Africa Remembered Adventures in Post-Colonial Nigeria and Beyond
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Africa Remembered Adventures in Post-Colonial Nigeria and Beyond Steve Clapp 1 Copyright 2008 by Steve Clapp. All rights reserved. The chapter entitled “Highlife Comes to Yola Club” was originally published in the October 1968 Washingtonian magazine and is reprinted with permission. Photographs on pages 27,63,65,75, and 76 by Lowell Fewster; all others by the author. Book design and layout by Florence Nash 2 INTRODUCTION When President Kennedy launched the Peace Corps The early 1960s were a time of hope in Nigeria. in 1961, I was working as a copyboy on the New York Tensions between the north and the south had not yet Post. In the scruffy newsroom in lower Manhattan, I erupted into civil war and a series of military dictator- responded to shouts of “Copy!” from reporters, carried ships. Elsewhere in Africa other newly independent fresh editions of the newspaper to the 19th floor aerie of countries struggled with their colonial heritage, while publisher Dorothy Schiff, and fetched coffee and cigars southern African countries chafed under minority white for editors sitting around the rim. rule. I was privileged to witness this time of transition between colonial empires and fledgling nation-states. I was a small town minister’s son who had seldom traveled outside New England and had never flown in an I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my late airplane. Foreign films in art houses fueled my desire to mother, Ruth Caswell Clapp, for saving my letters home, see the world, but I couldn’t imagine how to do it. I had typing them up on stencils for my father’s mimeograph applied for Army Intelligence as a college senior but was machine, and distributing them to a wide circle of family rejected for medical reasons. Despite encouragement and friends. She would have been thrilled to see this from my father, I couldn’t bring myself to become a book. missionary. I wish to thank to my wife Bette Hileman and my The Peace Corps opened an unexpected door of Peace Corps housemate Lowell Fewster for reading the opportunity. I don’t remember applying in 1962, but I do manuscript, and Florence Nash for her superb layout and remember the phone call inviting me to train for service design. in Nigeria. Teaching in Africa seemed more fun and Spring 2008 exciting than waiting for a trial as a reporter on the Post. 3 4 Contents A place called Yola 7 A sojourn in Dapchi 31 Safari to the Mambila Plateau 59 Highlife comes to Yola Club 89 Visiting the “godless ones” 101 From Angola to Zanzibar 117 5 6 A PLACE CALLED YOLA Africa and the Peace Corps seemed a match made in The first European to visit Yola was the German heaven. Newly independent countries were eager to expand their explorer Heinrich Barth. Arriving in 1851, he found “a school systems at little or no cost, and America had a ready large open place, consisting, with a few exceptions, of supply of young, idealistic college graduates — “BA general- conical huts surrounded by spacious courtyards, and ists,” we were called — who could be quickly trained as teachers even by cornfields, the houses of the governor and those and installed in African schools. of his brothers being built alone of clay.” However, Nigerian secondary boarding schools were still It was a Friday, the Muslim day of worship, and staffed and run, for the most part, by expatriates who had stayed Barth’s men proceeded to the mosque, an oblong hall on after the demise of colonial rule. As a result, there was with clay walls and a flat thatched roof. His companions ongoing tension between career British educators and the fresh- raised their rifles in the air and fired a salute. faced Americans who suddenly appeared in their ranks. Armed “This,” Barth recalled in his journal, “was not very with recent memories of our high school years, we were a constant judicious.” source of wonder and irritation to our colleagues and our students. “I preferred the American way of teaching,” one of The disturbance so annoyed Yola’s emir that he our former schoolboys said decades later, “but I learned to give refused to grant Barth an interview for two days. When British answers.” the emir did agree to an audience, he rejected the explorer’s gifts and ordered him expelled from the town. During our Peace Corps training in New York City, one of the instructors mentioned a place called Yola, a Despite this inauspicious beginning, foreigners came hellhole in a river valley surrounded by hills that trapped to Yola in increasing numbers, first as soldiers and the heat reflecting off its hard soil base. I don’t remem- traders, then as missionaries and technicians. A British ber the context, but he made it clear that it was a place base camp in the port village of Jimeta was converted to avoid. Sure enough, I was assigned to teach English in into a sabon gari (“new town” in the language of the a secondary boarding school for boys in Yola, the capital Hausa-speaking tribes of the area) for non-Muslim of Adamawa Province in the so-called “Middle Belt” residents of Yola. between northern and southern Nigeria. Most of the foreigners were Englishmen. By 1963 Left: Benue River in the dry season there were also Americans, continental Europeans, 7 Indians and West Indians in Jimeta. Regardless of origin, countryside was beautiful and the people fascinating. foreigners were known to the local populace as Batures The broad Benue River flowed across an immense plain (“Europeans”) and to one another as “expatriates.” against the backdrop of the Cameroon mountains. Cattle egrets roosted in baobab trees at sunset. Hawks and Early in its history Jimeta acquired a reputation as a vultures circled endlessly in the sky. punishment station. Before tropical medicine and air- planes, a group of five British soldiers sent to Jimeta could expect that three of their number would die out- A smoothly functioning household right and a fourth return home permanently broken in My own journey to Yola began with a charter health. Even in the 1960s the station wasn’t a pleasant flight across the Atlantic Ocean and continued with a place to spend three or four years. Jimeta’s remote loca- train trip from the jungles of southern Nigeria to flat, tion on the cool Kaduna in the north. The final 500 miles to Yola Benue River were driven on a dusty, often unpaved one-lane highway forbade travel to that served as the North’s principal east-west artery. We other expatriate sped along at 40 to 50 miles per hour on the clear settlements on stretches. A cloud of dust signaled the approach of weekends. another car or a “mammy wagon,” lorries that contained During the 110- incredible loads of goods and people. Because of the degree weather constant danger of accident, these trucks bore colorful of the hot mottos such as “Thy Will Be Done” or “More Days, season, expatri- More Hope.” ates moved their beds outside The car windows were closed; the driver steered to their houses in the side of the road, and the two vehicles eased by each hopes of catch- other. My hair turned about two shades redder during the ing a stray night trip. Red laterite dust from the roadway got into every- breeze. thing, even suitcases locked in the car’s “boot” (trunk). Compensat- ing for these Left: British soldier’s grave in Yola Right: Faculty house shared hardships, the by Lowell Fewster and me 8 Three of us were driven by a rather nervous En- In contrast with the two of them, who had to set up glishman who taught physics and chemistry at Adamawa an entire household, I moved into a system that had been P.S.S. The other riders were Harvey Flad and John functioning smoothly for well over a year. There were Bishop, who would be teaching in a newly opened school four of us plus the servants. Hassan, the cook, prepared in Ganye, a town even more remote than Yola. They food for all four. Isa helped him and also cleaned our would be surrounded by the pagan Chamba tribe of house. Abubakar, the so-called “small boy,” washed and Sardauna Province, a new jurisdiction formed from cleaned up after Lowell Fewster and me. sections of the former British Cameroon that became Lowell was a Princeton graduate who had dropped part of Nigeria. The Chamba voted almost to a man to out of Harvard Divinity School after a year to join the become part of the French Cameroon, so the Nigerian Peace Corps. The others were Tom Seiler, a graduate of government was eager to woo them with schools and Indiana (Pa.) State College who taught English, and Rod roads. Hence Harvey and John. Larson, an outdoorsman from the Midwest who taught chemistry and general science. Tom and Rod were the first Peace Corps volun- teers to arrive in Yola and would leave later that year. Except for the hot climate and the small size of the expatriate community, ours was scarcely a hardship post. We regularly dined on guinea fowl shot by Rod, then adjourned to the senior service club to play tennis, darts and snooker, a favorite billiards game of the British. Adamawa P.S.S. was evenly divided between Christian and Muslim students, reflecting political compromise. The Muslim boys didn’t score as well on entrance tests on average, but they were 9 of pagan tribes and even one or two, far in the hills, that had not yet been “settled.” Every five years or so an unwary tax collector got his head chopped off.