Travels with Myself and Another (20 page)

Each wife has a bedroom hut and two huts to store millet, her private granary or larder. The bedroom hut contains her bed, a smooth piece of wood with rounded edges, rather like a surfboard, which is raised by adobe bricks so that the head is higher than the feet. She also has a petrol tin for water, a stone for grinding millet and a little fireplace, very easy to make; two medium-sized stones are laid on the mud floor and that’s the fireplace. No one has thought of a chimney. (Also the wheel was never thought of in these parts.) No clothes of course, no blanket. Presumably living conditions here are the best in the village; early Red Indians were sophisticated, artistic and luxurious in comparison.

The chief and a swarm of young brothers took me up to a hillside to see a stone house they had built (stone storage shack), their communal granary. Below this steep hill, the land dropped away to a cultivated valley. The chief made a sweeping gesture, his face alight with pride. His kingdom, worked by the women and children. Each year they have three months of feasting and parties; they then drink all the millet beer and have a lovely time. After that the women get to work again.

I asked the fourteen-year-old brother how long the chief had reigned; he misunderstood me and thought I’d asked how long chiefs had been reigning here.
“Depuis le commencement de Dieu,”
since the beginning of God, he said, amazed at my stupid question.

I gave the Chief 1,000 francs, having no smaller bill; I was nervous about tipping a king but he took it with grace and satisfaction.

Down the mountainside from them (these are small mountains, which look as if they were full size, the way a warthog looks like a boar) there is a missionary. I went to call on him, out of curiosity. The old Sultan in Mora is (by dress) a Moslem; I can see that Islam, which is so permissive about wives and so forgiving generally, if you just say your prayers, and warlike, would appeal to these people; but I cannot understand what Christianity could mean to them. The priest had just returned in his Citroën tin-lizzy from somewhere or other; he was a young bearded man, wearing khaki shorts and shirt and spectacles, and like Père Moll he is a new breed to me. All muscle, lean, tough, much more one’s idea of an explorer than a priest. Père Sylvestre, he is called, and his order (name forgotten) stems from Provence which is also his home.

Père Sylvestre had built his house with his own hands, a bucaroo much better constructed than the blacks’ are, though they have been making these round huts for centuries, and the priest only used his eyes and figured out improvements. He has a dispensary hut too, and his chapel, made of stone, with a tiny stained glass window; all his love and skill have been lavished on this chapel of which he is touchingly proud. He thinks that within ten years he may make a few converts.

He is bone poor, and alone, and when he finds he is going round the bend
(tournant en rond),
he goes off to see some brother priests forty kilometres away—a long journey on these roads—and talks to them until he’s sure of himself again; then returns to these pagans. He likes the pagans very much (and they like him); infinitely prefers them to Moslems, and says they have a deep religious sense and a unique god, whose name is the same word as for sky. He is learning the language from children, who all day long squat around his hut and stare at him. The language is of course not written; he writes it phonetically and hopes to master it in time. The language has no, repeat no, abstract words. I think it will take quite a bit more than ten years to convert these Kirdi. They’ve been managing without abstract words or ideas for untold centuries. Like everyone else, he practises medicine as much as he can; people in France send him gifts of money and he spends it on medicines. One could hardly go very wrong, there are no doctors anywhere around.

We talked at length; I will put down what I mainly remember, translating literally. “From the human point of view, we have no right to touch these people. From the supernatural point of view, it is our duty to teach them about Jesus Christ.” “They are happy; they are not demanding; they do not want or need unnecessary things; they are familiar with their dead; they have much that we have lost.” I cannot remember how we got on to the subject of women, perhaps through the chief’s fifteen wives. I had been doing simple arithmetic and figured that if the chief was fair and spent a night with each he could visit each wife twice a month, which might not be adequate. The missionary doubted very much whether the chief satisfied his wives. “Do you believe that they occupy themselves with the pleasure of the woman?
Eh bien, moi, je trouve ça humainement dégoutant.
(Well, I find that humanly disgusting.)” I never thought to hear such words from a priest and was astounded. I also wondered if he imagined that all white men were sufficiently informed or concerned to occupy themselves with the pleasure of their women; and was startled to find that his anger on behalf of the women was greater than mine.

I felt more indignant about the heavy work the women do, while the gentlemen tend herds which isn’t too bad, or loll. All the time we were talking, young girls and women passed downhill to a valley in front of his house and climbed laboriously back with large water jars on their heads. Does the female sway-back, which is universal, come from this; the young spine bent by these weights? The result is an ugly body, with a deep curve from shoulder to buttocks, and the stomach pushed out. The resultant walk—steady head and shoulders, swinging hips—is fine; but not the deformation of the back. Père Sylvestre said that the men, when choosing a woman, looked at her skin and her jewelry, not at her face and figure, “as with us.” His pity for the women contradicted his saying that the Kirdis were happy. Though the men might well be happy as larks.

On the face of it, missionaries here are a doomed lot. They have been in Africa for over a hundred years and even if conversion to Christianity is merely a head count, I doubt that they are a roaring success. I wouldn’t preach anything to the blacks, not anything at all. If they want our kind of medical care, it should be given to them, but ideally by trained black doctors, though that may disturb the Darwinian balance of their world and their lives. A child is born each year; the hardiest live. The survivors have to be strong enough to endure this appalling climate and land. Much better to teach the women birth control. But I think nothing will be taught or learned for a very long time, and I do not consider this a disaster by any means. Who are we to teach? Leave them alone is my cry; let them find their own answers. We cannot understand them and the answers we have found haven’t been anything to cheer about, for look at us . . .

I had lunched in the priest’s hut, off my ham and heavy bread bought at Mora. The priest gave me sacramental wine, all he had; it tasted like red ink but he did have cool water. (I travel with two bottles of Evian bumping beside me on the seat; their temperature is not quite suitable for hot water bottles but almost.) Now the chief appeared, Père Sylvestre said he expected him. Whenever Père Sylvestre returns from a journey the chief shows up to hear the news. The passion of the blacks for talk, gossip is understandable; they live entirely by word of mouth, and my imagination cannot grasp a life which never, generation after generation, needs the printed page. The radio is unknown and there are few travellers and their own trips are made on foot and limited. They do not visualize the whole of their country; Yaoundé would be another world; and of course nothing at all really exists beyond their own tribal land.

I gave the priest 1,000 francs for medicines; it seemed only right after giving the chief 1,000 francs which I hope he will spend on beads for wives. Ibrahim and I set off in the heat and dust. Ibrahim is growing thinner before my eyes.

The road to Mokolo, over the mountains, is a backbreaking surface and the view is the best yet. It is dark land, with outcroppings of volcanic rock and then the mountains start behaving well and merging and flowing into each other, and one can see a long way. There are little clumps of huts, stuck away on the hillsides. The Kirdis run out to raise their right arms high in a salute and/or to scream and laugh. They seem to have no pubic hair; they must be a generally un-hairy race, the women’s legs and arms are smooth as are the men’s faces. Black penises don’t look naked, nor do female pudenda (on the contrary, very small and neat like little girls’). The women haul water and wood along the paths, but seem cheerful about it, and I doubt if they do more than the necessary each day. Men can be seen sitting or lying naked on rocks, at ease; time passes. This century has nothing to do with these people.

On the road, we saw a collection of European buildings; a church, a house, another big building that might have been a school, all very neat, gardened, made of stone. We stopped and immediately a white man and woman rushed out; they were in their forties I would think. German Swiss, and Protestant missionaries. The woman has been here five years, the man has spent ten years in Africa. They are very thin, very white, very ill-looking (really suffering ill), lined and dried: classical missionary appearance, from literature. When they came, they said, the “poor people” were wretched, living in fear of the conquering and marauding Fulbé tribe, and hiding in the hills. They had no clothes, didn’t know how to do anything, and were sick. Now look, said the missionaries, with pride; but what was there to see—a girl, covered with a pagne, knitting a narrow strip of red wool (whatever for?). And a few schoolboys.

They began to murmur what sounded like an insane incantation or as if they were talking in a trance, over and over, again and again—Jesus Christ, who died for our sins, if we can teach that, then these people are saved. As they droned these words, like self-hypnotism, I was embarrassed and frightened, as with the mad. I excused myself from visiting the mission, said I would think of them when next in Berne or Lucerne or wherever it was, and fled.

Arrived at the Hotel Flamboyante at Mokolo; a large fairly tidy room for eating, with a bar; local meeting place, I assume; and a single-storey row of bedrooms. I wondered at the lack of a mosquito net and was told there were no insects at this season, all dead from the dryness and the heat. A very nice young Frenchwoman, of the lower middle class, and her mechanic husband run this hotel which is also the garage and gasoline pump. She has been here for twelve years; in another year and a half they mean to return to France, as they cannot stick the new black régime. I gather that this revulsion is due to
“pagaille”—
disorder, not knowing where one stands, sudden taxes, etc.—rather than to colour prejudice.

We talked about missionaries, my latest puzzlement. Madame says the Catholic priest has been here for twelve years and he believes that when he leaves it will be amazing if two blacks remain Christians. Madame thinks all missions are idiotic; these people
“demandent pas mieux que d’être laissés en paix.”
Furthermore, their happiness is their own, we don’t understand them or anything about their lives and they never talk openly to a white. There is a smallpox epidemic in the region, and much leprosy. Some years there is famine, and then the people are really miserable. Otherwise they are quite content, living in the present and accepting whatever happens to them.

Madame had to leave as local customers arrived, two French couples for their evening card game. How many nights have they been doing this? They slap each card down on the table very hard, but scarcely speak. No one is the least interested in talking to me; I am too shy to butt in. It occurs to me that—in my Yaoundé trousers and general dustiness—I must look very unappetizing; also it is unheard of for a white woman to travel around the country alone. I don’t imagine they have any sinister ideas about me, but probably think I am dotty. No one is ever eager to chum up with the unbalanced.

February 2:
Mokolo market is poor and pitiful too; the naked Matakam Kirdi women obviously come for fun and chat rather than gain. (I should say here that there are some 200 tribes in the Cameroun and some 122 different dialects; they’ve got Europe beat on this kind of division, hostility, and barriers. The country is a bit larger than Japan with a population of about 3,200,000.) The naked women bring a few handfuls of withered-looking vegetables for sale, but spend more time visiting with each other than attending to business. Their clothing consists in a leather thong around the waist from which hangs a metal
cache-sexe,
wide leather anklets which stop circulation, and same sort of bracelets around the upper arm which cut into skin, a narrow leather band around shaved head. For jewelry, they wear a silver pin like a toothpick, jutting from the under side of the lower lip (how does it stay in?), and in the large holes in their ear lobes they wear either wooden plugs like a spool or peanuts. Over one shoulder hangs a strip of earth-coloured cotton, which I think is what they use to carry the vegetables to market. They are uniformly hideous, of all ages; not a body that isn’t lamentable.

These people apparently make nothing themselves except the women’s jewelry and cache-sexes, and their primitive tools. For tilling the soil, they use a long hook; it is about a foot and a half long, a straight handle, with a small curved hook at the end; that’s all. The metal is silvered—don’t know what it is—and has a simple design of dots.

Today we have to get back to Garua as President Tubman of Liberia is coming to town with President Ahidjo of the Cameroun for a state visit, and my dusty Citroën (whose rear doors will not now open) is required for the presidential cortège from the airport.

All day there was no shade anywhere, and the heat began to have the power of noise. No sweating, but burning skin and insatiable thirst. I drank from my hot Evian bottles, and five minutes later my mouth felt swollen and sandy. One blows up, as if the heat had been swallowed.

The scenery is rocks, starved dying skinny trees and few of them, rocky mountains and the strange reddish needle formation of the Kapsicki range. I don’t think the moon can look any worse than this.