The train was nothing unusual. It was a regular freight service hauling crude oil from Cameroon's fields near the Nigerian border toward the capital, where the cargo would be processed at the Mvolye plant or sent on to the coast for export. Such trains ran through Yaoundé as a matter of routine, part of the unremarkable machinery of a working country. On that mid-morning it reached the city's southern suburbs and collided with another freight train heading the other way. Tankers jumped the tracks and split open. Oil began to spread across the ground around Nsam, dark and slick, pooling where the wreckage lay. In those first minutes there was no fire, only the strange sight of a commodity that usually meant money for someone far away, suddenly spilling free in an ordinary neighbourhood.

What happened next was not recklessness so much as arithmetic. In a city where many households survived on very little, a stream of crude oil flowing into the open was something you could collect, carry home, and sell. Local residents and passing taxi drivers stopped and waded in with whatever containers they could find. It is important to see these people clearly, not as a faceless throng but as individuals doing the rational thing the poor have always done with an unexpected resource. They were trying to make a hard life a little easier. Reports afterward held that one person in the crowd was smoking, and that a dropped cigarette was enough. A flash fire raced back along the spilled fuel toward the ruptured tankers, and in an instant the pooled oil became a single enormous fireball that swept across the people gathered around it.

Emergency crews reached Nsam soon after the blaze took hold, but the fire was beyond them. The heat was so fierce that for a long time they could only contain it, not put it out, working at the edges of an inferno they could not enter. The fire burned for at least a full day. A column of black smoke hung over the district for days afterward, visible across the city, a grim marker above the place where so many had died. There were fears the flames would reach the central petroleum depot nearby, which would have multiplied the disaster many times over, but that catastrophe was narrowly averted. At least a hundred and fifty people were taken to hospital with severe burns, and the final toll of the dead was placed at more than two hundred.

The dead of Nsam were not statistics in a railway ledger, though that is often all such disasters become in the wider world. They were a cross-section of a Yaoundé suburb on a Saturday morning, people whose only mistake was to see free fuel and to need it. Their deaths exposed an uncomfortable truth that has played out in oil-bearing countries across the world, from the Niger Delta to elsewhere: where great wealth flows through the lives of the very poor, the temptation of a leak or a spill can prove fatal. Cameroon mourned, and the names of the lost are remembered by their families if not by history books. To pass over this place is to pass over the site of one of the deadliest single disasters the country has known, and the people who died here deserve to be carried in mind, not merely counted.