on arguing, protocol, and nose-picking

I would be slacking in my bloggy duties if I didn’t provide some kind of commentary on what I experienced of Cameroonian culture. Certain professors of mine at Cambridge would never forgive me if I didn’t preface these observations with the caveats that these are broad generalizations, that there is lots of cultural diversity within Cameroon, and wocka wocka wocka. On we go.

Confrontation. In at least one sense, Cameroon’s culture is the opposite of an Asian culture—namely its high tolerance for interpersonal conflict. I would frequently observe Cameroonians engaged in what appeared to be shouting matches, but Kate and others assured me that that’s just how they roll. A Peace Corps volunteer I met on our long train ride has taken the idea of being integré to the extreme on this score. In dealing with railroad employees, fellow passengers, and the assorted vendors and hustlers associated with the rail system, I watched him adopt the same kind of brash, confrontational, in-your-face attitude that he and other PCVs attribute to Cameroonians.

But the strangest thing about the Cameroonian approach to conflict is how quickly it can all be turned off. A Cameroonian can seem to be chewing you out one moment and acting like your best friend the next; it’s as quick as flipping a light switch. Here again, the culture seems to be the opposite of what I’ve experience of Asian cultures, in which personal slights can linger in the atmosphere for a very long time. When Kate and I arrived in Limbe, we tried to explain the location of our hotel to our cabbie—who, you should be unsurprised to hear, had never heard of said hotel. He repeatedly claimed that we would have to pay him extra because the hotel was located inside a botanic garden that charged an entrance fee; we knew that it wasn’t. We went through several rounds of him arguing with us, his face lit up with rage, interspersed with bizarrely friendly questions and commentary about the town, Kate’s post in the Northern Cameroon, and other topics.

Protocol. Cameroonians are big on protocol. This is the kind of principle that one typically discovers in the breach, and we had a couple of educational but mildly unpleasant encounters with Cameroonian protocol.

Prior to our arrival in Maroua, a northern transport hub where we spent the night of my birthday, Kate received an invitation from a fellow PCV who happens also to be a Williams grad. We were invited to share a (non-alcoholic) hot beverage, the name and significance of which I forget but which has something to do with a Muslim holiday, with the sister of the lamido from Kate’s town. A lamido is the traditional local chief in Northern Cameroon, and you can read about Kate’s fascinating run-in with the local lamido here. (I’m not really addressing gender issues in Cameroon here, primarily because Kate does a really nice job of it in her blog.) We arrived to an elaborate welcome from members of the princess’ household and then the princess herself. As we sat waiting on a mat and darkness fell, a creeping sense of unease set in. Hot-beverage-whose-name-and-significance-I-forget (HBWNASIF) doesn’t take that long to hear up; it was becoming clear that, contrary to her invitation, the princess had something fancier in mind for us. With birthday celebrating plans in the hopper, other errands to do, and an early wakeup the next morning, we were not prepared for a multi-hour commitment. Perhaps no self-respecting princess would have guests over only for HBWNASIF, and perhaps the real import of the invitation would have been something a real Cameroonian could have deciphered. We were caught completely off guard. Austin, the Williams alum PCV, extracted us from the situation with all of the diplomatic skill he could muster. The parting was friendly and Kate and Austin promised a return visit, but I worried that the incident may have set Kate father back with the lamido and his family.

A big part of Cameroonian protocol is letting people know when you’re entering their territory. Roadside ID checks are a standard part of most any bus trip, and Lonely Planet advises travelers who are going off the beaten tourist track to announce themselves to the local lamido or fon (as they are called in the South). During our biking/hiking trip on the Ring Road, Kate and I spent two nights in the village of Missaje (mee-SAH-jay), which does see a trickle of foreign tourists but is still the kind of place where two people can eat out for less than $1. By our second night, it became clear that we had been noticed. At the local watering hole, an intoxicated but well-dressed man who said he was a journalist struck up a conversation with us. He offered to present us to the local authorities. He was just looking out for us, he said, because an introduction would make things easier later on in the event that we were “subpoenaed.” He was sloshed and obviously full of shit, but the whole encounter still felt ominous. Kate calmly and politely explained that she lived in Cameroon and understood the custom, but that we were leaving first thing the next morning and it was too late at night for anything to be done in any case. He backed off—but not before obliquely slighting Kate’s character—and we finished our drinks and got out of there. To smooth things over, Kate suggested we give our journalist friend a final “greeting” before we left. He responded with extreme friendliness, as if nothing had happened. There’s that on/off switch again.

Just for Fun. On a lighter note, my picks for:

• Grossest Cameroonian habit. Flagrant, public nose picking. And sometimes eating.
• Strangest appropriation of Western food. Spaghetti omelets, which are on offer at omelet shacks in most sizeable towns.
• Best way to get tipsy while meeting your Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin C. Top Pamplemousse (grapefruit soda) with whisky (sold in 50 mL plastic sachets).
• Funniest placenames. Bum and Dumbo, both in Anglophone Cameroon.
• Best Cameroonian Slogan. “On est ensemble”—roughly translated as, “we’re in this together,” and the best way to signal solidarity with your travel mate in the event of drunk journalists, biting ants, muggings, derailed invitations to drink HBWNASIF, and other mishaps.

the joys (and otherwise) of cameroonian transportation

This is one of those posts that really would have benefited from pictures, so y’all will have to use your imaginations for this one. Developing country transportation is a surefire source of aggravation, terror, and hilarity, and Cameroon’s system gave us plenty of all three.

Train. Unless you’re up for days in a bus on awful roads—and you really don’t want that, as I will explain below—the overnight train from Ngaoundéré to Yaoundé is the only way to get from Cameroon’s North to the rest of the country. Here’s that map again to refresh your memory:



If all goes according to plan—which it usually doesn’t—the trip is supposed to take about 16 hours, lasting from 6 pm until 10 the following morning. The freight trains that use the same tracks are notorious for derailing, which means delays for the passenger trains. That didn’t happen to us, but our train did grind to a halt around 4 a.m. because, we were told, the engine gave out. I went back to sleep, hoping that when I woke up things would be moving again… but well after 7 am we were still sitting in the same place, waiting for a replacement engine. We finally rolled into Yaoundé around 2:30 in the afternoon—which really isn’t all that bad, considering that trips of up to 30 hours are not unheard of. Throughout the ordeal, I marveled to myself that this is Cameroon’s Amtrak, their most sophisticated form of ground transportation, the aorta linking North and South. Yikes.

Taxi. In the North, “taxis” consist mostly of jumping on the back of a motorcycle, so we didn’t get in any bona fide yellow cabs until we reached Yaoundé. Unless you want to pay through the nose for a depo (a taxi all to yourself), you have to share a cab with other passengers, which means finding a driver who is headed roughly in the direction you want to go. A majority of the time, what happened was as follows: the driver would slow down and pull over, we would shout where we wanted to go, the driver would give us a look like it was the stupidest thing he had ever heard, and then he would speed away.

Another difference from developed-country taxis is that there is no presumption that the driver knows where your destination is, and he usually will not admit it up front if he doesn’t. On a Sunday morning in Yaoundé, after dropping in on a depressingly un-African Mass, Kate and I got in a taxi and requested the Musée Afhemi. Lonely Planet told us that the museum was located in a residential neighborhood, but it didn’t provide a precise street address. Once we were in the right area, the cabbie pulled over and described what we were looking for to a guy on the street whom he seemed to know. The man’s face lit up in recognition as he told us that there were white people “like this” while pounding a first into his open palm—a Cameroonian gesture meaning “a lot.” White people “like this”—it must be the local tourist attraction! The driver brought us to the house, we paid him, and he drove away. The whole thing felt slightly dubious, but Lonely Planet did say the museum was in an old residence, so we rang the bell. A blonde coed answered the door and, after a moment of utter bewilderment, explained that the house was full of study-abroad students from Pennsylvania. At that point Kate and I gave up on the Musée Afhemi and went for a beer at the local watering hole.

A couple of our cabbies, however, deserve a gold star. In addition to our post-mugging rescuer in Douala, a cabbie from the Anglophone town of Kumbo deserves mention. Kumbo was the jumping-off point for our mountain bike tour, and one of the Peace Corps volunteers from a neighboring village came up to lend us her bike and helmet. We met her and David, a Kumbo-based PCV and good friend of Kate’s, at the local restaurant/bar. After a meal and a few rounds of Cameroonian beer, we crammed the bike and ourselves into a taxi with a hatchback for the ride back to David’s house. In the darkness and in our beer-addled state, the helmet got left behind. The following morning, David and I started asking around among the cabbies in the central square to see if anyone had heard about the stupid foreigners who left a bike helmet in a taxi. Within two minutes, we heard a honking from behind us, as our cabbie from the previous night pulled up, helmet perched on his dashboard. David slipped him some CFA and we were ready to go.

Bus. Of all modes of transportation in Cameroon, I found the buses to be the most terrifying. The bus companies predictably cram in more people than the vehicles are designed to hold. There are almost never seatbelts, and the drivers speed along over rutted or dirt roads like madmen. (Hilariously, the inside of buses in the Anglophone region usually list rules such as “No Fighting” and “No Vomiting.”)

To make matters worse, there is a widely held Cameroonian superstition that wind blowing in one’s face causes illness, so most Cameroonian passengers will insist on closing the windows no matter how suffocating things get inside. Kate and other PCVs make a point of grabbing a seat with control over a window, and usually they can negotiate a small crack with the other passengers to let some air in. During our ride from Yaoundé to Bamenda, we sat behind a woman who had a baby and seemed especially perturbed about the whole window situation. During a rest stop she asked us, in all seriousness, “Could you please switch seats with me? I don’t want to lose my baby.”

Scariest of all, for me, was the prospect of our night bus ride from Bamenda to Limbe. Kate informed me that night bus drivers occasionally turn the headlights off—a misguided attempt to save gas?—and that as a result of such behavior, one bus in the North had rear-ended a flatbed truck, decapitating the first few rows of passengers. This was right after she booked us two seats in the second row of the bus. Thanks for that, Kate, thanks a lot. As it turned out, our night bus trip was one of the tamest I experienced. The driver had the headlights on the whole time, as far as I could tell, and there actually were (gasp!) seatbelts. I know seatbelts don’t offer much protection against decapitation, but I slept soundly.

thoughts from a mugging

So I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that on my last night in Cameroon we got mugged in Douala, and I lost my camera and with it all of my pictures from the last three weeks. The good news is that Kate and I are both safe and sound, and the muggers didn't even make off with all that much loot from me.

For the morbidly curious, here's how it went down. On Saturday night I took Kate out for a celebratory thanks-for-being-my-tour-guide dinner at one of the nicer restaurants on Boulevard de la Liberté, one of Douala's main drags. Ironically, during the course of dinner we looked over and reminisced on the 200+ pictures that I had on my camera; Kate hadn't taken any pictures on hers up to that point. The restaurant was only a few blocks from where we were staying, so although it was late, we bypassed the taxis waiting out front. We were probably more than halfway home when, on one of the quieter stretches of the sidewalk, a tall and built man in sunglasses charged toward me saying "give me money" in English. I had encountered similar approaches before -- panhandlers are aggressive in Douala -- so I didn't immediately think much of it, though the man's physical presence and smart dress should have been a tipoff. He grabbed my arm and wouldn't let go, repeating his demand, while we just kept walking forward and firmly refusing. Then at least two other goons appeared from the woodwork and started grabbing me too. They didn't bother with Kate, probably because she obviously had nothing on her. Shit, I thought, this is for real. I handed the first guy my wallet as another relieved me of my watch and my camera. (Longtime readers: I'm also sad to report this was the Mongolian wallet that I won at a conference in Manila and that was later lost and returned to me by an honest cabbie.) I struggled to get out into the street as Kate pleaded "c'est tout" (that's everything), but they continued restraining me, ripping my shirt in the process. In fact I had a money belt tucked far down in my shorts, which contained my passport and a larger wad of cash than the pittance I had in my wallet. I think that one of the muggers knew or at least suspected that I had more. By then a taxi driver had seen what was going on and stopped in the street; Kate opened the door and I tore myself away from the muggers and got inside. We returned to our room for the night, shaken but unharmed.

Things certainly could have gone worse, and part of the reason they didn't was that I was prepared for the possibility of being mugged, notwithstanding our bad decision to forego the first opportunity for a taxi ride. Peace Corps volunteers are technically not supposed to go to Douala, and those who have seem to have gotten mugged with a regularity that would be comical if it wasn't so sad. I've never heard of such incidents turning violent, but they do contribute to the city's poor reputation. I should have left the camera in the room, but I was smart enough to take my driver's license out of my wallet, knowing that it would be one of the more disruptive and annoying things to have to replace. When traveling in sketchy areas I carry a wallet even when I have a money belt as a matter of policy, in order to have something to give a potential mugger.

I came away from the incident vowing that "I got mugged" would never be the first sentence or even part of the first paragraph when I tell people about my time in Africa. I had been hoping to finish the trip with a clean bill of health and safety -- perhaps to affirm my competence as a traveler, to help change people's ideas about Africa, to prove something to my parents, who knows -- and I did make it 98% of the way through without incident. It sucks to lose my pictures and a little bit of my pride, but above all I'm grateful that Kate and I came away unscathed, and I have a newfound appreciation for places where I can walk around at night without fear.

I also want to emphasize that, other than the assholes we had the misfortune of meeting on Blvd. de la Liberté, everyone else we met in Douala was welcoming, kind, and helpful. We left Limbe with the intention of arriving in Douala before nightfall, but it was already dark when we arrived in the neighborhood where we were staying, and we had some trouble finding the guesthouse. Two white people, obviously lost, with big backpacks, in downtown Douala-- not a good scenario. Yet the folks we met on the street went out of their way to help us; one woman who knew of our guesthouse walked with us until we found our destination. Many of them were clearly educated professionals. Douala's place in Cameroon is a bit like New York's in America; it's not the political capital but it is the economic powerhouse, the place you go to make something of yourself if you're strong enough not to get your ass kicked by it. The mugging makes me sad for the vast majority of decent peole in Douala more than for myself.

dispatches from the volcano

Limbe, Cameroon - I'm down to about 48 hours left in Cameroon, and it feels like I've been here forever. I realized with some surprise that if I put the countries I have visited in order of the time I have spent in each one, Cameroon would come in 4th place, behind the US, the Philippines and the UK. We're wrapping up in the humid beach town of Limbe, stuffing our faces with delicious grilled fish, fried plantains, and ice cream after three challenging days of hiking on Mt. Cameroon.

By now I am used to the fact that the culture of backpacking is different in developing countries than in the US, so it came as no surprise that we had to hire a guide and porters to carry our stuff on Mt. Cameroon and that Leave No Trace would be a foreign concept. So while it was still a little difficult to be shorn of my independence and to see trash lying all over the campsites, I was more or less able to tune that part out and just enjoy the mountain.

At over 13,000 feet, Mt. Cameroon provided me with a new personal record for altitude. Happily, I had no altitude-related complaints apart from the expected shortness of breath-- though I'm sure that if I were administered a math test at the summit I would have done poorly. For me, Mt. Cameroon's most appealing feature is its spectacular variety of landscapes: its base is wrapped in rainforest mixed with the occasional cultivated plots, which gradually gives way to grassland dotted with scrubby trees. The mountain's upper ramparts are scarred with craters and lava flows from its many eruptions (most recently in 1999 and 2000), though fortunately the summit is easily accessible.

We made the trek with a couple of Kate's Peace Corps friends, in addition to our required complement of guide and porters. Apart from a few wipeouts and an attack of biting ants at our second campsite, everyone emerged from the trip unscathed and probably a few pounds lighter. I will have buckets of pictures to post once I get back. But for now, my turn at the internet cafe is running out and the grilled fish are waiting...

not the queen's english

Bamenda, Cameroon – “English-speaking,” I have learned, is a relative term. When we first arrived in Bamenda six days ago, I was excited to be in a region of Cameroon where language would be less of a barrier to interacting with the locals. Then we went out to Bamenda’s most posh restaurant—we’re still talking fluorescent lighting and 3,000 CFA ($6) entrees here—and I got a reality check. After spilling some Top Pamplemousse (Cameroon’s delicious homegrown brand of grapefruit soda) on the table and floor, I went back to the bar to ask the bartender for some napkins. My initial request was met with a look of incomprehension. I gradually simplified my question to just “napkins?”, but that didn’t work either. I finally got the message through by miming a spilling beverage and wiping motion.

The majority of people in Anglophone Cameroon don’t speak the Queen’s English in their daily lives. The true lingua franca is Pidgin, a blend of English and local languages that is incomprehensible to a speaker of standard English. To give you a small taste of how different it is, prior to our mountain bike trip along the Ring Road I asked one of the local Peace Corps volunteers for a short primer on asking for directions in Pidgin. I was told that “which way to Ndu?” would be translated as “wu side Ndu de?” The word “side” does come from the English, but as you can tell, the meaning of the word is a little bit different than the sense we are used to.

That said, most of the Cameroonians I have met in this region can speak and understand English fairly well, as long as you adopt what the Peace Corps folks call “Special English.” Special English entails speaking very slowly, enunciating clearly, eliminating contractions, and introducing a bit of a lilt to one’s voice. It’s funny, but this seems to be the one place in the world where the stereotypical “ugly American” way of speaking to the locals—i.e. speaking more slowly and loudly, as if the listener were stupid—actually works. I’m told there is one volunteer in this region who has got Special English down so well that now he can’t turn it off, even when talking with other Americans. I’m pretty bad at Special English, which means that even here, Kate does most of the talking with the locals.

Some of the importations from English are downright hilarious to American ears. Whereas in the north of Cameroon I would be addressed as “nassara,” here I am “white man.” “White man” is a unisex and even a plural term; thus Kate is also “white man,” as are the two of us together. In almost every village we biked or hiked through, children would shout to us from the roadside; at one point we got shouts of “WHITE MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN” in stereo from both sides of the road, the kids apparently competing to see whose lungs could hold out the longest. Another of my favorites is “I will beat you” (that’s “beat” in the sense of “smack around,” not “defeat”), which seems to be the preferred idle threat among children and Peace Corps volunteers. Cats are referred to as “pussy,” and a kitten is “small pickin’ pussy” (“pickin” somehow means “children”). But my favorite local phrase of all is “you are welcome”—Cameroonian hospitality in action.

the crab sorceror and the human zoo

Bamenda, Cameroon - Greetings from Bamenda, the heart of Anglophone Cameroon. This town is referred to as "America" by Cameroon's Peace Corps volunteers, much to the chagrin of Courtney, the PCV who is posted here. Bamenda won this moniker thanks to its relatively high level of development and the abundance of businesses named after American cities and places. There was one spot named after Boston just a few steps away from a hair "saloon" (as they call them here- no whiskey or shootouts as far as I know) called "Yankee New Look." I think the significance of that combination is probably lost on most Cameroonians. It has been quite a transition in just a few days from the desert north to the busy francophone capital city to the red-earthed, grassy, English-speaking northwest.

But for now I'm going to rewind the clock back to our time in the North, since I have quite the backlog of things to write about. During our time in Kate's town, we took an overnight side trip to Rhumsiki, a town near the Nigerian border with some gorgeous mountains. Our guide brought us in to see the Crab Sorceror, a local spiritual leader believed to have power to foretell the future. In addition to predicting the quality of the harvest for the community, he offers his services to visitors for 1,000 CFA per question. His method is as follows: he speaks to a crab in the local language, asking it to do a good job for his guests, and then poses the first question (as translated by our guide) to the crab. He places the crab in a clay pot filled with water, sand, and pieces of wood that represent the different locations of the visitors' life. The crab gets a few moments to do its thing beneath a lid, and then the crab sorceror reads off the answer from whatever the crab is up to in the pot when the lid is lifted. We didn't ask, but the crab sorceror provided enough information for us to conclude that Kate and I are going to be married, that the matter will be settled in a year and a half to two years, and that we will have a daughter, a son, and a daughter. (P.S. - Kate is not particularly eager to have kids. P.P.S. - The crab sorceror only gives out good news.)

I found our encounter with the crab sorceror noteworthy not so much for what he predicted, but for how the whole experience felt... or how it didn't feel. In my Philippines blog I complained about the tourism in some of the poorer regions of the country being a kind of "human zoo." I often encountered situations that felt undignified and degrading to the local people and cultures, driven by sheer economic desperation and the need for tourist cash. But the crab sorceror experience did not have that "human zoo" feeling to it, nor did our visit to the chief with 50 wives, even though my blog about it may have been a bit sensationalistic.

I thought about why that might be and discussed it with Kate, and she made a really good point: the local people are more in charge of their destiny here. We really are their guests, and we play by their rules. The morning after our meeting with the crab sorceror, Kate and I went on a hike around Rhumsiki, and as we were descending a woman was climbing the trail with a bundle of wood on her head. Our guide promptly ordered us to get off the trail and let her pass. We would have done it anyway, of course, but I was impressed because I would have expected/feared that we, the rich white people, would have been allowed/expected just to steamroll right over the daily life of our hosts. That's the kind of mentality that human zoos are made of, and it has been refreshingly absent during my time in Cameroon.

technicql [sic] difficulties

Ngaoundere, Cameroon - Just a quick post to let everyone know I am alive and well, but the blogging is proving to be more difficult than anticipated. The internet is pretty slow most places, sometimes blogspot wont even load, and the keyboards are arranged a bit differently than old QWERTY. So I cant promise much of anything before I get back to the states on April 13- but there will be lots to share then. Everything so far is going great- and I got a boubou for my birthday!