How the fourth most important man in Cameroon came to lunch at my house
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 23/Apr/2010 20:00, 34 days ago
Last Monday Luc Ayang, who is the fourth ranking Minister in Cameroon, the President of the Council for Economic and Social affairs (and who used to be the Prime Minister), along with the Minister for Secondary Education and an extremely large retinue of hundreds of other important people, came and had lunch at my house in Maga.The Sultan (left, with his servant who fans him) whose house I live in, besides being the Sultan, is also the local leader of the RDPC, Cameroon’s ruling political party, and so we were going to be hosting the Minister’s official visit in my compound, the Sultan’s Maga residence.On Friday morning the Sultan came to the house from his palace in Pouss to supervise the progress of our preparations. I went into the reception room to say hello, and was followed moments later by all the highest-ranking local RDPC members who’d come to receive instructions.“Mischa will prepare the food of the white people for the Minister,” the Sultan announced gleefully to his assembled audience, who were all sitting on the floor.There was enthusiastic nodding and promises that if I prepared a list of ingredients they would buy them for me at Maroua.“No, no, no.” I said. “If you make me cook the food of the white people I will accidentally poison the Minister and bring shame upon Maga.”“What?” someone asked. “You can’t cook the food of the white people?” I decided that toasted sandwiches and pasta with Sainsbury’s tomato sauce were not easily translatable cultural concepts, so I said no.I eventually convinced them that the Minister would be sure to eat much better if the food of the white people stayed off the menu and I joined the twenty strong team of women coming to my house to cook and followed their instructions very carefully.We started cooking at three pm on Sunday afternoon, and finished at eleven o’clock the next morning- I slept for four hours between two and six am, but there were some women who didn’t. Fortunately turning a Cameroonian backyard into a kitchen that can cater for three hundred people isn’t too difficult- you can slaughter the animals at the back and if you need anotherstove you just build another cooking fire in an empty patch of earth. Everyone was very entertained by my presence in the kitchen: a crowd of small children gathered round to watch the twin wonders of the white girl cooking and the speed of my English potato peeler.Our preparations on Monday morning were further complicated by the fact that when the Sultan’s in residence people aren’t meant to wear shoes in the compound and the 50 degree heat had made the sand too hot to walk on. After he arrived, wearing a particularly impressive gold embroidered cape and accompanied by a servant who fanned him and said Djamus (“Your Majesty”) after his every sentence, everyone was running across the sand as fast as possible and standing in the flower bed to stop their feet getting burnt.The Minister himself, who was small and smiley and wearing RDPC robes with big pictures of the President on (modelled by three of my fellow cooks on the left) stayed for an hour (after five days of intensive preparations) and upset all the people in charge of protocol by not sitting in the place that had been laid out for him. He did ask the Sultan why there was a white girl in his house, and the Sultan told him I was doing good deeds with schools and women, so I suppose I got the Ministerial stamp of approval.