Adam's Ambles

Stories from Penang

I stared at the house and the ‘For Sale’ sign for a good five minutes and walked away. And then walked back, and took some pictures. And looked at the sign again and walked away, a shorter distance, and turned around one last time, and took a few more pictures, and then I left the house behind me.

It was on a street in Georgetown in old Penang, shaded by hanging red Chinese lanterns, the second in a series of old rowhouses that look like Chinese apartment blocks out of a Hong Kong pirate period thriller. If you walked west there was the Ho Ping coffee shop, where I had roast chicken and barbequed pork chopped into fine, fatty bits over soft white rice with a clear vegetable broth served on the side, and two fried egg rolls served with mouse chili and plum duck sauce.

If you walked east there was the Sri Mariamann, a fantastic mountain of Gods, devas and demons climbing over each other into the cosmic layout of a perfect South Indian temple, and in the street below the whinny-woony-weeeoooo of Bollywood and all my familiar sights and smells and screaming from the subcontinent – Punjabi drums, thin, high oboes and bargain, hassle, smile where-you-from. I ate in Sri Ananda Bhawan, where I used my hands to scoop up more rice, this time doused in a chicken and okra gravy with a mango pickle as red as blood and hot as the sun adding biting but not masochistic heat, all served on a banana leaf in a cafeteria dining room.

A few minutes walk down from where the house and I are there’s an air-conditioned mall if I need a new laptop or Starbucks if I need a mochacino (even though most local cafes here do much better coffee). Wi-fi is plentiful. People smile. The Malays add a Southeast Asian love of laughing to otherwise savvy and aggressive Chinese and Indiasn.

I haven’t been to a place that mixes the mother cultures of India and China in such close proximity. It’s intoxicating. I was looking at a four word poem written in traditional Chinese characters in an old mansion here; the guide said there were 200 potential meanings of the poem, and I knew: I need to go to China. Later on I smelled fish curry from Andhra Pradesh, my favorite Indian state for food.

The travelers here – some of them – are the only thing pissing me off so far. So many seem to expect a party island and beaches like Ko Phan Ngang – some literally have no idea what Penang’s role has been in history. Others refuse to eat locally in one of the greatest culinary cities in the world, where Malays, Indians and Chinese were assembled to help facilitate the spice trade to Europe: a sure recipe for good recipes. These travelers get burgers at night, which is like going to Manhattan for the pizza and sticking to Sbarro’s.

I imagined myself in that house, noodle soup for lunch, writing on my balcony as the evening and the Heavenly Lanterns come alive, a fan and the wind for air con, sweaty beers under the moon. Like a good summer night.

Plenty of places to walk to. I love it here, but there’s still places to see. That said, I’m glad I saw this one, where all my Asians seem to exist side by delicious, evocative side.

Exile in America

My latest worldhum story can be found here.

Extremes of behavior

Me and a buddy from the hostel had sank a few beers. We were feeling them, but not too heavy – unlike the table full of Malaysian men at the next table, who were having a grand old time, to say the least.

One of them came over to our table and refilled our glasses of beer, apropos of nothing. Typical Malaysian friendliness, I figured. I smiled, gave a heartfelt ‘Terimah Kasih’ (thank you) and he nodded enthusiastically and sat back down. Then his friend sat across from us.

He was stumbling drunk and Indian. He asked us where we were from – my friend said ‘England,’ I said, ‘America.’ He frowned, pitched a bit, then said, loudly, ‘America is just controlled by the Jews.’

My friend raised her eyebrows. “I’m sorry?”

“The Jews! Yahudi! Control….everything.” He pitched a bit more in his seat and embarked on a rant that went in plenty of directions, always brought home and anchored by his hatred of ‘Yahudi.’

I was a little drunk, like I said, so I smiled evenly and said, in a non-confrontational way, “Have you ever met a Jew?”

“No!” Pitch.

“Well, you have now.

I can’t say his reaction was particularly pleased. He started yelling, sputtering and stumbling all at once, before finally getting up and shouting, “You are not welcome in Malaysia!”

As, it seems, in any country removed from an actual conflict, the bitterest partisans are the ones who have nothing to lose and lots to hate. Malaysia, a majority-Muslim country, is particularly hard on Israel, a sentiment none too exacerbated by the recent Gaza war. I’ve seen banners in both Kuala Lumpur and here, in Kuala Terranganu, advocating boycotts of both America (interestingly represented by a Starbucks symbol, Colgate and McDonalds) and ‘Yahudi.’

On top of this, political Islamism – not Islam the religion but the political philosophy that Islam and governance are inseparable, has enjoyed something of a resurgence in Malaysia since the 1990s. A little background: in the past, Islam was often ridiculed as an impediment to development in this rapidly developing country. The Muslim population seethed, and when Malaysia experienced a degree of political liberalization, the opposition to the ruling party often took the form of Muslim activist groups. Political theory becomes gray here – by some standards (anti-corruption and social welfare programs) these parties were pretty left wing; by others (my own standards of women’s rights, institutionalized anti-Semitism, and more pertinently, disenfranchisement of Malaysia’s Hindu, Christian and Buddhist communities) they are fascist demagogues.

PAS (Parti Islam SeMalaysia, or the Islamic Part of Malaysia) was at the vanguard of this movement. The party has performed in a middling way in recent elections, but as with the Christian Coalition, it has cumulatively bumped this country and its incumbent ruling party into a more religious fundamentalist state of mind – to win the last election, UMNO (United Malays National Organization) essentially ‘out-Islamed’ the Islamic Party. Interestingly enough, PAS now forms one leg of a three-party opposition bloc in the Malaysian parliament that includes  the DAP (Democratic Action Party), a secular, multi-racial party that seems to be opposed to just about everything PAS stands for – except the all important anti-corruption stance. Terranganu state, where I currently am, is part of Malaysia’s, for lack of a better term, Koran Belt – a rural, very religious and socially conservative corner of the country.

Anyways. Back to last night. The drunk continued railing against Jews. I didn’t budge from my seat. The man’s friends began yelling at him. One walked out angrily, obviously cursing the drunk as he left. Another – bless him – came to me, held my hand and said, very heartfelt (if also quite drunk) “I apologize. I am very sorry. You have nothing to fear when you are here.”

Most Malaysians I have met are incredibly friendly and accommodating. I prefer to judge them based off these experiences, and the embarrassment of the bigot’s friends, then the actions of said bigot. I’m more sad than mad at what happened last night, although with that said, I’m going to keep my religion under my hat now – which I hate doing.

I remember, in India, watching an American (complete with John McCain button) go off on his own screed, to an Indian, about the eternal war between Islam and the rest of the world, that the only solution was war till the bitter end. I would love to place that man and last night’s idiot and all their ilk on some island and let them do us all a favor by killing themselves until the rest of us can salt the earth where their bones lie. I take that back. Rather than salt the earth, we’ll grow something there. Let these bastards have their irredeemable hate and death and insecurity. I prefer walking on.

 

 

On frog porridge and sense of place

In Columbo airport, Sri Lanka, the old black man approached me in the smoker’s lounge. He spoke with the slow, wet accent of repressed pidgin English.

“White man – you have one cigarette for me?”

He was from Accra. We smoked and talked of Cameroon and his part of the world, and when he left I went to another part, and so this chance meeting off the tip of India – a place where I was three months earlier – felt like a predestined one: goodbye from one assignment to the next, in the shadow of another.

Saya di sini – I am here, in Malaysia. Southeast Asia, again. I don’t think there is one part of the world I’m meant for, but I feel like I know this place. I studied the region for years in university; my family ties on both sides run deep; I’ve worked here as a journalist, writer and editor. The history, culture and food don’t feel like something to be learned so much as remembered, such is their degree of familiarity with my memories and mind.

Tonight I’m sleeping in Kuala Lumpur, which feels like Bangkok, where I once lived and worked, with more Islam and less seediness. It is a modern, busy city, and while the ruins of bad development are scattered in little piles of rubble and rebar by the gleaming glass towers, the towers still shine, as do small street stalls and huge electronics emporiums and 24-hour bazaars.

I came here from London and a visit to my alma mater, the School of Oriental and African Studies. Seeing as I’m transitioning from Cameroon to Malaysia, my choice of Master’s institution feels apt. And it’s hard not to compare Asia to Africa at every step and on every street. The express train from the airport is a good start: sleek, fast and air-conditioned, in better shape than the Gatwick Express in London. I think if there is any reason why Africa’s Big Men, the unblinking autocrats who have raped that continent, have a particularly hot room in hell reserved, it is this train and the truth it represents: dictatorship does not have to exclude development. For decades Malaysia and neighboring Singapore were ruled by the same leaders who  often ignored press freedoms, internal dissent and occasionally, due process and human rights. But these same leaders, to their credit, have used their unassailable position to develop their countries – not always in the best ways, but I feel confident saying the average Malaysian is better off than 95 percent of Cameroonians. And that is because Africa’s leaders for life (with some exceptions) don’t even bother with improving their playgrounds; they simply pillage and squeeze them while the roads and public health and education and opportunity are wasted. I should add as a final caveat: while Malaysia and Singapore are hardly perfect democracies, they do have at least viable (if often harrased) opposition camps in their parliaments and have both experienced peaceful transfers of power (albeit sometimes from one patron to his client) in the past.

On the train, an older English backpacker starts a mindless conversation with the Malay woman sitting across from him. He rabbits on about how disappointed he is with certain spots in Southeast Asia, how they’re “losing their culture”, or to be more accurate, not displaying the quaintness he ascribes to them, not fitting his idea of an Old Asia.

In my mind, the screaming monologue is: Yes, how dare these people modernize and gain access to good healthcare, education, consumer comforts and the general level of development that allows Westerners like yourself to holiday at your leisure in their country and then criticize said country in your own native tongue, which, by the way, the people here understand because of the impact of the above described progress and the legacy of colonialism, old school and neo, which nations like ours have left here, and which, by the way, is also (the colonialism) partly the foundation of the ethnic tensions that still threaten this nation with instability.

Those tensions are between Malaysia’s three ‘main’ recognized ethnic groups: the Malays, Chinese and Indians. These are simple categories that have become part of modern Malaysian discourse, but in truth the above groups blend and mix and produce sub-categories and alliances that create far more complex truths than these three simple labels suggest. But complexity equals hard to follow equals usually ignored.

That’s a shame, but to be fair there’s enough interesting about the three main ethnic groups to avoid complex explanations of complex affairs – just for a little. I’m particularly interested in the interaction of Indians and Chinese and this, their common ground, exemplified today by a Tamil man behind a noodle stall ordering around his employees in Hokkien, (sidenote: Another huge Asia-Africa difference? The food here is great, as opposed to starch plus overcooked meat) or the Chinese baby who ran, screaming and laughing, into an Indian uncle’s arms. Think of the name: Southeast Asia. South of what and east of what?

China and India. These two juggernauts (juggernaut, by the way – root word: Jagganath, from India) of the human experience, the oldest extant cultures of Earth, meet here. Right here, where Indian merchants and Chinese tin prospectors once convened and traded and lived, as the Malays clustered and added their own unique mix of, well, mix – for they are, surely, a mixed culture – into the preexisting blend. How this cultural drama plays out between the children of the nations that will define the next few decades is my side interest here (the main interest being finishing the ton of work and hillion jillion books I have left to write and squeezing in beach time besides).

Southeast Asia. I am back. How do I know? Dinner: frog's leg porridge, the white meat a fishy chicken swimming in a congee of rice gruel, shallots and chilies; ripe wafts, orange and strong, sweat or a womb in a forest, the unmistakable fecund scent of durian; static voices crackle in the street like broken short waves: Tamil, Bahasa Malay, Hokkien, Cantonese, Singlish, carried by smoke from the sizzling oil and the air hot with these different words and smells, all resolving themsleves into an unmistakable whole. South of what and east of what? Saya di sini lagi. 

Where in the Sahel is Adam?

I've not been to Chad, and after this week I'm not sure I need to go. That's not to say Chad isn't a perfectly nice country (well, in point of fact, it probably isn't), but having spent the last few days in the dusty wilds of North Cameroon, I think I have an idea of what to expect.

At least when it comes to the physical landscape. And by physical landscape, I mean the Sahel -- the band of semi-desert that extends like an ochre belt across the Sahara and the whole of Africa. It's very difficult to describe what its like to enter the world's greatest dry zone. In one way everything becomes more muted, more blanched by the sunlight -- which in turn is the only thing amplified, a semi-blinding white explosion, always there, always burning you out through the motile net of the thickest dust clouds.

The dust, like the light, is everywhere. It gets kicked out by trucks and motorcycles and herds of cattle and goats from the Sahelscape, which is yellow-grey-white-brown-above-mentioned-ochre, and the sky is white, bright, and its all hard rocks and spiny trees and quick lizards. This is a hard place. If you're a video game nerd, like me, let me put it this way: this is easily a level 55-60 zone.

It has produced a thin, beautiful people -- some of the most handsome people I've encountered while traveling: the Fulani. They wear bright wraps the color of rainbow puddles like they were rebelling against the natural monochrome of their homeland, and their features are a blend of traditional Bantu African and Nilotic, that bird-boned delicate frame you see in the step of Sudanese, Ethiopians and Somalis. I've experienced few stares as striking as the dark eyes lined in kohl and henna that peered out at me from behind a veil like fire or a sunset on the short grass and thorn trees: red, orange, yellow and dark, bloody purple.

They eat very good meat here. Its always what's for dinner: beef or goat, hunks of it with the fat still wet and yellow off a grill with some dry desert bread that tastes sweet, but also gritty, like it was equal parts sand and flour. It's sliced into bite-sized pieces with a knife that could be small scimitar by a man in a turqouise robe and turban, and maybe next to you an elder who smiles warmly as you enjoy the food, or boys eating the local version of salad, wich is made with avacadoes and tomatos and does, and sorry to be unimaginative, really taste just like guacamole, or a man clad in red keffiyeh and black cloth gloves and black tshirt and camo pants and an AK-47 with an extra banana clip taped to the stock slung over his back.

By Waza National Park, Adamioau and I waited for a van to take us back to Maroua, the commercial hub of Cameroon's Extreme Nord province. Let me make another nerdy aside: Maroua is basically Mos Eisley. Now back to those readers who perhaps aren't religious Star Wars fans: low, rounded buildings, beige and white and soft brown, all neutral tones, and red desert paths between the houses, soft geometric patterns cross-hatched onto the walls and the doors, all of it shaded by thin but tall and strong Neem Trees, which are such the arboreal equivalent of the Fulani you start to wonder if people really are, physically, just a product of their local geography. In and amidst the back alleys are mud palaces and mosques made in that Muslim West African architectural style that is one of my favorites, the way it combines the elegance of Arabic taste without the effeteness, and the pleasing geomteric lines that characterize so much of sub-Saharan Africa, but with a greater sense of artistic refinement.

In any case: back to Waza. We waited, and waited, and waited on the side of the road. A herder sauntered past with a few dozen beautiful bulls, all brindle and dark brown and long horned, skin smooth and sweaty in the dust and their tails swishing a cloud from which emerged maybe 50 more snow white goats. It was one of the finest herds I've seen in Africa -- and, I realized, I have seen a few, having spent much of my time on the continent with people like the Xhosa, Zulu and Orma -- and I mean it, I actually derived pleasure from seeing such fine livestock driven so a gracefully across the semi-desert.

The only other animals were lizards -- dozens of them, chasing each other by the tail and licking unseen moisture from the air. A Fulani boy sold me a bottle of cold ginger juice, which was perhaps too sharp to really quench my thirst, and then did something that touched and surprised me and Adamioua: set out some water, cooed, and watched smiling as all the lizards gathered round and drank, bobbing their heads like small reptilian 'thank you's. Adamioua began to play songs on his cell phones and the lizards loved to the dust in front of us, heads like metronomes again, and that was how we wiled away the hours in the Sahel: drinking cold, yellow ginger juice and watching lizards dance to hip hop.

Cameroon Pictures

Some Cameroon shots, available here.

I saw pygmies and turtles

South province – the name itself suggests hot, and hot it is, and humid to boot. First days were spent in Kribi, Cameroon’s biggest beach resort, although by Western – even Kenyan and Indian standards – it’s pretty laid back, much more Florida Keys than Miami Beach.

A bit of beer, a bit of grilled fish, and then a stuffed share car to Campo on the border (or in French, frontier, which sounds way cooler) of Equatorial Guinea, which vies with Cameroon for the title of Most Corrupt Country in the World.

Just what does corruption entail? For one, the favoritism that plunks a petroleum refinery just off the coast of Francophone Kribi, despite the fact Limbe, in the Anglophone Northwest province, is much better positioned to extract oil.  Thus, the considerable money that accompanies said refinery is diverted into Kribi, as opposed to the base of opposition to president Paul Biya in the Northwest.

The refinery is oddly beautiful at night, its permanent spout of flame giving the ocean a lake of fire cast. And the road to Campo is beautiful, period: a laterite dirt track through some of the thickest jungle I’ve ever encountered, a forest that could have easily been a JurassicPark set piece. Along the way, glimpsed briefly and a bit disappointingly: pygmies. Who were, in contrast to the cliché about meeting celebrities in person, taller than I expected.

What did meet expectations? The terrible conditions of the road and the weak engine of our share car. Twice, we passengers had to get out and push the vehicle uphill – remember what I said about heat and humidity? – then run back inside as the engine coughed into submission. By the time we reached Campo, there was a sort of team camaraderie evident between the car’s six passengers (four in back, two shotgun); everyone chirped a cheerful ‘au revoir’ or ‘a bien tot’ as we parted ways.

I’m about to indulge in a gross generalization, but I think it is true that one of the main differences between the West and the rest is the former’s emphasis on individuality. But it’s worth stressing that it’s easy to be an individual when everything works and you don’t have to rely on your neighbor or the passenger next to you in the car to get something done. This isn’t a judgment on either way of life; I’d prefer if folks back home were less self-obsessed, but the poor infrastructure and everyday frustrations that make village values more necessity than choice in this part of the world are nothing to romanticize.

Adamoua and I did the work we had to do in Campo, then turned around and took a motorbike to the tiny villageof Ebodje. Here, the French fund an eco-tourism project that protects local sea turtles who use the nearby beach as one of their main nesting grounds. The turtles, essentially helpless when landbound, are prized eating (along with their eggs) in this area, so locals are given 10,000 francs (about $22) to report their presence to a small hatchery and museum when they find them.

The beach in question was uncluttered and undeveloped, so I did what I always do when I reach some nice coast after a day of hot, hard travel: stripped to my skivvies and swam until I felt clean. Adamoua watched me bemusedly and chased sand crabs along the shore. When I went out after dark to dip my toes in the water, my companion warned me, “Be careful. They don’t enter the ocean at night here because of traditional spirits!” – advice which was duly noted and ignored.

I’ve had a few nights in rural Africa, and am always struck by the silences and the darkness. You’ve probably seen those nighttime satellite images of the world where America, Europe, China and India all glow with lights and Africa becomes her old nickname: the Dark Continent. When you sleep in rural Africa, you’re in the thick of all that dark. Adamoua and I shared a bowl of chicken and rice and a bed in a village guest hut, and I read by the light of a paraffin lamp.

Around – well, who knows what time, but it was late – the head of the ecotourism project knocked on our door. It was time to find turtles. We walked for miles down the beach in pitch black; if we shined a flashlight it illuminated hundreds of scuttling ghost crabs and coconut husks. After 40 minutes, I became convinced we wouldn’t see any sea turtles, a feeling hit home when we reached a line of fallen trees the guide said marked the end of the nesting grounds. Resigned but unsurprised, we started heading back to the village.

Well of course there’s a happy ending. We had covered almost half the ground back home when our lights picked up a deep furrow in the sand running up to the beach ridge, the entire track encased in parallel swishy prints. At the end of the trail, half buried in the sand and grunting in what I guess you could call labor: a 75-year old Olive Ridley sea turtle.

You’ve all seen this on television, and you’ll all be unsurprised to hear me say that seeing a sea turtle lay her eggs is way cooler in person than it is on TV, and I’m sorry to add that what makes it cooler is the same thing that separates TV from personal encounter and, unfortunately, written description. It’s the feeling of elation after walking several miles for naught at some godawful hour in the middle of the night; the smell of the salt and the whisper-y sound of the palms; the way a sea turtle really does cry and how touching that actually looks (even though she’s just moistening her face); the odd chicken-like head movements she makes and the grunting, gasping noises that escape her beak; the weird rocking motion at the end as the mother pats down her eggs, the slaps of her undershell on sand sounding like a combination of wet meat on a counter and a steel pipe on stone.

We tape-measured big momma, clamped an ID tag on her right front flipper and watched her trundle back into the ocean. She moved surprisingly fast on land, but when the waves washed over her real grace emerged, and in less then a minute she had paddled safely into the black waters. We walked back to the nest and dug out 126 eggs (I’m sorry to say only five will likely survive to adulthood) which we packed in wet sand, wrapped in an ad-hoc t-shirt bundle and brought back to a nursery pen in the village. The next morning Adamoua and I had to wake up at 5am to catch another shared car back to Kribi (which of course broke down), but all in all I can say: it’s been a good few days in the office.

Cameroon Moments

MOMENTS OF CULTURAL CONFUSION FOLLOWED BY GRADUAL UNDERSTANDING. OF A SORT.

Shamrock hotel reception desk, Kumbo:

"‘Morning, Agnes.”

“Good morning, sir. Did you sleep well?”

“Like a baby. You?”

“I slept in the blood of our lord Jesus Christ and am very well, thank you.”

There’s a smile that I know crosses my face in situations like this. It’s the same smile I flash when, say, a crazy man tells me the end of the world is coming and I better repent.

I’m not saying Agnes, the front desk girl at the Shamrock, is crazy. Far from it; she was the picture of kindess itself, and intelligent to boot. And like a lot of Africans, she is very, very religious. Religious in a way that makes many Americans seem kind of secular, and Europeans downright heathen-ish. For many Africans, God is taken literally and immediately; no fuzzy interpretation of a universal spirit that manifests as a shared spark across a metaphysical cosmotic abstraction. God is God, and He either died for your sins or His only profit is Muhammad.

And yet…Africa maintains her own. Agnes’ friend Patricia was showing me around Kumbo the previous day; in a dusty amusement park where the pool was empty and the playgrounds rusted into red spiderwebs, we paused under a hill.

 “You cannot built on this hill! It is the center of town. The witchcraft here is very powerful. Any team that builds there is losing two souls!”

‘Witchcraft,’ in this context is a bit difficult to define; not being an expert, I can only decide from context that it refers to both magic that people cast and the inherent magical properties of certain places/things/etc. A lot of Africans are embarrassed about their continued belief in withcraft; in a garden outside Bamenda, a statue of Africa portrayed as a chained woman was hung with sings like, “Corruption. AIDS. Witchcraft.”

But plenty of Africans still believe in those old powers. In some ways, it seems they worship Christianity and Islam with such fervor because they believe the ‘withcraft’ of those religions sublimated the witchcraft of the old ways; after all, how powerful could native spirits be if the followers of Jesus and Allah subdued their homeland?

Or maybe it’s the need to believe in some Power in a land where power – and here I define power as the ability to change the external environment to suit my needs – is both abused and out of your hands. Nothing happens just because you want it to happen here, which I find is much more relatively the case in the West. Back home, when I want light, I flick a switch. I miss a friend; I call them. I want to know about something; I google it.

Here, the electricity is often out. The internet only works on a spotty level (it’s taken me three tries to load typepad). Traveling 60 miles can take five hours. The roads are often a mangled mess, and the police are corrupt.

This is the zeitgeist I have always felt the most in the developing world, the main difference between here and the West: things don’t just happen. Life is not in your control. To the contrary; in any givens scenario (broken bus, busted water, police bribe) the end result is you much more likely accepting than changing the situation, so better to accept fate and hope for change. In that vein believing in God, or witchcraft, or both (depending on your theology), beings not only beyond power but influential over it, entities that might listen to you and have direct bearing on your day – well, it makes a lot more sense.

MOMENTS OF UTTER CULTURAL DISJUNCTION

Scene: Foumban, Western province. Me and a few African guys sitting around a house -- specifically, the house of Adamaoua's cousin, Abdel. </p><p>Abdel, who is studying theater, likes to sing, and we've been going through a hit list of African standards and French and American hip hop and R&B.

R. Kelly, Akon, TI, Brick and Lace, Diddy, Fiddy, the rest; the guys sing along and look hard, in sports jerseys and kangol caps.

And then...those seagulls. The distant waves. That sort of pan pipe. And Celine...

"My Heart Will Go On," plays for the third time today, and everyone of these African men, who frankly look like they could chew razor wire for tea, is singing along, and not just mumbling the words, but lustily belting out the lyrics. Abdel in particular seems to be experiencing communion with the French-Canadian Gods of Song and Lyric Themselves.

"Celine Dion," says Adamoua afterwards approvingly, smiling at what I realize is my usual terrified smile flashed in nervous situations (see above). "The Mother of Love."

MOMENTS OF COMPLETE CULTURAL CONNECTION AND, DARE I SAY, UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD, WITH AN EMPHASIS ON 'BROTHER'

Earlier that day I had met Adamoua's fiancee and one-year old daughter. I have to say -- both were beautiful and both seemed kind of...mad (that baby wasn't smiling at candy). Adamoua, you see, lives in Doala where he is, well, a handsome graduate student, while his girl (and their baby girl) stays in Jakiri, the small, provincial dustpit where Adamoua went to high school.

In the living room, with the guys (after the above Celine Dion incident), I asked Adamoua what his plans were.

"Well, she is my fiancee..."

"Will you move back to Jakiri?"

"Ech!" he said, falsetto and guttural all at once. "There is nothing for me there."

"Will she move to Douala?"

"Tch." A little less emphasis and lot more resignation. A short quiet descended over all assembled.

"I think," Adamoua said after awhile, "she is angry because I stay away from home and want to be in another place."

"I looked at him and said, dryly, "Probably."

"The immediate outburst of laughter amongst all the men in the room was followed by shared looks that said, in so many words, "Yeah, dude," a look that I have found works any and everywhere, from the Andamans to Zimbabwe (I'm not just making a cute A-Z comparison either. I mean that -- I've talked about women problems with guys in Port Blair and Vic Falls, and my conclusion is: of all the bonds that connect our common human soul, the ability to sigh from your toes and say either "Men" or "Women" in your respective language is perhaps the strongest).

A Wum, potentially without a view

In my pockets: dust, dust, more dust, and the address of a police officer in Wum, Cameroon.

Yesterday was a long day. It started in Bamedna and carried on for 13 hours, folded like origami into vans, shared cars, on motorcycles and constantly, all the time, the red dust of the Cameroonian dry season spinning in and caking me, head to toe, so later Adamoua, my guide, says to me, "You are not a white man any more." The trees, villages, shrubs--everything on the side of the road: red. I've only seen it like this once before, on the road between Poipet and Siem Reap in Cambodia.

We're in northwest province and some places are well developed, but others are rural, back of beyond Africa, including the area neat Lake Nyos, where some 1,600 people died when the lake erupted in what is scientifically known as a limnic eruption and sounds to me like toxic death farts. Natural gas eruptions from the lake spread among local villagers who farmed the rich volcanic soil around the water; they smelled what was probably a terrible odor of methane, then died where they stood. This, too, is Africa.

It took us three hours to cover the 60 km between Bamenda and Wum, stuffed like a sardine in a hot, sweaty, and of course dusty shared van. By the time Adamoua and I arrived we were exhausted and in sour moods, which weren't helped when two men approached us, claimed to be police, and asked to see our identification.

Neither man was uniformed, neither flashed any kind of badge, and both looked pretty thuggish (which, in retrospect, they were). Adamoua did the sensible thing: he asked to see their identification. Foreigners are often robbed here by people claiming to be police, and these two looked ready to rob.

Unfortunately, they really were police, and none too happy to be asked to procure ID by a young Cameroonian on their home turf. They started yelling in French, then at two nearby lackeys.

"Take them to the commission office!"

So: a tense ten minute motorbike ride, being hustled into the office of "Monsieur Inspector," the hassle of dealing with corrupt police.

"Do we not look like officers to you, sir?" said one of them. He was wearing a Diadora jersey and Adidas track pants. His colleague had tucked an ill-fitting shirt into ill-fitting pants. Between the two of them, they could have been any male in sub-Saharan Africa.

The situation more thick and the room feeling hotter, more static charge in the air, me making up a story about being robbed in Douala by men claiming to be police, Adamoua having to humiliate himself and swear up and down that he loved the police of Cameroon, that they were the country's protectors, that he would never disrespect an officer, etc, ad nauseum.  I hated watching someone I respect debase himself to cops on a power trip. I hate that this is the way things are here, and in most of the world.

After a few minutes it became clear I didn't have much to worry about, that the cops were intent on intimidating Adamoua and taking whatever hurt pride they had out on him instead of me. After long, circular discussions in French, one of the cops turned to me.

"You can go. But your friend is going to stay three days in the cell for minimizing  police officers." [direct quote]

I protested, said Adamaou had been recommended to me by the American embassy and was a trusted friend of American visitors to Cameroon, that he had the full confidence of the American people, etc. The cop listened for a bit, then shook his head.

"He's doing three days in the cells."

I once read a line, "What does the universe require of me today?" I know it sounds corny, like something you'd read off a Hallmark card, but I do like the sentiment. At this point I did something that was probably silly, but for me, at the time, in line with said sentiment.

"Look, where he goes, I go." I said. "If he goes in, I'm coming with him."

This seemed to nonpluss the officer a bit. After more burbling in French we were let go, but not without having to leave some money for 'drinks' (as bribes go it was very low --about $3, compared to $40 I paid in Kenya to some traffic cops). Adamoua and I didn't talk about it until we reached a hotel, at which point he turned to me and smiled.

"It was going to be OK. They were just trying to intimidate a bigger bribe out of you."

Looking back from here I suppose I can see how this was the case, but at the time, in that hotbox little office and the loud voices, the statement taking and the knowledge we were far away from everything, everywhere, the situation hadn't seemed half as benign.

The irony of the entire incident: at the end of our little interrogation, the lead cop gave me his name, address and phone number -- to call, he said, if we ever ran into trouble.

Which, I suppose, we did.

Votre jour, votre pais -- Adam in Ouest Afrique

Item: Landing at Douala International Airport, Cameroon.

To whit: Exeunt aircraft, cue immediate: heat. Sticky. Smell of ripe fecundity. Overlaid with something bad, something poor and not washed. Latter item could be self, or stained concrete walls of airport complex. Equatorial night feels like a cotton curtain; on the tarmac, fire blinks. A cigarette, and its cherry. Out of the aircraft, of Al Afriquiyah airlines (or Freaky Air, as a friend calls it), a company that transfers you through Tripoli where the rudest nationality I think I've met yells you through several layers of transit lounge rigmarole all the while looking like they should be standing outside of a cheap bar in a Greek island in gold chains and tank tops smoking Gitanes and growing chest hair, out of this airline come businessmen looking business-y and French looking ready to holiday in their old colony and, past the luggage handlers, a female passenger balancing her carry-on on her head. The image is so African it should be banned.

I almost wasn't here. Unbeknownst to me, my flight made a stop in Cotonou, Benin, before heading to Cameroon. In Benin, half asleep, I stumbed out with the majority of the cabin passengers, waited in a security line and managed to fill out half a disembarkation form before realizing this was, in fact, not quite Cameroon.  I ran into the plane with tail firmly between legs, wondering how a Lonely Planet author on assignment almost ended up landing in the wrong country.

Doala? Not my first choice for a honeymoon destination. Not as bad as some may claim, either. Last night I had beer, cold and fresh, sweating out of a mug in an expat spot that was normally surreal -- dark wood verandah overlooking the docks, a mix of the French and the British overlanders and the working girls and the rest, and me, in a hostelry made for members of the German Merchant Marine.

When I went home the street kids came out, hands outstretched, groaning and/or giggling. Excuse a rather flip observation made at the expense of Cameroonian poverty (which is of the stagnate sort -- the people have generally enough to eat. But they're dealing with a president for life who's been around for 26 years whilst managing an incredibly corrupt network of vested interests), but nothing made me feel more present in Francophone Africa then being addressed as blanc, blanc (white white).