The Crabs of Bangui

Chapter Twelve

91 Chapter Twelve H ansel meant to take Bamenda by storm as far as his company was concerned. One way of attracting responsible public attention, he thought, was to erect an eye-catching building at a strategic location in Bamenda. He recalled that sometime ago as he drove past T-Junction at the end of the Commercial Avenue, directly opposite the famous Experimental Alimentation, he had seen a notice: PLOT AND HOUSE FOR SALE. With that concluded in his mind, he spent several days in Douala conceiving the shape his projected office would take. He got a draftsman to slightly modify one of the plans his Japanese friend had proposed to him. He landed in Bamenda like a comet. When he arrived even his detractors nodded with satisfaction that he had suddenly stepped into money somewhere, an El Dorado or something of the sort. He entered Bamenda just a little after mid-day when most people would be out in the street on lunch break. There was no rain. He was driving the vehicle himself, a glittering deep-to-cream SKIPPIO A1. A SKIPPIO A1 is a dream car. It had what the most modern Land Cruisers had and more, a lot more. It was the first and only one in the North West. Only television viewers were used to seeing it in advertisements. It stood like a rhinoceros, or even an African elephant, huge, imposing, scary at the same time. Many of its features were familiar but a lot more fanciful: it had a silver or perhaps an aluminium front bumper that projected in front of the car like the front loader of a caterpillar. But it differed from the other brands in that the 92 Linus T. Asong bumper could be adjusted, it could be made to rise or go lower from within. It had a pair of unusually huge headlights on either side, a pair of parking lights, each of these of giant size. At night when he put on his headlights, others became so blinded by its glare that the drivers usually pulled to the side and waited until he had passed. There was a mechanism inside which could cause the entire chassis to rise to about half a metre above the tires, should the situation arise. A protective shield rose in front of the radiator grill with six fog light tinted yellow. The windscreen was tinted dark yellowish. The windows all tinted dark green from inside but glazed with reflecting glass from outside, were all worked electronically, including the back windscreen On both the driver’s and the passenger’s side was a pair of driving mirrors, one large and the other slightly smaller. On the larger mirror were written the following warning: Objects seen in this mirror may be nearer than reflected. The vehicle was a ten-seater: three persons could sit in front, four in the second row and four more in the far back, two facing each other. It was not yet matriculated. To the untutored eye, it was a brand new vehicle and definitely cost at least 50 million francs. This exaggeration suited him very well. He parked his beloved Peugeot 504, suspending chassis, tires and all on concrete blocks in front of his new office. He ignored nothing that could draw attention to his changed circumstances. The parking of this car which he treated and spoke of as a good personal friend, was the most eloquent sign that he had bade good bye to a particular period of his life and opened a new one. When the whole world seemed to be closing in on him in the guise of poverty, the car, with all its problems remained the one thing he held on to salvage his crushed ego. He was the first to admit the age of the car and to tell jokes about it. For instance, he once remarked to a mechanic that no part of the vehicle at the moment was original. All its original parts had long been replaced. 93 The Crabs of Bangui On another occasion he said that because of the uncertain condition of the car, his neighbours feared entering it for fear that they would have to push it every now and then. Hence, he said, whenever he met a neighbour going the same direction as himself and offered to give him or her a lift, the man would simply say...