Dégustation

‘I mean, what was with all those midgets at the Olympia club?? Was there a reason why?’ Mbula snapped out of her fading sleepy stupor on the long bus journey from western Cameroon down into Yaoundé. It seemed perhaps my coffee travel companion had been halfway to snoozing when this memory from several days back crept into her dream state and rocked her back from slumber.

I laughed very loudly at the memory of the night out at Douala’s former number 1 nightclub. Mbula – now fully awake again – joined me as our giggles peeled into hearty laughter. For once on this bus journey, our voices rang louder than our compatriots’ hearty and near-constant laughter.

Cameroonians are always seconds away from loud laughter – at anything – no big excuse needed. They seem to simply love to laugh together. But now the bus was quiet. The CICC staff and various African delegations traveling with us had worn themselves out with their own laughing – and with the many visits undertaken since leaving Douala early Sunday morning. Mbula and I were equally exhausted, and yet adrenaline and the privilege of this trip kept us going somehow.

As even our laughter died down I began to think about how I often find myself in these travels – caught in circumstances, among characters, and in scenarios – that mirror more the strange fictional worlds of Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy in Oz than anything real or plausible.

It’s true in dreams that time can warp, and spaces can collide and overlap, in ways they cannot in reality. Or can they? It’s no secret that the concept of time in Africa differs from the Western concept – ‘you have the watches, we have the time’ the African proverb elucidates with a wink. I could practically see the wink as I sat outside in the post-dusk dark of 6:30 pm enjoying the coffee cooperative’s buffet ‘lunch.’ Dinner would just have to be sometime after 11 pm.

And space?

With traditional Bamoun music and dance lining the ceremonial walkway at the ANJ Plantation offices in Koutaba, the King of Bamoun himself leans over and confides that after all the touring of the coffee plantation he is looking forward to the dégustation before anything else. Given that I’ve been flown in to be Festicoffee’s Dégustatrice and that, in my world, this refers to the science of coffee cupping, I am expecting a cupping of their coffees to be set up under the gazebo at the end of the red carpet we are parading down. But once the King and I and all the others have been sandwiched into the shade of the little gazebo, I see between the plates of delicious homemade cakes and fresh juices that the only coffees in sight are the rows of seedlings planted to elegantly line the red carpet. The enjoyment of this irony hasn’t yet worn off for me by the time we retire to the ceremonial tent for a roundtable that consists of chairs turned around into a square formation.

A circle can be a square as much as a dégustation at a coffee co-op can be an aperitif.

Maybe language shapes our perceptions. Can dinner be lunch and can lunch still be lunch when it is enjoyed at dinner?

A few evenings later I’m sitting in the audience at Yaoundé’s Palais des Sports – our Festicoffee venue – taking in a wild kaleidoscope of Cameroonian entertainment. The cultural evening moves into the first ever Miss Coffee Awards as a dozen women coffee farmers parade the catwalk in spectacular get-ups.

We recognize the memorable lady with the inordinately large spectacles from the square roundtable – she has made it to the foot of the catwalk somehow without her eyewear and is standing looking vaguely out in the direction of the panel of women serving as Miss Coffee judges. Judge #1 addresses this Miss Coffee candidate #8 and presents her with her first coffee general knowledge question. #8 hears the particularly low-pitched voice of the female judge and, half turned backstage in the direction of the loudspeakers through which the voice boomed its question, responds confidently and erroneously in correct compliance of protocol by addressing the female judge as ‘Monsieur.’ The whole scene is ridiculously funny to watch – somehow reflective of the surrealism of the chapter where Alice in Wonderland meets the Queen of Hearts in court.

Madame becomes Monsieur and behind is in front. Lunch is dinner, and a dégustation is whatever you want it to be. And that’s the freedom of Africa.

It’s very imprisoning if you long for constancy and a certain fixity of things. But if something deep within you longs to be set free from the mundane nature of predictability and certainty… you should come to Cameroon – it promises a dégustation of this kind of strange near-fictional freedom.