I first met Jacques Ngoun, a Bagyeli Pygmy from south Cameroon, at a IUCN run forest conservation conference, on my first visit to Cameroon in February 1999.
Category Archives: Africa
Pygmy Health Project part 3
I was a refugee from the fighting in Goma, and the threatened attack on Bukavu, temporarily settled in a friendly Rwandan NGO just across the border in Cyangugu. But the project was in ruins. We had been driven out of Minova by the M23 rebel assault on Goma, and my colleague and friend Jean Claude had had to travel into rebel held Goma to pick up his two year old daughter. I was at a loss, as I was thousands of miles from home, and yet still a half dozen of miles away from my colleagues
Bambela, Etogo, Zali
Naming our daughter among the Ewondo 1700 words/12 minutes Felix with Judith and la belle mere A few weeks after my daughter was born, in the Central hospital in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, Judith and I prepared to register her birth at the town hall. Having a baby in Cameroon is not as simpleContinue reading “Bambela, Etogo, Zali”
Fleeing the M23 rebels, a Refugee in Rwanda
While researching Pygmy peoples access to healthcare in the DR Congo, I hear the booming of artillery fire across Lake Kivu. The M23 rebels are attacking Goma, and we have to flee…
Volcanoes, Pygmies, and M23
I was worried I might need to cancel my field trip in the eastern Congo, and the Foreign office travel advisory was less than reassuring: We advise against all travel to eastern and north eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The only exception to this is within the towns of Bukavu and Goma, where we advise against all but essential travel. In Bukavu and Goma we advise against travel at night and to avoid travelling alone at all times.
Agadez, Heart of the Sahara
Hitch-hiking across the Sahara in 1972, I got a ride with Jacques across the most isolated part of my route, the 1,000 km from the Tamanrasset, Algeria to Agadez, Niger. We had run out of spare tires at the tiny community of Tegguiada In Tessoum, and Jacques had managed to get a ride with four flat tires and an empty jerrycan into Agadez, leaving me to look after the car until he returned.
Sahara Daze-3
At the camp ground in Tamanrasset there was a group of five Italian junkies who had decided to hitch-hike across the Sahara to get off heroin. Tamanrasset is the southernmost town in Algeria, sitting almost in the middle of the great desert.
First Knock Door
When Victor found I had an Ewondo girlfriend from the Centre Province, he asked me if I was a serious man.
“If you are a serious man, you need to know how to dote your love,” he said. “I will tell you how to go see her father.”
The Ewondo live in the French speaking Centre province, so I asked, “How do you know about the Ewondo?”
“I had a love from there,” he told me. “You must be ready for what will happen. It is called the First Knock Door. When you go to see the father to ask for his daughter, you will say to the father, ‘You have a nice flower in the family that I love’.”
A short walk in the Cameroon rainforest
(Summer 2014) Simon Waters; 15 minutes As we left Assok, morning light streamed down through the rainforest tree tops. Soon the trail crossed a wide mud-brown river on a fallen tree trunk and Etienne strolled unconcernedly across. Although my pack was lighter than Etienne’s, I needed to protect my iPhone, and digital camera, so IContinue reading “A short walk in the Cameroon rainforest”
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