Paving Paradise Cameroon 100 Years Ago and Now By Daniele Anastasion Marcel Proust has written that "the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." What of the landscape that finds itself with new eyes? For centuries now, since the migration of the first white men into Africa, new eyes have looked upon its landscape and new eyes peer out of it. And still new eyes reflect upon it. One summer, I, like each generation of white men and women before me, ventured into Cameroon to secure her treasures and seek new landscapes. Curiosity found me in the small corner of a library reading the journals of Jean Kenyon Mackenzie, a woman who, nearly a century ago, ventured into the same territory as I had. A protestant missionary who lived in small bush villages for almost ten years dating from 1904 to 1913, Mackenzie's Cameroon was vastly different from the one that I experienced. The country and culture she described, once raw and new to the Western world, now comes fully equipped with a Hilton for the modern day tourist. In a land that has been married to the Western world for nearly a century, Mackenzie's journals prove doubly fascinating: not only do they present a picture of the lost virgin bride-Africa as the modern tourist romanticizes her-but they also record the changes as they occurred, the wave at its crest rolling towards the present. Well aware of the perils of the clash of systems, Mackenzie sensed the magnitude of the major shifts taking place and so felt compelled to record them. In the same way that the archaeologist desires to preserve what has remained, so I set out to record the gaping contrasts between Mackenzie's Cameroon and my own. I kept a list of each town and village mentioned by Mackenzie in her travels, intending to cross-reference these with those that I had visited. Unfortunately, most of these names are not to be found on modern maps of Cameroon-the towns and villages mentioned had either been swallowed by expanding cities and highways or wiped out in UPC uprisings against the government in the early sixties. Thus a continual string of places described by Mackenzie becomes a search for one lost city after another. I encountered another obstacle in the fact that Mackenzie never penetrated past the dense forest region, limiting her knowledge of Cameroon to the coastal areas. In comparing my observations of towns and villages to hers, I would have to eliminate entire regions of the North that I'd visited. This presented a problem in that a large majority of the images I recalled had spanned the entire country all the way to dusty Lake Chad. It then occurred to me how very remarkable it was that I had been able to access the parts of Cameroon that I did. Mackenzie had a tough time as it was, beating through the bush paths along the coast. For her to have reached the desert scrub with which I became so casually familiar would have been a triumph. And so this obstacle for Mackenzie and me, travel, became the very means by which I would convey the most important change that has occurred between her time and mine. And now, we finally come to the amusing difference between Mackenzie's entrance into the country and mine. We begin with our beloved missionary, who upon reaching the coast, endures a six day journey through Cameroon's equatorial forest to her post at Lolodorf. On July 31, 1904, Mackenzie writes, "Here the ship lies about three miles off the coast, and we had to go ashore in a surf-boat…You get into the boat any way you can…There were five rowers on a side, and they were, it seems, very skillful in their management of the boat. But this was lost on me…I thought we would end up in the sea…when the next wave carried us ashore again, natives ran into the surf to her prow and held her against the return, while others picked agitated missionaries of the sides." After being carried through the surf, Mackenzie recounts her group's preparations as they waited at Batanga, the receiving-port for the mission, for the fifty "carriers" who would lead their crew on a four nights' journey into the interior. Walking twenty miles each day, at the beginning of the rainy season, she and her hammock carrier struggled up hills only to slide back down into pools of mud. Apparently, Mackenzie's introduction to the country required of her what the modern day adventurer, who, in search of physical hardship and endurance, dares to find. Yet, her entrance, depending on the interpreter, can be seen as either more or less graceful than mine. Although she writes of "the miserable 4:30 A.M. sensation", Mackenzie romantically recounts the splendor and beauty of that virgin equatorial forest. I, myself, compare the beauty of which she writes to my own first glimpse of the African rainforest. Our lovely AirFrance flight gliding through the sky did provide a modern perspective unknown to Mackenzie-that of the aerial view. However, one is allotted a window only so big in that tiny pressurized cabin, a window that doesn't allow escape from blinking lights and nasal landing warnings. And, of course, instead of the fifty scantily clad carriers to greet you in the forest, the Douala airport provides the modern day tourist with fifty suitors, each one targeting the first-timer for some easy money. While I lost out on the mosquitos and sweat of Mackenzie's four day trek, she had to forfeit frequent flier points and the usual document hassles of Douala's airport. If the journey is the destination, as is popularly said, means of travel dramatically altered our destinations in terms of both the travel experience itself and the areas we were able to access. Douala airport to nearby Buea took only an hour or so by bush taxi. In Mackenzie's day, it would have meant another four day trek through bush trails. In 1904, your way in the forest is measured by the rivers that are to be crossed as opposed to the speedometer. Mackenzie and her crew walked from village to village with lanterns and torches or, in some cases, were forced to take canoes along the rivers through heat, mud, mosquitos, and mangrove trees. Of course, I, in my small yellow bush taxi (Peugeot 504) pass over the convenient bridges and roads now running adjacent to the rivers, listening to barges sound their smoggy horns. I imagine Mackenzie's ghost canoe gliding quietly in and out of the huge freighters that clog up the riverways, waving my hand in one-woman memoriam. The rising industrial smoke echoes of a distant time when there were small fires to be found all along the bush path. Mackenzie had written of the continuous activity of hundreds of carriers along the bush trails hired by the government and traders: "The forest is not lonely. There is a continual line of carriers coming from the east with ivory and rubber. I feel a breath of fresh air from the interior pass with them; you know, the feeling one has about a ship from foreign lands….and everywhere by the road, in the open spaces before the houses, at the foot of the great cottonwood trees, the little fires built by the carriers-little fires showing violet lights and crimson, and pallid blue-hundreds of little jewel fires, and about them the ground black with sleeping men. So the carriers sleep; they cast aside their burdens and their loin-cloth, 'and so good-night!'" The next morning, their loin-cloths missing, the carriers woke up as truck drivers, cargo loaders, flight attendants, and train conductors. I passed them in Limbe, Bamenda, Yaounde, and Garoua, some filled with travellers, some with workers, and others with oil from Chad. For every fifty or so carriers, it can be estimated, I saw one bush taxi in Buea, a town relatively close to the area inhabited by Mackenzie. At a single point in time, one of three hundred taxis in Buea will hold up to five passengers, each unknown to the next, each sharing the same destination (be the journey the destination). The nature of modern day travel has both literally and figuratively altered the face of Cameroon. Rusty, broken down cars rest like shrines on the sides of roads (there exists no such thing as a junkyard in Cameroon), having become as much a part of the landscape as the dense tropical plants. The aerial view would reveal winding and ambitious roads, hundreds like arteries and veins, connecting the vital organs of the country. The unmaintained paved roads boast potholes so large that they comprise more of the road than does the solid black tar. They are, nevertheless, made to accommodate the bush taxis, motorcycles, and trucks found all across the country speeding to the next shell station. The trading post found adjacent to the canoe drop in Mackenzie's day has, of course, been replaced by the shanty alongside the road selling Fantas, toilet paper, and petrol in small glass jars. One wonders, though, when exactly the canoe drop turned into the roadside shanty, the paddle replace by the pedal. Slowly and then…suddenly? During her last years in Cameroon, Mackenzie returned to several of the villages in which she had first begun her work. In the ten years in which she inhabited Africa, so much change had occurred due to the building of roads, that even she mourned the loss of the old ways. "All the sweet intimacy of the forest has gone with the trail, and out of the terrific tumult of the building of the road runs this immaculate highway quiet in the sun. When I think of the uproar of the days and the outraged earth and the great cries of the falling trees and the enforced efforts of the forest tribes amongst the debris, I feel some lack of zest in the journey on the complacent highway. Yet it is a wonderful road and most creditable to those white men who camped along it. I suppose that they are well out of this by now, travailing in other forests, and glad not to have to live 'on top of the paths' they have completed." The white man gone, his connection to the road brief and fleeting, the Cameroonian is now forced to live "on top of the paths." Here we must look at the aspect of travel not from Mackenzie's perspective or mine, but from that of the Cameroonian. When I think of all the roads on which I travelled in Cameroon, I can't help but wonder how many villages were pushed aside for them, or how many men left their homes in order to build them. Roads were not simply built from one village to the next, but through and over one village and the next. As Mackenzie so poignantly states, "There is not a wheel that turns in the forest but an African custom is broken on it." The building of the roads, though, was only a precursor to the cavalcade of change that would invade Cameroon. Mackenzie writes, "You must be prepared, if you open the window of your mind toward Africa, to have an airplane fly in. You must be prepared for the sound of passing trains, for the rattle of machinery, for the rustle of corn, for the odor of tobacco, for the great fields of cotton, for rubber in huge quantities, for the sparkle of diamonds, for the flow from Africa's golden fountains of the gilt of palm oil…No more Dark Continent-cities now, and electric light plants, mines, labor and labor problems." Mackenzie's speculation has proven strikingly accurate. The plane has long since flown into Africa, Cameroon Airlines offering six flights daily from Douala to Yaounde. New modes of transportation, like any revolution, were accompanied by radically altered belief systems in Cameroon. Imagine going about your business in the forest only to be disrupted by a metal bird rustling noisily across the sky. At the beginning of the century, French and British planes would fly overhead and drop supplies to explorers in isolated parts of the inner continent. Entire "cargo cults" formed to explain these gift-bearing steel birds, then believed to be blessings from the gods. With the coming of the white man, the African not only dealt with a change in his system of beliefs, but in the very essence of his existence-his concepts of space and time had been radically altered. Mackenzie writes, "The white man's need has been expressed throughout Africa by his mechanical devices-the devices by which he himself has been altered past belief in the last hundred years are set to modify the black man overnight…probably you must wonder sometimes, as I do often enough…as to the future of the African peoples. I don't know my dears. I have not an idea. They wonder themselves; they have misgivings that haunt and shake them. They beg me to explain their low estate on any other ground, if I can, than their intrinsic inferiority. They see as clearly as you do that the normal man does not sleep away the thousand years, or all the ages." The bush paths, once quiet and contented, were sudddenly deemed inadequate for the white man and his machines. The African, having "slept away the thousand years", wanting madly to prove his capability, races toward the finish line. He eagerly hops the trains appearing out of the mist from the West-no matter where they're headed, he knows from whence they came. The journey is the destination. The West has become his only salvation-schools, corporations, automobiles-and so he climbs its ladder blindfolded. Transportation, the means by which the Westerner first distinguished himself in the forest, has now become the symbolic key to the maze of modernity in Cameroon. Every Cameroonian remembers the first man in his village to possess a bike. Decades old photos reveal men posing proudly beside the family car, the sole purpose of the picture being the documentation of that holy shrine. Modes of transportation delegate self-worth, the Cameroonian now able to repossess the road that once uprooted him. We've paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Here, Proust's sentiments return to us with new meaning: in the attempt to acquire new eyes, we have essentially changed the landscape. For the traveller, the act of seeing necessitates that we change what we look upon. The facilitation of the traveller, by its very nature, eradicates what the next explorer will wish to see. It is this paradox that faces every modern traveller, this zero-sum game that only allows us to venture at the cost of determining the experience of those who will follow in our tracks. Collectively, from one venturer to the next, we have found new eyes. Mackenzie writes, "and each generation of white men has had a new Africa-the gift in the main of enduring travellers, young, curious, who have gone out unarmed to secure her treasures, to know the sources of her rivers, the water sheds of the continent, and her material secrets. Many of them are forgotten…with time, the fully conscious African will read [the biographies of missionaries], modern types of approbation will seal them, and their adventures will have a nostalgic fascination in a fully explored world. Already these hills are less strange and this forest-I know the secret of many paths and shall soon know all. A country and a circumstance are soon familiar; only people are perpetually mysterious." In the short run, the country and circumstance may, in fact, be familiar. But as we have seen from Mackenzie's day to our own, change becomes the only constant, the country, the circumstance, and the people inseparable. In fact, the more comfortable and familiar Cameroon seems-roads, hotels, and air-conditioning-the more complex and uncertain the circumstance has truly become for both Cameroonian and traveller alike.