If You’ll Be My Bodyguard, I Can Be Your Long Lost Pal

I first met Guy at the family’s home in Douala. He was younger-looking and soft-spoken, with a faint mustache. Guy tilted back in his chair and loped around the house with a bit of an egotistical air, so I assumed he was a teenager. When word got around that I’d been robbed at the airport and near Limbe, phone calls were made and friends and family were called upon to ensure that I was protected from further troubles while I was in Cameroon.
This was never explained to me, I just started seeing the pattern. Over the first few days, I was given a local’s phone number and met them when I got to town, and handed off from one person to the next as other commitments came up.
Guy showed up again as I was leaving for Buya and when I thought he was seeing me off to the bus to the next town, he got in and rode along. From that point on, we were partners.
At first I thought this was great; I was in no hurry to be taken advantage of again, and I was a bit nervous based on my initial experiences in Cameroon. Guy spoke enough English and I spoke enough French to get the point across, and it was nice to let someone else do the negotiations with cab and bus drivers, to ask directions, and to explain the things I was seeing in the marketplace.
Within a day, though, the presence of my partner started to eat at me. I had learned a valuable lesson on my motorcycle trip across China: it can be fun to have someone do all the question-asking and negotiating for you, but a big part of the fun is the adrenaline rush of not knowing whether I’d gotten on the correct bus, or the moment where the few words I know in the local language suddenly click and I am able to string together enough to communicate myself perfectly. It was nice to have the protection, but I also felt I was being robbed of part of the experience.
Another lesson I learned on the China trip is that it is fun to travel with companions. Traveling alone, it is difficult to share the humor and internal commentary on the things I see every day. With my companions in China, we made up names and phrases to describe the things we saw, and the inside jokes still rattle around in my head and bring a smile to my face from time to time. Sitting at dinner our second day together, I looked across the table at Guy and we suddenly ran out of things to talk about. We’d hit the boundaries of our shared language and experience and suddenly my partner seemed even more of a burden. Over the course of the day, my frustration had increased as I noticed that Guy tended to mumble whenever he had something critical to explain or ask of me. It was probably due to a lack of confidence in the language, and a habit he just wasn’t aware of. In any case, continually asking him to speak up or use different French words was quickly getting on my nerves.
I was wondering how long this would last, and knowing that Guy was out of work until April, I had surmised that he intended to travel with me for the rest of my trip. I would be footing the bills for all of his hotels, transportation, food, mobile phone minutes, and so on. And Cameroon is anything but an inexpensive country to visit. Hotels firmly at the low end of third world standards can still cost $30 or more per person per night, mosquitoes or cockroaches included. So I was paying a high cost for my protection in Cameroon. In the past, I’d chosen my own travel partners; this one chose me, and there would be no easy way of declining his assistance.
I turned to my camera and started reviewing the photos I’d taken over the previous days. After a couple minutes, Guy slid over beside me and watched the slide show as well. When I got to a photo of some food I had eaten during a few hours alone in Douala, he started cracking up.
“You know what that is?” Guy asked me in French.
“Yeah, suya! I love suya!” Suya is meat slowly barbequed over a fire, chopped into small chunks, spiced with cumin and chili pepper powder and served with slices of onion. Apparently the idea of taking a photo of the man who prepared my food was too much for Guy. He laughed hysterically.

Suya for sale in Douala

“Suya, suya!”
“I love it! Maybe we can have it tomorrow!” I suggested. This sent Guy off even further.
“Papa Suya!” he exclaimed, pointing at me and giving me a new nickname.
“Papa Suya!” I hollered back.
“Wik-wik-wik, Papa Suya!” Guy said, imitating scratching the name across a turntable.
The chorus from Run DMC’s song, Papa Crazy appeared in my head, and I started freestyling, changing the lyrics to describe Papa Suya and how much he loved suya. It’s a simple song and I was able to span some English and some French in the process. When I rhymed suya with Buea, a rhyme that was dying to be made, it sent us both into laughing fits.
Later that night, we both ordered some drinks. I grabbed a “33” Export beer, the pride of Cameroon, and he ordered a Guiness Stout and a Coke. I know this is going to sound like blasphemy, and it is in a way, but in Cameroon Coke and Guinness are mixed together. I’d never heard of such a thing. Guy gave me a sip. The tastes actually seemed to be made for each other, though still not what I would really want to do to a Guinness.
“It’s good…” I said in French, before explaining that my friends back home would think this was crazy.
“I love it!” Guy crooned, imitating my love declaration for suya.
“What’s it called?”
“Gi-Gi Co-Co!” Pronounced with a hard G and a long E, just like Guy’s name.
“Papa Gi-Gi Co-Co!” I declared.
So, names declared and applied to each other, Papa Suya and Papa Gi-Gi Co-Co had our first inside jokes together. Maybe we would find a bond between us after all.

Guy, Jeannine, and Lucy, Buya's "Top Model"

A Girl Gets Her Hair Cut in China…

…and the effects are felt across the world.
During my first day in Douala I noticed a Qingqi motorcycle, the Chinese brand that I rode with my friends in China in 2006. Now keen to see what other brands were represented in Cameroon, I started to keep track. Indeed, there were quite a few Qingqi K50s (as well as a knock-off, a Qyngqi), and looking around the city, the motorcycles read like any city in China: Sanlin, Lifan, Kymco, and Nanfang being the most common.
Many bikes are modified or given fake nameplates, including a couple Wonda bikes, whose font looks just like that of Honda.

Waiting for passengers, Foumban

The Chinese connection didn’t end there. As I explored the markets of Douala, Kumba, and Nkongsamba, it was obvious where most of the goods were coming from. Truckloads of brightly colored plastic sandals are for sale in the markets. A Chinese specialty. Soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, tissues, shoes, luggage, fans, televisions, VCD players, speakers, plastic chairs, and of course the ubiquitous knockoff football jerseys and name brand clothing, all made in China. A handful of “Chinglish” shirts seem to have made the journey as well, which seem to be worn with as much pride and innocent ignorance as they are in China.
I’ve been stunned by the seemingly infinite patterns, colors, and styles that Cameroonian women wear in their hair. The braids alone are woven into countless intricate and physics-defying styles that I have never seen imitated on the streets in America or on television. As my Congolese-Swiss friend Jessica later explained, the hair artists seem to forget how to create some of these styles when they leave Africa. Braids are just part of the picture, however. Woven into the braids, or woven into normal hair, are countless other styles of hair. Some of them seem to be made from plastic, but others are so downright convincing that it seems perfectly plausible that the funky flip the woman on the bus is sporting is her natural hair. In the marker, it was apparent how this all works.
Sure enough, in the markets, I've seen shops with large varieties of packaged hair extensions for sale. Looking at the packaging, the more expensive offerings are labeled with the assurance that they are 100% human hair. And all of the packages are labeled as Made In China.
It only stands to reason. With 1.6 billions heads of stick-straight, black hair, it seems a natural industry to take the longer clippings, style them as needed, and sell them to the thriving market in Africa.
The forced community of more than a dozen Cameroonians sharing a single mini van to get from one city to the next leads to some fascinating conversations. On the trip from Limbe to Buea (pronounced Boo-Yah!) a cop at a routine traffic stop took a particular interest in my passport. He never asked for the expected bribe, but took quite a bit of time paging through the booklet and examining every page, despite the protests of the crowd on the bus.
“Please, we beg of you to allow us to leave, we’ll be late!” shouted one woman. The cop finally returned the passport and as soon as the van door closed, the entire crowd got into a heated discussion about what had happened. Every person had something to say and offered it up to the rest of the bus. Some spoke in Pidgin, some spoke in English, some in French, and others in their local dialects. Two men carried on long after the others, mainly in English, discussing Cameroon’s corrupt government and police force, and centering the debate on whether “this is inevitable or whether we have done this to ourselves”. The men seemed to agree on their own country’s poor leadership in creating a difficult living situation despite a country rife with natural resources such as rubber, pineapples, bananas, timber and their port.
Engaging me, the man asked why I was in Cameroon.
“Well, just to see it, really.”
“And so you came to swallow some dust with us!”
It was true: we were on an abhorrent road, pitted every few feet and filled with loose, red dirt. With most of the windows open to add some moving air to the tightly packed bodies which were sweating all over each other, the dirt breezed right through the vehicle and stuck to the wet surfaces of our skin. The man explained that the road was under construction, based on new innovations the Cameroonians were trying to adopt based on work they'd seen by outside companies that had recently done major road construction in Cameroon. Where were those companies from? China, naturally.

Roads wreak havoc on cars

It turns out that Chinese road construction crews were contracted in to create high quality roads. Rather than employ local resources, they brought their own men, trucks, tools, and materials. “They even brought their own tar,” he explained.
It was unfortunate that the deal was arranged that way. I would guess that the Chinese knew their efficiency would be reduced by having to employ or mentor the locals, though it would have benefited the Cameroonians better if they had. As it happened, the man explained to me that only a few Cameroonians were able to learn the Chinese methods of road construction, and that they were to pass it on to the local crews for future work.
Later, in Kumba, I met a man named Elvis who explained to me the relationship of the Cameroonians and the Chinese.
“Well to be honest with you, they help us, but I really do not like their policies. They come to do fishing near the port in Limbe. In the past, we had small boats and all the fish we needed. Now they come with huge boats and there aren’t enough fish remaining for people to eat anymore. The prices are now huge, imagine paying 2000 CFA ($4) for a fish! How can someone feed their family?!”
Once again, it was apparent that Chinese efficiency has both positive and negative effects. For the benefit of Cameroon, and for the world at large, I can only hope that sustainable relationships are developed that have positive impacts down the road. In the meantime, in case you needed a reminder about whose millennium this is fixing to be, once again it is China that is cashing in at the moment.

The Grand Pecking Order

As I flew the final leg of my two days' worth of flights to arrive in Douala I met a half-Swiss, half-Congolese girl named Jessica who had previously lived in Cameroon and was willing to give me a few pointers on changing money and decent hotels. In the end, she suggested I check in to the same hotel as she, and introduced me to her local friend Julio who had picked her up.
As I caught my first glimpses of Cameroon through the windows of the taxi—work crews exercising along the road in the day’s first light—I was invited to Julio’s family's house in Douala. Their home was just around the corner from the hotel, a humble one-story cement structure tucked behind the overall din of downtown Douala. As we arrived, Julio's Mama jumped up from the ground where she had been hunched over a bowl, squeezing the moisture out of a white putty I later learned was starch for pressing clothes. The family was ecstatic to see their friend Jessica and were very welcoming to me, offering snacks and a local hibiscus and juice drink called folera right away. I struggled to resurrect the remains of the French that has rotted away in my brain for the past 15 years, and got my first tastes of the dizzyingly fast transitions between comprehension and seemingly gibberish as the family traversed English, French, their local dialect, and pidgin.
After a lunch of omelettes and baguettes with tea, Julio, Jessica and I left to get cash and my bearings. Stopping by the hotel on the way, I discovered that the crooks working the baggage at Royal Air Maroc had relieved my backpack of my small digital camera, my Chinese cell phone, and 3 Clif bars. Not the best way to start a trip and I had really been looking forward to getting audio and video on this trip. Getting over it, I was taken on as the adopted tag-along and invited back to join the family for beers that night. I had heard that Mama was particularly fond of Amstel.
When we arrived at the house, Mama had changed out of her loose, bright green patterned dress and into a black, better-fitting one. She'd put on a wig and lipstick and was clearly ready for a night on the town.
So the whole entourage walked to the bar about 10 feet from their front door, down the same alley, and took a seat at a table made from a giant wire spool, under a thatched roof, lit by one bare green bulb, illuminating the dusty football posters and Guinness ads that adorned the walls. A barrage of makossa music and the latest local hits such as Seka Seka and Don't Matter surrounded my jet-lagged and drunken head. Jessica and an extended array of family and friends gathered around. Mama and I tipped back Amstels as she declared that Amstel stands for “Aime-moi si tu es libre." Love me if you are free. Occasionally, the joyous Cameroonian music would overtake Mama and she would stand, clapping the first three beats of a measure and leading the rest of the gathering crowd in loud “eh-eh-eh”s on the polyrhythm. Just like that, I had arrived in Cameroon.

Having been taken under the family's wing, I was in their care for my first couple days. I had a few hours here and there to explore the city on my own and shoot some photos and venture into the cuisine. Douala struck me as a little tamer than I expected for a bustling West African capitol. The smells weren’t as pungent, the heat not quite as oppressive, and the noise not nearly as assaulting as I have come to expect from my travel destinations.
Douala, and indeed all of what I have seen of Cameroon is incredibly musical. Local and regional music is heard everywhere; the uplifting and lilting guitar lines that have always entranced me from Paul Simon’s Graceland are brought to the fore in Makossa music. Seemingly every shop, every taxi, every restaurant has music playing and as opposed to so many people in the world, the Cameroonians generally seem to have a grasp on what a reasonable volume level should be.
With music playing everywhere, I've seen perfectly sane people take to dancing on street corners or in shops. It still impresses me that people constantly just decide to sing along, whether walking down the street or hopping in a cab. This too is just one of the many forms of community and shared experience that I have seen here. For example: taxis are always shared, picking up and dropping off passengers along the way. One simply puts their finger in the air or makes a kissing sound and a cab will pull over. The desired destination and price is suggested and the driver honks his agreement. A moment later another passenger joins in, two in the front seat and three in the back. It is customary that a new passenger greets everyone in the car with a “bon jour” or “hello”. As I was later explained, if one doesn’t offer verbal greetings upon crossing any stranger, people think that the person is upset or doesn’t like the people they didn’t greet. This is vastly different from anything I have experienced before, and takes a lot for me to get used to, coming from the impersonal and individualistic West.
Aside from greetings and singing, the forced community of having to touch strangers while sharing taxis and buses seems to create a unity and solidarity that I have never seen elsewhere. I have heard multiple Cameroonians mention their "African solidarity" which I believe comes from these shared experiences. In China, where I have seen their indifference to injury or even death of their fellow countrymen, I wonder whether they'd be more prone to caring about one another if they had such intimacy together.
The reactions I get as a tourist in Cameroon are totally different from most places I have visited as well. There are moments of immense interest in my presence and astounding hospitality once I get into a conversation with a stranger, but as I walk down the street, I seem to be viewed with indifference or even suspicion. I’m still learning to read the local body language, but it is really discomforting to not have my smiles returned when we make eye contact. It’s not the unbridled wonder I got from Tibetans or the oppressive attention from Ethiopians, but is taking some getting used to.

Down Beach, Limbe


When I arrived in my second town, Limbe, a friend of the Douala family, Guy, had phoned ahead to have his friend Babi to meet me there. Babi took me to the nicest hotel in the town, implying it was the only suitable option for a foreigner, and took me around to the beach for fresh braised fish, poisson braise, eaten by hand with the black sand between our toes.
In the morning, I was actually a bit relieved to have a couple hours without an escort, so I decided to walk north from my hotel to shoot some photos. I walked along a rural road surrounded by plantain trees and with the ocean crashing along the shore below.
About 30 minutes away from my hotel and only about 3 photos in, I was called over to someone's front stoop.
After an initial first few questions about my origin and reason for visiting Cameroon, things went awry.
“So you is just walking around snaffing (snapping photos) in dis village?”
“Yeah, more or less,” I said. I didn't see any reason to lie.
“You can not jus do dis. The chief may get very angry.”
I'd heard about chiefs. I had read that it was generally polite to check in with them upon arrival. It hadn’t even crossed my mind to find one yet, since Babi had taken me around Limbe.
“Oh, then let me meet him then!”
Mobile phones were punched, loud talking in another language. I heard the word blanche, French for white.
As we walked down the street, one of the men filled me in. “Our chief is dead, and we not appoint a new one yet, but you meet da Chairman.”
We crossed the street and on the wooden front porch of another small home, I was directed to sit down, across from an older man with yellowed eyes and a plaid shirt sitting on a wooden chair;
“Dis de Chairman.”
I removed my sunglasses and greeted him with deference. I was excited at the opportunity to forge a bond with a person of stature.
“So ah hear you snaffing in (the name of his village, apparently no longer Limbe). Dis is not OK. You cannot jus do dis."
"I'm sorry, I didn't know that it wasn't OK. I have come to talk with you and make sure that it is OK for me to look around your village."
"No, you can not. Are you a journalist?"
"No, photography is just a hobby."
"Who you show them to?"
"My family, and friends who are not able to be here to see the beauty of Cameroon."
"No, you make money from them. You then send photos of naked children to your home and they think we are poor and naked!”
I assured him that was not my goal; that I am so much of a shutterbug that I end up covering all aspects of a place I visit and that I have no interest in making a place appear poorer than it is. After a fair amount of discussion led by the Chairman about the relative wealth Americans compared to Cameroonians, the Chairman laid down the law. He told me that my appearing in his village and “snaffing” was a crime in his eyes, that I could make money from my photos and that he needed to be compensated. He asked for CFA50000, about $100.
“Your choice; I will hold you here until you pay." The Chairman sat back in his chair and stared off down the road that ran through his little kingdom.
I protested, I negotiated, but I really had no leg to stand on; I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to properly deal with a Chairman. In the end I handed over the equivalent of $50, was treated to a nice cold Coke by his cohorts, and was invited to take all the photos I wanted. I wanted none. And I had to meet Babi in mere minutes.
When we met, he was distraught, and as we talked with more people, it was estimated that the Chairman was probably nothing more than a man on a chair. I'd been fleeced. With that story and the camera story plying the, mobile phone lines, friends and relatives of the people I met in Douala have accompanied me at every turn since; striving to ensure that I get a safe and positive impression of their country. They are doing a great job. So, counter to my past travel habits, I've been traveling in a pair or group the entire time and will do so for the duration of Cameroon. I've learned a few things about dealing with chiefs and men who sit on chairs, which I hope to not need in the next countries. In a moment, I'll be taken to a place where passenger cars are loaded up with unimaginable amounts of cargo to be driven to Nigeria. That’s right up my alley and I can’t wait!

Diving into a lake near Kumba (not naked)