religious person, but the whole experience was quite moving, and to these people the message of Christianity clearly had meaning to them in a deep way: if you live in Nigeria, then the next life can only be better than this one.