The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba

Afterword

177 Afterword My earliest impressions of Cameroon were gleaned from the stories I was told by older people. Their comments revolved around two things: first, that Mount Cameroon—also known as Mount Fako, the Throne of Thunder, and the Chariot of the Gods—the highest peak in West and Central Africa, is the site of the earliest recorded volcanic eruption in the region; and second , that the country they call home was named after prawns by some white people. It is said that in the fifth century BCE, while sailing along the Atlantic coast of West Africa, Hanno, the Carthaginian explorer and ship’s captain, observed Mount Cameroon erupting and inscribed in his travel writings the name Theon Ochema, Chariot of the Gods. He is said to have noted that the fires from the mountain were so hot and so bright that the flames reached up and touched the stars. Firm believers in this historical version point out that Mount Cameroon (also called Mount Fako because it is situated in Fako Division of the South West Province) is the only active volcano on the coast of West Africa, erupting seven times in the twentieth century alone.1 They also point to the fact that the mountain is known locally as monga-ma loba—Seat of the Gods. I was born in the South West Province but was raised through my teenage years in the grasslands of the North West Province, where Beba, my village of origin, is situated. Mount Cameroon has therefore always held a kind of mystery for me. You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Cameroon—Administrative. Map taken from Macmillan School Atlas for Cameroon © Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1985. Reproduced with permission. image not available You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. As a young girl, I was fascinated with these stories of the socalled discovery by Hanno, of flaming arrows reaching for the stars, and with the fact that Debundscha, the wettest place on the African continent and the place with the second-highest rainfall in the world, lies at the foot of the Seat/Chariot of the Gods. I found it amusing that my country was named after big juicy shrimp, and by a bunch of white men we did not know. I could not grasp what that act of naming really entailed, but the teachers who taught me in primary school and the adults who told us those stories by the evening fire were not amused. They insisted that branding us with the name of shrimp was an invitation to a feast. The metaphor was lost on my young sensibilities. As I got older and attended primary and secondary school, our curriculum was tailored to the British education system of O levels and A levels. In our history lessons, little was afforded the various peoples who migrated to and now inhabit the sahel and plauteau regions of the mostly Muslim north, or the grasslands , littoral, and forest regions of the largely Christian south. History lessons were dominated by European and Cameroon’s colonial history. Only later, at the University of Yaounde, did I, on my own, read all the books I could find that addressed the various kingdoms, chiefdoms, and indigenous civilizations of the people who today call Cameroon home.2 Cameroon: A Brief History In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese navigator Fernao Do Poo and his crew were so taken by the sheer quantity of mbea towè in the Wouri estuary in Douala that they named the river Rio dos Camarões, River of Prawns.3 But this name was to undergo further changes with each new arrival of European traders (in both natural and human resources) and conquerors. The name became Camarones to the Spaniards, Kamerun to the Afterword / 179 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Germans, the Cameroons to the British, and Cameroun to the French. The Portuguese arrived in the fifteenth century, launched sugar plantations, and began the slave trade in the sixteenth...