My night in a Nigerian prison camp.
Back in 2001 I was working for an oil and gas consultancy, where everything was run on a shoestring budget and safety considerations were at a minimum. I now work for a major and this sort fieldwork would never get sanctioned.
I was on my way home from a friend’s party on a cold and frosty February evening. I had one last bit of packing to do before my 3am flight.
I stayed on the web until about 1am checking out sites on West African trouble spots, there was a lot happening on the border with the Congo and was spilling over into the south of Cameroon, the situation had been getting worse day by day for about a week and people at work were concerned and were days away from asking me to cancel, but all that was too late now. I knew an opportunity like this wouldn’t arise for a long time. So although a little nervous of the political situation and my first time in West Africa… I was excited.
I first landed in the port city of Duoala, which is on the west coast of Cameroon and is referred to as the armpit of Africa due to its geographical position and exceedingly hot/humid weather all year around. It was a hulking mass of concrete and dockyards with a thriving population of young people.
I found a reasonable hotel with relative ease using my pigeon French and spent the night in comfort. The next morning I was to meet up with some agents who would secure me transport to Yaounde, the capital to the east. Let me at this point relay to you that the whole of Cameroon is basically rainforest with roads and cities cut out of the bush and traversing the country over only short distances can take many hours or even days.
I found the agents with ease (they came to meet me in the hotel lobby after more pigeon French this time over the phone) and we set off for Yaounde; the drive there took two days and I saw and photographed images that would stay with me the rest of my life the scenery was breath taking. We drove through laterite roads, through thick rainforest, forded small streams and over bridges spanning mighty rivers.
On the second day tired and weary we reached Yaounde, which was a very modern city not unlike Islamabad and Daoula reminded me of Karachi.
I booked into the Hilton that night and was asleep before my head touched the pillow. The next morning I arose early refreshed exercised and set off for the oil company HQ I would be working for the next month or so. The Cameroonian people are amongst the nicest I have had the good fortune to meet, very hospitable and cheerful and have a zest for life. Suffice it to say my stay in Yaounde passed quickly and was all too short. I had my agenda and was all set for the meat of the trip.
I was to enter the Mamfe River basin, some of the thickest rainforest in the country and find any evidence of oil; my years of schooling and experience at work were about to be put to the test in the ultimate challenge in my field, I had 4 weeks to sink or swim.
Before I continue I will just fill you in a little on the people of Cameroon, the population is around 13 million, of this about 8 million are Christians of varying denominations and 5 million are Sunni Muslims. The southwest of the country is mostly Christian and the north mostly Muslim. The extreme north borders with Chad and is open savannah with all the associated wildlife gazelles, giraffes lions and the Muslims. Cameroon is predominantly Francophone along with numerous local dialects, pigeon English being one of them.
The rainforest is home to gorilla, elephants, crocodiles etc.; I will recant tales of each of these at another time.
Me and a team of locals…we numbered five in all, a Cameroonian geologist and two helpers and the driver, who was Muslim by the name of Moosa a young gentle man who read namaz five times a day and remained very quite speaking little English. I later learned that he had four wives and thirteen children; I suppose he had his fill of conversation.
I knew the journey up to Mamfe was going to be tough for many reasons, very bad roads, animals, bandits and most of all it was in the cross-river state bordering Nigeria, an area prone to flooding and landslides.
Most of my work was to be carried out in the village of Mamfe and the surrounding rainforest; I couldn’t wait to get there. Being the first party in this part of the world to do this, it was virgin territory and consequently very exciting.
After three days on the road driving through the bush heading northwest from Yaounde we had finally arrived at Mamfe and set up camp in the jungle. Right in the jungle can you imagine…even the local Cameroonians from Yaounde were used to city life and were a little nervous about this. But we did it, the main dangers weren’t the Gorillas, or the elephants or the snakes or spiders, or the bandits of which there were many, but it was the potential diseases form insects. Bilharzia was rife in still water; tapeworm, malaria, typhoid, cholera, sleeping sickness, river blindness and a whole plethora of other nasties that would make you stay at home.
Only on my return did I realise that Cameroon is amongst the most virulent disease ridden places on the face of the earth! So here we were setting up camp in the forest.
But strangely it was one of the calmest places I had been for a long time.
I got used to the snakes day by day and even the tarantulas stopped freaking me out after a week or so but the mosquitoes ate the **** out of me!
For the next two weeks we had been collecting samples and traversing the forest by day and sat chatting playing cards by night. We met many local hunters during the day jogging along with there machetes, a scary site but on the whole they were nice enough people. They took wonderment at a white man in their jungle. At this point I will explain something to you, anyone who is not black African is known, as white man be they Indian, Arab or Pakistani in this case. So I was repeatedly called white man, which I found both frustrating and hilarious, because by that time I had been baked so long in the sun I was several shades darker than normal but still brown. So I would shout after them “brown man not white” but they would just laugh and say “no, white man!”. So there was little point in arguing, I was a white man for first time in my life and I disliked it.
After two weeks spent in relative ease in the jungle it came time to traverse the basin into Nigeria. The only way to do this successfully was to take a boat down the Cross river. Cameroon and Nigeria have had shaky relations in the Cross-river state for a long time and there have been several incursions by the Nigerian troops into and around Mamfe in the past years. Nigeria has a population more than ten times greater than Cameroon and has the most powerful/corrupt army in Africa.
To top it all off I had no visa for Nigeria and no permit to do any work there. Despite this we hired a boat to power down the Cross river, into Nigeria. Along with the boat we hired came the boat master a stocky individual who smiled a little too much and his helper. The boat master is another story…very sordid I wont go into that now. But as far as I knew he was our key to opening up the basin.
We were to power down the river in a day if possible collecting samples, because there were very few places to berth and no one including the seasoned boat master wanted to be on the river after dark. We had only that one day. So I packed my sleeping bag just in case and sent Moosa with the jeep to Ekok, the border town to pick us up on the other end, and we set of.
The temperature was in the in the 30’s but it was the humidity that killed, so it wasn’t all fun as you can imagine. The mosquitoes were particularly annoying on the river and every precaution had to be taken against river ticks as they carried untold diseases. One particular insect from Cameroon has been used as the model for the alien creature in the movie of the same name. This insect lays it’s eggs in it’s host usually in the feet of the individual and the eggs hatch worms that exit from the person as fully formed insects from various orifices in the body….even the eyes causing blindness, river blindness.
I wasn’t doing all this for the money, at that time I was paid very little.
As I mentioned much earlier it was the dry season no rain yet for another 3 months so the river was very low, extremely wide, 500m meters in some places but very shallow in areas. The shallow areas or “riffles” were the places where crocodiles usually lay and the deeper areas the “pools” were home to hippo. I knew from reading before I set off that hippos kill scores of people each year in Africa whereas their fluvial counterparts only a handful.
So each time we went over a pool the team would get nervous and the boat masters mate would ready his gun. Needless to say it was very tiring on all. But we were making good time by about 2pm we had got half way, I was quite happy but the boat master would only frown, as the worst of the journey was yet to come and the sun drops out of the sky like a bullet this close to the equator.
Then it happened we went over a shallow sand bank and the boat grounded stuck fast beached like some strange whale carrying passengers. With croc’s on one side hippos on the other and Nigerian guards not too far off in the forest and the sun getting ever lower….this was not the best of situations.
…continued below.