Bonjour Madame And The Cameroonian High Commission

The overworked – yet of course totally African paced – mama looked up from behind eight different stacks of visa and passport applications, past the mug of lollipops through the glass at me. For a moment she regarded me with the same blank expression as the stuffed bear who defensively gripped one of the lollipops as he sat like a mascot up against the vitrine.

But then she recognized me as the visitor with inside connections and her face softened and a smile glowed forth to match her beautiful Cameroonian dress – a fuchsia print tastefully adorned with gold and green patterns and threads.

‘Bonjour Madame’ she beamed from within this chaotic antechamber – a place enclosed by typical cubical walling discordantly juxtaposed against the Holland Park architecture of the High Commissioner’s building. Behind her smile sat mountains of papers – all bunched in stacks several books high and tossed into a corner of the space like they were kindling for a fire. Before her sat a quantity of applications so overwhelming – and so much like the kindling in appearance – that I experienced inevitable apprehension about receiving a visa on the same day.

But as much as the defensive scowl of the guard teddy bear and the initial frown of the receptionist masked a warmth behind the front – so the chaos proved to mask an ability to return my visa-stamped passport to me within four working hours.

Had I not had other work commitments to attend to across the city before returning for a third trip to Holland Park to collect my little red passport, I’d have gladly stayed to witness the miracle that occurred when my visa got processed amidst the antechamber’s appearance of chaos and the constant stream of visitors that graced the waiting room.

Before I jetted off back across the city between my second and third consular visits in 30 hours, I was invited to pass from the narrow entry room through the heavy, white Victorian doors into the rest of the High Commission’s red-carpeted building. Bonjour Madame smilingly buzzed me through and told me to check in with Madame Colette upstairs before seeing Monsieur Mpouma Mokete – whose name I’d been rehearsing to pronounce for the last 24 hours, whose name carried gravitas like the Wizard of Oz, and whose hand probably carried the magic stamp needed for the approval of my visa.

To expedite the laborious visa process, he had been phoned by my host in Cameroon – Monsieur Maledy Omer – man of great connections, great height, and a smile like the Grinch’s but without a hint of malice at heart. The phone call certainly expedited the process in the long run but also beautifully convoluted things along the way.

In between Holland Park visits one and two I found myself on the phone – the personal mobile phone no less – of the one and only Monsieur Mpouma Mokete. The man snapped at me down the phone and put me in my place about showing up without proper documentation on visit one. I apologized and tried to explain where the confusion had crept into the miscommunication – but Monsieur Mpouma would have none of it and continued to discipline me sternly over the phone.

When he felt we had sufficiently established my error and his authority, his tone suddenly changed – and he proceeded to progress to the part of the conversation in which we would determine how to move forward to a workable solution. But this part of the conversation was just a formality as Omer had already phoned me from Cameroon to explain to me that – following his second conversation with Monsieur Mpouma – I needed to return to the High Commission with my papers either that afternoon or the next morning.

The path to a solution was already clearly communicated to all relevant parties involved – but somehow, protocol necessitated running over it again. What I hadn’t realized at first was that in fact the first part of the conversation – the part where I get yelled at and take it – was also just a formality – a part of the protocol.

There was some African rhyme and reason behind how this was all playing out and I was navigating my way through it one tentative – yet determined – step at a time – as best as I could discern how. My Austrian passport already carried in it one visa to Cameroon from last year, but I still felt like I had many miles to go before I had anything worth calling a grasp on this Central/West African culture.

Part of the journey to be made into another culture is simply going on the ride with your wits and analytical skills about you. You travel long enough and along the road, you begin to see forming patterns that make sense of things you’ve seen so far. There are moments like signposts that direct you into a place of deeper understanding of all that is not second nature – all that is ‘other’ in the culture.

I sat in Monsieur Mpouma’s spacious office on the second floor and recognized a signpost. I could not tell if the spaciousness was merely a mirage effect created by the fact that everything – except the desk and two chairs – stood packed away in cardboard boxes that lined the wall and flooded the corner of the room behind M. Mpouma’s desk.

He pulled out the wicker-backed chair for me and took his place on his leather throne. Between us sat the vast expanse of shiny wood that was his empty desk – no computer, no documents, no nameplate even, no pens – save the one he held between both hands contemplatively. As I watched him and waited I could see in the corner behind him boxes overflowing with all things packed away – or half unpacked – it was difficult to say.

And therein lay the signpost. It made me think of the entry room I just quit with Bonjour Madame sat behind the vitrine of cubical walling – the cheap wood laminate paneling cascading down from the ornate Victorian ceiling it adjoined to. I thought of the gilded metal picture frame encasing the president’s smiling Cameroonian face in the waiting room. The state-of-the-art HD TV screen behind Bonjour Madame playing music videos that made early MTV look good. The temporary tucked inside that of another era – the tacky against the backdrop of the tasteful – the advanced time-warped in the company of the archaic – the chaotic thriving across the realm of established, structured authority like mushrooms on the forest floor.

Both worlds collided into one oddly harmonious whole that only looks right in the context of Africa – that beautiful, vibrant continent of extremes. Both worlds fought for their rightful position in this whole picture as though to assert that they were there first. Both looked out of place and yet strangely in place – it’s difficult to say.

In a meeting appropriate to the discordant context in which it took place, I talked with Monsieur Mpouma about business in London and being raised across cultures. All the while the sentences danced between totally irrelevant and mundane and illuminating and poignant. We covered the distance between the Mpouma household in West London to the High Commission in Holland Park, to the reality and causes of this year’s poor coffee crop in Cameroon.

The dance was peppered with surreal information about things like the details of a recent West African business congress in London. At any moment I thought this chitchat might turn to the crux of the matter. But it never did – or there never was a crux – it’s difficult to say.

And soon I was on my way out the door, past the boxes, down the red-carpeted stairs, and through heavy, white Victorian doors, down the wide steps onto leafy Holland Park. I felt like Alice – unsure if I’d just fallen down the rabbit hole or reemerged.

I ran over all that transpired in my visa application process and I was struck by the odd sensation of being both a loser and a winner all at once – of being somebody and nobody within a single context.

When I remember my initial visit where I was turned out without the proper paperwork and subsequently scolded down the phone like a child, I see Bonjour Madame and her teddy’s face frowning at me and telling me without words that I am nobody. But into that perception flash images of my sitting in the High Commissioner’s office and the warm smile of Bonjour Madame and suddenly I think I must be somebody.

When I later came one last time to collect my visa – processed before the two-dozen other applicants I was ushered past in the waiting room – I felt I’d wielded power – and that I must be someone. Am I nobody or somebody? It’s difficult to say.

And then it dawns on me – I’m neither. I’m simply a person – foreign still to this culture – caught in the patterns of Cameroonian communication and the protocol of procedures that have long been established. I begin to see the pattern.

Just as discordant as it seems to me for anything to be achieved out of chaos, so unfamiliar does it seem for such warmth and ‘can do’ attitude to so abruptly follow the stern and unswerving. Until I see it for what it is – another aspect of the beautiful, vibrant, juxtapositional dance of extremes unique to Africa.

I see the pattern and I smile. Before I can be welcomed as somebody, I have to be put in my place as nobody.

When I returned for my third visit to the High Commission that afternoon, I came prepared. I’ve learned the pattern of the protocol and I’m ready to receive the warm, accommodating treatment I’ve graduated to as if it were the most normal thing in the world. At least this world.

As I touch down in Yaoundé 72 hours later, I look down at my visa-stamped passport and I remember. I don’t even bat an eyelid when I encounter the ‘you’re nobody’ tone and frown of the customs official – I just wait for it to naturally graduate into the smile that reminds me of Bonjour Madame.