Note: Africa Days is a series of posts based on journals and letters from my years living in Kinshasa and traveling across Africa, beginning in 1974. You can read previous and following posts on this site.
Three weeks after leaving Zaire, we’d made it to our first new country in this long drive out of Africa — the Central African Republic. About its capital, my journal reports that “Bangui is more ‘civilized’ than Kinshasa. The shops are full of goods. There’s a nice small museum. We’ve been able to take care of lots of errands, including getting our tires fixed. We had scotch and soda with a Frenchman this afternoon as his staff wrote up our third-party insurance policy. We met a South African refugee, Collin, who is hitchhiking to Liberia to study. We’ll take him along to Cameroon.
“The next night we camped by a waterfall and shared a beer with a 71-year-old Yugoslav engineer. He told us, ‘You’re doing what you must do.’”
We liked Cameroon immediately, finding it “a bright and pretty place, extinct volcanoes scattered around, hills covered with grass, yellow flowers on fat bushes. Gigantic rock formations in the mountain country.”
We were struck by the remarkable costumes, including “men who look like a cross between an Oxford don and a beefeater, with gorgeously colored flowing robes and huge-crowned hats.” We liked the “neat villages with peaked thatched roofs with dried grasses flowing down from them.”
In one village, we got a fine tour from a chief we had encountered. “We walked all over, asking questions as we went, about how this society is organized. We found that the gatherings of men, which we saw earlier today, are court sessions, with a scribe sent out from town and the chief and his representatives acting as judges. We saw the chief’s ‘concession’ — this is what the enclosures are called — and toured the concession of the chief’s brother. He has a building for each of his two wives, a building for the children, a separate kitchen, and a building for two mother goats and their five little kids along with many chickens. (The brother tried to give us a chicken, but we squirmed out of it as graciously as possible.) There was also a hut for storage and a building for his horse. We saw various crops — tobacco, peanuts, corn and cotton — and we heard about SODECOTON, the society which gives out cotton seeds and buys back cotton. Land ownership is forbidden here; the chief assigns you a plot to use for farming. Evidently the soil is very rich, and once you can afford two cows and a plow, you’ve got it made. They rotate the crops and let the land rest as well. Teachers are sent out by the state, and they live in the chief’s concession. Most men have two wives. A chief may have as many as 20. Once a man gets to three wives, he must take another, because wives come in two’s.
“We are impressed with how organized things are. Consider the rain-barrier system: Large trucks are not permitted to pass through the barrier until 12 hours after a rain. Rain-barrier chiefs are paid by the state to manage the system. It is effective, and truck drivers go along with it. Big contrast with Zaire!
“Now for a bit about daily life in Miles. A typical evening so far involves finding a fairly secluded spot on firm ground off the road (though in Zaire we had to stay on the road, asking permission from village chiefs and playing Barnum & Bailey for the crowd for an hour or so). We have perfected a mosquito-net setup which covers the open roof and sliding door and provides headroom, as it is suspended across cords strung between the roof racks. It covers the rear door as well, which swings up, and we thereby have a lot of ventilation.
“We have a lantern as well as a radio, which is most entertaining and exotic, and a small cassette player. Both of these operate off an electric outlet connected to a second battery, in a system installed by a friend. He also wired a burglar alarm which goes off when the front doors are opened. We have folding chairs for outdoor evenings.
“As for laundry, we have a big blue bucket in which we do a wash by loading clothes, soap and water and permitting it to bounce throughout the morning as we travel, followed by two separate rinse bounces in the afternoon. The following day, Miles Motuka becomes quite an effective dryer, as the clothes hang from a bungee cord strung across the open roof.
“Our sink is fine for washing dishes, as well as for sponge baths. We shower by using a plastic siphon complete with pump and shower attached. We have a big plastic tub as well. We generally keep one 25-liter can of drinking water (boiled) and another for washing in addition to the 20-liter jug above the sink. We have good food supplies, thanks to the U.S. commissary in Kinshasa, supplemented by fresh local produce.
“We usually stop by 4:30 or so in order to have time for radio news and for reading. One evening, still in Zaire, we listened to the Democratic National Convention, and heard Jimmy Carter for the first time. He was informative and sounded good to me.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the U.S. lately. It’s remarkable, listening regularly to Carter’s singsong tones on Voice of America, way over here in Africa.”
Our next destination was Chad: A terrible bust. We dipped in, hoping to be able to drive up the river to Lake Chad. No such luck: They said it would take two weeks to get a permit. Meanwhile, in the space of four blocks, our car was stopped and searched four times. The last time, they literally ransacked the place, throwing all our stuff around and ripping our closet door off, then stopping in the middle of it the moment their chief told them it was noon.
“We’ll be glad to be back in Cameroon tomorrow — and on to Nigeria, a country we are eager to explore.”