A Single Swallow (23 page)

‘What can they do?'

‘They should have a revolution, that's what. I've been telling them that for years. I've even told the government! But nothing changes.'

‘What can we do?'

‘Oh, you try to help. You know, I've been helping someone for years. She wanted to sell SIM cards. You've seen all the kids selling SIM cards? Well, I tried to help her do that. But then someone in her family got ill and she gave them all the money. Then she wanted to sell something else, and so I helped her set up again. It didn't work, all the money vanished, you know, bills, family. The government gives them absolutely fuck-all. Even schools aren't free; as for health-care, forget it. If you get ill, that's it, you're probably dead, and they throw you in the ditch.'

To apply for a visa for Britain from Cameroon you first have to log into a website. Despite Cameroon being a Francophone country, this website, and the visa form, are only available in English. Guessing that the best way of getting the process right is to speak to a human being, we try the British Consulate. The lady at the gate turns us firmly away: ‘You must apply through the website,' she insists.

We download copies of the form at an internet café and take them back to the hotel. Patrice needs a letter of invitation, proof of income, an itinerary and something to prove that his accommodation in London actually exists: I email my father and arrange for a copy of one of his utility bills to be couriered to Mr Kenneth. We go over the form several times. Though a trial with a rugby club would be a clear infringement, as the holders of tourist visas are not allowed to seek
employment, I can see nothing to suggest that gaining a coaching certificate would be against the law. There is a box on the form in which anyone who has helped with the form must identify themselves, which I do.

In the evenings we pick our way along broken pavements to small cafés, where we are served minuscule portions of thin, delicious chicken with manioc or rice. Patrice devours them in seconds. My stomach has shrunk: one small meal in the evening, with a breakfast of eggs the next morning is all it seems to require.

On the fourth day – visa application being a slow business – Patrice receives a telephone call. I watch his face as he takes it. He looks stricken.

‘My wife is ill,' he says, ‘malaria. I must go home.'

‘Horace . . .' he begins. A black face blushes as readily as a white one. I press a mixture of euros and dollars into his hand and we dash to the offices of Western Union: Isabel will get anti-malarial drugs this evening. We make our arrangements on the run to the bus station. When my father's utility bill turns up Patrice will be ready to submit his application. He will let me know by email when he has done so and I will track its progress by calling the consulate – they are likely to want to speak to me, we believe.

We hug. I lift Patrice off the ground.

‘
Force, Patrice!
' I cry.

‘
Force, Horace!
' he returns.

We shake hands.

‘See you in London,' we say, and he goes.

The Nigerian Embassy in Yaoundé is much quieter and more efficient than the one in London. Two visits, a long wait in a Chinese restaurant across the road, gawping at huge bats which circle and flap in broad daylight like flocks of gulls, a third visit and a short sleep in reception yield a visa. I have given up on taxis now,
being short of money and depressed by the regularity with which they break down, or sit in dammed streams of smoking traffic. I walk everywhere. When I am nervous I carry my notebook and pen: a sword and shield, I tell myself, as I did in Lusaka, then in Brazzaville. No threat appears.

There are two routes to choose from: north-east to Maroua in the marshes south of Lake Chad, west to Maiduguri, then Kano in Nigeria and north again to Zinder in Niger. I study this and dismiss it. There has been fighting in Chad, with French forces backing the government against a rebel insurgency. The swallow route, based on the last time I saw a great many of them, should lie to the west, nearer the coast. That is the way ornithologists say they come south – across the Gulf of Guinea. I will take the train to Douala on the coast, then look for a boat across the armpit of the Gulf, up into Cross River State, in Nigeria. From there I will go due north, across Nigeria and into Niger, striking west again to meet the Niger River at Niamey. I will go on to Agades, way up in the Sahara in northern Niger, not far from the Algerian border, where I will use a number that Christine in Brazzaville gave me for a guide named Akly. There are rumours of Touareg rebellion on that border, but if anyone can get me through to Tamanrasset in Algeria, she said, he could.

The Douala train is drawn by an old diesel locomotive which looks like a steel egg-carton stuck on top of a shoe-box. The carriages have fewer doors than doorways – in the last, where I sit, the back is open, showing the tracks tailing gently away. We roll out through slums, into hilly wooded country, over river beds, through a morning which heats and turns smoky yellow. At the first stop, all around the train, suddenly, whipping in swirling dives above the roof of the station, there they are: a flight of swallows.

I rush to the open door to stare at them. There are twenty or thirty; they come and go too quickly for me to count them. Their moult looks complete: their new blue backs shine in the hazy sunlight like hardened silk. It seems extraordinary and somehow unbelievably simple: they have kept to the course I plotted from the Mambili; they have overflown the whole of the rainforest, crossed Gabon, and now
here they are, feeding ferociously. I see more flocks in Makak and Eseka: I am on to them again, I have found them. The day becomes hotter and hotter and the carriage more crowded, as much with hawkers who travel from stop to stop as with travellers bound for Douala. The train seems to lose speed rather than gain it but I am perfectly happy. This is the most luxurious, gentle travel, and I am keeping pace with the birds. What I am seeing, they see. Where they have been, I have been. Where I am going, I dare hope, they are going; I feel a drowsy oneness with them and fend off sleep by speculating on the effort it costs them to cover ground at the speed I am, slumped in the seat. Four wing-beats a second, 240 a minute, 14,400 an hour: suppose they fly for eight hours a day, at a conservative guess – over 115,000 wing-beats. It seems ludicrous, and perhaps it is. Along with swifts and martins, swallows are the smallest birds capable of gliding flight, which assists in hunting, and even more so with migration. Without the ability to glide, their task would be akin to riding a bicycle over 6,000 miles while prohibited to free-wheel. Swallows have a much higher power to weight ratio than most birds thanks to their wing-loading: at just over 14 grams per 100 square centimetres this is much lower than that of most birds. The bird's shape, the swell of the breast tapering to nothing at the very end of the tail streamers, is similar to a racing yacht.

For a long time the elongated tail in male swallows was cited by scientists as a classic case of a male trait exaggerated by female choice, but recent studies have suggested the aerodynamic effect of the streamers' ability to twist when the tail is spread allows a long-tailed male to avoid stalling in a high angle of attack, and also generates lift which aids manoeuvrability in slower, turning flight. Intriguingly, studies show that at their summering grounds in the north, where mating and breeding take place, male tails are on average 10 millimetres longer than the optimum length for flight – and it is well known that females select long-tailed males. The swallow's pattern of moulting in the south and regrowing their streamers as they travel north thus forms a rather wonderful trade-off between the demands of migration and the demands of mating. When they most need their
extraordinary powers of flight, the tail is at its best length to provide them. When they most need a seductively long tail, it is ready.

The outskirts of Douala are rough and ridden with smoke. The heat pounds the train, radiating out of a sky the colour of new corrugated iron. The train moans slowly across points.

At the station I make phone calls and establish that there is a boat to Calabar in Nigeria, which leaves tonight.

‘Where does it go from?'

‘Tiko. You must buy a ticket before five o'clock,' says the woman on the end of the line.

‘How do I get to Tiko?'

‘There are buses, but – you do not have much time.'

It is gone three o'clock already. I agree a fare with a taxi driver and we set out.

‘No trouble,' he says. ‘It does not take too long.'

We circle the hem of Douala, lurching through heavy traffic. It is much busier and much hotter than Yaoundé.

‘Oh yes,' says the driver, ‘this is the economic capital; here everyone comes for money.'

There are mills and the sweet smells of sawn wood. There are lagoons in which there are no birds, there are glimpses of ships and the roads are jammed with people, buses, cars, scooters and lorries. We drive along the edge of one market as crammed and chaotic as anything I saw in Brazzaville: only the pot-holes are not quite as fierce. We stop briefly to get a permit allowing the taxi to leave town, and stop again to have the permit checked. Then we are out onto a motorway. On either side, dense groves of thin grey trees all lean seawards and a familiar smell fills the car, the thin, tightly clean smell of a bicycle shop: we are driving through a huge rubber plantation.

The taxi breaks down, steam boiling under the bonnet. The driver fills up a water bottle from the plantation's irrigation system, which is intricate and hugely extensive: someone has a lot of money invested in these trees. It is something of a shock to be among them, to smell
them; this is the odour of the stuff so many millions died for, that made so many thousands rich. And yet this is not the same plant that made King Leopold over a billon dollars, that baubled-up Brussels and seeded so many villains' villas on the French Riviera: that was the rubber vine, which grew wild in Congo. This is the rubber tree, imported from South America and first widely propagated in this region after 1908, when Leopold was finally persuaded to hand over his fiefdom to the Belgian government. Here, in what was French Equatorial Africa, the rubber tree served French companies well, thanks to a Leopoldine system of hostage-taking, forced labour and brutal punishment. In 1911 competition from plantations in South America and Malaysia (largely under the control of Britain) caused a crash in rubber prices. Companies operating in French Equatorial Africa lost profits, so cut their expenditure. Transport and collection networks reaching into the interior were abandoned: it was plantations on the coast, like this one, which continued to operate.

I could not prove it but there was no reason why the men crossing heavily, heads down, from one tract of trees to the next, and the trees themselves, should not be descendants of the people and the plants which were here a century ago. Only now, thanks to the hissing irrigation system, fewer men are required per hectare – each of which, it seemed reasonable to assume, supports even more trees.

It is night in Tiko on the coast of Cameroon and hot under a smoky, black-brown sky. The moon is a sardonic yellow grin – 4° north of the equator it fills from the bottom, like a wineglass. The waiting room is a concrete shed, thick with heat and the smell of bodies. A fan makes no impression but the noise from the television reaches all of us. I am beginning to hate that television: tuned to a Cameroonian channel, it is showing one of the interminable soaps in which people are always weeping by hospital beds, finding each other dead on floors, overacting like mad and agonising about who will tell the matriarch the bad news this time. I have watched a lot of television, in various hotel rooms, and nothing has struck me as distinctive except a soap I saw in
South Africa, set in an office and apparently focused on the lives of a bunch of gay Afrikaners in striped shirts.

I wake from a half-doze on the hard bench to shouts: ‘Let's go! Let's go!' Everyone leaps up in a flurry, grabbing their bags and children. We are herded out of the back of the shed into a yard where a huge lorry is waiting. It has four long benches, with room for twenty people on each, and is constructed like a giant crate with rectangles cut into the side. Light comes from a bulb swinging dimly above our heads. We clamber in with maximum panic, which does not augur well for our voyage. When we are all seated the truck fails to start – and fails again. Everyone sweats and tuts. I have picked up the habit of teeth-sucking to express disapproval. When eighty people do it at once the lorry suckles and bubbles with the sound of hissed saliva, as though we are a load of consumptive crickets. Teeth-sucking is wonderfully expressive. When stopped by a policeman, as we so often were in Cameroon, the whole bus sucked – ffsscch! (meaning ‘Bloody cops'). When a tyre burst, as every tyre seemed to, sooner or later, we sucked: wwssccchh! (‘Here we go again'). When the bus did not turn up, or the truck did not leave – mmwwch (‘Well, there you go'). When a ticket seemed expensive, when an hotel was full, when a room was grotty, mwvcchh . . . (‘We'll just have to live with it, but we're unimpressed'). It came so readily to me now, and was so viscerally, accurately expressive of feeling, I worried about doing it inappropriately: My wife is ill – mmmwwchh . . . (‘Well, that's bad but what can you do?'). The words it saves are countless, and impossible for the hearer to misinterpret.

After half an hour of sweating in the semi-dark the engine begins to turn over, unconvincingly. A man addresses me.

‘Hey, White Man, are you a mechanic? Can I see your qualifications?'

‘No, Black Man, I am not. Who are you – the police? Can I see your ID?'

The woman opposite laughs at this, throwing her head back and jabbing her sack further into my groin. The truck starts. We bounce through Tiko, my stomach complaining about supper, which was rice
with a lump of gristle and a short tubular section of rubbery artery. We pass a checkpoint and enter the port area, a dark swamp about 2 miles wide. The engine gives up after half a mile. There is more sucking of teeth, more sweating and more banging from the driver as he punishes the machine for its failure. The mosquitoes feast on us. Everyone piles out, then scrambles back in as the engine fires. We bump through the swamp to lights, shiny black water, two fishing boats, and ours. It is not a big boat, about twice as long and twice as high as the fishing boats, and it is entirely covered with people. It is Dutch-made and rusty. In the bowels is a canteen where a crowd is piling into spicy chicken on skewers, and beer. Lifejackets are stacked around the walls and all the seats are full. God help anyone down here if anything goes wrong. In the queue for food I meet Mark, a tall Cameroonian about my age. He is extremely quick and funny: we buy beers and withdraw to the upper deck to watch the rest of the loading.