Disco Inferno

In one day, Guy, Elvis and two of Elvis’ friends, Patrick and Fredi, I did a rather grueling circuit across the southwest of Cameroon. As well as seeing the boats loaded for Nigeria in Idenau, we also stopped at a place where the 2000 eruption of mount Cameroon destroyed a large swath of farmland and roads, and visited a ~50 person fishing village named Dibunscha. These destinations were reached after the long drive from Douala to Buea to Limbe, so in short, it was a long day of travel.
However, it was also my last night in Cameroon and Guy was set on making it a good one. So after checking into a hotel in Buea, which turned out to be another Hotel Sans Eau, we were going out to the local disco. We’d be joined by his friends Lucy and Jeannine. I was a little self conscious, knowing we were going to a disco. I had no idea how developed or fancy things could get, after all, we were in a pretty small town in the middle of Africa, but I didn’t like the idea of going to a club in my backpacker clothes. When I travel, I take lightweight, compact, fast-drying clothes and chant in my head a little mantra a la The Fresh Prince in Parents Just Don’t Understand: “You see the world to learn, not for a fashion show.”
There wasn’t enough time for me to procure any nicer threads, so in my hiking boots, zip-off pants, and nicest REI buttondown, I was heading to a disco.
We spent a couple hours in Jeannine’s apartment before leaving, listening to more Cameroonian music. There was so much of it that I liked, though Guy and his friends seemed to be set on a genre that all had a very similar beat, almost akin to the Bo Diddley Beat, and with vocals that sounded like aggressive shouting, similar to Dancehall Reggae. It was beginning to sound all the same to me. I longed for some Makossa, and to get to some air conditioning if it was to be had, or a beer at the very least.
On the way out that night, I was introduced to Guy’s girlfriend, Olivie. I’d heard she existed, but found it hard to believe, the way Guy followed every woman with a significant backside, crotch first. He’d often make the shape of an hourglass with his hands, but his eyes out and say “I liiiike!” Every town we visited, he was busy collecting phone numbers and attempting to make plans later in the night which never came to fruition. But I had to respect the guy’s persistence and unflagging enthusiasm.
Olivie was incredibly cute and friendly, though one of the first things she said to me was “Guy doesn’t want to go with me anymore!” It seemed a crime, and I offered my condolences. So Olivie walked off, and we got in a cab to go find Elvis.

Elvis and the boys in Idenau

Elvis was posted at a bar with the other guys, and two new girls. Both college age, far younger than any of the men present.
“You know what I love, Adam?” Elvis asked. I knew the answer. “Women! They make me so happy! Even if I can’t fuck!” Elvis made a gesture with his fist and forearm. I assumed he meant because he was married, but I was pretty certain that it hadn’t held him back in the past. I concurred, of course, and we slapped hands, did the Cameroon handshake, and Elvis carried on in a torrent of belly laughter.
Together, with the two new girls, the whole posse headed down the road to a bar. ”Here you will see how the African woman dance!” Elvis shouted.
We approached a bar with a sign that read Zanzibar and had a chalkboard propped up in the dirt parking lot which said in French that there were people from Cote d’Ivoire present that night. Walking in, there were 6 lone men at tables and one hefty woman in a white tank top lip synching to an African song on a stage illuminated by one bare bulb.
Beers were procured, and Guy took me outside.
“Oh Adam, I wish I could be you!”
“Why is that?”
“I have big problems tonight. I want to, you know, with Jeannine or maybe Lucy, but because you wished Olivie could be with me, now she will be here!”
I had no intent to salt his game… I was just offering my condolences! Guy said he was worried about having to balance the conversations, and was worried if one of the other girls tried to kiss him in front of Olivie. I told him that I would help keep the other girls chatting so that it wouldn’t happen. It’s tough juggling language, conversational niceties, and some other guy’s fraternization!
It turned out that the dancing at Zanzibar was to be watched rather than participated in. Our group made up the bulk of the audience, and the women lip synching got progressively more suggestive as the night went on. One woman in a white Chinglish tanktop and short, high-waisted white shorts was the clearly most skilled dancer. Over the course of her songs, she abandoned the mic and incorporated some kind of combination of typical African dance as well as some incredibly suggestive moves like a stipper would perform.
The crowd went wild, with the women in our crowd doing the majority of the whooping and hollering, and of course, endless enthusiasm from Elvis.
“Oh my god! Man, can you believe this?! I love it! Look buttocks!! I love buttocks!!”
The dancer took to the floor of the stage and thrust her hips as if there were an invisible man below her. Jeannine jumped up and tucked a small bill in her shorts. Elvis and I did the handshake.
Everyone seemed to ignore it when, after her last song, the dancer caught a heel on the tattered red carpet on the stage and completely landed on her ass.
When Olivie arrived, she sat next to me and we chatted. I remember looking over as the big-bellied waitress, dressed in tight pink jeans with the belt undone to give her some breathing room, and a missed belt loop in back laughed when she received an ass-grab from one of Elvis’ friends. Seeing my shock, Olivie asked, “Not like your country?” No, not at all.
Guy seemed to spend the evening nervously loping around the room, avoiding all of the girls, and sucking on a small box of wine.
As it turned out, the performance at Zanzibar was a bit like a striptease, though without the stripping, and the girl in white came over to tell me she loved me before standing upright and immediately slamming my forehead so hard with her pubic bone that I saw stars and my glasses were knocked someplace behind me. After a short and incredibly rough performance, she returned to her friends and left me to pick up my pieces. I felt like a truck hit me and just kept going.
But apparently Zanzibar was just a bar and after that we were to go to Jupiter, the local dance club. Outside, the scene was just an African version of the same thing one might see at a western disco. Men looking tough, women looking sexy, moto taxis swarming around, tables with beers on them visible in the outdoor courtyard.
Guy’s nerves and consumtion of his box of wine had put him in a state I hadn’t seen before. At the door, the ladies were ushered through without cover; it was Thursday night, ladies night. Guy argued that since he had brought a handful of hot girls he shouldn’t have to pay eihter. My impression being that Guy hasn’t really refined the art of negotiation, the response wasn’t what he wanted. And when he tried to just walk in, he was forcefully pushed to the ground by the bouncer. I made myself scarce. I didn’t need to be the one Blanche (white) in the club that was associated with the one clown getting beaten by the doorman.
In the end, the girls smoothed things over and I happily handed over the 12,000 CFA ($24) required to get us both in. Not a lot of money to me, but a ton of money to someone in Cameroon.

Guy sleeping off his hangover the next day

Stepping through the hallway, the first thing I noticed was the heat. I was sweating in the night air outside, but a wet heat was radiating down the hallway. People moved past, exiting the club, completely drenched.
Inside was nothing like I ever expected. It was a club like any other, although less deced out in terms of decorations, televisions, and lighting gear than most I have seen. The bar offered less than 5 choices for hard alchohol, though it appeared that most people had empty hands. Who could afford a 2000 CFA drink after such a cover charge? The crowd was one black blob, all moving in unison. As we joined it, suddenly it was as if everything I’d experienced in Cameron suddenly made sense.
The enthusiasm and dance moves that I had seen Guy perform or on the music videos on TV were exactly what everyone was doing. Guy and Elvis’s incessant and blatant sexuality was everywhere: the grinding was more carnal than I have ever experienced and strangers danced with strangers in ways that would make most people blush. That community that I had seen in the taxis and on the streets continued in the club. While it seems back home in Seattle, people rarely dance with strangers, anything was fair game in Buea.
I thought that I’d sweat with the Africans in the cars and buses, but that was just the warm up. In this room where the temperature must have been a heavily saturated 100 degrees, the crowd was one enormous wet mass, all sliding against each other, throbbing to the beat.
The music that was getting to me in Jeannine’s apartment suddenly made sense. It all had that same beat because it was club music. The tunes were expertly DJed, never missing a beat as they segued from one tune to the next. The crowd whooped and sang along with every song and bumped hips or did a pelvis thrust in time with the moves that the performers did on the music videos.
One of the bits of Pidgin I had picked up was what I thought a little poem that Elvis taught me, but turned out to be the lyrics to one of the songs. I got a great reaction from the crowd when the one Blanche was able to sing along
“Boby na ma ting!
Boby na ma chop!”
“Breasts are my thing, breasts are my food!” All the girls played a game of grab-tit to the beat of the music.
And finally the fashion. Perhaps it is just because things different to us look cooler, but looking around the disco that night, I could nto get over the fashion. Every person looked straight out of some music video, some film, some… something. And it was just the little flourishes that did it: a newsboy hat here, a wide collar, a cloth tied around a waist, a pair of sunglasses, a sweater vest, a turtleneck, a gold chain. Everyone looked different, individual. No copycat goombahs with the open collar button down shirt and the same haircut. Everyone looked impeccable, and the tiny handful of name brands visible were all certainly fakes.
As we carried on toward sunrise, I wondered whether my clothes, which I wished I could have replaced for that night, looked potentially interesting and different to them. Maybe because I was different, I looked cool. It was hard for me to believe, but the feeling I got from the people at the club that night was that it didn’t matter. I was one of them for a little while, sweating, sliding, laughing with one big mass of humanity.

Relaxing the last morning in Buea

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)