Every night for the next eight days I will post a part of a story about life in Cameroon which was not included in the original edition of “A Leaf of Honey and the Proverbs of the Rainforest.” PART 1 OF A SELECTION FROM THE CHAPTER ENTITLED “BRINGING DOWN THE SHUTTERS”, IN THE NEW EDITION OF “A LEAF OF HONEY” Life was very different living in the Cameroonian capital, Yaoundé. One morning in 1978, more than a year after leaving the jungle, I woke up, ate breakfast with my family and dressed for work. That morning I selected my cream white suit and white leather shoes, because I had a meeting scheduled with one of Monsieur Khoury’s best customers and I needed to look good. This detail is important to the story. After dropping off Anisa at the International Kindergarten, Fanny went on to her secretarial job in the consular section of the American Embassy. At about nine o’clock, a factory foreman came into my office with the news that there was someone looking for me. I went outside to see who it was. A large, strutting, Cameroonian army major in a crisp uniform, someone I didn’t recognize, was standing beside an open back Land-Rover with two soldiers holding machine guns. Fanny was sitting wide-eyed in the front seat. The major informed me in French that I was under arrest. “Je suis daccord,” I agreed without comment or question, remembering some very good advice I once heard: never argue with people with significantly superior fire power. At the moment, I was only armed with a white suit. “Je suis daccord” was a good choice of response because it was so flexible in meaning: “I am in agreement with whatever you say”, “Absolutely no argument here” or “Don’t shoot me, I will come peacefully.” The major didn’t handcuff me, but he had me walk ahead him. He marched me the full length of the factory so that everyone could see how important he was and hear his loud boasting that he was so powerful that he could arrest a European. This was his version of a perp walk. When we arrived back at the Land-Rover I asked Fanny what had happened. It seems that the major had given some pretext to the receptionist asking if Fanny could come downstairs. The receptionist picked up the phone and called her. The major said he would wait for her outside by the gates. Embassy property is sovereign, it is an enclave of land belonging to one nation inside that of another. Inside the gates where Fanny worked, it was the United States of America, but if she stepped over this sovereign threshold, she was back in the Republic of Cameroon. When Fanny passed through the gates unsuspecting and was escorted around the corner to a vehicle. No one probably saw that this had happened. People came and went all the time through these gates. There was nothing suspicious. The major already knew where to find me at the Sintrabois factory. Fanny thought that I was the one they were really after. I was told to stand in the back of the Land-Rover between the two armed soldiers so that everyone could see me. This was a great day in the career of the major. When we exited the factory he had all of us in the back sit down. He didn’t want to draw attention as he drove back towards the center of Yaoundé. We passed the American Embassy and pulled into a prison nearby I didn’t even know was there. My immediate concern wasn’t knowing the charges of my arrest, it was being detained incommunicado. The sooner the people at the embassy knew what was happening to us the better. An idea came to me as we as I got down from the Land-Rover at the front of the prison. “You know,” I said to the major, “you didn’t catch all of us. There is still one more.” I showed him the palms of my hands in a deferential gesture that meant: “What can I do?” and acted resigned to my powerlessness. By my demeanor, I acknowledged his ability to inconvenience, the definition of true power in Cameroon, that I had learned from Samuel Akale. “Who else is there?” he asked. “Our daughter,” I replied. “You will want us all together. She is at the International Kindergarten right now. You can go there and I could pick her up.”
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 23:32:33 +0000
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