Road Companion to Democracy and Meritocracy: Further Essays from an African Perspective

2. The Medium and Long Term Lessons of the Lake Nyos Natural Disaster

21 2 The Medium and Long Term Lessons of the Lake Nyos Natural Disaster1 * T here have been three events in recent times that have drawn world-wide attention to Cameroon, a country which, otherwise, might have been thought to be practising quietism as its own official ideology. The first of these three events that I have in mind was the 1982 ‘World Cup’ in Spain where Cameroon’s ‘Indomitable Lions’ - one of the two highly underrated African teams - performed quite creditably. The second event was the 1984 abortive putsch in which a bunch of soldiers dropped a rock into the usually serene political waters of a nation whose political stability had become the envy of its neighbours. The third event is the August 21st, 1986, Lake Nyos natural disaster. The first of these three events chronicled above was a pride to all Cameroonians, the second was a veritable embarrassment, and the third is pure anguish. Before it ends, 1986 might qualify as the Century’s Year of Greatest Disasters. This year we have heard of earthquakes, landslides, famine, nuclear plant accidents, industrial gas leakages, plane crashes, ship sinkings, rocket explosions, city bombings and daily plain shootings. Thousands of human lives have perished and continue to perish. All these disasters might be categorised under two headings: those due to natural causes and those due to human agency, although some overlap must be admitted for some of the cases. Now, while disasters in the second category are avoidable and can conceivably be completely eliminated from our world via tolerance, understanding and sheer common sense, disasters in the first category are not usually avoidable nor can they be completely eliminated, although their deleterious effects can certainly be minimized. It is therefore important to reflect on the Lake Nyos natural disaster, in which an estimated 2000 of our compatriots perished, in order to see what lessons we might learn from it. 22 Road Companion to Democracy and Meritocracy The first thing that must be understood ab initio is that our knowledge of the world and of all natural phenomena in general is, at best, in the form of intelligent guesses. Nature is completely inert, having neither feelings nor emotions nor arms nor purposes. And because we human beings have aims and purposes, feelings and emotions, nature stands as an adversary against us - indomitable, invincible and - inexorably cruel. While as human beings we always act purposively, for good or ill, nature, by contrast, is mostly incomprehensibly capricious in its actions. This is why, from his earliest beginnings, man has sought to understand, to control and thereby gain dominion over nature It is, however, evident that nature cannot be understood beyond a certain extent nor can it be tamed in the manner in which some wild animals have been domesticated by man. Human aims and purposes constantly flounder against nature. Indeed, to borrow an expression from David Hume, the Scottish philosopher (1711 - 1776), ‘‘Nature is always too strong for principle.” The reason that our knowledge of nature, that is to say, our scientific knowledge in the broadest sense, can never be better than intelligent conjectures or hypotheses or guesses is that we can only learn about nature through experience. And since experience can only be corrected by further experience we have no guarantee that our experiential knowledge of today might not be rendered untenable by future experience. In other words, the knowledge that we have of nature depends on our past observations, our past experience. But we have no guarantee that the future will be like the past. Why may things not suddenly change? This is why it has been rightly said that even if we had complete and correct knowledge about nature we would not even be able to know that we had it. This is the general philosophical background to the assertion that the best we can hope to achieve in the realm of nature are intelligent guesses. There are, for instance, several hypotheses as to what exactly happened at Lake Nyos on that fateful night of August 21st . What caused the explosion? A gas? Was it a single gas or a combination of gases? What gas caused the deaths? Was it carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulphide or sulphur dioxide, etc’.Some of the suggested hypotheses can easily be ruled out with good arguments. In this way we might end up with one hypothesis 23 The Medium and Long Term...