Bafoussam

I came into Bafoussam from the east on the ring road, which is the correct way to arrive — the road descends through misty hill country where the terracing of the slopes is so complete that the landscape looks sculpted rather than farmed, every available gradient organized into rows of maize and coffee and vegetables bounded by hedges that follow the contour lines like topographic maps made real. The Bamiléké people have been farming these highlands for centuries, and the evidence is everywhere: not just the terracing but the density of the compounds, the frequency with which you pass a chiefly enclosure with its distinctive tiered architecture, the sense that this is a settled, confident, deeply inhabited landscape rather than a place where humans are recent arrivals making do.

The city itself is the main commercial hub of the West Region and carries the particular energy of a Bamiléké town — purposeful, trading-oriented, with a merchant culture that has sent Bamiléké businesspeople to every corner of Cameroon and beyond. The Monday market in Bafoussam is one of the largest in the country, a sprawling affair of covered stalls and open ground where the produce from the highlands — enormous avocados, bitter kola, palm oil in quantities measured by the jerrycan, live chickens, smoked fish, dried spices — is traded alongside fabrics, metalwork, and the Bamiléké prestige objects that the region is known for. Among the latter: carved masks with dramatic headdresses, elaborately beaded calabashes and stools, and the distinctive carved wooden figures of the Bamiléké tradition that turn up in the collections of every major ethnographic museum in Europe.

The chiefly system — the fon — remains active throughout the highlands, and the chiefly palaces scattered along the ring road from Bafoussam through Baham, Bandjoun, and Banjoun are among the most architecturally significant traditional buildings in Central Africa. The palace at Bandjoun, about fifteen kilometers from Bafoussam, is particularly impressive: a tiered structure of carved wooden pillars, thatched roofing, and courtyard spaces used for ceremonies that the fon’s court still hosts. I visited on a day when the fon was not receiving, but the palace compound was open and a custodian walked me through the royal collection — elephant-tusk trumpets, leopard-skin royal garments, carved memorial posts — with a proprietary pride that made clear this was not a heritage display but a living archive.

In the evenings in Bafoussam I drank palm wine, which arrives in a calabash warm and slightly fizzy and sweet, with a fermented edge that deepens as the evening progresses. The taste is difficult to place in any category I already had, and the speed at which it produces a gentle, uncomplicated contentment surprised me the first time. The bar where I drank it — a few plastic chairs on a dirt terrace, a radio, a man refilling calabashes from a large plastic drum — was the same as approximately three hundred other bars on the ring road, and it was exactly right.

When to go: November through February, when the highland mists clear enough for the terraced landscape to be fully visible and the laterite roads of the ring road are reliably passable. The ring road can be beautiful in cloud but inaccessible when the rains are heavy. The Monday market is reason enough to time your arrival for Sunday night.