Dancing In the Street
LEAD: It was already a national holiday, so the 10 million inhabitants of the Republic of Cameroon hardly knew how to celebrate on Friday when the West African nation's soccer team defeated the defending champion, Argentina, in the opening round of the 1990 World Cup. They found a way.  As soon as the game was over,
It was already a national holiday, so the 10 million inhabitants of the Republic of Cameroon hardly knew how to celebrate on Friday when the West African nation's soccer team defeated the defending champion, Argentina, in the opening round of the 1990 World Cup. They found a way.  As soon as the game was over, Cameroonians, who had been given the day off to follow the match on radio or television, poured out of their homes in exuberant, and sometimes raucous, celebration.
In the capital city of Yaounde, in the port city of Douala and in every town and village in between and beyond, there was dancing in the streets and impromptu parades.
Horn-blaring taxis trailing noise-making chains of scrap metal formed a procession through Yaounde, where ecstatic fans sang the national anthem over and over and paraded through the streets chanting, 'We mourn the death of Maradona.'
The reference, of course, was to the acclaimed Argentine star, who came under such constant and vicious attack from the Cameroon players that he must have believed the apocryphal rumor that the Cameroonian team had prepared for the World Cup by practicing barefoot using a human skull as a ball.
Actually, the players had incentive enough to win. In addition to salaries of more than $20,000, the rough equivalent of $400,000 in the United States, where the per capita annual income is about 20 times the $800 Cameroon level, each player receives a bonus equal to half his salary for each victory.
For all the national glee over the stunning upset, there was one ominous indication that the Cameroon Lions' days as World Cup lions might be numbered.
The nation's sorcerers, who had publicly predicted the 1-0 victory over Argentina, refused to foretell the outcome of Cameroon's next game, against Romania on Thursday.