Navigating Cameroun – Part 2

I REALLY do want to get on to trying to convey how wonderful Cameroun is / could be as a tourist destination, but it would be unethical to do so without first giving some idea of the brutality of the dictatorial regime headed by Paul Biya. So bad is this that it has been known, like the agents of apartheid South Africa, to hunt down its opponents and to have them murdered abroad. I’ll continue by getting up close and personal on the above topic. In 1988, shortly before I first came to Lesotho, I spent a couple of months in southern Cameroun working as a cultural journalist. This was largely for West Africa magazine, at that time edited from London by the late Kaye Whiteman, who was one of the UK’s finest journalists writing on Africa. He suggested I produce a kind of weekly “letter from Cameroun”, dealing with all sorts of topics, but warned me not to write anything that touched on politics until I was safely out of the country. I started off in the political capital, Yaoundé, which has plenty to recommend it, notably its bars and restaurants, and because it is sited up on a high plateau has a bearable climate. Then the much larger commercial and industrial centre, Douala, which is a coastal city. To say goodbye to a departing Kenyan friend, I found myself at the airport in the middle of the night; I couldn’t believe that anywhere on earth could be so hot and humid at 3 o’clock in the morning. Then to the Anglophone West, staying at a friend’s house in the regional capital, Bamenda. One vivid memory is of the two of us having tea on the veranda of her house, which was on a high hill overlooking the town. From down below suddenly there came a vast but distant noise like a huge wave crashing on a shoreline; we stared at each other in alarm, then Felicity giggled: “oh, of course, it’s the Africa Cup on television. Cameroon must have scored and the whole town erupted!” Because I wanted to write on a wide variety of topics for West Africa, I went with Felicity to the town of Bali (the one in Cameroun, not the Indonesian one!)—a beautiful drive through wooded land. This was to write about a workshop on teaching mathematics through the medium of English. The best part of the event was “Item Eight” on the agenda, which is, apparently, a standard fixture: the point at the end of the day when everyone breaks off to re-group at the nearest bar. Next, I volunteered to give some lessons on Wole Soyinka’s play The Trials of Brother Jero to the inmates of a prison for delinquent youths. I’d been told that the Director of this institution was a very good man, who was deeply concerned to get the inmates into skills training and into passing high school exams they had missed out on. After the final lesson the Director gave me tea in his office; he proved to be every bit as fine a chap as I’d been told. But then, looking out of the window, on top of a nearby hill I saw a prominent whitewashed building with watchtowers and gun turrets at its corners. I asked him what this was and he just dropped his gaze and shook his head saying nothing. Later, I put the same question to a local friend, who had never been backwards in coming forwards. He shook his head and said: “We don’t talk about that. Nor should you.” He paused and then went on: “But if you must know, it’s where they lock up the political prisoners. Many go in. Not many come out.” Once I’d left Cameroun, I wrote a long piece for West Africa magazine on accusations made by Mongo Beti, the dissident and exiled Camerounian novelist and essayist, who was claiming that the French branch of Amnesty International was systematically ignoring human rights abuses in Cameroun, because the French government, the former dominant colonial power, regarded the country as its chasse gardée (private hunting ground). After researching the matter at Amnesty’s headquarters in London (thanks to Stephen Ellis, the then Head of their West Africa desk), I wrote what I thought was a very fair and balanced piece—no matter, the mere mention of Beti’s name was enough to get that week’s issue of West Africa banned from Cameroun. Not that that was such a problem; copies were smuggled in from neighbouring Nigeria and anyone who wanted one would know where to find it. (I should add that I’m not generally in favour of smuggling, but make an exception for printed matter). At about the same time, the Camerounian ambassador to London phoned my editor and told him—in very undiplomatic language—that, as author of the piece, I could not be expected to be allowed into Cameroun again. That remains the case. For the last two weeks I’ve been talking about the dire political and human rights situation in Cameroun under the dictatorship of Paul Biya. Next week I want to put my tourist guide cap on and give some idea of what a wonderful place it would be to take a vacation, were it ethically possible to do so. To be concluded Chris Dunton