4 May, 2012
After a grueling week of meetings at the University of Yaoundé as part of a team “evaluating” its Faculté des Arts, Lettres et Sciences Humaines at the behest of AFELSH., we were rewarded with a Saturday morning excursion to the near-by Apes Action Sanctuary in the Mefou National Park in Cameroon (“near-by” = an hour in a 4X4).
As I remarked en route in the Subaru, I usually don’t care for this kind of tourism. Yet there I was with the rest of them snapping photos and standing in awe at what my young colleagues Désiré Atenga and Jean-Bernard Evoung Fouda referred to initially as my “friends”, eventually as my relatives. For the resemblance is unmistakable.
Almost upon launching this blog in 2009, I wrote on Yaoundé and an earlier visit to Cameroon, which I am beginning to think of as yet another corner in my far-flung nexus of homes and pieds-à-terre. We stayed in the same hotel as I had three years ago which, despite certain shortcomings, has the advantage of a restaurant-bar with a menu running from your standard simple French fare through an array of Cameroonian dishes.
Cameroon is a net exporter of comestibles upon which is based a recognizable cuisine replete with specialties, porcupine stew and ngolè coming highly recommended by yours truly. I am always happy to have the chance to chew on manioc in its various incarnations, and if you want hot peppers, no need to import anything in a bottle. Even the simple dishes are delicious, since the poultry is literally free-range, pecking away wherever you go: grilled chicken tastes like chicken, eggs like eggs. The best local beer is “33 Export”, one of those pale lagers easy to find in the tropics, where they are a necessity of life. 
This time, as part of the evaluation procedure, I met a large number of professors and students at the Universty of Yaoundé, one of the best in Africa and bilingual to boot. The Faculty of Arts is huge, over 20,000 students. But despite the glut of students and the straightened material circumstances, it is amazingly well-run. Over and over I was struck by the serious personal commitment of the staff to their work and to their students, and by their intellectual quality.
There is a satisfying sense of having come full circle. The beginning of my career was in a small African college, now Cuttington University in Liberia, where I taught English, French and African Literature 1967-1969. The arc has descended in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Yaoundé. But enough about my work there last month, my academic swan song.
Slide show of our visit to the Mefou Ape Sanctuary.
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The two years I spent in Africa in my early twenties not only left me a huge place in my heart for things African, but a number of emotional triggers easily set off by tropical smells and sounds and best conveyed not here but in poetry.