Culture and Ideas—Gold: “Takumbeng, C’est Quoi?”
by David Torrey Peters
I.) Escravos Rising
Ugborodo, Nigera. July 8th, 2002: In the weak, unsaturated light before daybreak, a husband’s arm flopped over to his wife’s side of the bed and came to rest in the indented space where she should have been. Outside, too early to expect such things, female forms flitted through the underbrush on paths still muddy from the outgoing tide. Farther east, the forms gathered, here two, there four, until they converged en masse, a seething mob of women, on the banks of the Escravos river.
A short time later, an hour, maybe half that, the first of the rough-neck oil workers walked groggily towards the docks to catch the Ginuwe, the ferry that shuttled them daily into Chevron Texaco’s Escravos refinery. A surprise awaited them: hundreds of women. All shapes and sizes, ages and status, octogenarians beside teenagers, mothers alongside mother-in-laws; and the common denominator — anger.
The captain of the Ginuwe, unaware of the danger that awaited him on the far shore, maneuvered the thrusters until the craft slid parallel alongside the dock. Once bow and stern lines had been cleated tight, the women struck. They surged onto the dock, pouring over the sides of the ferry, over-running the boat. The attack came swiftly; by the time the captain might have raised a response on the radio, the women were in control. “He was afraid.” one of the leaders, Mama Ayo, later said, “We told him not to say anything. The guards believed it was the workers coming. Before they knew it, we were inside.”
* * *
Escravos, the heart of Chevron Texaco’s Nigerian oil production, takes its name from the Portuguese word for slaves. The complex is massive, the size of 583 football fields, employing over seven hundred oil-workers to produce three hundred and fifty thousand barrels of Nigerian Crude daily. Ten million five hundred thousand each month.
A little patch of America blossoming on the petroleum-rich soil of the Niger Delta. Behind the concrete wall, beyond the barbed wire, one finds telephones, microwaves, fresh fruit, foam beds, and most importantly for the visiting Texans, air-conditioned climate control. A runway and landing pad provide a means of direct access from Lagos — no dusty trip across the countryside, no contact with poverty, no accusatory local faces.
Just down the shoreline from Escravos, the village of Ugborodo slowly sinks into the sea. To construct Escravos, the folks at Chevron Texaco concluded that the little creek bordering the village would need to be widened and expanded. Foreign workers in John Deere bulldozers and Caterpillar cranes arrived. They excavated the mangrove forests that had long served the villagers as burial grounds; super-sized that creek – the American way. Unfortunately, no one at Chevron Texaco had accounted for the erosion such an expanse of water would cause. The village of Ugborodo began to wash away. High tide submerged whole sections of the village ankle-deep in brackish water. Once clued in to this erosion dilemma, Chevron Texaco came up with a solution: nowadays, facing the little out-houses that dot the Ugborodo side of the river, a concrete barrier wall protects the complex by diverting high-tide floods into the village.
* * *
The women of Ugborodo descended swarm-like from the Ginuwe, infesting every cranny of the Escravos complex. They cordoned off runways, took oil-workers hostage, shut down oil production, played with the microwaves, tested out the foam mattresses, and laughed gleefully when their phone calls went through. They kept roughly seven hundred oil-workers captive outside, while the women themselves basked in the hitherto only-heard-of climate control. A thirty-three year old woman named Roli Ododuh remarked, “The Bible describes Paradise as a beautiful place where there is everything. When we got in there, it was really like Paradise.” An older woman named Anirejotse Esuku put it more succinctly, “I saw America there.”
* * *
The women of Ugborodo were not the first to attempt a take-over of a foreign-owned oil-processing facility in the Niger delta. In the past, local villagers who took it upon themselves to mix it up with Chevron Texaco in Nigeria have not fared well.
May 25th 1998: Unarmed Nigerian youths, roughly two hundred in number, occupied one of Chevron Texaco’s off-shore oil platforms. The youths pledged to hold the platform until Chevron acquiesced to their demands: provide local villages with potable water, electricity, environmental reparations, as well as employment and scholarships for young people.
In phone negotiations, Chevron officials conceded to the demands and promised to send an envoy out on a helicopter to finalize the agreements. Instead, members of the Nigerian paramilitary mobile police force and Nigerian marines boarded the helicopters. James Neku, Chevron’s acting director of security, accompanied the soldiers on the flight out to the platform.
Two activists were shot shortly after the helicopters landed. Although Chevron contends that the youths were killed after they attempted to disarm the Nigerian troops, forensic evidence suggests the two activists were shot in the back.
Chevron Spokesperson Sola Omole in an interview on “Democracy Now with Amy Goodman:”
Q: Who took them in, on Thursday morning, the Mobile Police, the Navy?
Omole: We did. We did. Chevron did. We took them there.
Q: By how?
Omole: Helicopters. Yes, we took them in.
Q: Who authorized the call for the military to come in?
Omole: That’s Chevron’s management.
Afterwards, Chevron declined to provide electricity, water, or any other form of aid to the local villages cited by the Nigerian youth who took over the platform.
January 4th, 1999: “We were here in the village. At about 2-3 p.m. we saw a Chevron helicopter flying by on the other side of the river, and then flying along the route of the pipeline. By the time it got to us it was flying very low, and then it started firing at us. We didn’t know what to do, and we ran into the bush. After thirty minutes or so the helicopter was gone. Then some of the community members came back and were calling to the others to come back from the bush. We were gathered here on the river side and were discussing what had happened when we saw Chevron boats coming towards us carrying soldiers. Three were Chevron sea trucks (two numbers were 221 and 242), the ones they normally use, and the other one was a military boat with a machine gun mounted on it. They were full of soldiers, maybe more than one hundred in all. We ran into the bush again but as we were running they started firing, it was so intense I can’t describe it, dugu-dugu-dugu-dugu-dugu. As I was running a bullet wounded me on my leg. When we went into the bush we saw fire everywhere in the community, everything burning. Then we heard the boats leaving, so we came back carefully, crawling to see if it was safe and watching who was around. No one was there, so we called to the others in the bush to come back. We saw two people lying dead on the ground, Kekedu Lawuru, and Timi Okuru, a woman. We started crying, and called to the others to come. But some did not come back: fifteen are missing till today. Maybe the bodies are in the river. About twenty were injured, of which ten or so were from bullet wounds, the rest from branches and stones as they ran into the bush. Almost all our houses were destroyed, burnt to the ground. All our property was destroyed. We had a boat that could carry forty or fifty persons which was sunk in the river. All our canoes were destroyed. We have nothing now, no means of livelihood.”
A few days prior, some of the residents of the rural villages Opia and Ikiyan had gotten into a scuffle with members of Chevron’s private security forces; perhaps justifiably, as Chevron had previously unveiled a plan to route a pipeline directly through the center of the villages. The day following the attack, the Nigerian Army sent Chevron a handwritten invoice for $109.25, which Chevron paid, to cover expenses for “services carried out…responding to attacks from Opia village against security agents guarding Searrex.”
* * *
The women of Ugborodo occupied Escravos for ten days. Chevron sent down Jay Pryor, the American head of Chevron Texaco’s Nigerian operations to negotiate. According to both sides it was all very cordial. Pryor, originally an oil engineer from Mississippi, seemed almost enthusiastic about the takeover. “There was an organized effort to try to give us, I would say, what was characterized to me a — a try to give us some feedback, to try and get more attention to their plight.”
On July 17th, the two sides met to sign a memorandum of understanding. The women agreed to leave the Escravos terminal. Pryor guaranteed that Chevron would hook the village electric and water grids directly to Escravos. He pledged to build schools, a community center, and a series of two bedroom houses. Local women who ran fish and poultry farms were awarded contracts to supply the terminal with meat. Chevron agreed to equip and staff a roving hospital-boat, able to move up the river and along the coast. Finally they promised to resume construction on a place called “New Town.” “New Town” was exactly that, a brand-new, uninhabited village of concrete bunkers, to be ready and waiting when Ugborodo finally sank into the ocean.
* * *
Q: How is it that several hundred unarmed women from Ugborodo were able to take over the largest oil processing facility in Africa, capture seven hundred rough-neck oilmen hostage, rebuff (in ascending order of belligerence and brutality) Chevron Texacos’s own private security force, the Nigerian Police, the Nigerian paramilitary mobile police force (the “Kill ‘n’ Go”), and both the Nigerian Army and Navy, not to mention negotiate for the most generous concessions ever granted by Chevron Texaco?
A: They were naked.
II.) Takumbeng
Shortly after winning Cameroon’s 1992 presidential election, Ni John Fru Ndi fled behind the two-story wall that surrounds his compound and hunkered down for a siege. The army commanded by the incumbent president had arrived in Bamenda with orders to arrest and most likely kill him. The well-armed troops marched down the washed out clay road that leads to Fru Ndi’s compound, and there found the outer wall surrounded by a throng of naked old women busy stripping off their clothes. The women belonged to a secret society of post-menopausal women called the Takumbeng, who had not been active in nearly one hundred years. The naked women greeted any soldier to wander within range with screeched curses and water flung from earthenware pots. Presently, some of the troops began to feel ill, others grew uneasy and frightened, until the army turned and retreated.
* * *
I was introduced to Ni John Fru Ndi by Rotcod Gobata , the writer and journalist whose inflammatory stance towards Paul Biya, the then-and-current president of Cameroon, had forced him to write under a pen-name. The titles of his two books;
- The Past Tense of Shit
and
- I Spit on Their Graves
, offer some idea as to his position on the man.
On several occasions, I asked Gobata how the women of the Takumbeng had managed to rebuff a group of heavily armed gendarmes intent on breaching Fru Ndi’s compound. His response was invariably cryptic.
“Some of the soldiers died, so they got scared.”
“Yeah, but I heard the women were unarmed.” I insisted, “So how did the soldiers die?”
“The women were naked.”
“So? What happened to make the army get scared?”
“Some of the soldiers saw the women naked and died.”
“Why did the soldiers die though?”
“They were sick to the stomach.”
“So some soldiers who were sick, saw some women naked and then they died. If they were sick and dying, you’d think they’d be happy that their last sight was a bunch of”
“No, they died because the women were naked.”
“Yeah, but did the women kill them?”
“The women didn’t kill them, they died of stomach sickness.”
And so on.
Finally, said Gobata, irritated, “What if I took you to see Ni John Fru Ndi? You can ask him.”
* * *
Ni John Fru Ndi had been a bookseller in Bamenda in the grasslands of Cameroon before founding the Social Democratic Front (SDF) in 1990. Over the next two years, his party rose to become the only viable opposition to Cameroonian president Paul Biya, who had been in power for over a decade. In 1992, Fru Ndi ran as the SDF candidate against Paul Biya in the first Cameroonian presidential elections monitored by independent international observers.
In Bamenda, the unofficial center of government opposition, supporters of Fru Ndi’s SDF party made preparations for violence on election day. They expected violence because of threatening documents that emerged, like the one circulated by MP Sammy Najeme, a Biya supporter, that called for:
Our youths, our vanguards, to beat up any stranger who does not vote for President Paul Biya. If you see any [Anglophone or Bamileke ] coming out of the polling booth, accost him and ask him to show his unused ballot papers. If he has not voted for Paul Biya pluck off his eyes.
One of my Bamileke friends confessed that he had gone to the polls in a group of ten, each of them carrying either knives or chains.
On the night after the election, The National Democratic Institute of the United States and Transparency International both declared Fru Ndi the victor. Meanwhile in Yaounde, the capitol of Cameroon, President Biya’s official election tally had Fru Ndi losing with 37 percent of the vote to Biya’s own 39 percent. The Supreme Court of Cameroon, whose members Biya himself had appointed, verified the numbers.
In a few hours, celebrations in Bamenda turned violent. When it became apparent that Biya had maneuvered to steal the election, the SDF supporters were already amassed on the streets with weapons in hand. Pro-SDF mobs swept through the townships, torching the businesses and homes of any known or even suspected Biya ally.
The following morning, Biya declared a state of emergency in Bamenda and moved in with troops. Heavily armed police and soldiers clashed with rioting pro-SDF demonstrators. Despite published photos and news reports to the contrary, the government minister of information insisted that not one civilian had died in clashes between SDF supporters and government troops. However, The U.S. Department of State’s 1993 report on human rights practices concludes that the police and army of Cameroon had engaged in “serious human rights abuses, including political and extrajudicial killings.” Chris Mwunwe of the Cameroon Post went so far as to write of “arms and legs lost in fierce con-frontations with armed troops.” Scars left by pro-Biya soldiers who beat, raped, and tortured Bamenda into submission have yet to fade from the collective psyche of the town.
During the riots, Ni John Fru Ndi holed up in his compound with 145 other SDF supporters. In the chaos of the riots, a mixed force of gendarmes and soldiers were beaten back from his door by the naked women of the Takumbeng. Unable to arrest him, the gendarmes placed Fru Ndi under “house arrest.” a measure that amounted to a two month siege of his compound.
* * *
Initial Meeting with Fru Ndi 7/12/03 11:00 A.M.
Under what appears to be a Chinese-style lou, former president-elect of Cameroon and Chairman of the SDF, Ni John Fru Ndi, enters to greet Rotcod Gobata, the underground journalist. At Gobata’s side is a young American man, with a notebook folded double in his back pocket.
Fru Ndi: Who is this boy you have brought to see Fru Ndi?
Gobata: He is an American friend of mine. He studies at the University in Yaounde, and I was hoping he might be able to ask you a few questions about the Takumbeng and their uh…assistance after the 1992 elections.
American: Good day sir, I appreciate–
Fru Ndi: (Loudly) Is Fru Ndi the Takumbeng? Why would he come here to ask Fru Ndi about the Takumbeng?
Gobata: No, Fru Ndi is Fru Ndi.
Fru Ndi: I know who Fru Ndi is. I was asking the young man.
American: (pause) Uh, what I mean is, sir, I understand the Takumbeng aided Fru Ndi… I mean you… back in the ninety-two election and-
Fru Ndi: I repeat — Is Fru Ndi the Takumbeng?
American: Well, no sir. Fru Ndi is not the Takumbeng?
Fru Ndi: There, he said it. (Suddenly expansive, as if addressing a lecture hall) Fru Ndi is NOT the Takumbeng. Yet he comes to ask Fru Ndi about the Takumbeng. Young man, if you want to know how a doctor cures his patients, you ask the doctor, you don’t get a lesson in surgery from the patient.
American: (Pause) True sir, but in medicine nowadays, the effectiveness of any medical procedure is evaluated by talking to the patient about their symptoms before any treatment, then following up later see if a given treatment or procedure had any success in alleviating those symptoms. Talking with a doctor only tells part of the story.
Fru Ndi: Eh? (To Gobata) Why does he speak in metaphors like that? Clever, but it could get irritating, hmm? Nevermind. Gobata, you may bring the boy to lunch with us. How does two o’clock sound?
Gobata: Um, I sort of had previous… I was just sort of hoping you could talk to the boy, I mean him, rather, David, that is.
Fru Ndi: Who?
Gobata: (points at the American). Him.
Fru Ndi: Does he like hedgehog? If so, by all means, he may join us.
American: Is it like squirrel? I had squirrel once.
(The cell phone holstered on Fru Ndi’s belt rings. Before the ring has fully sounded, Fru Ndi has answered it; his removal of the cell-phone from his belt reminiscent of a quick-draw artist.)
Fru Ndi: (Into cell-phone) Fru Ndi.
Gobata: Lunch sounds wonderful, but you see, I agreed to meet my niece at two o’clock…
Fru Ndi: (Into cell-phone) Fru Ndi! Of course Fru Ndi! Who else would it be? (Covering the cell-phone with his free hand) Excellent, two o’clock it is then. And tell the boy we don’t eat squirrels in Cameroon. (Strides purposefully out of the room, humming into his cell phone)
American: Thank you sir.
Gobata: (to Fru Ndi’s receding back) Chairman, I really don’t think I can be there because I told…. Chairman?…Damn. (Gobata stands in silence for a moment, before he turns to the American)
Gobata: Squirrels?
* * *
I never met a single member of the Takumbeng. The residents of Bamenda tended to be very suspicious of Americans. Eighteen years earlier, the people of Bamenda had woken up to find the stiff bodies of over 1,800 people lying along the shores of nearby Lake Nyos. Most of the dead appeared to have passed away at nearly the same moment. Their bodies were found exactly where they would have been at nine-o’clock at night. Women lay near extinguished cooking fires, dead men huddled in groups over open beers gone flat. In the hills surrounding the lake, the bodies of white cattle, stiff with rigor mortis, lay in clusters. There were no flies on the bodies. The flies were dead too.
Shortly afterwards, scores of hydrologists, geochemists, pathologists, and limnologists from across the globe inundated the area. They diagnosed the cause of the disaster quickly. Lake Nyos, 683 feet deep, sits directly atop a volcano. Carbon dioxide from magma degassing deep under Lake Nyos had percolated up into the bottom layers of water over a course of years or maybe even centuries. The pent-up gas dissolved in the water had suddenly exploded, releasing a wave of concentrated carbon dioxide. Like its cousin carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide is odorless and colorless. At high concentrations CO2 displaces oxygen. In air that is five percent carbon dioxide, candles will snuff out and car engines will putter to a stop. At ten percent, people begin to hyperventilate, grow dizzy, and eventually lapse into a coma. At thirty percent, people gasp once or twice and fall to the ground dead.
No one disputes that 1,800 people died of carbon dioxide poisoning from a sub-surface gas explosion. The big question is, why did it happen? The Western scientists generally shrugged their shoulders and said it was bound to happen sometime. People in Bamenda often subscribe to another explanation: Paul Biya had hired mercenary foreign scientists to make the lake explode in order to wipe out a hotbed of political dissidents. These mercenaries were either American, or — in a bit of anti-Semitism gone adrift — Israelis.
The case against Americans and Israelis was strengthened when Mount Cameroon erupted in 1999. Again foreigners were seen on the mountain just before the eruption. In The Angry Gods and the Eruption of Cameroon Mountain 1999, a glossy pamphlet written to teach school-children about the disaster, the author Jonas N. Dah writes, “One rumor about the cause of the eruption stated that foreigners went up the mountain and performed medicine in order to win the last mountain race, a practice which was against the will of the gods.” When I briefly met Paramount Chief S.M.L. Endeley of the Bakweri tribe, he affirmed that once again these meddling foreigners were surely either Americans or Israelis.
Given the reputation Americans enjoyed in the Bamenda area, I couldn’t feign surprise that no one wanted to tell me the secret identities of the members of the Takumbeng. The presence of Americans and their purported occult practices leads to natural disasters and dead Cameroonians. A young American was the last person with whom the secrets of the Takumbeng should be entrusted. Consequently, no one who had been outside Ni John Fru Ndi’s compound the night the Takumbeng stood down the Cameroonian army was willing to tell me what they saw. My inquiries were rebuffed with a simple restatement of local belief: any man who sees a member of the Takumbeng naked would have long since died from the accompanying curse. Thus there was no one left to talk to me anyhow.
* * *
True to his word, Fru Ndi served hedgehog for lunch. Although there were only three of us eating, the table was set for fifteen. Dishes of food were placed in front of the empty seats. I thought maybe some of the taciturn young men with clipboards who wandered in and out of the house might join us, but they waited in the living room and watched cartoons while we ate.
Fru Ndi was not a terribly large man, but was clearly accustomed to being listened to; he occupied space with the same easy authority as a man half again his size. I did not get to ask many questions; the few that I did ask, Fru Ndi nimbly turned into pro-SDF diatribes. His craggy face topped a green collared shirt which appeared to be some sort of compromise between African and Western styles. He wore his hair cropped close, more gray than not, unlike the SDF political pictures I had seen, in which he sported a head of rich black hair or a fiercely shaven pate.
I have a hard time trusting the impression I got from Fru Ndi during that lunch. While it’s true that he was all the things that a leader should be — urbane, current, worldly, and able to articulate his convictions – I also glimpsed the beginnings of something cartoonish. If the African leaders caricatured in movies are drunk on power, my impression of Fru Ndi was that he had a little buzz going. He had a suspicious habit of referring to himself in the third person. It was as though he had grown to think of himself as an idea rather than a man. Midway through lunch, he began to use his own name and his party’s acronym interchangeably, i.e. “The Social Democratic Front (SDF) went to make a speech in Maroua last week.”
This little conversational tic might have been an eccentricity, but he shares it with many leaders who have made themselves an icon in a personality cult. Paul Biya’s CPDM party, for example, is essentially synonymous with Biya himself, who has made himself essentially synonymous with Cameroon. In the middle of an economic crisis Biya made a speech in which he said “le Cameroun se porte bien (Cameroon is doing well or Cameroon is healthy)” when perhaps a more accurate assessment would have been “Biya is doing well.” Biya’s cult of personality isn’t as obvious as, say, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, who elevated his own mother to mythic proportions by building national monuments to her days as a laundry maid. Still, Cameroon’s symbol is a lion, its champion soccer team is named the Lions, and its president (Paul Biya) goes by the nickname L’homme Lion (The Lion Man) – not coincidentally either. Fru Ndi portrays himself as the anti-Biya, but I spent a good deal of that lunch pondering whether, if he were elected to power, his autonomous “SDF” would morph into “Cameroon.”
“Eat some more. You aren’t eating at all.” Fru Ndi had said mid-way through lunch, handing me another gallon-sized plastic bag of homemade corn fufu. “If I were you I would be embarrassed. When I was a guest with your Bill Clinton, I ate everything in sight.”
I opened the bag and spooned a fist-sized chunk down my throat. Despite all the young people lounging about the house, Fru Ndi’s wife, Rose, had prepared all the food. The hedgehog meat and huckleberry were very good, but I had some difficulty stuffing down the gallons of corn starch that were a staple of Bamenda cuisine.
“Gobata.” Fru Ndi said, placing his elbows on the table and folding his hands together, “About these 2004 elections. You will be covering them?”
Gobata looked as full as I was. He stared despondently at the huge pile of huckleberry leaves on his plate. “No sir. I no longer write my column.”
“Nonsense Gobata. You will write next election, we need good coverage. The CRTV is not adequate. Already, all the opposition parties are consolidating. If Biya again rigs the elections, there will be no peace in Cameroon.” He nodded meaningfully at Gobata. I felt like I was missing some sort of subtext.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Fru Ndi looked at me sharply. He unfolded his hands and held them out over his plate. Then he formed two guns with his thumbs and forefingers, like a little kid, and made gunshot sounds. “The young men of this country, they come to me and they want change. Although I perhaps could, I myself choose not to expose Cameroonians — who have already been devastated by AIDS and poverty — to civil war. But I also won’t stop them if they decide to evict Biya by force.” He made two more gun-shot noises and holstered his fingers.
If I had been a more important person, or somehow influential, I don’t think Fru Ndi would have referred to the outbreak of Cameroonian civil war by making shooting noises with his fingers. Fifteen years as a political force must have taught him how to tend to his image when he thought it mattered. But Fru Ndi had pegged me right from the start; he felt no compunction to guard his words (or apparently, his pistol-fingers) around some American kid with a poorly-knotted tie. I have always heard about the odd detachment that men in power privately display towards the serious tasks of ruling or war. Maybe Saddam Hussein turned his hands into air-planes and made bombing noises after he dropped Botulinum toxin on Iraqi Kurds.
Fru Ndi went one better later in the lunch, when he made comparisons between himself and Charles Taylor, ex-president of Liberia. Dispatches from Liberia under Charles Taylor reported the situation to be a very close approximation of hell — complete with limb-amputating, amphetamine-fueled soldiers clad in wedding dresses and child-soldiers who held up candy-stores with RPGs.
At the time of our meeting Taylor was considering going into exile in Nigeria. Gobata began to say that he felt exile for Taylor would be a good thing, but Fru Ndi cut him off with a dismissive hand wave. “If he leaves Liberia, what happens to all his followers? I have said it before, and I will say it again; no good shepherd can abandon his sheep. That is why I can’t go into exile.”
I nearly blew chunks of hedgehog out my nose. How should one interpret it when the guy who everyone considers Cameroon’s brightest political light makes a benign comparison between himself and a man who made a career of mass murder?
A few days after lunch with Fru Ndi, I mentioned to Gobata how much Fru Ndi struck me as a caricature. A strange expression passed over his face, a look reserved for someone who has embarrassed himself and doesn’t know it. He raised his shoulders in a non-committal gesture and looked away, mumbling something like, “Well, you know, these powerful men….” I have dwelled upon that look, to the point that I have developed an alternate interpretation of the conversation that took place over that lunch. I think it is possible that Fru Ndi acted out a caricature because he did care what I think, not because I was so insignificant that he could let down his guard. Did he understand the opinion I was forming of him? And in turn, did he meet me and see a young arrogant American, ready and culturally-predisposed to see all African leaders through a pat Coming to America lens? Maybe by meeting my expectations, he off-handedly mocked me; the way I used to poke fun at Frenchmen by telling them how much I loved McDonald’s hamburgers. Whether he was playing me or not, I’ll never know – but note his skill as a politician: I never once pinned him down on a question about the Takumbeng.
* * *
Nwga Mary-Anne Ngengang was a teenager when the Cameroonian army moved into Bamenda. Although the identities of the Takumbeng members were purportedly unknown, the nights when Mary-Anne’s mother wasn’t home to prepare dinner corresponded nicely with appearances of the Takumbeng. Mary-Anne Ngengang grew up with the Takumbeng; their secrets formed her childhood. It was only natural that, seven years later, Ngengang found the Takumbeng and their incantations and songs to be the perfect subject for her 1999 Master’s thesis.
Ngengang got a B on her thesis, and at the time I lived in Cameroon, worked as a school teacher in a small village near the Nigerian border. Her thesis advisor, Babila Mutia, a professor of African Religion at the Ecole Normale of the University of Yaounde, owned one of the three extant copies of Ngengang’s thesis. “Here.” he said, pulling it off the shelf of his office, “You might want to take a look at this one as well, although she relies a bit heavily on her own experience and doesn’t touch on the wider discourse at all.” I photocopied the thesis, took the photocopies home, and didn’t realize what I had until almost three months later. Her 160-page thesis reads like an exposé written by someone who didn’t realize there was anything to expose. Imagine a memoir by Princess Diana’s maid or butler – a list of what lingerie the Princess had worn for which lover written as one might describe which teacups she had chosen for what meal.
In her thesis on the Takumbeng, Ngengang carefully transcribes all the incantations and rites that would reputedly kill a man should he ever hear them. She even translated them into English, so that they might be understood by those who don’t speak the local dialect. The rituals never to be seen by an outsider were described in the direct prose of someone for whom English was a second language. Her thesis could be the definitive how-to manual for performing most of the rites that have been guarded in absolute secrecy by generations of Bamenda women.
Mary-Anne Ngengang defined the Takumbeng as “a secret society of women, similar to the Anlu of Kom, that can only appear when the deities themselves have called the women together. They represent a potential force before which even eminent men must bow.” Ngengang expends a good deal of text reiterating that the Takumbeng is not a secret society or a club but rather a physical manifestation of a higher power. When Mary-Anne Ngengang’s mother went out with the Takumbeng, she ceased to be Mrs. Ngengang and became an i
