Since returning home early last month, nearly all my conversations begin with the same recurrent question; how is Cameroon/home? Roughly eight weeks later, I still haven’t found a suitable way to reply. I say: “It’s just there”. It’s just there as in; it is how I left it, except where it’s worse As in: home is surviving – barely living, As in: Cameroon has managed to retain just the bare minimum of what makes it home- the familiarity of those who are yet to leave, the humid weather which in turn envelopes you like a sweat-inducing fog and reassures your skin that it will not crack here. I say ‘it’s just there’ because to answer ‘how is home?’ would require several contradictory descriptions: Like the security of never doubting where your next meal will come from because there is an endless list of people waiting for me to stop by for a meal since I returned, but also like the hesitation and insecurity I feel at the thought of leaving home to do any visiting because leaving home means passing through a terrifying military checkpoint akin to what stands at the US/Mexico border. And if I were to describe home what would I share? The laughter of the children in our compound; the toddler next door who calls me ‘Nica’ and giggles like it’s the soundtrack for a Disney classic yet to be made, the preteens playing games like ‘dodging’ and assorted versions of hopscotch after their morning chores on ghost-town days… Or do I tell of this air of apprehension which hangs over us all and leaves me feeling like I’m paranoid in my inability to properly describe it? But I’m not paranoid, it is real. Our laughter, our noisy nature is now somewhat muted. We who used to advertise nearly everything with ‘Papa Promo’ a car with massive speakers attached on its roof, blasting Pidgin-English adverts into the eardrums of pedestrians. That car seems to have stopped going around. And Mutengene which was always busy and loud. A distracting hub to pass through, not stop in with its shops and bars blaring music from loudspeakers competing with each other for the attention of customers…. even here the music is not as loud any longer; only one shopkeeper with a speaker has yet to close down and move away, no more competition. And of course, one can’t play music so loud that they don’t hear if gunshots go off and they need to run. If I were to answer ‘how is home’? Which of the homes shall I speak of? Home feels different depending on the neighborhood. That apprehension that cannot be explained is experienced in varying degrees from one quarter to the next. In Mile 16 and Muea it is heavy in the air with closed shops, vacant businesses and the desolation that is breathed in and out by all who invested in the area, by the few who have stayed despite the very real threat to life. From Mile 17 upward to Molyko the apprehension is a crescendo of feeling; with very little felt between 8am and 5pm- just people on their guard for any sudden alarm. Then the crescendo peaking at dusk as we all rush to go home, grown or not, afraid of the dark. Finally, in Sandpit upwards; here there is life, the shops are all open, and people still sit at makeshift bars to eat and drink. But there is also an awareness that the girls selling akara and beans with that old mami by the roadside are not going to school, they have come to Buea to stay with their aunt because their village was burned by the military. That apprehension here is a shadow at the edges of life, like a silhouette. And in the telling of home do I count even the other regions East of the Mungo where in place of apprehension it is a resignation that hangs in the air along with the weight of dust? *** To properly respond to ‘how is Cameroon’ would demand I tell several stories of Cameroonians: The story of how my godmother’s father who suffered kidney failure would have died because his urologist couldn’t come to work on Monday because of Ghost-town and the general practitioner had more than his share of patients to deal with. Similar to the story of expectant mothers who now have an additional fear of going into labor on the wrong day of the week. To respond properly would entail I tell of the number of families split up, with parents having to send kids off to other regions for school possibly with one spouse going as well and how managing two households has made already the lives of people who were already struggling much more difficult. It would require I tell of the loans my neighbors are paying with bitterness every month because the house they took the loan for is complete but they can’t move into it- the area is now a no-go zone. The bushes not too far from there has a shrine where the Amba Boys are said to congregate so it is regularly attacked by the military. The last time the neighbor visited this house, he remarked with palpable frustration on how a house he had yet to sleep in had already seen bullet holes in the walls, need for repair. I would need to tell of the Faculty of Science lecturer who I used to admire for her fashion sense and how she jumped a foot when I greeted her from behind… I was later told that she had been kidnapped and her family had to pay 5.5 million in ransom… she is still traumatized… And she is not alone. Enjema, the younger sister of my neighbor-friend has nightmares periodically now- since witnessing a man being shot in front of her by gendarmes last September. She recounts that the man had been the driver
No-Internet Cameroon: Two months on
On the evening of 17th January 2017, two regions in Cameroon- one of which is my permanent domicile- were indefinitely cut off from internet access. Today marks two months. The government claims it “had to take drastic measures to curb the spread of false information and extremist messages”. This could be debated. However collectively punishing over 4 million people by limiting their freedom of speech, hindering their business operations and so much more just because our government cannot stand bad things being said about them? That is not debatable. It is just wrong, short-sighted and dictatorial. I have no doubts that if Cameroon were a lot more united. If my people had a stronger sense of social justice, this would not be happening. The other eight regions would not have taken it in stride that two were being silenced. Both Anglophones and Francophones make up the other eight regions. If we had even a tenth of self-respecting government administrators, this would not be happening… again, I find myself concluding that we are all to blame. No one person can successfully mess up a country with tens of millions. Yet here we are. I wrote about my experience living under the internet ban and my thoughts on #BringBackourInternet for ThisIsAfrica.me Find an excerpt with a link to the full piece below: Life in No- Internet Cameroon It used to be difficult to explain that there were two Cameroons. At conferences, international round tables where Africans and Afro-inquisitive Westerners would swap stories, as well as questions and assumptions about each other’s countries, you would often have to debunk the myth that you were fluent in French by virtue of being Cameroonian and being called Monique. It would take too long to explain the invisible divide of that Picot Line. This problem, which has since either been ignored or normalised, would be too broad to broach. So you limit your comments on your country to corruption, the president’s everlasting reign, conveniently patriarchal cultural ‘values’ – issues all Africans understand and face, unfortunately, irrespective of their country of origin. But recently your government has made it easier to explain that there are two Cameroons. They somehow found that dividing line that no one would acknowledge existed and now it is clear: There is Internet Cameroon and No-Internet Cameroon, that is, La Republic du Cameroun, which gained independence from French rule on 1 January 1960, and former British Southern Cameroons, which gained independence by merging with ‘long lost brothers’ on 1 October 1961. Now when your colleagues from other countries ask you about Cameroon, it is easier to explain the problem that has long been ignored and subdued. Easier, not easy. The issues of who and what you identify as remains as complex as ever. Now your colleagues ask you, how are you coping? What is it like living under an Internet ban? You attempt to help them envisage it. Imagine this, you say: So, what is it like? It is 7pm. Just two hours earlier news had broken of the government banning the associations at the forefront of the longest and largest strikes in recent national history. Now you are reading reports online, stating that some of the leaders of the strike (and one of the now banned associations) have been arrested. Upon reading this you feel alarmed. You attempt calling those you know to check on their well-being. Your call doesn’t go through. You try reaching out to mutual friends and family online to discuss your fears and ascertain their safety, but your messages keep loading. You can’t see the tick next to your WhatsApp messages, the one that would confirm that they had been delivered. You assume it is the network; that the lines are probably crammed as the news of arrests sends everyone scurrying to call their loved ones. Things will surely escalate. And they do. You see cars held up on the road just outside your window – bikers have taken to blocking the roads with burning tires and abandoned cars to show their displeasure. You hear shots being fired into the air, the police descending with tear gas. People try to park their cars on the pavements to hide in the safety of neighboring buildings like the one you live in. Others use the opportunity to loot and steal – you see them running with gas bottles stolen from the local gas station. You have dismantled your phone and reassembled it twice, removing and replacing your SIM card, restarting it, feeling confident that the network will return so you can check in with your loved ones or follow updates on the situation. An hour later you receive a call from a friend who is stuck a mile from your place due to the road blocks. Could he come spend the night? he asks. The roads are blocked and the police are arresting whoever they can. When he arrives at your place, he tells you of the fear on fellow passengers’ faces when they saw tires burning on the road and bikers with bottles – ‘kerosene bombs’ – only for the gendarmes to follow with batons and tear gas. He tells of running for his life and feeling ashamed for not stopping to help a female passenger who fell into the gutter as they both tried to escape. He says all this while reassembling his phone. You both still think it is a network problem. Hours later, you can’t sleep. You receive an SMS from a friend in Douala: Has your Internet been cut off too? she asks. It dawns on you that this may actually be it; the government may actually have cut off Internet access. You two laugh. Crazy people! you remark. How long can this last? Douala, the economic capital, needs Internet access or else businesses will crash. Heck, everyone needs Internet access. You two discuss the government’s lack of foresight until you fall
What’s happening in Cameroon? Learning, I hope
On the 10th of October 2016, Lawyers in two out of ten regions in the country went on strike/industrial action, after giving the government fair warning in 2015. For two weeks they sat home and did nothing. No one paid them any mind, in fact the Minister of Justice insulted them. They took permission to hold street protests (confirm) and after successfully marching across Commercial Ave (with a crowd of people joining them out of curiosity) their union president gave a speech calling for the end of the protests, thanking his colleagues and police who he claimed had “behaved like police of America and Britain “. He praised them prematurely it seems, because by the time he finished the police aimed teargas at their group to disperse them. Well two weeks after that incident teachers- the most populated occupational field in the nation- decided they would go on strike too. To support lawyers and to bring attention to their own issues with the government’s attempts at harmonization which tend to be more of an assimilation of one system by another. Of course this particular strike won’t be limited to the workers. It would also mean students, their parents in other professions etc. would be affected. THE MAJORITY OF THESE PEOPLE WERE NEVER FORMALLY OR CLEARLY INFORMED OF WHAT EXACTLY THEY WERE STRIKING FOR NOR FOR HOW LONG THIS WOULD GO ON. This omission was allowed to slide because we all know there was a problem with the way our government marginalized our unique systems. So we didn’t bother to define the problem knowing that there were, what harm could come of not knowing exactly which one we were fighting eh? Well as the strike progressed, language changed. The fact is, the issues raised by teachers and lawyers were a result of a much larger problem- the Anglophone problem- the problem our government tried to ignore and which a lot of our citizens have been unable to correctly diagnose. So language changed, it was no longer a fight for industrial action but gradually becoming a political revolution fueled by long repressed anger over the Anglophone predicament in this country and being used as an opportunity by a group of secessionists calling themselves Ambazonians (the name they had given the citizens of a country yet to exist which they are fighting for). In an attempt to ignore the strike thinking it would go away students of the University of Buea were called to school to write tests. However their teachers had set no tests and no one would be there to administer them, the administration basically attempted to show they were superior to the teachers they administer and it backfired. After two weeks without classes, students turned up and saw empty classrooms, then proceeded to storm the administration building and vent their anger. In the absence of the VC, the Director of Students Affair approached the students and asked for representatives to take in to see the VC’s deputies. The crowd chose the most vocal to represent them before the VC’s deputies. They presented their issues: · Anger over the fine which they were being asked to pay for late registration, · The fact that some students (Level 400 students) had yet to receive their Excellency awards Anger over being asked to come to school thereby disrespecting their teachers’ calls to stay home and respect their strike. Of these three reasons forwarded by the students only one had to do with the strike and only one was legit (and even then still questionable). The Level 400 students had already been set to receive their cash award. The proof is in the document dated Friday 25thof November. The last working day before the strike. That information had not gone out fast enough so the students didn’t know that the administration had actually had to force Yaoundé to fulfill its promise and “gift students with the award”. The fine the students complained about though was a more legitimate problem, not because students were being fined (quite frankly given the way we do things at last minute, or abuse deadlines we need to be fined) but rather because the fine was too steep 1/5th the school fees and it didn’t help that students were late to pay their registration fees this year as a result of technical issues with the school’s website. While they had a legit problem few of them had attempted to complain to the right office nor did they use their elected student leaders to lobby for them. In essence, being called back to school they used an already tense atmosphere to vent their frustration without prior warning. In fear of aggravating the situation, the deputies agreed with all student demands: The fine will be revoked, level 400 students will receive their awards as was already arranged, and the students would be asked to come to school only after the teachers called off their strike, the director returned with the student reps. to the crowd of students in front of the building. But things had changed, the peaceful students had been infiltrated. Students were now being encouraged by members of the banned student union UBSU to demand for the reinstatement of the union. The director thinking he had done all to appease the students was told no, they want to see the VC and have their union reinstated. This was obviously unexpected as that association had been banned for several years and few undergraduate students new of it enough to demand reinstatement. Later, when I would leave the security of the administrative block I would recognize alumni, UBSU members of the batch ahead of me, and see their vandalism of staff cars which would be blamed on the peaceful group who were obtuse to their protest being used. I would realize that calling students back to school rather than addressing the striking teachers at that time, created fertile grounds for manipulation and chaos. These UBSU members who had
The Silent Majority
August of this year shall make five years of my blogging here on Musings. It was in August of 2012 during a trip to Nigeria for Chimamanda’s Farafina workshop that a friend of a friend, Martin Takha first introduced me to the world of blogging. Helping me with everything from the Gmail account to deciding the first template I used for a couple of years. As Cameroon’s ‘blogosphere’ has become crowded with a plethora of people aspiring to be Cameroon’s Linda Ikeji, I am proud to say I’ve stayed true to myself and the purpose of this blog. A dual purpose actually; to ensure I write regularly and to create platform through which I could share my views, defend my opinions and if possible tell a side of our story which may be otherwise missed as popular mediums echo a single often incomplete story. I have promoted blogging through my youth advocacy as a means for young people to get their voices heard. Through BetterBreed Cameroon I have preached to young people on the necessity in telling their own story, sharing their thoughts on issues they are affected by or care passionately for through Medium, LinkedIn, as Commonwealth Youth Correspondents, via World Pulse and of course through their own blogs. I suppose I should have considered the possibility of an internet ban imposed to hush us. In fact I did consider it, for about 5 mins during two different conversations. First being about six months ago when a friend told me of her experience in Ethiopia under the internet ban and then when we laughed about Turkey’s president need to abate anxiety over the attempted Coup d’état via Face-time? after recently banning social media. My friends and I discussed these incidents shook our heads, shrugged, laughed and let it go. Then it was my turn. Today makes a week since two regions in Cameroon have been denied internet access as the government attempts to quench protests against Anglophone marginalization in these regions via brute force. The protest leaders were arrested that night and smuggled out of the regions, simultaneously internet access was shut down so as to hamper the spread of news. During the last week I’ve had lot of time to think (the absence of social media distractions will do that for you lol), and two quotes came to mind: These two quotes spoke to me as I lamented on how the internet ban affects budding tech-entrepreneurs in Buea’s “Silicon Mountain”, how banks (which pay Cameroon’s exorbitant taxes) are closed for lack of internet access, how those who work predominantly online either for webzines, as researchers or just communicating with clients/business partners are now grounded along with scholars (like myself) who have online classes to follow and participate in. I wondered how backwards our leaders must be to punish over 4 million people in two regions because they didn’t like criticisms of them being spread via social media and couldn’t find another way to solve a problem they let grow out of proportion. But above all I thought of HOW this could be happening. It’s 2017 for God’s sake! Then the above two quotes reminded me that this happened in 2016 and I said nothing. It happened in two countries I know of (three counting Gambia during elections) and I barely tweeted my disapproval. Evil prevails because good men failed to act. A lot of people didn’t stand up in those circumstances, so it happened then, and now it is happening to me. Yet not enough people are reacting. Within my own country, a great deal of Cameroonians in the French speaking regions are either unaware or could care less about the ban. Three days into the ban I ‘crossed the border’ into the Francophone section of the country and when I checked online only a handful of people were talking about it. Some acquaintances online even attempted to justify the government’s actions saying “social media was spurring terrorism and the government had a right to take it away”. When I told one of them he was stupid for that I was told “you shouldn’t bring in insults when we are having a peaceful debate”. How can one be peaceful when they are justifying (and therefore an accomplice in) your suppression? How? Today I’m a bit calmer, I crossed the border this morning to find that voices- online at least- have grown against the internet ban using the hashtag #BringBackOurInternet. Yet there are not enough in my honest opinion, and there is a noticeable lack in Francophone voices. Yesterday it was Ethiopia, Turkey and Gambia, today it is my Northwest and Southwest regions, tomorrow it will likely be the whole of Cameroon as we face the 2018 elections… Please join us to speak up now. Speak now that tomorrow you still have your voice. Tweet to the Cameroonian government, our telecommunication agencies and all those you can using #BringBackOurInternet. Remember: If you are silent, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it- Zora Neale Hurston.