The Masked Rider by Neil Peart

Author:Neil Peart [Peart, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw
Publisher: Turnaround
Published: 2012-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

In the late afternoon we went to visit Kim, the Peace Corps volunteer, at her little bungalow. Kim was twenty, strawberry-blonde and freckled, and was near the end of her second year as a math teacher at the local school. She told us she was one of 160 Peace Corps people scattered around Cameroon, and had enjoyed her time in Jakiri, despite its remoteness and the odd bout of malaria — one of which had put her in a Yaoundé hospital. Guests were rare; she’d even put on makeup for us.

An elephant-head mask and a gamelan (thumb-piano) decorated her living-room wall, and a line of books, mostly well-used paperbacks, stretched across the top of a cabinet. No doubt inherited from other Peace Corps volunteers, they offered an inviting and varied collection of good reading: Faulkner, Steinbeck, Tolkien, Dickens, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Atlas Shrugged, Dune, Out of Africa, Great American Short Stories, as well as a row of college textbooks. With little else for entertainment — no television, no radio, no newspapers, no cinema — books were an important resource among the Peace Corps people. While glancing through one of the newsletters from Peace Corps Cameroon, I noticed the prominence given to book reviews, and the volunteers even advertised for specific books. “Wanted: The Sun Also Rises and Tender Is the Night. Can trade for something you want. Brian, posted in Yaoundé.”

Two other guests joined us for dinner. One was a Peace Corps supervisor visiting from Bamenda, named Chris. He told us he was from Dallas, though somehow he had escaped with barely a trace of Texas in his speech. (Probably a CIA cover.) The other guest was a tall Cameroonian man of about forty, named Paul, who was dressed in a knee-length cotton shirt and embroidered cap. Paul’s relation to Kim was unclear, but he seemed to be a kind of “houseboy emeritus,” as she had one of her students to do the fetching and carrying. Paul had been born in Jakiri, then had lived in Nigeria for many years, though now he admitted to us that he hadn’t liked it there (“too crowded”) and was glad to be back in Cameroon.

Our visit to the Fon of Nso sparked much of our conversation, the four of us still excited about our reception, and delighted by the hospitality the Fon had shown us. We told how we had been allowed to enter the Fon’s ceremonial chamber, and the conversation turned to juju. Kim mentioned that the masked spirits sometimes appeared in the middle of Jakiri, causing the local people to disappear from the streets in a panic. “I must admit,” she said, “they even frighten me. My mother visited me here last year, and you should have seen her face when we walked out of a shop to see one of them running at us!”

Paul nodded thoughtfully, and said, “Yes, there are some I am very afraid of, but others are not to be feared.”

“Some of them are even funny,” Kim said, “like jesters.

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